TECHNO WORLD

WELCOME TO IN MY SITE FOR TECHNICAL UPDATESFOR DAILY TECHNICAL UPDATES VISIT OUR SITE REGULAR AND REVIEW ON COMMENTS AND SUGGEST ME FOR WHICH TYPES OF UPDATES YOU WANT.
The headphone comes with a dedicated button for receiving calls and it is said to work from a maximum distance of 10 meters.

MevoFit has launches its Bluetooth wireless neckband earphones— Play N100 which are meant to be used during sports activities.

The key features of the MevoFit Play N100 Sports wireless Bluetooth neckband headphones are:

- The Bluetooth 4.1 technology for playing media wirelessly. The headphones allow control of volume, play & pause of music tracks and also track controlling by next & previous. Noise Cancellation technology is said to allow you to experience detailed music and passive noise isolation keeps interrupting noises at bay.

- The headphone comes with a dedicated button for receiving calls and it is said to work from a maximum distance of 10 meters.

- MevoFit PLAY N100 comes with the water resistant technology, which also makes Bluetooth headset sweat proof. It is made of silicone that stays tough against sweat, rain, and dust. This headset is claimed to be both flexible and durable at the same time.

- The lithium-ion battery helps MevfoFit Play N100 can last up to 12 hours on a single charge, as told by the company, which has 300 hours of standby time. It is rechargeable through USB power sources. An hour of charge is supposed to provide 8 long hours of taking calls and listening to music together.


- The neckband and wire clip is ergonomically designed to make it comfortable to wear for long hours. By design, the headphones set is tangle free. The adjustable clip ensures that you gain the desired length.

- It has in-built magnets to keep the earphones attracted to each other when they are not in use.

- This headset is claimed to seamlessly pair with two devices at a time. It has CSR 8645 chip combined with Bluetooth 4.1 for clear connectivity up to a range of 30 feet.

- This wireless headphones set is compatible with both Android and iPhone.

- The IPX4 sweat proof and water resistant technology help this Bluetooth headphone to prevent the liquid damage.

The MevoFit Play N100 Sports wireless headphones sets are available on Amazon at Rs. 2,690. It comes with 1-year warranty. MevoFit is available in three color options - red, blue and green

WELCOME TO IN MY SITE FOR TECHNICAL UPDATESFOR DAILY TECHNICAL UPDATES VISIT OUR SITE REGULAR AND REVIEW ON COMMENTS AND SUGGEST ME FOR WHICH TYPES OF UPDATES YOU WANT.

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi said on September 14 it will rejig its businesses and create new leadership positions aimed at building a second tier to CEO Lei Jun, amid increased scrutiny of governance and successions at Chinese tech firms.

The firm would introduce two new departments to advise Lei on strategy and oversee hiring, promotion and pay, Lei said in a memo to staff dated September 13 and shared with the press on September 14.

It also would reshuffle its four main business units into 10 to promote younger managers, Lei said, adding that a majority of the newly-appointed leadership belonged to the post-1980s generation.

“Our senior management team has implemented several changes that will provide opportunities for young talent to rise up the ranks,” said Lei, 48.

The changes come less than a week after Jack Ma, one of China’s best-known businessmen, said he would step down as chairman of Alibaba in a year and hand the reins to CEO Daniel Zheng, and underlined the need for sustainable succession planning.

Another Chinese tech giant, JD.com, has come under scrutiny recently after CEO Richard Liu - who controls 80 per cent of the company’s voting rights - was arrested in the United States on suspicion of rape before being released. JD’s board is essentially unable to make decisions without Liu present, according to company rules.

Liu, through his lawyers has denied any wrongdoing, as the investigation is ongoing.

Xiaomi listed its shares in Hong Kong in June in an initial public offering that valued the company at around $52 billion.

The company underwent a strategic shift in 2016 after sales fell sharply, forcing it to pull out of several overseas markets. It has since focused on offline sales and reversed its fortunes, and currently draws roughly a third of its revenue from outside China

Apple is trying to turn its smartwatch from a niche gadget into a lifeline to better health by slowly evolving it into a medical device.

