Eideard

It’s no secret that the rise of smartphones, tablets and social networking has fostered an entirely new market for app developers, but a freshly released study has now attempted to quantify this impact, in terms of real jobs.

According to TechNet, a bipartisan network of tech execs, the so-called “App Economy” has created an estimated 466,000 jobs since 2007, when the iPhone was first unveiled.

The report specifies that this estimate includes all jobs at Facebook-focused companies like Zynga, as well as dev gigs at Amazon, AT&T and Electronic Arts, in addition to the obvious heavyweights, Apple and Google.

As far as geography goes, California leads the way as the most app-friendly state, though New York City tops the list of metropolitan areas. It’s not an entirely bi-coastal affair, though, with some two-thirds of all app-related jobs located outside of California and New York.

TechNet acknowledges that the App Economy “is only four years old and extremely fluid,” so it’s likely that these numbers will fluctuate in the years to come, though the organization says these numbers underscore a fundamental principle: “Innovation creates jobs, and in this case, lots of them.”

You can read the full report at technet.org.

And don’t get your shorts bunched figuring the numbers are going to diminish or decline. When it comes to the predominance of the mobile web – you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.

X-ray technology, which first appeared in the late 1800s, hasn’t changed that much, aside from shrinking the size of X-ray machines down to the size of large handheld drills that cost some $40,000. Now, a Los Angeles-area start-up is steaming ahead with a more affordable, ultraportable X-ray machine that utilizes a brand new technology built off focused static electricity.

Tribogenics, which spun out of DARPA-backed project at UCLA, announced today it has raised $2.5 million from Flywheel Ventures and other angels to build its portable X-ray machines, which should be available in the next year or two. The company said it’s hoping to disrupt the existing $12 billion X-ray machine industry, improving the way other existing industries such as mining, medical devices and security screening lean on the technology and enabling much broader use of X-rays by consumers.

The technology is built off a discovery made by UCLA researchers Carlos Camara, Juan Escobar, Jonathan Hird, and Seth Putterman who found they could create X-Rays bright enough to produce images from peeling adhesive tape. They were able to recreate this tribolelectrification by using an actuator that brings an epoxy surface in and out of contact with a silicone membrane. This ionizes the air and when captured in a vacuum, can create X-ray radiation. This approaches eliminates the need for high voltage, which has previously limited how portable and small other X-ray machines can get.

What Tribogenics has done is turn this whole process into a handheld product called Pocket XRF about the size of thick iPhone. It doesn’t create an image like medical X-ray machines. Instead, it’s designed to send a burst of X-rays into an object and stir up the atoms inside. Then it reads the various fingerprints of the materials inside and presents the results on a graph. That means a jeweler can tell what metals went into a ring or a safety inspector can see the lead content in a product. Miners can see if there are precious metals in a sample. And security screens can inspect objects quickly.

Reflect upon how a technology like this might be used, how many complex expensive procedures might be simplified and costs reduced. These really aren’t X-Ray machines as we understand them; but, machines that excite atoms in similar fashion and allow recording and analysis – without the dangers attendant upon using X-Rays.

Researchers at Georgia Tech have worked up a proof-of-concept demonstration of using an iPhone 4′s accelerometer as a keylogger. After setting the iPhone near a computer keyboard, the device’s built-in accelerometer and gyroscope were able to decipher entire sentences “with up to 80 percent accuracy…”

Apps don’t currently ask for users’ permission for access to accelerometers and gyroscopes, which raises the remote possibility of iPhones or other accelerometer-equipped devices spying on keyboard inputs without users being the wiser…

The keylogger software works by detecting key pairs — detecting individual key presses turned out to be too difficult and unreliable — and by comparing paired accelerometer events against a built-in dictionary, the software can decipher keypresses with startling accuracy. Our own Mike Rose has coined “thump phreaking” to refer to this spying technique (after Van Eck phreaking, which uses CRT or LCD emissions to reconstruct the screen image) and it’s as apt a term as any for what this software does.

It must be mentioned that this is only a proof of concept and not an actual attack that’s out in the wild. The researchers themselves admit that this keylogger was difficult to build, and it’s easily defeated by something as simple as moving your iPhone more than three inches away from the keyboard.

OTOH, proof of concept almost inevitably leads to some demented script-kiddy trying it out on an unsuspecting innocent.

February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011

Diagram from the patent application

Jeff Bezos is worried about phone safety. Not your safety while you’re distracted by your phone. No, he’s worried about the gadget itself.

The Amazon boss and his colleague, Vice President Gregory M. Hart, filed a patent application to protect their idea of an air bag that inflates around your mobile device if you drop it. Broadly, the duo are seeking to patent the idea of a “system and method for protecting devices from impact damage…”

The idea is to use a device’s built-in gyroscope, camera, or other sensors to determine if the device its moving quickly toward the ground or some other object. If it determines that damaging impact is imminent, it triggers a protection system to absorb the fall…

And the patent filing isn’t just attempting to cover device air bags. Bezos and Hart also envision a “reorientation element” that would turn the device so that it hits the ground on the side of the device where the air bag has been deployed. And it doesn’t have to be an air bag. The filing also contemplates using “a propulsion element, a spring, an impact absorbing structure, and a reinforced edge,” among other protection elements.

