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– via The Verge
Hendo is a $10,000 hoverboard that wants to change the world
As I push off for my first time on an actual working hoverboard, the first thought in my mind is not how different it is from how Michael J. Fox did it in Back To The Future Part II — which is obviously just a movie. It’s whether or not I’m going to immediately go face-first into this large, copper-lined floor. It’s also sinking in that this highly experimental skateboard required signing a liability waiver, and that there are several people positioned around me whose sole job it is to make sure I and their $10,000 prototype don’t go flying out of control.
This is the Hendo, the namesake of an inventor named Greg Henderson, and it’s really more of a technology demo than something that’s going to get you to work in the morning. Right now it’s effectively a parlor trick, and it apparently only works in parlors lined with a one of a small set of metals. But Henderson, who co-founded the hoverboard’s parent company Arx Pax with his wife Jill, imagines the technology that’s inside it could become a solution for keeping buildings from getting destroyed in floods and earthquakes by simply lifting them up. They also say that it could serve as a replacement for the systems that currently levitate maglev trains.
Those ambitions are the opposite of humility, but Arx Pax seems like a humble company, situated in a nondescript office park in Los Gatos, California. Also humbe: the small square white box that floats just a few centimeters above metal surfaces, designed as a technology demo that will be made available to Kickstarter backers. It’s just like an air hockey table, but in reverse, where a large object is simply floating just a few millimeters above, and adrift. But there’s no air, just a barreling thrum of whatever is going on inside the “white box.” Inside it are a group of what Henderson refers to as hover engines, and the oversimplified explanation of how they work involves a little electromagnetism and Lenz’s law. Scale this up a bit and you get the hoverboard I’m on. Go even bigger and you can hold up cars, trains, and even buildings. Or at least that’s the idea.
“A magnet has an electromagnetic field. It is equal in all areas. It has a north and a south pole,” Henderson explains. “What if you were able to take that magnet, and organize the magnetic field so that it was only on one side? And then you combine that with other magnetic fields in a way that amplifies and focuses their strength? That’s magnetic field architecture.” When used on a material like the copper floor that I’m standing on, the entire unit floats a few centimeters off the ground. Goodbye friction, and hello hoverboard.
How that works with a human on top of it is fun, but not elegant. I used to skateboard quite a bit, but hopping on Hendo’s hoverboard is something else. The easiest way to describe it is like getting on a snowboard that’s just been pulled out of an oven. Any sort of lateral control you’d have with a skateboard goes out the window. Instead, you’re floating, and often spinning as your body pushes certain parts of the board, adjusting its direction. “You should just stay on the board and let us push you,” one of the safety attendants says to me after my first few trips across the demo space. I happily agree.
Henderson says the technology is “completely safe,” and that there’s no measurable field strength above it, where whatever’s on top of it is being carried. “It is very safe particularly relative to other forms of maglev,” he adds.
While “completely safe,” it’s far from silent. Where the white box sounded like a loud desktop computer, the sound coming out of the hoverboard prototype is like a high-pitched screech. This will be dampened by the time the company has a more polished version of the hoverboard ready by this time next year, Henderson promises, but for now it’s a cacophony of squeals when you get on. The word “Banshee” comes to mind.
Was it fun? Unequivocally. Pushing off for the first time, and even later runs was a thrill. For the first time ever, I felt like it was OK for some electronic device to have a blue glowing light on it. It’s just too bad there wasn’t more space to ride on. The small demo area actually made it more difficult to get momentum, and stabilize myself as I glided gently into the waiting arms of my spotting team.
Arx Pax also built a modest half-pipe, which I did not volunteer to try, but was given a brief demo of how this could work. The point here is that the board will work on a surface that isn’t entirely flat, but it also makes for a good demonstration the difficulties of controlling something that is not touching the ground. After losing his balance on a second run, Hendo’s brave stuntman leaned too heavily on one of the edges of the board, causing a chunk of the protective covers over the “engines” to snap off and go flying across the floor. That’s why we’re all wearing safety glasses, and why this is still in development.
