Track Snipers with Android (Android Phones Pinpoint Snipers)

 The military has high-tech equipment to track sniper fire, using microphones carried by soldiers or stationary ones mounted at strategic points. Now that technology is getting shrunk down so that it can be used in the hands of civilian bodyguards sporting Android phones.

A team of computer engineers from Vanderbilt University, led by Akos Ledeczi, has developed an inexpensive piece of hardware and related software to turn an Android smartphone into a sniper finder. The Vanderbilt team described the new system at the 12th Association for Computing Machinery/IEEE Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks in Philadelphia earlier this month. NEWS: ‘Smart’ Armor Learns More With Every Bullet

They built a sensor module that is about the size of a deck of cards. When a shot is fired, the sensor picks up the sounds and logs the exact time. The sensor then sends the data to a smartphone via a Bluetooth connection. If any other smartphones in the local wireless network have similar modules, the location of the gunshot can be pinpointed by the timing of the sounds’ arrival. It’s a similar idea to the ShotSpotter, a system used in Seattle to track locations of shooting incidents.
There are two versions of the system. One uses a single microphone per module, but requires at least six separate phones to accurately calculate the location of the shooter. The second setup has four microphones in each (slightly larger) sensor module, but needs only two separate phones to locate the sniper.
The sensors make use of a distinctive feature of gunshots: they produce two bangs. One is from the muzzle of the gun, as the gases propelling the bullet expand and create a shock wave. That sound wave goes out in all directions, and it is shaped like a sphere.
Bullets make a second sound. As they are usually moving at supersonic speeds, it is a small sonic boom. The sound wave is conical, with the bullet at the point of the cone.
Timing when the two sounds arrive at the microphone can give a good idea of where the shot came from, and when that data is taken from separate locations, it allows for triangulating the sniper’s position.
Using the sonic boom form the bullet allows the microphones to “hear” the shots over longer ranges. Janos Sallai, a research scientist on Ledeczi’s team, told Discovery News that at larger distances, the spherical wave from the muzzle is distorted by obstacles on the ground. That’s one reason people have a difficult time figuring out where sounds like gunshots are coming from.

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The microphones in a phone, he added, wouldn’t work. “Originally we were thinking of the phone mic, but the sampling rate wasn’t enough,” he said.
In addition, the noise cancellation that most phone makers build into them so that you can have a conversation in a crowded restaurant or outside, gets in the way.
Civilian bodyguards could use these sensors to protect dignitaries, with each member of a team equipped with a sensor module. If a shot were fired, the guards could track where it came from and help local police track down the shooter. Sallai added that the Secret Service has shown a lot of interest in this system and has even called for proposals.
Credit: Vanderbilt University

via  http://news.discovery.com (Apr 27, 2013 09:16 AM ET // by Jesse Emspak )

Appreciate Is A New Way To Find Quality Apps On Android

The Android marketplace, Google Play, may now be catching up with the Apple App Store in terms of sheer number of applications available, but finding the better-quality apps outside of the big names is still something of a challenge. Today, an app discovery service called Appreciate has launched on the Android app store to address this problem.

The company was founded two years ago by CEO Amir Maor and CTO Yaron Segalov, both who have previous experience in the mobile industry and with big data. As they developed the concept which has become today’s new Appreciate application, earlier prototypes released into the Android marketplace gained tens, and even hundreds of thousands of installs, indicating demand for the service they’ve been building
Maor notes that the first version of the app reached over half a million installs, even though it was more prototype than finished release. The private beta launched around a month ago has already gained 10,000 users. While backend of these apps has evolved over the years, the version of Appreciate launching today would be unrecognizable to any of the company’s previous users.
It’s not just the overall look-and-feel that’s changed, it’s the entire way the new app discovery service has been set up, the way it works, the navigation, the personalized recommendations it delivers, and more.
Like many startup founders, Maor cites a personal need as the inspiration for building Appreciate, originally. “As the number of apps grew, we found it harder to find good content for our mobile phones,” he says. “It started with just finding quality apps, and that improved over time. But then, even though we could find quality apps, it got harder to find those that were more suited to what we were interested in.”
Maor says that though it has become easy enough to find the Android app blockbusters, sifting through a narrower category, like chess games or arcade games (his personal favorite) is difficult.
With Appreciate, while the user interface is attractive, the power in this service is the algorithms on the backend. Appreciate not only understands which apps are quality apps – a metric it understands by analyzing a variety of specific signals – it also matches those apps to a user’s unique personal tastes.
Appreciate doesn’t determine an app’s “quality” based on ratings or reviews, however, which Maor explains can be less than reliable. Instead, its secret sauce looks for other indicators – like whether or not users have installed the app then rapidly uninstalled it, for example – a sure signal that it may have left something to be desired. Apps with a good install base across your social network may also be recommended, as are those other Appreciate users have indicated are good, too.