In its fourth incarnation, called Series 4 and due out later this month, the Apple Watch will add features that allow it to take high-quality heart readings and detect falls. It’s part of Apple’s long-in-the-making strategy to give people a distinct reason to buy a wrist gadget that largely does things smartphones already do.

Since the Apple Watch launched in April 2015 , most people haven’t figured out why they need to buy one. Apple doesn’t release sales figures, but estimates from two analysts suggest the company shipped roughly 18 million watches in 2017. Apple sold almost 12 times as many iPhones — 216 million — last year.

Worldwide, about 48 million smartwatches are expected to be sold this year, compared with nearly 1.9 billion phones, according to the research firm Gartner.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has long emphasized the watch’s health and fitness-tracking capabilities. The original version featured a heart-rate sensor that fed data into fitness and workout apps so they could suggest new goals and offer digital “rewards” for fitness accomplishments.

Two years later, Apple called its watch “the ultimate device for a healthy life,” emphasizing water resistance for swimmers and built-in GPS for tracking runs or cycling workouts. In February, the company announced that the watch would track skiing and snowboarding runs , including data on speed and vertical descent.

The latest version, unveiled Wednesday, is pushing the health envelope even further — in particular by taking electrocardiograms, or EKGs, a feature given clearance by the US Food and Drug Administration, Apple said. The watch will also monitor for irregular heartbeats and can detect when the wearer has fallen, the company said.

EKGs are important tests of heart health and typically require a visit to the doctor. The feature gained an onstage endorsement from Ivor Benjamin, a cardiologist who is president of the American Heart Association. He said such real-time data would change the way doctors work.

Gartner analyst Tuong Nguyen said the feature could turn smartwatches “from something people buy for prestige into something they buy for more practical reasons.”

It could also lead some health insurance plans to subsidize the cost of an Apple Watch, Nguyen said. That would help defray the $400 starting price for a device that still requires a companion iPhone, which can now cost more than $1,000.

Apple’s watch will use new sensors on the back and on the watch dial. A new app will say whether each reading is normal or shows signs of atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rate that increases the risk of heart complications, such as stroke and heart failure.

Apple says the heart data can be shared with doctors through a PDF file, though it’s not yet clear how ready doctors are to receive a possible flood of new EKG data from patients — nor how useful they will find the electronic files.

Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, warned that the EKG feature could spur more tests than necessary, result in unnecessary prescriptions for blood thinners and overwhelm doctors with calls from patients who probably don’t need treatment.

He said that while the feature will probably save some lives and prevent strokes with early detection of heart trouble, “the ratio between the benefits and the costs remains a big unknown.”

Apple said the EKG feature will be available to US customers later this year, an indication that it may not be ready for launch.

Fall detection could also be significant, especially for elderly users. The new Apple Watch claims to be able to tell the difference between a trip and a fall — and when the latter occurs, it will suggest calling 911 (or the equivalent outside the US). If it receives no response within a minute, the watch will automatically place an emergency call and message friends and family designated as emergency contacts.

Only certain Apple Watch models support cellular calls, but those that don’t can still make emergency calls when near a paired iPhone or Wi-Fi service.

Apple says it monitored some 2,500 people — measuring how they fell off ladders, missed a step while walking or got their legs caught in their pants while getting dressed. It used that data to separate real falls from other heavy wrist movements, such as clapping and hammering.

The feature is available immediately worldwide and will turn on automatically for users 65 and over. Younger people can activate it in the settings.

“I can see kids buying one for their parents and grandparents,” analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights said.

But the Apple Watch still lacks one feature found in rival wrist gadgets: the ability to analyze sleep quality. Battery life in the new watch remains at 18 hours, meaning it needs a nightly recharge

BlackBerry has unveiled BlackBerry Spark, the only Enterprise of Things (EoT) platform designed and built for ultra-secure hyperconnectivity from the kernel to the edge.