This is not the beta version of the product as much as a proof of concept — even if you could convince your local city council to pave the sidewalks in copper, commuting on this hulking beast is not going to be a viable option. Arx Pax is trying to raise $250,000 through a Kickstarter campaign to turn this into something beyond a prototype that runs for seven minutes before the batteries die. The company’s offering backers small engine packs so that they can use the technology to build their own creations. It’s also giving up to 10 people “production” versions of its hoverboard, which cost well over $10,000 a pop, but $10,000 is the most that Kickstarter will allow people to pledge. Ultimately, Henderson says, the price will come down, but for now he wants to offer the core technology to other people who might have a clearer purpose of what to do with it.
THIS HOVERBOARD WILL COST YOU $10,000
“Our goal is inspiring co-creation with the entire community of tinkerers and makers and outside thinkers,” Henderson says. “I guarantee one thing: we’re going to be surprised at the results. They’ll come up with all kinds of uses: planes, trains, automobiles, factory automation. Those are some of the easy ones.”
Henderson also believes that larger companies might want to license the technology for use in commercial applications. “Planes may be not so obvious, but maglev assisted takeoff is something all of the big airplane manufacturers are looking at because takeoff is where all the energy is used,” he says. “There’s this virtuous cycle that if you can shrink payload of fuel down, and take away all those pounds of fuel, the wings can get smaller, and then that means that we get less fuel, etc.”
Underlying that is the very real fact that electronic magnet suspension technology has been used for years, most notably in high-speed trains. Electromagnets lift the train into the air, and keep it from touching the tracks, which means less wear and tear, a smoother ride, and less friction from the tracks. Henderson sees his company’s technology as a more versatile solution since you could theoretically put it on individual train cars instead of relying on the tracks, making them easier to move around train yards.
But Henderson doesn’t want to stop at trains, or even hoverboards. He envisions it as something that could be useful for lifting a building off its foundation. In fact, that was the premise of the company before it was even talking hoverboards. A patent Henderson filed for the company last March envisions a three-part system that would put the hover engines in the very foundation of a building, lifting it up and out of the way of danger.
When I ask how you could handle 10 feet of water when this small white box and hoverboard lift up just a few centimeters, Henderson says the scale can go way up, and lift things even higher. The tricky part is keeping them from going out of control, which the company is still working on. That could keep the hoverboard from going bananas when you shift your weight the wrong way, and hopefully scale up to keep taller objects from toppling over.
To demonstrate that it can take this technology and actually steer with it, Arx Pax has developed a prototype it’s calling the Manta Ray. It’s a cylinder the size of a Roomba vacuum that has multiple engines on it, and can be adjusted to steer its direction and turn, though it doesn’t do it on a dime. It was plenty stable, though maneuvering it had a steep learning curve.
What Hendo is working on is very much a work in progress. I got a fun — albeit very loud — hoverboard ride out of it, but the ambition to put this beneath something like a house or an airplane seems utterly unfathomable at the moment. Even if you grant that the science is as innovative as these scrappy inventors claim, this company seems ill-equipped to get the technology there on its own. There are insanely big problems to solve, like getting this into a smaller, quieter package that lasts for more than a few minutes before running out of power. It also needs to work on more types of surfaces, and cost less than a decent used car. And most importantly, it needs to work in a way where people won’t easily fly off. The potential payoff is saving buildings, lives, and untold amounts of money. Until then, the whole hoverboard part is still something that’s perhaps best experienced at the movies
– via Mashable
The top secret experiments at Google’s skunkworks operation, known asGoogle X, now reportedly include a strange new approach to display technology.
Google’s experimental displays will come in all shapes and sizes and fit together in modular pieces, much like a set of Lego blocks, sources told The Wall Street Journal.
Once connected to each other, the smaller screens will have the ability to form one seamless, larger display.
The effort is said to be led by former MIT professor, Mary Lou Jepsen, Google X’s head of display research, who also founded Pixel Qi, a company focused on developing low-power mobile screens you can read in direct sunlight.
