Self Driving Car/Plane?

The self driving car that can also FLY - and its inventors say a consumer version could be on the road (and in the air) by 2017

    AeroMobil can fly 430 miles on a tank of petrol
    When its wings fold down, it can fit into a normal parking space
    New video reveals the plane is already in advanced flight trials
    Firm claims design is 'production ready' and will go on sale in 2017

It has been a sci-fi dream for decades - a car that can simply take to the air to avoid traffic.

However, a Slovakian firm has said it has finally cracked the problem - and it will sell in it just two years.

The AeroMobil can fly 430 miles on a tank of petrol - and when its wings fold down, it'll fit into a normal parking space.

Aeromobil is a 'flying car' that perfectly makes use of existing infrastructure created for automobiles and planes, and opens doors to real door-to-door travel,' the firm says.

When in its car configuration, it can fit into a standard parking space, and it also takes normal fuel pumped at every service station.

The latest version is the third generation of the craft.

'It is now finalised and has been in regular flight-testing program in real flight conditions since October 2014,' the firm said.

At South By Southwest, Juraj Vaculik, co-founder and CEO of AeroMobil, spoke at a panel about the future of flying cars, predicting a world ahead in which these vehicles easily merge with existing transportation.

He says it will be on sale in 2017, and that the firm was also developing a self driving (and flying) version.

Tatiana Veber, an AeroMobil spokesman said: 'We have been developing the concept of a flying car since 1990.

'Our first model looked quite bizarre and it would have problems in the regular use.

'That was a signal to improve the concept of the flying car in a way to become an integral part of the regular road traffic.

'We got a positive feedback from several experts in avionics, which appreciated design and the technical solution of the process of transformation.

'The car is constructed to be fuelled at regular gas stations using the fuel for Rotax 912 ULS engine.'

AeroMobil says its third prototype is ready to be shown to the world this October 29th at the Pioneers Festival in Austria.

However, design is still not perfect- the wings fold into the back seat behind the driver when in car mode.

The firm has also released a video of it in action, driving through city streets then taking to the air.

'Aeromobil 3 is stylish, comfortable for both the driver and passenger, and exceptionally combines the performance of a sports car with qualities of an 'ultralight',' it says.

The vehicle can reach 200km/h when in the air, and 160km/h on the roads. –Source: Daily Mail

 

 

How Starbucks, Apple, General Motors And AT&T Are Preparing The World For Wireless Energy

If you visited a Starbucks in Boston or Silicon Valley during the last year or so, you may have noticed black circles embedded in the coffee bars and tables. You may have even glimpsed an early adopter with a special cellphone case charging an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy simply by resting it on a black disc. If the scene was perplexing, there’s a reason: what you saw was an image from the future.

Some of the world’s biggest brands are quietly preparing their customers for what they see as the next big technology shift. If they have are right, all the power cords and battery chargers that have been cluttering our homes and offices for decades will soon be headed for the nearest landfill. For years, wireless power has been a technically possible and universally desirable geek obsession, fueling dueling standards and an array of gadgets. But so far the required ecosystem of pervasive charging spots along with a critical mass of chargeable devices has failed to emerge. That may, however, be at about to change.

Today, Starbucks will announce the rollout of 100,000 wireless charging spots in coffeehouses around the United States. While it’s still early days, the number of devices embedded with wireless charging capabilities is growing. More than five dozen models have already been released, and there’s a distinct possibility that Apple will include wireless charging in the new iPhone 6, according to media reports last week.

A spokeswoman for Apple declined to comment, but it wouldn’t be the first time Apple and Starbucks combined their clout to bring a breakthrough wireless technology to mainstream consumers.

In 1999, Apple released AirPort, a base station and wireless card, exposing mass market consumers to wireless home networking for the first time. Two years later, Starbucks began offering Wi-Fi in its coffeehouses, eventually partnering with Apple to offer exclusive entertainment through the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store. The juggernaut created by the two brands, both of whom embraced a standard known as 802.11b, helped kill a competing standard known as HomeRF.

Daniel Schreiber, the president of Powermat, one of the leading providers of wireless charging technology, learned a valuable lesson from Wi-Fi’s early days. “Standards are set in coffee shops, not conference rooms,” he told me last year during a trip to Israel where Powermat is headquartered.

