Tag Archives: first
Twitter’s Innovator’s Patent Agreement launched, applied to first patent
The patent wars have grown long and tiresome for many, but Twitter’s among the first to take meaningful action to stop them with its Innovator’s Patent Agreement. Today, the company launched version 1.0 of the IPA and is using it for the first time. Patent number 8,448,084, which claims a method for refreshing a scrollable list of content (aka pull-to-refresh) is the first to get the IPA treatment, which means that Twitter has pledged to use this patent for defensive purposes only.
What’s that mean? Well, under this version of the IPA, Twitter can assert claims against anyone who has filed, threatened or participated in a patent infringement suit against Twitter or any of its users, affiliates, customers, suppliers or distributors. It can also assert the patent to “deter a patent litigation threat” against Twitter and its peoples. If you’re thinking that such a broad definition of “defensive purposes” means Twitter can pretty much use its IPA’d patents how it chooses, you’re pretty much right. Still, we applaud Twitter’s effort to pre-empt future patent litigation, but we’ll have to wait and see if it accomplishes its goal of having companies spending their money on innovation instead of litigation.
Filed under: Software
Source: Official Twitter blog
First Wave of Google Glass Apps Revealed
At Google’s annual I/O developer conference Thursday, the company announced the first big wave of third-party Glass apps, dubbed Glassware.
Gadget Lab
Chargers’ Manti Te’o among first NFL rookies to ink contract
In addition to this weekend being Mother’s Day (you’re welcome for the reminder), 23 NFL teams will be conducting rookie mini-camp. With the new collective bargaining agreement removing most of the guesswork out of rookie contracts, some teams are taking advantage of their draft picks coming to town by signing them to their standard four-year agreements.
The Baltimore Ravens and Chicago Bears had already begun to get their picks under contract, but more teams have joined the fray this week. The Bears continued to get their picks under contract on Thursday, reaching a four-year deal with second-round linebacker Jon Bostic. That leaves first-round offensive lineman Kyle Long as their lone unsigned draft choice.
The New Orleans Saints, who did not sign a 2012 draft pick until June 29, reached agreement with four of their five picks in the 2013 draft, including safety Kenny Vaccaro, the No. 15 overall pick in the draft and the first player selected in the first-round of this year’s draft to reach agreement on a contract. Vaccaro’s deal will include a $ 5,234,328 signing bonus, which will be significantly more than the maximum signing bonus that third-rounder Terron Armstead ($ 617,436), fifth-rounder Kenny Stills ($ 194,452) and sixth-rounder Rufus Johnson ($ 105,308) will receive.
Five draft picks of the Philadelphia Eagles signed contracts on Thursday, the highest being second-round tight end Zach Ertz. Joining Ertz were fifth-round safety Earl Wolff and a trio of seventh-round picks — Joe Kruger, Jordan Poyer and David King — signing their deals, as well. Philadelphia still has three picks left to sign. First-round offensive tackle Lane Johnson and third-round defensive tackle Bennie Logan should be easy enough to sign, though fourth-round quarterback Matt Barkley could be tricky if his agent (Jimmy Sexton of CAA Football) attempts to extract additional guaranteed money from the Eagles.
The San Diego Chargers also got down to business on their rookie contracts, signing second-round linebacker Manti Te’o, third-round wide receiver Keenan Allen, sixth-round linebacker Tourek Williams and seventh-round quarterback Brad Sorensen to deals. With four picks down, only first-round offensive tackle D.J. Fluker and fifth-round cornerback Steve Williams are unsigned.
Te’o's contract will include a $ 2,141,768 signing bonus and will be worth just over $ 5 million with over $ 3.1 million in guaranteed money.
The Detroit Lions announced on Wednesday that had agreed to terms with their four late-round picks. Reports on Thursday had the Lions reaching four-year deals with second-round safety Darius Slay (initially reported by Southern Sports Edition and re-tweeted by Slay himself) and third-round guard Larry Warford (via Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press). The Detroit Free Press also reports that the Lions have signed fourth-round defensive lineman Devin Taylor and fifth-round punter Sam Martin, leaving first-round defensive end Ziggy Ansah as the only member of their nine-player draft class without a contract.