Defined as the interconnectedness of people, organizations, and machines, hyperconnectivity is set to revolutionize the way people work and live. BlackBerry's new platform enables:

• OEMs to make complex 'things', like autonomous vehicles and industrial equipment which must have the highest levels of security and safety-certification, as well as consumer-friendly interfaces to complex processes and artificial intelligence (AI), such as voice-activated speakers with privacy protection designed in at the start.

• Enterprises to leverage AI and manage smart 'things' regardless of operating system (i.e., Android, iOS, Linux, QNX and Windows) via a single pane of glass, as well as snap-in existing platform services such as Android Things, AWS, Azure, and Watson.

• People to use and trust any hyperconnected 'thing' and the new experiences they enable by making military-grade security easy and intuitive to use. And, as the workforce continues to evolve, BlackBerry Spark will provide end users with the flexibility to move seamlessly and securely between their personal and work profiles.

BlackBerry Spark stands out in a fast-emerging market as the only platform designed and built for ultra-security and industry-specific safety-certifications, such as ISO 26262 in automobiles. As an open and extensible platform, BlackBerry Spark ships ready to "snap-in" IoT and other solutions from partners that include AWS, Baidu, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Samsung.

Sparking new ideas

BlackBerry Spark customers will be able to create entirely new user experiences that take advantage of hyperconnectivity. Below are some early examples of how BlackBerry customers can put EoT to work in their organizations.

• In a hospital, a patient's slowing heartbeat can trigger an alert to the right medical team and simultaneously prepare the patient's room for emergency care. This includes automatically raising the bed to the right level, starting up a ventilator or pump to deliver prescribed treatments, and bringing elevators to the floors where key personnel is located.

• Employees can soon put virtual assistants such as Alexa to work for the first time by giving them ultra-secure access to information and workflows they can't see today such as employee files, calendars, and emails.

• In transportation, BlackBerry Spark allows connected vehicles to communicate in real-time with other vehicles and critical infrastructure because the data transferred inside and outside the vehicle is encrypted and certified by BlackBerry Spark as genuine. For example, a salt truck could be deployed automatically to address a patch of black ice after receiving a notification from a connected vehicle.

"BlackBerry smartphones sparked a mobile-first revolution that changed the way most of the world lives and works," said executive chairman and CEO, BlackBerry, John Chen.

"The ultimate outcome of this inevitable convergence of ubiquitous mobility and computing power will likely turn on the cybersecurity decisions we make collectively over the next few years," added v.

"CCS Insight has long predicted the convergence of mobility, end user computing and the internet of objects inside businesses as computing technologies become increasingly ubiquitous and integrated across our work and personal lives," said VP Enterprise Research, CCS Insight, Nicholas McQuire.

"BlackBerry Spark is a bold but necessary step in helping organizations bridge these worlds, creating new connected experiences whilst simplifying and improving security from the chip to the edge," added McQuire.

"The rapidly expanding IoT universe contains within it a nasty surprise, every connected device is a potential access point for an attacker wanting to penetrate the network to do damage or steal personal data," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst, Enderle Group.

Unmatched privacy, compliance, and security

BlackBerry has long been fully committed to the principles of never monetizing client data and protecting customer privacy to the full extent of the law. BlackBerry believes that security and privacy are essential for people and machines to confidently trust what sensors and other endpoints are reporting.

BlackBerry Spark leverages the company's deep portfolio of technology that has earned 80+ certifications, which is more than any other IoT vendor. It includes FIPS-validated, app-level, AES 256-bit encryption to ensure data is always protected on a device, across the mobile network, and into a company's infrastructure. BlackBerry Spark will enable organizations to comply with stringent multi-national regulatory requirements. In fact, BlackBerry is the only EoT platform provider to achieve Common Criteria EAL4+ for both iOS and Android

A big screen change for Sony


Update: We've had the phone for two days, here's what we think so far, expect the full review in the coming week.

The Sony Xperia XZ3's OLED screen with Bravia technology is without a doubt, the best smartphone screen we've ever seen from Sony. In fact, this could be the best screen we've ever seen from any manufacturer to date - it's that good.