Powermat originally participated in a standards body known as the Wireless Power Consortium, but it broke away in early 2012 to form the Power Matters Alliance along with initial members from Procter & Gamble PG, Duracell, Energy Star, eMerge Alliance, Google, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Sony Pictures Entertainment, General Motors, Facebook and the National Grid. The alliance has since grown to include more than 100 members including Samsung, Qualcomm and AT&T Mobility.

The goal of the alliance was to create the missing ecosystem—something that alliance members felt the consortium was failing to do. Powermat had already started to build bridges with the automotive and consumer products industries, and it hoped the alliance would provide additional momentum.

Over the next two years more than 2,000 charging spots that adhered to the PMA standard were installed in airports and hotels in the United States and Europe. A joint venture with Procter & Gamble called Duracell Powermat secured deals with McDonalds and arranged to put 550 charging spots in Madison Square Garden. Starbucks first introduced the charging spots in its coffeehouses in Boston in the fall of 2012 and later expanded the pilot to Silicon Valley in 2013.

Meanwhile, GM, a member of the PMA alliance and an investor in Powermat, is unveiling new cars equipped with wireless charging pads later this year. They won’t, however, be first to market. Rival car makers such as Toyota have already debuted cars outfitted with charging pads powered by the consortium’s standard known as Qi. The number of handsets capable of wireless charging and embedded with Qi dramatically outnumbers those with PMA. The consortium has also signed up Verizon Wireless, the #1 US mobile carrier, whereas the alliance is backed by AT&T, the #2 carrier.

In a statement, Adam Brotman, Starbuck’s chief digital officer, said the company was pleased by how customers responded to the pilot. “We’ve always tried to anticipate our customers’ needs early in the adoption curve and provide a world class solution,” he said. “We’re expanding this nationally to provide our customers a quality and reliable experience as they use our stores as their respite, their office away from home or as a gathering place with their friends and family.”

“Starbucks is a highly regarded global brand and its decision to roll out a Powermat network is both empowering and transformative for consumers and the mobile industry as a whole,” Jeff Howard, vice president, mobile devices and accessories at AT&T Mobility said in a statement. “Many of our newer devices have compatible technology either embedded or available as an added feature to give consumers the freedom to charge wirelessly.”

Schreiber believes that Starbuck’s announcement will give the alliance’s standard an edge over the consortium’s Qi. He compares it to Warner Brother’s announcement in January 2008 that it would back Blu-ray over HD DVD. During 2007, the market share for Blu-ray disc players versus HD DVD players was evenly split 49/49, according to NPD Group. But one week after Warner Brothers backed Blu-ray, its share jumped to 90 percent according to weekly sales and dollar volume.

Whatever standard prevails, the days of power cords and chargers are surely numbered. Once carriers, handset makers and car manufacturers commit to a single standard, it will just be a matter of time before wireless charging spots become as pervasive as a hot cup of coffee. –Source: Contributed by Mary/Forbes

When Your Cable Company Attacks: Why Comcast Abuses Its Customers

Insults directed at consumers are proof that Comcast is rotten to the core.

When it comes to popularity, cable companies rank down there with members of Congress, root canals and Nickelback. Current and former customers agree; they hate the high cost and poor service, and they especially hate the runaround they get from call centers.

Comcast and Time Warner Cable, the two largest cable television providers in the U.S., are consistently at the bottom of consumer satisfaction surveys and are among the least trusted corporations in the nation. Now these two monolithic companies are on the brink of a mega-merger. 
The merged company — which will be named Comcast — would control more than two-thirds of all cable television subscriptions in the country, and some 40% of the home Internet market. The $45.2 billion merger, proposed a year ago, is awaiting approval from the feds, and there are unfortunate signs the merger will be approved.

Survey after survey shows that Americans wholeheartedly oppose the proposed merger. The latest survey, by Consumer Reports, finds nearly three-quarters of Americans believe it will result in higher cable and Internet rates, while two-thirds say it will likely have a negative impact on customer service and that Comcast would have no incentive to improve.