Little else is known about the modular screens at this point, but one source with knowledge of the project did offer a comment as to its development. “
The big challenge is to electronically, and through software, do the stitching between the seams
The big challenge is to electronically, and through software, do the stitching between the seams,” the source told the Journal.
Given the mixed responses to Google’sNexus smartphones and Chrome notebooks, the notion of more hardware from Google isn’t necessarily packed with promise.
Still, if you imagine a wide array of modular smart screens distributed throughout a hotel or airport, allowing you to connect your small, portable screen to larger stationary ones, all equipped with Google Now, suddenly the modular screen idea gets a lot more interesting.
Despite the success of Google’s overall business and its ambitious approach to innovation, the Google X lab pedigree is no guarantee of mainstream traction for any of its new creations. Google X projects Google Glass and the company’s self-driving car have both garnered a good deal of attention, but neither has managed to gain any significant foothold as a commercial venture.
However, a recent Google X creation, Project Wing, an autonomous, drone-powered delivery system, indicates that the company’s research remains aggressive in its approach toward innovation — regardless of commercial considerations.
A Google spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by Mashable for comment on the report.
– via Wired
Mariam Abultewi is sitting at a small wooden desk, pitching her company’s smartphone app, when the airstrike hits.
A laptop sits in front of her, and a whiteboard hangs nearby, filled with colored scribbles. Several other twenty-somethings sit at desks across the room. Most are typing on their own laptops, and one draws animations on a tablet, as a few colleagues watch over his shoulder. A familiar chirp bounces from desk to desk—the sound of messages arriving on Facebook.
The vibe is typical of a startup accelerator—one of those communal spaces where new companies bootstrap their ideas—and as she pitches her app, Abultewi sounds a lot like any other young entrepreneur. She describes the app, Wasselni, as a social networking tool that hails taxis and private cars, echoing services like Uber and Lyft. But then the explosions rattle the building, as Israeli planes attack downtown Gaza City, a few miles away.
Abultewi goes quiet, and so does everyone else in the room. The sound of so many clacking keyboards is replaced by the crash of bombs in the distance. One woman stands, puts her hands together, and says Halas!—Arabic for “enough”—before leaving the room. But soon, the clatter of the keyboards resumes, and Abultewi, a slender 25-year-old dressed in a light-blue hijab, continues her pitch. Soon, it’s business as usual at Gaza Sky Geeks, the first startup accelerator in the Gaza Strip, home to one of the world’s oldest geopolitical conflicts.
Over the past seven years, Gaza has endured three wars between Israel and Hamas—the democratically empowered Islamic organization determined to reclaim Palestine from Israel—and a civil war between Hamas and Fatah, the secular Palestinian political party that rules the West Bank. Initiated by a Hamas attack on Israel, the most recent conflict left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead and more than 10,000 injured, and it devastated the local infrastructure, destroying more than 18,000 homes, depriving more than 450,000 civilians of municipal water, and blanketing the region in extended blackouts after an airstrike on Gaza’s only power plant.
But here in this room on the sixth floor of a small office building on the outskirts of Gaza City, young entrepreneurs like Abultewi are still intent on bringing new internet technologies to their sliver of land between Israel and the Mediterranean and, crucially, to other parts of the Middle East and North Africa. That may seem a Sisyphean task, and perhaps even a pointless one, given the basic amenities needed throughout the region. But Gaza Sky Geeks—created by Mercy Corp., a global aid agency that has for more than a decade worked to improve life in Gaza—provides much-needed employment for local youth and a potential path to economic recovery.
These young entrepreneurs, reflecting attitudes held across the region, believe Gazans should have everything we have in the west, including technologies that provide instant access to information and streamline how the world works. But they also want to build careers for themselves. They want to prove their worth. They want to live their lives as anyone else would.