Two days in, and it isn't just the screen that's impressing us. The premium design and the fact it's running the latest version of Android all come together beautifully. With plenty of power and a respectable battery capacity, it also looks good from a specs point of view.

Having said that, the camera is the same module as that found on the Xperia XZ2 and XZ1 before it, neither of which were best in class. All said and done though, is the XZ3 a phone we would recommend?

You're reading our early impressions after 48hrs with the XZ3, check back in the coming week for our full review.

Display


The screen on the Xperia XZ3 is the core upgrade, and you can expect to see Sony start pushing this tech as being among the best on the market.

First off, the 18:9 aspect ratio and no notch design seen on the Xperia XZ2 is back here, but that's all the company has brought forward from the last generation phone when it comes to the screen.

There's a 6-inch screen squeezed in here, and Sony is embracing a new tech for the first time on its phone range.

Specifically, the Xperia XZ3 includes OLED tech for the first time – usually Sony uses IPS LCD panels – and it comes from the company’s BRAVIA tech division too. It's a similar tech to what the company uses for its Sony A1 TV range.

This screen tech makes video and images look bright, vivid and striking as soon as you lock eyes with the phone. It made a genuine impact, and its QHD+ resolution is more than enough to make video look great.

After two days of use, it's clear that the default display settings showcase a wonderful balance of deep, slightly muted colour, plenty of detail with an incredibly broad tonal range.

There’s less punch, pop and contrast than found in phones like the samsung galaxy Note 9 That isn't necessarily a bad thing though, with the results producing more of an HDR look. This applies to everything from pictures right through to the user interface.

So while Sony may be late to the OLED game, but boy are we glad they’ve arrived

The display tech will upscale content to varying degrees depending on the quality you’re watching. If you’re watching a Full HD video on YouTube, the phone should be able to upscale it almost to QHD resolution.

Unlike most other flagship phones in 2018, the Xperia XZ3 doesn’t feature a notch even though it has an 18:9 aspect ratio. Instead the company has opted to keep thicker bezels along the top and bottom of the display to house the speakers and front-facing camera tech.

For those who don’t like notches, you may be excited by this prospect, but even if you don’t mind a notch you likely won’t be disappointed here as the bezels along the top and bottom are still fairly thin considering each houses a speaker and more

This ability is called Side Sense and it gives you a quick way to open up apps on your phone. Double tap on the side of the display and it will open up a quick launch menu with all of your favorite apps listed in one place.

Want to go back a step within an app? Just slide your finger down the side of the screen for a bit and it will step back. It will even allow you to take photos by tapping the display edge within the camera app.

After two days of using the phone, Side Sense has definitely been more miss than hit. Activating multiple times unintentionally, failing to fire up at other times and loading after a significant delay if activated for the first time in a while – it definitely isn’t as polished as the rest of the UI.

It is useful when it works though, giving you quick access to predefined apps within easy reach. The smart, AI shortcut mode, which populates apps based on your usage also seems to learn quickly.

With any luck, stability and speed of the feature will be refined in updates, then it could be something we’d recommend keeping turned on. Until then, you may want to deactivate it if the continual misfires get on your nerves.
Design


If you’ve seen the Xpeira XZ2, you’ll know a lot of the design language here. There's a 3mm aluminum frame around the outside of the phone, with glass that protrudes from that making it much thicker. It's actually quite thick as a whole at 9.9mm, but we didn't particularly notice that when holding it in the hand.

There’s curved glass on the rear of the phone too, which probably helps it feel thinner. Both the front and back are protected by Gorilla Glass 5, and it comes in a selection of four different colors: black, white silver, forest green and Bordeaux red.

Black and white look good, but we particularly liked the red and green variants as they look different to a lot of other devices on the market. The darker shades help it look premium, but we found the back of the phone to be a bit of a fingerprint magnet even though we only used the phone for an hour or so.