So, knowing that most of their customers hate their guts, you would think that Comcast and Time Warner would do some corporate soul searching and perhaps polish their respective images. Maybe some acts of goodwill like rolling back prices, making a true commitment to net neutrality or providing better customer service would do the trick. But that hasn’t been the case. As regional monopolies, these companies know that when they are awarded a local franchise, they can pretty much do as they please without fear of consequences.

Comcast even seems to have grown surlier toward its customers since the unpopular merger was first proposed. This past spring, technology journalist Ryan Block attempted to cancel his service. Not only did Comcast’s customer retention specialist try to talk Block out of it, he got hostile with him, chiding Block and refusing to take back Comcast’s cable card. What the rep didn’t know is that Block was recording the last 10 minutes of the conversation, after it became ridiculous.

"This phone call is actually an amazing representative example of why I don't want to stay with Comcast," Block tells the retention specialist at one point.

The recording, which went viral after it was posted on TechCrunch, further amplified customers’ frustrations with Comcast and other cable providers. Comcast didn't handle this bad publicity well; the response was your typical corporate lip service. The company said the rep’s behavior was “unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives.”

But was it?

Earlier this month, Lisa Brown, a Comcast customer from Spokane, Wash., was rechristened “Asshole Brown” on the service bill she received in the mail. Upset by this, Brown believes her name changed after she phoned Comcast’s local offices to remove the pay-TV portions of her cable package. Brown’s call, like other customers who attempt to downgrade or cancel, was forwarded to a rep who tried to talk her out of dropping premium channels.

“I was never rude,” Brown told consumer advocate Chris Elliott. “It could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer.”

After she received her bill, Brown said she called Comcast asking for an explanation and to have her billing name changed back to Lisa, but she says the local and regional offices were of no help. It wasn’t until Elliott contacted Comcast’s headquarters for a comment about the incident that the company sprang into action. Again, Comcast claimed it has no tolerance for this type of behavior and would investigate.

But it turns out this wasn't an isolated incident by a rogue employee. Only days after Brown’s story went viral, three other customers reported that they, too, were defamed by Comcast employees.

Julie Swano reported that her December bill was addressed to “Whore” Julia Swano. Swano said she had to talk to at least 20 Comcast employees in a three week period to find out what happened and to get her name changed back, yet she says “they did nothing about it.”

Another customer, Carolina Heredia, contacted Elliott after her name was changed to “dummy” on her online account. When she gained access to her customer page, the greeting said, “Hello, dummy.” Heredia says she called Comcast several times about the name change, but got no satisfaction until she visited a local office. Even then, she says no one from Comcast has offered an apology or an explanation.

And finally, a 63-year-old Chicago-area woman told WGN-TV that she, too, was insulted on her Comcast bill. Mary Bauer of suburban Addison was having trouble with her Comcast service for months. After the issues were resolved, her bills stopped showing up, but Bauer said she would call customer service to make her payments. Recently, bills started showing up in her mailbox again, with "Super Bitch" stamped where her name should go. Again, Comcast responded and said it was investigating the matter.

A former Comcast subcontractor told Chris Elliott that it's easy to change a customer’s name, but the changes would have to be made deliberately. "It does take some serious navigation to get to the portion of the biller, or the software they used to make changes on accounts, where you change account names and information. So the rep who changed the customer’s name to ‘a**hole’ couldn’t have done it by accident,” he tells Elliot.

But who would do something like that? And why?

Signs point to exasperated customer service reps or retention specialists who have access to a customer’s profile. They can do atrocious things to the account, including abusing a customer’s name. And after hard day of dealing with dissatisfied customers and cynical managers, it's an easy way to vent some frustrations.

“It’s high-pressure work,” one former retention specialist told AlterNet. “It’s a sales job, and you’re monitored all the time.”

Retention specialists are given small bonuses for "saves," when they persuade customers not to cancel services or disconnect. But they’re also punished for “discos,” the term used when they are unsuccessful in retaining a customer. These call center salespeople work from a script that is supposed to persuade customers to reconsider disconnecting their service. It’s a step-by-step method and a formula that is supposed to succeed a large percentage of the time. “And if it’s not working for you, managers know it's not the fault of the script," the former specialist said.