Of course, you still could buy a humungous case or just quit dropping the bloody thing. I presume the addition of the air bag also makes it float if you drop your phone into the toilet.

The FBI released its first app for Apple’s iPhone on Friday, called Child ID.

The app can store photos and information on a child, such as height, weight, date of birth, gender, ethnicity, hair and eye color and whether or not they have pierced ears.

“Using a special tab on the app, you can also quickly and easily e-mail the information to authorities with a few clicks” in case a child goes missing or in other emergencies, the FBI said in announcing the app’s release.

Parents and guardians of a child can also call 911 or the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children from within the app. Child ID also has a list of safety tips for parents and a checklist of things to do if an emergency arises.

The phone can store multiple entries for multiple children, but filing out information about a child doesn’t automatically send it to the FBI. Everything entered using the app stays on a parent’s device running Apple’s iOS software – which includes the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

The only time the information is shared with law enforcement is when a user emails an entry on a child to police or the FBI.

There is a flaw or two in the software. The concept is in the right part of our social lives.

It’s worth considering for all geeky parents – though I guess the iOS devices are now mainstream enough, I can leave off the geeky part.

NASA has launched an iPad application for those interested in Earth science.

Dubbed the NASA Visualization Explorer, the application delivers real-satellite data, including movies and stills, of Earth, that enable users to learn a bit more about the “natural world.” Short stories accompany the videos and stills to explain what users are seeing and why it’s important.

“The app will explore stories of climate change, Earth’s dynamic systems, plant life on land and in the oceans–all of the small and large stories captured in data by NASA satellites and then visualized,” Michael Starobin, a senior producer at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement.

“Science should be accessible to everyone, and visualization reveals the meaning and value of the often intangible, but essential, data delivered by NASA’s research efforts,” Starobin continued. “Data visualization makes information immediately visual and understandable when it otherwise might go unnoticed.”

In addition to visualizations, the app also comes with six editorial features related to Earth science. According to NASA, two new editorials will be added each week. The organization also said it might include stories about the sun and solar system at some point.

The free NASA Visualization Explorer is available now in Apple’s App Store.

Last month we reported on the Aurasma augmented reality (AR) app, and compared it to the special sunglasses in the John Carpenter movie They Live, that let their wearers see the aliens secretly living amongst us. Well, the new appBlaster iPhone accessory is much, much more reminiscent of that film. It’s essentially a toy gun, that your iPhone mounts on top of. Running the free Alien Attack AR game, the phone will proceed to show you the virtual otherwise-invisible aliens that are all around you, overlaid on real-time video of your your real-life surroundings. You then use the gun to shoot the little goobers before they nab you.

Unlike some AR apps, Alien Attack appears not to recognize real-life objects, so aliens won’t come through doorways or sit on chairs, for instance. The aliens do maintain their orientation to actual objects, however, so if you swing the gun back and forth, the aliens will stay where they are within the room instead of swinging with the gun. They can even come at you from behind, which the game’s radar function will warn you about…

The whole thing is a bit like the Ghost Gun, a Hasbro toy from the 70s that five or six readers might remember. It projected an image of a ghost on the walls of a darkened room, which flared-jeans-wearing youngsters then “shot” at by using the gun’s trigger to poke holes in a film within the gun, that the image of the ghost was printed upon … OK, I said it was a bit like it.

If you’ve previously managed to alter your own relationship to reality with your chemicals of choice — I can envision some of you enjoying a truly memorable gaming experience with this device.

 
Thanks, Ursarodinia

As AT&T tries to swallow up the American wing of the German telekom, many have wondered whether Apple would allow T-Mobile to carry the iPhone. Apple’s answer so far is a no*, but that hasn’t stopped T-Mobile customers from adopting iPhones. In huge numbers.

In a meeting with T-Mobile spokespeople today ahead of the NYC Pepcom event, I received word that there are actively over a million Apple iPhones currently on T-Mobile’s network.

When asked for a breakdown, the spokesman said the majority were pre-iPhone 4 but that a significant amount of people had “taken the scissors” to their T-Mobile SIM cards. T-Mobile doesn’t currently offer a Micro-SIM solution for Apple’s iPhone 4 so people who want to use the iPhone 4 must modify their SIMs into MicroSIMs. Those using iPhone 4s also won’t receive T-Mobile’s 3G or 4G data speeds because of the radio differences between the networks.

When asked to elaborate further on Micro-SIMs, the spokesman told me they are in the works but there was no time frame for release. Why not wait until the deal with AT&T is done to make MicroSIMs? Perhaps we’ll have a little surprise come September?

Cripes. I may finally have an excuse to get my wife an iPhone.