Appreciate works better for those who sign in using Facebook, however it already knows a little about users’ tastes from the apps installed on their own devices. Within the app, users are encouraged to follow other “experts” who are also interested in the same types of apps, which also gives Appreciate a social network feel, to some extent.
In addition to expert recommendations, users also get personalized feeds showing app recommendations, apps trending across favorite categories, friend notifications, and a personalized app search engine which shows results indicating which apps are used by friends.
For example, if Appreciate knows you love wildlife, a search for “birds” might return an app about actual birds, not the Angry kind.
Appreciate is available now in Google Play, and the plan is to bring the service to the iPhone in the future. However, Maor admits that he, like many developers today, doesn’t really understand Apple’s new clauses around its ban on app discovery service. “It won’t be just mimicking an app store,” he says. “We hope everything will work well and they’ll actually approve it.”
Time will tell.
Based in Israel, the ten-person company has several million in seed and Series A funding by Magma Ventures, and many undisclosed angel investors.

by Sarah Perez via  http://techcrunch.com

Android 4.1.1 rolls out to Sony Xperia S tablet today

Owners of Sony's Xperia S tablet will finally get a crack at Android 4.1.1, aka Jelly Bean, early today.
Sony expects to push the update to its production server sometime between 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. PT. Xperia S owners will then receive a notice in the bottom right Notification Area alerting them that a system update is available. Users can also follow the steps outlined on Sony's System Update page to manually check for the latest Android flavor.
The update will be available in the U.S, Canada, and Latin America. Once the update is set to launch, Sony will provide futher information on Android 4.1.1 via its Release Notes page.

by Lance Whitney

  via -http://news.cnet.com

Zuckerberg: Google Can't Stop Facebook Home on Android

At Facebook‘s mobile strategy event yesterday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was surprisingly confident of Google‘s inability and unwillingness to prevent Facebook from rolling out Home on Android, because of the search engine commitment to opennness.
But when Google realizes Facebook Home is hijacking Android, drawing users to the social network’s services and ads, away from Google’s, things might turn ugly.
Below are Zuckerberg’s comments on the matter:

Zuckerberg on the relationship with Google
Google is aware of what we are doing and we talked to them about this and all of that. But fundamentally Android is just a more open system, so we don’t have to work directly with them in order to build an experience like this. So we can even go deeper that we’re talking about today. They’ve designed Android from the ground up to support deep integration.

Can Google stop Facebook Home?
We think that Google takes its commitment to openness in this ecosystem really seriously. These features that we are plugging into aren’t like a surface feature of Android that you can easily paper over… they’re operating system really is designed from the ground up to support these things. And it is theoretically possible that they go back on there commitment to openness but I don’t think that they will and it will take a lot of effort, a lot of really concerted effort to change the rules of something like this and make the system different. So it won’t just be some subtle thing that they choose to do. It will have to be a complete 180˚ in their philosophy and promise of openness to the community if they go back.
 
But what if they decide to do it?
If 20% of the time that people are spending on their phones are in [Facebook] Home or in other Facebook experiences then I really think that they’re going to have a hard time making a rational decision to do that and looking at themselves in the face and saying that they are building the best experience that they can… Every company that I know wakes up in the morning trying to build the best experience. And Google too!
(src http://www.forbes.com)

Camera Trigger ,ShutterBox Turns Your Android Phone Into A Sophisticated, Sensor-Laden Remote

A new Kick-starter campaign from San Antonio-based Ubertronix, Inc. aims to turn your Android Smartphone into a wireless activator for DSLR. The mission follows others that offer similar devices, but this one, the brainchild of Josiah Leverich, who founded Ubertronix a little over a year ago to build camera remote hardware, has some unique elements, including a way to use your Smartphone as a lightning sensor for capturing remarkable storm photos.

Ubertronix began as a way for Leverich to build and market his Strike Finder camera trigger product, which is a dedicated piece of hardware that features built-in sensors to help capturing high-speed photography, and lightning specifically. The ShutterBox is an extension of that tech, which features a hot shoe-mounted receiver box that communicates wirelessly with your Android smartphone via Bluetooth. It uses the phone’s built-in sensors for triggering automatic shutter activation, including light sensors for lightning, as well as motion detection for capturing wildlife or other movement-based events.

shutterboxThe ShutterBox can also be used as a standard wireless remote for triggering single shots, time lapse, bursts of exposures and more. It’s even designed to be able to work with multiple slave units for capture across multiple cameras at once, or for triggering remote flashes in a studio setting.

The idea following ShutterBox is to leverage the devices already in users’ hands instead of making them invest in and learn new proprietary hardware. The ShutterBox receiver will still cost you $199 as a pre-order (or $249 retail), but since a lot of its features are app-based, there’s ample potential for later capability improvements and expansion.

(src 

http://techcrunch.com

Darrell Etherington

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