The Verge, a tech news site, contacted several current and former Comcast employees. They concur that all disconnect requests are forwarded to retention specialists and that front-line customer service reps don’t have the ability to cancel subscribers. If customers wish to disconnect or downgrade service, they have to endure a high-pressure sales pitch to convince them otherwise, and some retention specialists just won’t take no for an answer.

“There’s a stock answer for every concern,” the former retention specialist told us. “If the price is too high or someone just wants to drop everything but Internet, we stick with the script. So, you’re really focused on your results, not the customer's needs."

The script is a simple ordered checklist of what to say to a possible “disco.” Some parts of the script are innocuous enough, but it mostly guides retention specialists how to feign empathy and build rapport with the customer while subconsciously maneuvering the subject away from cancellation. The checklist includes instructions to how to “relate and empathize,” “take control,” “set the agenda,” “overcome objections” and “take ownership.” These sales tactics are similar to those used by car salespeople and boiler-room stock brokers. The retention specialists are also given some leeway to offer customers modest discounts on service and Internet speed upgrades to try to retain them. Bonus points can also be earned for steering customers away from trap words like “disconnect,” “downgrade” and “cancel.”

And while retention specialists are rewarded for saves, it can be brutal when one of them is riding a bad luck streak. Some retention specialists say they will go as far as to hang up on customers or put them on hold indefinitely if they don't think they can talk them out of disconnecting. Because they know that if they string together just a few discos in a short period of time, it can result in dismissal. That’s probably why they lash out at customers.

In a post on his LinkedIn page, Frank Eliason, a former Comcast executive, says the issue starts with the business atmosphere, and the customer experience with retention contractors could be just one symptom of a larger cultural problem.

“Customer service is often the most expensive line on any company's balance sheet, especially for a company like Comcast which has more than 300 million interactions each year,” says Eliason, the former senior director of national customer operations. “Call centers tried to shift to become sales centers. This is why any time a customer calls, they're pitched everything under the sun instead of actually helping you with the reason why you called in the first place.”

When client care gives way to seedy sales tactics, that's when the wheels fall off customer service operations.

“Incidents like these most often happen because of a culture within the company,” says Eliason. “The reason you tend not to hear about incidents like this from other companies is because people within the company would be horrified if they heard of such a thing, and they can easily escalate the situation to higher levels.”

Eliason says he would “hit the roof” if he heard that a customer’s name was changed to Asshole, but this evidently didn’t upset current Comcast employees enough to rectify the affront to Brown. It wasn't until Brown's humilation made national headlines that it was taken up by Comcast’s public relations department.

So, it appears Comcast’s infamous customer service gaffes aren't isolated incidents at all, but inspired by the narcissistic corporate culture of a juggernaut that couldn't care less about its customers, just so long as they’re paying their bills. And why should they? Without any real competition in most of the areas it serves, Comcast enjoys the impregnability of a captive audience. –Source: AlterNet

10 Creepy Sex Apps You Definitely Never Asked For

Here are the 10 apps making us fear for the future of sex.

Two things I love are sex and technology. I think 99% of 20-something women can agree that sex and technology are two things which vastly improve one’s quality of life. But while they say two wrongs don’t make a right, two rights almost certainly can make a big fat wrong.

Nowhere is this more evident than on the app store. One thing making the internet right now is the addition of Glance, an app made by Glassholes for Glassholes who want to watch themselves boning while wearing Google Glass. The X-rated DIY horror film can either be saved to your phone or deleted in a self-conscious freakout after you’ve experienced the glory of thrusting into your own O-face. And it’s not the first time horny app developers have royally cocked up. Here are the 10 apps making us fear for the future of sex.

1. Google Glance

There’s checking out your vulva in a hand-held mirror, then there’s having sex while watching your own face redden and grow seven chins. Call me a bad feminist, but I just don’t want to be this familiar with my body.

2. Spreadsheets

Boardroom-meets-bedroom is a very tricky line. Sexy secretaries, I think we all agree, can be hot. Especially sexy male secretaries. But recording your sexual duration, decimal peak, and TPM (thrusts per minute) on a digital spreadsheet isn’t just really fucking creepy — it’s pointless. If you’re shooting for personal bests, don’t involve your poor partner. Louder is definitely not always better.