NHK and Mitsubishi develop the first H.265 encoder for 8K video
NHK’s 8K Super Hi-Vision is an extremely bandwidth-heavy format — so much so that earlier tests used gigabit-class internet links rather than traditional TV broadcasting methods. Thankfully, both the broadcaster and Mitsubishi have developed an encoder that could keep data rates down to Earth. The unassuming metal box (above) is the first to squeeze 8K video into the extra-dense H.265 (HEVC) format, cutting the bandwidth usage in half versus H.264. Its parallel processing is quick enough to encode video in real time, too, which should please NHK and other networks producing live TV. We’ll still need faster-than-usual connections (and gigantic TVs) to make 8K an everyday reality, but that goal should now be more realistic.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD
Source: NHK (translated)
Colin Kaepernick gets the First Lady Kaepernicking, gets kids moving
Hey, it’s not everybody that can get the First Lady of the United States to pull off his trademarked move, but Colin Kaepernick did just that.
Kaepernick and Michelle Obama have teamed up to help promote physical education in schools in the “Let’s Move” campaign, which might explain why the 49ers QB was as casual as you can get away with when meeting a member of the First Family. He posted this shot on his Instagram account on Tuesday.
Here, for your viewing pleasure, is video from February of the First Lady getting some kids into shape, with help from Kaepernick, Serena Williams, Bo Jackson and others:
If President Obama Kaepernicks after his next State of the Union address, you’ll know who talked him into it.
-Follow Jay Busbee on Twitter at @jaybusbee.-
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Could Eagles 2011 First Round Pick Danny Watkins Wind Up In CFL?
With the Eagles drafting Oklahoma offensive tackle Lane Johnson with the fourth overall pick, the Eagles’ offensive line situation has suddenly become crowded, Vaughn Johnson of the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
Taking a tackle that high in the draft, it is almost a certainty that he will start right away.
Johnson will more than likely start at right tackle with Jason Peters starting at left tackle. Jason Kelce will more than likely be slotted to play center again.
That leaves Todd Herremans, Evan Mathis and Danny Watkins to fight for two guard spots.
Herremans is better suited for guard than tackle and Mathis has played better than Watkins lately.
Where does that leave Watkins then?
Watkins could end up being let go all together, which would leave him looking for another team. Kansas City could be an option to be reunited with Andy Reid, the man that drafted him.
But another possibility is Canada. Everyone has been talking about the prospect of Tim Tebow heading up to the Canadian Football League this season, but the chances of Danny Watkins heading north of the border are very real.
The CFL draft allows teams to draft Canadian-born players only — whether they play football collegiately in Canada or the United States.
Watkins, a native of Kelowna, British Columbia, was drafted by the B.C. Lions with the fourth overall pick in the 2010 CFL Draft. The Lions still hold his rights.
Robot bees take first flight
Researchers at Harvard University have conducted the first controlled flight of a robotic insect.
(Credit: Kevin Ma and Pakpong Chirarattananon)
After more than a decade of work, Harvard University researchers have finally gotten the so-called “RoboBee” to take flight.
According to the scientists, the robot — which is half the size of a paperclip and weighs less than a tenth of gram — was able to hover for a few moments and then flew on a “preset route through the air.”
“This is what I have been trying to do for literally the last 12 years,” Robert J. Wood, principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-supported RoboBee project, said in a statement. “It’s really only because of this lab’s recent breakthroughs in manufacturing, materials, and design that we have even been able to try this. And it just worked, spectacularly well.”
The tiny machine, which was developed for the purpose of studying insect flight, was actually inspired by the biology of a fly, and included a submillimeter-scale body and two wafer-thin wings. The wings seem to flap invisibly and beat at a rate of 120 times per second.
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HTC M4 to be mini-One not Facebook-free First rumors claim
HTC put its faith in the One to restore its position in high-end smartphones; now, leaks suggest, the company may be sticking closely to the same pattern with the HTC M4 for the midrange. Expected to be visually near-identical to the HTC One, according to phoneArena‘s sources, the M4 (a codename, of course; the One was codenamed HTC M7) is expected to have a 4.3-inch 720p display and an UltraPixel camera.