As the airstrike blasts subside on this August day and Mariam Abultewi finishes her pitch, she goes back to work. So does Hadeel Elsafadi, 24, the founder of a digital animation startup called Newtoon. “These bombings have become normal for me and everyone here,” she says. “This is why I do what I am doing—to have a normal life away from bombs and danger.” Her work, she explains, is not just for her, but also for her two younger brothers. “I want them to have a future, and I want to have a future as well.”
Indeed, this day is not unusual. A few hours before the bombings, another entrepreneur, Alaa Alsalehi, the 29-year-old CEO of a Gaza startup called Serve Me, sits in a house not far from the accelerator’s offices, remembering another recent airstrike. Sipping from a cup of tea and occasionally stroking his goatee and mustache, he says the strike came during a Skype call where he was pitching his company’s mobile privacy tools to a group of VCs. As they looked on from across the internet, he broke down in tears.
Even on the good days, he and his fellow entrepreneurs are hamstrung by slow and intermittent internet access. On others, there’s no electricity or no water. When his home lost power this summer, he moved Serve Me into his brother’s home, which had a generator. At Gaza Sky Geeks, his colleagues used a car battery to keep their phones powered. But as he discusses their hardships, he doesn’t complain. “We love to do our work,” he says.
Seven years ago, after the rise of Hamas, Israel blockaded the Gaza Strip. This prevents anyone from leaving, and it keeps people, goods and crucial reconstruction materials from entering the region. Among other things, the blockade severely limits the prospects of the younger generation. According to the World Health Organization, the unemployment rate among Gazans 20 to 24 exceeds 70 percent.
For Iliana Montauk, one solution is to fund the creation of internet businesses, which can transcend borders. As the digital economy program director at Mercy Corps, a non-governmental organization based in Portland, Oregon, Montauk helped create Gaza Sky Geeks in 2011, drawing on funding from Google and, later, other stateside organizations. “We basically saw there was a market on two sides,” she says. “The investors wanted to invest in Gazans, and Gazans wanted to launch their startups. But they didn’t have access to each other.”
Backed by a Google grant made through the Arab Developer Network Initiative, Gaza Sky Geeks began offering “startup weekends” where aspiring entrepreneurs could meet with successful tech founders and venture capitalists from other parts of the world. Montauk admits it was slow going—there wasn’t “too much interest in the beginning,” she says—but as word spread and more local and international businesses and organizations offered support, young Gazans gravitated to these meetups.
Said Hassan, a Gaza Sky Geeks entrepreneur who also serves as a marketing consultant for the accelerator, remembers the low turnout at the first meetings. But eventually, he says, the program provided an outlet for ideas already percolating in the city’s cafes and coffee shops. Perhaps more importantly, it provided jobs, with the accelerator working to facilitate investments in new startups. “For all of us, it’s about building a community,” he explains one afternoon in a colleague’s home in the city’s Tal al-hews district. “What we are creating will be the only hope for young graduates in Gaza to find work.”
Working with Middle Eastern venture capital firms such as Palinno and Oasis 500, the accelerator has since October 2013 helped secure investments in four startups ranging from $15,000 to $20,000. It also provides these fledgling companies with space in its Gaza City offices. And through another partner, Blackbox Connect, it’s bootstrapping a two-week startup immersion program for Gazan entrepreneurs in California’s Silicon Valley. When the accelerator announced its latest startup weekend, held in June as Israel and Hamas exchanged missile fire across the region, over 600 young Gazans applied.
When Mariam Abultewi attended her first startup weekend in 2011, she knew little about building a company. During these meetups, entrepreneurs pitch ideas and vote on who should win a meeting with potential investors, and she received only one vote: her own.
But she learned what sells—”investors invest in people,” she says—and when she returned the next year, she won a spot in the accelerator. By 2012, with help from Gaza Sky Geeks—and with the approval of the Israeli government—she traveled to Israel, Jordan, and Egypt to pitch her taxi-hailing app to investors. Eventually, she landed an investment from Palinno, a Palestinian operation that works in both Gaza and the West Bank. It was one of the first startup investments in Gaza, and she sees it as a step toward changing attitudes that still linger in the Middle East.