3. Passion

Finally, an app that silently judges you while you bone! If you’ve always wished sex was a little more like the worst parts of high school, this is the app for you. But as  Gizmodo points out, the app unfortunately does not automatically dock you 5 points for using it in the first place, making it completely inaccurate.

4. Good2Go
 

This Tough Mudder obstacle course of sex apps has praiseworthy purpose: trying to prevent non-consensual sex. But in practice it’s the most annoying app since the math problem alarm clock. Good2Go makes you ask a series of questions about your age, intoxication level, and whether you consent before it gives you license to do the dirty, but the entire process takes around four minutes. That’s longer than most people spend on foreplay. Shockingly, it’s no longer on the app store.

5. 3nder

Tinder’s creepier cousin, 3nder, also set itself an admirable goal: making threesomes even more awkward than they already are. From the app itself: “I will connect you wtih open-minded couples and singles with mutual lifestyle and desires.” Let’s be real — if you’re treading the sexually and emotionally complex waters of a threesome, you should probably have the balls to do it in real life.

6. Wingman

Think of this one like the Tinder for air travel. While I don’t in theory have a problem with the idea of joining the mile high club, I do want membership limited to those sitting in business class or flying on half-full planes. People hogging the economy bathroom stall deserve no sympathy when their airborne boning backfires and they’re stuck sitting behind that person for another five hours. Also, if you’re limited to people who have agreed to pay $30.95 for in-flight wifi, pickings are going to be slim.

7. Pocket Girlfriend

This app isn’t just stupid — it’s incredibly offensive. Pocket girlfriend doesn’t appear to know how to wear a shirt, but she does know how to piss off 99% of the female population. Her conversation is limited to demeaning remarks including, “It’s important for me to stay in shape, but I would never make you go to the gym,” “Why would I want to talk about my feelings?” and “Let me iron that for you.”

8. Ring for Sex

It’s literally a bell sound you push when you want to bone. Could a smartphone be any more caveman?

9. Crowd Pilot

To me the only thing more terrifying than a bad first date is having other people listen in on your bad first date. But that’s precisely the premise of Crowd Pilot, which will livestream your awkward audio to friends or total strangers, who can then suggest things to do or say next. Unfortunately there’s probably no smooth comeback you can segue into when your date accuses you of illegally broadcasting what’s supposed to be a confidential discussion.

10. Sock-it

Ever wanted to hang a sock on your doorknob to warn your roommates of sex taking place but didn’t want to separate it from its twin? Nope, never had this problem either, but Chlorox made an app for it anyway. I’m using the word “roommates” here because I refuse to believe this is for letting your parents know your bonking schedule. –AlterNet

The Amazing New VW In China With No Wheels!

Volkswagen is just about to revolutionize the entire automotive industry --and that includes not only the automakers but also the oil producers/refineries, the tire manufacturers, and the auto repair technicians & mechanics.

This is really revolutionary because it changes practically all concepts about motor vehicles which have dominated for years.

The new VW car does NOT need either wheels or gasoline because it moves around with the use of air! The prototype which has been tested and shown in Chengdu (China) works perfectly.

VW plans to produce hundreds of thousands of the new "air car" for its Chinese market.

VW also plans to introduce the no wheels "air car" in North America, Europe, and in South America later.

Google’s Strange Discomfort With Sexuality

The list of words banned from the latest Android operating system is as baffling as it is odd. Apparently, the Internet giant is not OK with words like “preggers” and “uterus” but it also has something against “LSAT.” No genitalia have made it into the 165,000-word dictionary within the new system, but neither have harmless words such as “panties” or “pizzle,” or rather useful words like “condoms” and “Tampax.” These are just some of the 1,400 English words absent from Google’s Kitkat phone.

Wired magazine discusses the approach the company has taken to language:

    Type or swipe the word on the latest version of Android’s Google Keyboard — or for that matter “intercourse,” “coitus,” “screwing” or even “lovemaking” — and the web giant’s predictive algorithm will offer no help.

    Taken as a whole, Google’s list suggests not only a surprising discomfort with sexuality, but also reproductive health and undergarments. Words like “panty,” “braless,” “Tampax,” “lactation,” and “preggers” are censored along with sexual health vocabulary like “uterus” and “STI.”