After two days of usage, the XZ3 still feels and looks sleek, from both front and the back. It slides comfortably into a pocket and feels incredibly rich in the hand. We have the Bordeaux red version and it is standout – and despite the fact it attracts fingerprints readily, it isn’t as bad as many devices we’ve seen with similar glass finishes.

The bottom edge of the Xperia XZ3 features a USB-C port, but there’s no 3.5mm headphone jack on this phone so you’ll have to use Bluetooth headsets or an adaptor in order to be able to listen to audio privately on the move

Kids learn better with a friend. They're more enthusiastic and understand more if they dig into a subject with a companion. But what if that companion is artificial?

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have built a robot, named Minnie, to serve as a reading buddy to middle school kids, and Minnie's new friends grew more excited about books and more attached to the robot over two weeks of reading together.

"After one interaction, the kids were generally telling us that, sure, it was nice to have someone to read with," says Joseph Michaelis, a UW-Madison graduate student studying educational psychology. "But by the end of two weeks, they're talking about how the robot was funny and silly and afraid, and how they'd come home looking forward to seeing it again."

Michaelis and computer sciences professor Bilge Mutlu published their work with Minnie on Wednesday (Aug. 22) in the journal Science Robotics.

Research shows thatsocoal learing—pairing up with a peer to complete math problems or read a chapter in a textbook—is a powerful way to help students develop skills and interests, according to Michaelis. It improves students' comprehension by distributing the cognitive workload and reinforcing understanding through dialogue.

"Most interesting to me is that we know social learning strengthens interest and motivation," says Michaelis, who taught high school science before returning to graduate school. "A lot of kids who don't like reading, in particular, point out that it's an isolated activity, and people just sort of accept that isolation. But it can be demotivating and harder to learn and understand in that situation."

Michaelis and Mutlu believe companion robots will soon be a fixture in homes, and they wondered if those robots could serve as social learning companions for kids.

They designed a two-week reading program including 25 books representing a range of reading skill and story complexity, and programmed Minnie to be an interested listener. The children in the study read aloud to the robot, which could track their progress in the book and react to the story—every few pages or so, especially during important moments in the plot—with one of hundreds of preprogrammed comments

The goal is to try to make it as genuinely conversational as possible. If you were reading a book to me, and I was surprised, I'd say something like, "Wow, I didn't see that coming!" Michaelis says. "When a scary part of the book happens, the robot says, 'Oh, wow, I'm really scared.' It reacts like it would if it had a real personality."

With simple, oversized black eyes on a relatively featureless white globe of a head, Minnie can react and cajole and summarize and appear thoughtful. It even starts by following an initial introductory read by recommending (via an algorithm) a good book from its library of titles, which include the familiar Harry Potter and Goosebumps series and genre classics like "A Wrinkle in Time."

"That match is crucial. If you're trying to make a social connection with someone, and they say, 'You'd love this book,' and they're totally wrong? That ruins that credibility," Michaelis says. "Most kids said the robot did a good job suggesting books to them."

The connection grew from there. The number of children who told researchers the robot has a personality or emotions increased more than fourfold over the two weeks readers spent with Minnie. The number reporting they were motivated to read also spiked—and surpassed a control group following a paper-based version of the reading program. And kids who read with Minnie said they felt like they understood and remembered more about the shared books.

Mutlu, who studies human-robot interaction, said the illusion of personality in a robot is so fragile, it often breaks down in a matter of minutes.

"We're getting more used to interacting with things that talk to us now, with Siri and Alexa and others. When they are behaving in a way that kind of reveals their technical flaws or limitations, you realize immediately you're not having an actual conversation," Mutlu says. "The biggest shock in our study is that two weeks later, the kids are still relating to the character—rather than saying, 'This is stupid. I'm not talking to your robot anymore.'"

He attributes that success to the care taken in developing Minnie's speech repertoire, and also to a sweet spot robots enjoy among the age group in the study—a group that may be emotionally sophisticated enough to make connections, but not wary or snarky enough to push the envelope.