“People don’t believe we have the ability to do this type of work because we live in a closed area,” says Abultewi, who lives with her mother, father, and six siblings in a home partially destroyed by a recent Israeli Air Force strike. “We can’t reach people and don’t know how to properly develop the applications to international standards…Our professors in the universities are not good enough. Our technical developers are not great enough. And we need to make connections with those people who have great experiences in these areas so we can learn and develop.”
Hadeel Elsafadi echoes these words. She launched her startup, Newtoon, out of an office at Gaza’s Islamic University in 2011 as part of a business-development program called Mobaderoon. The idea was to create animations for games, movies, and other media. With tech innovation booming across the Middle East and North Africa, she knew there was an ample market for such technologies—”no one else was doing it,” she says—but despite working with Mobaderoon and SPARK, another business incubator, she lacked the resources to make it happen.
Elsafadi first worked with Gaza Sky Geeks at the end of 2012, and she reconnected with the accelerator this year through a program called Intalqi, which seeks to increase the number of women in the local startup world. Intalqi, run from the Gaza Sky Geeks offices, is a kind of mentoring program where “big sisters” advise “little sisters” like Elsafadi. One of her big sisters was Sara Chemaa, a strategy and business development manager for the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation in Dubai. Elsafadi calls the experience “invaluable,” explaining that Chemaa provided crucial insights into how her startup should approach the commercial market, and one result is a growing company.
Today, Newtoon’s services are available not only in Gaza but Amman, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, and Elsafadi’s company is planning further expansion across the Middle East and North Africa. With startups like this, says Mercy Corp’s Montauk, the goal is to keep them in constant touch with mentors and investors—while continuing to support them in other ways. In October, Gaza Sky Geeks will launch a crowdfunding campaign to give some of the accelerator’s startups, including Newtoon, another source of capital.
After sitting with Abultewi and Elsafadi in the wake the airstrike, I pack up my things, leave the office, and walk onto the elevator. Said Hassan, a kind of spokesperson for the accelerator, joins me on the ride down. “You see what we are up against?” he says. “This life is not normal, and for these startups everything is hard. But we are still working toward finding success and working hard to achieve our dreams.”
His words resonate as we walk onto the street. Plumes of smoke billow in the sky above downtown Gaza City, and drones circle overhead, buzzing as they move around the buildings. It’s a familiar sound for Gazans. They call it “zanana,” the Arabic word for bug. But upstairs on the sixth floor, Abultewi and Elsafadi continue their work.
Christopher Schroeder describes their work as unique. In his book Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East, he closely chronicles the rise of the new tech culture across the region, and he’s seen nothing that compares with efforts in Gaza. “I have traveled all across the Middle East and seen remarkable startups and entrepreneurs, at scale, everywhere,” he says. “But that it was possible under the circumstances of Gaza still amazed me.”
The impact of this movement, he says, shouldn’t be underestimated. “We, in the West, see one narrative of the Middle East on the news, and that narrative is real, important, and worrisome,” he says. “But it misses the significant access to technology, which means bottom-up problem-solving and ideas for futures—economic and otherwise—that top-down institutions not only don’t understand but really should embrace. There are huge youth bubbles across the region, and young people taking hold of visions for their own futures is a good thing.”
Certainly, some perspective is required. “There have been about 20,000 homes that have been destroyed,” says Rana Qumsiyeh, the public engagement manager for the humanitarian organization World Vision Jerusalem, Gaza, and West Bank, in the wake of the most recent conflict in the region. “Soon, it’s going to be winter, and they’re going to be seeking shelter somewhere.” But Qumsiyeh believes efforts to bootstrap local startups will prove beneficial in their own way, helping to ensure a better life for the youth of today and for future generations.
Yes, there may be economic benefits. But Gaza Sky Geeks is about pride as much as anything else. Alsalehi, the CEO of Serve Me, says the biggest challenge he and his fellow entrepreneurs face isn’t poor infrastructure or the constant threat of war, but attracting international investment. “Some of the investors might think that because we are from Gaza, our products are not reliable and not professional, but it’s simply not true,” he says. “We are just as good as anyone else and are working hard to do so. Just give us a chance and you will see.”