    “I try to Swype-type the word ‘condom’ and I get ‘condition’ or ‘confusion,’” said Jillian York, a spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “There is no context in which that makes any sense. Grow up, Android.”

    Indeed, many of the rules seem to go well beyond simple inconsistency into the realm of the absurd. For example, there’s a zero tolerance policy on “morphine,” “demerol” and barbituric acid precursor “malonylurea,” while “marijuana,” “methamphetamine” and even “bong” are allowed. Islam-related words “Sunni” and “Iftar” are censored, but many others related to the Muslim faith and other religions are kosher. Tech outfits “AMD” and “Garmin” are both verboten and yet Google competitors “Apple” and “Microsoft” are permitted.

    “Klansmen” and “supremacist” are blocked, but “Nazi” is fair game.

    Google declined to comment on how it compiles the list of offensive words, and how often it’s updated. But it’s clear that built-in dictionaries for other languages censor far fewer words.

    As others have pointed out, words included in any dictionary, digital and otherwise, can quickly become a political issue. Anti-bullying advocacy group Grin Campaign successfully lobbied the Oxford English Dictionary and Microsoft Office to include the word “transphobia” in future editions, and during the runup to the 2008 presidential election, New York Times blogger David Pogue pointed out that many versions of Microsoft Office still did not recognize the name “Obama” (though an updated word list was available at the time as a patch).

For those of you who don’t feel like being limited in your verbal exchanges with others, you can disable the filter in the phone’s keyboard settings. Just don’t be too surprised if your next Google update suddenly makes it difficult to discuss “lovemaking” or call someone a “geek.” -Truth Dig

5 Tech Products That Will Be Dead In 5 Years

With the speed of innovation in the tech industry, we can’t know every piece of technology that will fill our everyday lives in five years, but we can predict what won’t last. As smartphones begin to render low-end cameras obsolete and Netflix continues to upend the DVD and Blu-ray market, it’s clear the technology landscape will look dramatically different in the near future.

Here are five tech products we predict will go the way of the dodo in the next half-decade.

Blu-ray/DVD players

Netflix, Netflix, Netflix. Amazingly, the entire demise of Blu-rays and DVDs (and Blockbuster) are due to one company. There were other players in the cultural shift to streaming movies, but Netflix is the iTunes of movies on demand. Funny enough, iTunes offers movie rentals as well.

Blu-ray players were the cream of the crop when it came to watching movies for a few years, but 2013 is expected to be the last year of growth for the market. As the ease of use, accessibility and quality of Netflix continues to increase as it rolls out 4K streaming over the next few years (not to mention other competitors that may generate interest from users), look for Blu-ray players to quickly become a nice collectible right next to your VCR.

Stand-alone in-car GPS units

In a little over six years, over 1.3 billion iPhone and Android smartphones have been sold around the world, and all of those devices have access to mapping software. Combine that with the propagation of in-car GPS systems, and it spells a swift demise for the stand-alone GPS units for vehicle dashboards, which saw widespread success in the early and mid-2000s. Since smartphones started offering GPS capabilities in 2008, sales of stand-alone GPS units for vehicles have seen a 15-20 percent decline per year.

Costing between $75 and $350, standalone GPS units built for vehicles from companies like Garmin and TomTom are already losing their viability (although these companies are still finding success with GPS units for boating and other outdoor activities), and will likely be completely removed from the market in five years. As battery technology allows for more usage time in smartphones and more people move into newer cars with built-in GPS systems, opting for a standalone GPS unit will cease be an option in the near future.

Dial-up Internet

Yes, dial-up Internet is still around, and people still use it. In fact, 3 percent of Americans still use dial-up Internet. That’s 9 million people, equal to the population of New Jersey. Only 65 percent of Americans currently have broadband connections. Thanks to the necessity of the Internet and new alternatives for connecting to the Internet at faster speeds, this won’t be the case for long.

Internet companies are expanding at a rapid pace, as people in underserved areas demand access to broadband speeds. Expansions will continue over the next five years, thanks in part to the FCC’s Connect America Fund, which aims to bring broadband to 7 million Americans who cannot currently receive it. Combined with expansions from cable companies and new viable alternatives like satellite Internet (which now reaches speeds of 15Mbps), dial-up Internet will finally be extinct in five years.
 