If that all sounds familiar, we’re not surprised. Chatter around the M4 began in early April, meshing in with this latest leak with talk of a dualcore processor, 16GB of onboard storage versus the 32GB+ of the HTC One, and 2GB of RAM.
However, those rumors pegged the M4 as more of a Facebook-free HTC First, rather than a mini-One. The Facebook Home phone has a 4.3-inch, 720p display after all, along with a dualcore processor, leading to suggestions that the HTC M4 would effectively be a rebadge of the predominantly plastic handset.
Instead, this new batch of rumor pegs a far closer aesthetic to the HTC One for the M4, though it’s unclear how much this is a speculative render from evleaks above, rather than a leak of the actual device. Although similar in design, it’s also expected to shelve some of the One’s rock-solid materials so as to hit a lower price point; whether that means metal-effect plastic rather than the sturdy unibody aluminum we’re so fond of on the One remains to be seen.
Otherwise, the M4 is expected to have LTE, a fixed 1,700 mAh battery – 600 mAh less than the One, not to mention 300 mAh less than the HTC First – and run Android 4.2 Jelly Bean when it arrives near the end of Q2 2013. The biggest difference from the First, beyond software, of course, is the inclusion of UltraPixel technology: HTC’s oversized pixels which trade sheer resolution for improvements in low-light performance.
As a strategy, it’s something we’ve seen work well in the Samsung Galaxy S III mini, borrowing halo branding and design to push a far cheaper model to those with less cash and less ambitious expectations. Whether it’s enough for HTC to continue turning around its 2013 remains to be seen.
HTC M4 to be mini-One not Facebook-free First rumors claim is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
SlashGear
Tim Tebow gets his first job offer … from the former Lingerie Football League
When you lose your job, there’s sadness. Depression. Frustration. And sometimes, from an unexpected quarter … salvation.
Tim Tebow’s out of a job. But on the very same day the Jets kicked him to the curb, the Legends Football League — the fancy new name for the former Lingerie Football League — came through with a job offer.
[Jason Cole: Jets' release of Tim Tebow could be blessing in disguise for QB]
No, no, Tebow won’t be in lingerie. Rather, he now has a standing offer from league president Mitchell Mortaza to serve as the national Quarterbacks Coach of the Legends Football League. (The females-only league has undergone a rebranding effort, including getting rid of the revealing outfits as shown above. And that’s a good thing, because Tebow would probably have a tough time reconciling lingerie-clad quarterbacks with his faith.)
Here’s the letter in full:
Now, we’d place the odds of this happening at only slightly higher than Tebow’s winning percentage as a Jet, but hey … at least the guy’s got options.
-Follow Jay Busbee on Twitter at @jaybusbee.-
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NASA gets first ever look at hurricane on Saturn
A hurricane is an impressive display of the power of nature, an unfortunate reality that sometimes causes more than its fair share of damage and grief. While we’re all familiar with what a hurricane on our own planet looks like, hurricanes on other planets have been something of a mystery. That changed this month when NASA got the first-ever detailed look at a hurricane that took place on Saturn.
As it turns out, a hurricane on Saturn looks remarkably similar. Said California Institute of Technology’s Andrew Ingersoll, who was on the team responsible for imaging the storm: “We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth. But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”
Both images and a video were captured of the hurricane, which NASA reports as having an eye 20x bigger than a typical Earth hurricane at 1,250 miles across. The storm took place in what is known as a hexagon weather pattern, six-sided and with thin outer clouds swirling around at 330mph. And unlike hurricanes that take place on our planet, the hurricane on Saturn is stuck to its north pole region rather than traveling.
One of the scientists’ goals is to figure out how the hurricane is created and sustained in the relative absence of water. Learning how the hurricane utilizes water vapors to form – especially given its overall larger and more powerful nature than our own – will help researchers understand the function of hurricanes on our own planet. The content was captured by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
[via NASA]
NASA gets first ever look at hurricane on Saturn is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.
SlashGear
