Month: July 2014

This Temporary Tattoo Can Unlock Your Phone

TechCrunch

tatoooooo

I’d think this was just a clever April Fools joke, if it wasn’t the middle of July.

Motorola has teamed up with a company called VivaLnk to make a temporary tattoo that can unlock a smartphone, no PIN required. Slap it on your skin, hold your phone up to it, and bam — phone unlocked.

Who needs gestural passwords or face recognition when you can unlock your phone like a time traveling space wizard?

So how does it work? It’s an ultra thin NFC circuit, wrapped up in medical grade 3M adhesive that won’t (or, at least, shouldn’t) freak out your skin.

A 10 pack of tattoos will set you back $10 bucks. Motorola says these things should stand up to swimming and other exercise and should last for up to 5 days — so that 10 pack would optimally last you a bit over a month and…

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The story of WebP: How Google wants to speed up the web, one image at a time

come on guys i dont wanna leave everyone behind

Gigaom

Tired of slow web pages? So is Google, (S GOOG) and the company thinks it has the key to speed up the web: smaller image files. Google’s WebP image format aims to replace existing image file formats like JPEG with a smaller file size, resulting in faster load times and significant bandwidth savings for website operators. But will the company be able to convince everyone to switch, or are we about to see even more media format fragmentation?

WebP offers around a third better image compression than JPEG, which can add up to a lot of bandwidth savings and speed improvements, depending on how image-heavy a page is. YouTube was able to cut down page load times by up to 10 percent when it recently started rolling out  WebP video thumbnails. Google has also saved several several terabytes of bandwidth every day since switching images in the Chrome Web Store…

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