Low-end digital cameras

We have Apple to thank for this one. The 2010 release of the iPhone 4 and its game-changing camera forced the mobile industry to step up camera quality to the point that it has rendered sub-$200 point-and-shoot cameras all but obsolete. There are still a few straggling consumers out there who prefer the optical zoom or battery life of a low-end digital camera over the one in their smartphone, but at the rate of progression of mobile camera technology, those user complaints will soon be addressed.

In five years, camera companies like Nikon, Canon and Sony will have done away with their low-end camera lines and shifted their focus to the mid- and high-end market, as the low-end market will have been completely subsumed by smartphones.
Car keys

One of the quickest and least discussed changes to happen over the last few years is the reduction of physical car keys and the introduction of smart keys in a number of new vehicles by manufacturers. Surprisingly, the move away from physical car keys happened without much of a fuss from consumers. With benefits like keyless entry, push to start, driver profiles and remote start, buyers of newer vehicles have enjoyed the benefits of the new smart system (though many still end up to getting locked out of their cars if they leave the car while the engine is warming up).

But as quickly as smart keys have come on the scene, smartphones may soon replace them. With apps like OnStar RemoteLink offered by Chevrolet, which allows you to unlock and start a your car with an app, the future of car keys may lie in an app store. Whether we stick with smart keys or move on to something more innovative in five years, you can be sure that the physical car key we have used for the last 70 or so years will be a thing of the past for new cars. –Time

The Future Of Books Looks A Lot Like Netflix

Struggling against plunging prices and a shrinking audience, book publishers think they’ve found a compelling vision for the future: magazines.

Today, the San Francisco-based literary startup Plympton launched an online fiction service called Rooster. It’s sold by subscription. It’s priced by the month. And it automatically delivers regular content to your iPhone or iPad. In other words, it’s a book service that looks a lot like a magazine service. And it’s just the latest example of how books are being packaged like magazines.

With Rooster, readers pay $5 per month in exchange for a stream of bite-sized chunks of fiction. Each chunk takes just 15 minutes or so to read, and over the course of a month, they add up to two books. The service builds on the success of Plympton’s Daily Lit, which emails you classic literature in five-minute installments.

Originally, as part of a partnership with Amazon, Plympton focused on selling its serials one volume at a time. In other words, you’d sign up for a series like “Hacker Mom” for $3.99, receive each episode on your Kindle, and then be done. The company then moved to subscriptions after co-founders Yael Goldstein Love and Jennifer 8. Lee realized Plympton knew far more about its readers than any traditional publisher.

Whereas an old-line book maker sells to bookstores, Plympton deals directly with customers. It knows their email addresses and could at least theoretically use their reading and purchase history to tailor the content of subscription streams (though with only one subscription channel, the company has no immediate plans to do so). Meanwhile, production costs are significantly lower with ebooks, and distribution is essentially free. That means more money can be plowed into online marketing for subscription channels. So, whereas the idea of mailing a monthly batch of books was ungainly in the old physical book market, it has become feasible in the ebook world, feasible not just because digital distribution is easy but because online publishers know and build audiences better.

Rooster follows in the footsteps of the whole-book literary subscriptions offered by indie Brooklyn outfit Emily Books, the all-you-can-eat genre subscriptions offered by F + W Media, and more general subscriptions offered by the likes of Oyster and Scribd. Tim Waterstone, owner of the UK bookstore Waterstones, has also announced Read Petite, a forthcoming short-fiction streaming service.

So now that we know that it’s possible to deliver books like magazines, to sell them like magazines, and to target them at clusters of readers like magazines, the big question looms: Do book enthusiasts actually want to engage with literature the way they engage with magazines? And can they afford to? After shelling out every month for Spotify and Netflix subscriptions, for New York Times digital, for electronic tablet magazines, for immersive online videogames, for online file storage, and, oh right, for high-speed internet, will people sign up for yet another monthly charge? Will they have the intellectual bandwidth to consume what they bought? And will they come to trust or despise the online studios pushing books onto their phones and iPads?

Those are difficult questions to answer. But such is the world of modern book publishing. –Wired