Their ultimate goal, he explains, isn’t complicated. They want to show the world that they can do what anyone else can do.
Armando Cordoba is a freelance journalist based out of Melbourne, Australia. Born in the U.S., he has covered conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Mexico, and other parts of The Americas as well as Israel and Gaza, writing for USA Today, the Associated Press, AFP, and other news outlets.
– via The Verge
Apple’s newest iPhones are on sale, which means it’s time — once again — for iFixit to tear them to pieces. It’s not doing this in malice, but to determine how good (or bad) a job Apple’s done at letting people repair them, as well as to note changes in how the company puts its devices together.
As was to be expected, the larger iPhone — the iPhone 6 Plus — brings with it a far larger battery; 2,915 mAh to be precise, or close to twice the one found in last year’s iPhone 5S. Per the markings on Apple’s A8 chip,iFixit surmises that Apple ended up putting in 1GB of RAM this time, something the company doesn’t advertise, but that makes a marked difference in the amount of data apps or browser tabs can keep open at once. Some were hoping for more. Other findings include a change in location for the vibration motor just to the right of the battery, an LTE modem from Qualcomm, NFC chip from NXP, and flash memory from SK Hynix. The phase-detection autofocus camera is labeled “DNL432 70566F MKLAB.”
GETTING THE BATTERY OUT OF THE 6 IS NOT EASY
Along with the 6 Plus, iExperts (hosted on iFixit) are also doing a teardown of the smaller iPhone 6, which required mangling the smaller 1,810 mAh battery to get it detached. A more complete teardown of the phone is coming later.
The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus go on sale today after being introduced by Apple last week. The phones are the largest Apple’s ever made, and likely set to be the company’s best-selling. At the beginning of this week, Apple said that preorders in the first 24 hours topped 4 million, though the company did not go into specifics about which one was the better seller.
– via Tech Crunch
Gird thyself, a new Windows approaches. Tomorrow morning in San Francisco, Microsoft will show off some part of its next operating system in a long-awaited event whose existence leaked before it was formally announced. The market is expectant, and the technology and business media will have its eyes trained on what Redmond has on offer.
In the past few days, odd rumors have cropped up: Will the technical preview be ready to go, or released several weeks after the event? Does the code even have a formal name? We’ll find out soon enough.
Given that the market is only expecting a preview, whatever Microsoft shows off will be feature incomplete by definition. I missed it, but apparently there was some sort of recent rumor saying that Windows 9 — provided that that actually is its name — was set to touch down, outside of preview in October. No. That’s not happening.
The Windows community is, unsurprisingly, most excited about the consumer-facing bits that the operating system is likely to contain. Tomorrow isn’t about that. Microsoft didn’t brand the shindig an enterprise event for no reason.
So, if you don’t get to see your favorite, expected goodies, don’t lose it. They are probably still coming. Though, of course, for Microsoft, the more good stuff it can quickly release, the better.
Why do the technical, and not consumer bit first? Windows 7 has a shelf life. Windows XP is dead, and Windows 8 is not something that business customers have welcomed. Microsoft has a massive interest in catering to its enterprise clients as they provide it with mammoth revenues and profits. And since Windows 8 didn’t do the trick, Windows 9 will have to land with a touch more poise. Also larger companies need more time to make choices, so showing off what is being built for them first is a reasonable exercise. This of course sets aside the technical
Also on a technical note, there is no livestream of the event, I’ve confirmed with the company. This is irksome, but here we are. It’s annoying when Apple does it, and it’s annoying Microsoft does. So, I’ll be on the ground, blogging as fast as I can.
If we get a build tomorrow, and I’ve heard two different build numbers floating around that could either be the correct code lockup, TechCrunch will have notes up as fast as possible, along with video and the rest. Hold tight, we’re almost there.
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