Fire Phone is Amazon's Shopping Mall in the palm of your hand

Fire phone is finally out. The pricing is not what I thought it would be. Many of the features are available in many other phones but not the 3D effect or, what is known as Dynamic Perspective, a view created using multiple camera output to stitch a 3D perspective, a dynamic hologram.
Here is picture that explains static and dynamic perspectives (the details may not be exactly as shown but the principle is):

Using 4 low resolution, ultra low power cameras the image is synthesized in real-time (perhaps sucking lot more power than the non 3D cameras). There are, I assume two other cameras for the usual photo/video capture. In days to come we will see how the 3D effect is leveraged to make the phone more attractive for buyers.

The effect as seen in the videos (MPEG-4 video file (.mp4)) is quite interesting. Here is a video downloaded from Amazon Site. This may require you to view in IE 10 or Google Chrome.

The Z-axis is not out of the paper but as if you peer into the device and the 3D effect is inside of the camera.

Presently only AT&T is the designated carrier and the purchase of camera gives you free Premium membership (3-Yr free). Fire phone also has Firefly technology providing access to mountain of information with one-click.

Fire phone, built on Android OS,  out of the box has a large number of apps and developers will creating more for which Amazon will be releasing it code base.

Remove the OffersWizard malware as soon as you notice it

This is an obnoxious malware that somehow gets into your computer (even inadvertently entering the address of an unknown, untrusted URL). The free stuff It promises are not worth the trouble.

 It manifests in the form of putting long rectangular pop-up ads on four sides of your browser besides adding many other obnoxious features like page turnover effects etc. as shown:

 

 

On noticing this you should immediately take some action. Tried to cleanse with these steps in IE 11.0 but did not seem to remove this malware.

 

 

Tweaked the Advanced features some more as shown:

 

 

But this did not help. Also tried Microsoft Security Essentials which validated that the PC is clean, but did not help.

 

 

Finally, did a System Restore to an earlier date and this seemed to have fixed the problem.

 

 

After restore the IE displayed the following message:

 

The lesson is if the Internet Options | Advanced (tab) | Browsing node changes (mostly reset) does not fix perhaps you should restore the computer to an earlier date. You should take steps to remove this malware as soon as you notice it. Time is the essence.

Microsoft Security Essentials is a free download available for Windows 7 and Windows 8 OS. I also found that trying to use the Manage add-ons is quite ineffective.

Download here:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/security-essentials-download

 

 

Amazon Holophone imminent

Apple, Google watch out! You too, Microsoft.

Holophone is my concoction, but it is a phone that render 3D objects using perhaps 'Holograms'. It is not just a 3D phone but a phone with a new twist. Do you need 3D glasses, the answer appears to be no as it is not the run of the mill 3D rendering.

Well, Amazon can sell it cheap and it can be at your door steps in a matter of days starting June 18!
If the price is marked right, it could pose serious challenges.

Here are some pics from selected sites:

Source:  Insideradius.com

Source: Gadgets.ndtv.com

 

BusinessInsider.com

Source: finanzen.freenet.de

Open Source mobile app development with PhoneGap

It is now possible to work with PhoneGap on Windows using PhoneGap Developer App available from the Windows Store. PhoneGap is a free, open source framework based on the Open Source Apache Cardova project that allows developing mobile apps using standardized Web APIs.You can create apps using HTML, CSS and Javascript. PhoneGap bundles up your code for the device of your choice.

You start here:
http://phonegap.com/

PhoneGap Developer app can be used to develop both Windows Phone 8 app as well as the soon to arrive Windows Phone 8.1 store app. With PhoneGap you have full access to the PhoneGap APIs and there is no need to install platform SDKs, registering devices etc.

Get the information guide relevant to your platform from here:
http://docs.phonegap.com/en/edge/guide_platforms_index.md.html
Watch video here for additional motivation:

Electric imp and the Internet of Things

Internet of Things is the next big tsunami to hit the world. The numbers quoted are staggering. There are lots of players, big and small building up their stuff.

The Electric Imp is a platform which has all the necessary features:

• Hardware
• Software
• OS
• APIs
• Cloud Service

With these you get all the well known capabilities (Cloud Mantra 1:01):

• Intelligence
• Flexibility
• Scalability

Electric Imp has several models, this model (imp001) has 6 I/O and works with Wi-Fi(802.11 b/g/n) with a 32-bit ARM Cortex M3 Processor. Programmability is via Squirrel language, a light weight, object oriented language. The physical size is small, 24mm x 32mm x 2.1 mm.

You can make API calls to the device. Here is what API's can do for you:

"The Electric Imp API provides a set of classes and global objects with which imp code may access local hardware and remote cloud functionality. This API augments the Squirrel Standard Library which provides non-imp-specific functionality. For more general information about the Squirrel language, see Learning Squirrel."

Read more about Squirrel language here:
http://squirrel-lang.org/

The company is young with seasoned warriors who have left the likes of Apple and Google. Hey! that's a plus+.

Read some background information on this one year old company here:
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1261758

More on Electric imp here:
http://electricimp.com/product/

Here is stuff from a gallery of products using Electric Imp:

Well, these may make you think, do we really want to light up a lamp from the cloud or a lock that can be activated via Wi-Fi? But what is important is if it can do this, it can do lot more.
Imagination is the limit.

Most of the images are from Electric Imp site.

Disclosure: This is an independent post from Hodentek and not supported by any organization