"The children are a match to the robot's capabilities, and vice versa," Mutlu says. "This robot supports an engaging reading activity, but it's not a social companion to the extent that you could have an open conversation with it. If you had a much more capable robot, that picture might change."

Not that other family members were left out. Minnie's homestays got to be comfy visits, with the robot and humans sprawled on the floor or propped up on beds with pillows.

"I had families send me pictures of themselves dressing up the robot. I'd get the box back, and it would have sorts of extra books in it that were just from the kids' shelves, just thrown in there. All kinds of random paper, markers, crayons," Michaelis says. "Your experiments don't get to live like that—to get that authenticity—in a lab."

Michaelis and Mutlu, whose work is supported by the National Science Foundation, see Minnie helping to spur otherwise reluctant students on in all sorts of academic tasks, and have already begun testing a version of the robot that shares in science studies. They hope to try out periods of interaction even longer than two weeks—an eternity for a robot interaction, but a blink of an eye in the development of a child.

They expect social learning functions could be part of a companion robot shared by a whole family, but acknowledge that future as fraught with design concerns over how to craft an engaging personality for users at different ages, protect family members' privacy and maintain the hard-won trust of a child that will also see therobot having private interactions with parents.

"This idea is in its infancy. But now we know if you really, carefully design this, it can actually sustain interaction and heighten kids' emotional experience with reading," Mutlu says. "That's a huge achievement."

Showing prejudice towards others does not require a high level of cognitive ability and could easily be exhibited by artificially intelligent machines, new research has suggested

Computer science and psychology experts from Cardiff University and MIT have shown that groups of autonomous machines could demonstrate prejudice by simply identifying, copying and learning this behaviour from one another.

It may seem that prejudice is a human-specific phenomenon that requires human cognition to form an opinion of, or to stereotype, a certain person or group.

Though some types of computer algorithms have already exhibited prejudice, such as racism and sexism, based on learning from public records and other data generated by humans, this new work demonstrates the possibility of AI evolving prejudicial groups on their own

The new findings, which have been published in the journal Scientific Reports, are based on computer simulations of how similarly prejudiced individuals, or virtual agents, can form a group and interact with each other.

In a game of give and take, each individual makes a decision as to whether they donate to somebody inside of their own group or in a different group, based on an individual's reputation as well as their own donating strategy, which includes their levels of prejudice towards outsiders.

As the game unfolds and a supercomputer racks up thousands of simulations, each individual begins to learn new strategies by copying others either within their own group or the entire . population

Co-author of the study Professor Roger Whitaker, from Cardiff University's Crime and Security Research Institute and the School of Computer Science and Informatics, said: "By running these simulations thousands and thousands of times over, we begin to get an understanding of how prejudice evolves and the conditions that promote or impede it.

"Our simulations show that prejudice is a powerful force of nature and through evolution, it can easily become incentivised in virtual populations, to the detriment of wider connectivity with others. Protection from prejudicial groups can inadvertently lead to individuals forming further prejudicial groups, resulting in a fractured population. Such widespread prejudice is hard to reverse."

The findings involve individuals updating their prejudice levels by preferentially copying those that gain a higher short term payoff, meaning that these decisions do not necessarily require advanced cognitive abilities.

"It is feasible that automachnical machine with the ability to identify with discrimination and copy others could in future be susceptible to prejudicial phenomena that we see in the human population," Professor Whitaker continued.

"Many of the AI developments that we are seeing involve autonomy and self-control, meaning that the behaviour of devices is also influenced by others around them. Vehicles and the Internet of Things are two recent examples. Our study gives a theoretical insight where simulated agents periodically call upon others for some kind of resource."

A further interesting finding from the study was that under particular conditions, which include more distinct subpopulations being present within a population, it was more difficult for prejudice to take hold.

"With a greater number of subpopulations, alliances of non-prejudicial groups can cooperate without being exploited. This also diminishes their status as a minority, reducing the susceptibility to prejudice taking hold. However, this also requires circumstances where agents have a higher disposition towards interacting outside of their group," Professor Whitaker concluded