Apple HomePod

The much awaited Apple's HomePod is here! The Apple smart speaker is similar to Amazon Echo and Google Home.

The HomePod costs 349$ that is Rs.22500 in India. It is available for sale at apple stores across US, UK and Australia. 
HomePod is 6.8 inch tall along with a upward facing woofer. It has a cylindrical design with acoustic mesh. It weighs 2.5kg. The HomePod consists of voice control for music playback. One has to tap into Apple music, iTunes tracks, iTunes match to benefit from Siri. Airplay can also be used from an Apple device to use HomePod. An iOS device is mandatory to set up HomePod. Apple has provided control gestures alongwith voice controls which allows to play, pause,skip and adjust volume with a single tap.
HomePod is provided with 6 microphones which will be used o listen to voice commands. Questions can be imposed on HomePod asking the artists name and which song is being played. The microphone array is smart enough to remove background noise so that the HomePod can hear the voice commands. This is achieved as HomePod uses A8 chip processor. HomePod is available in space grey and white colors.
HomePod will be released in France and Germany this spring. There's no announcement about HomePod releasing in India yet.

A new FVL

Bell helicopter announced on monday, december 18, its tilt rotor has achieved its first flight according to Wired. "This is an exciting time for Bell Helicopter, and I could not be more proud of the progress we have made with first flight of Bell V-280", said Mitch Snyder, President & CEO of Bell Helicopter.
The V-280 is a part of JMR- TD (Joint Multi Role Technology Demonstrator), a submission by Bell Helicopter to the US Army. It is clearly a competitor to Boeing and Sikorsky. It's a Future Vertical Lift hybrid among a plane and a helicopter. It has side loading doors. Including two pilots, the V-280 can occupy a crew of four and has the capacity of transporting up to fourteen troops. It has twice the speed and range of conventional helicopters. Its top speed will be 300 knots and is constructed for a range of 2100 nautical miles and the capability to self deploy 2100 nautical miles at a speed of 230 knots.

Movi for iPhone

Movi gimbal for iPhone

Freefly has introduced a new gimbal specifically designed to use with an iPhone. This wonderful creation will surely help many filmmakers. Priced at $299, Movi stabilising gimbal will be launched in early 2018.
The Freefly Movi is built with gyroscopic technology. The Movi makes it simple and easy for people to get the cinematic effects by not letting the iPhone shake, using a motor at the hand-held unit while recording. It has few control buttons on the handle that controls communication with the iPhone. The app containes different operating modes that aides effects similar to Hollywood level cameras. The majestic mode, which keeps the filming steady without any bumps or shakes affecting it. The echo mode where you can set a start, end point and duration. The orbit mode helps in rotating around the object.
There are many gimbals for smartphones but the controls for Freefly Movi for iPhone is definitely of high quality.

Buzzing data

Buzzing Bees have become tech savvy. Bees with a chip glued on their back, buzz data about their arrival and departure in their hive.This makes it easier for the scientists to observe the pattern of the bees movement.
With the decrease in numbers of the honeybees world wide due to pollution,pesticides and various man made blunders, this new technology can help the scientists study their behavior and help them increase in number.

Data collection in Big Data

In Big Data Analytics, a lot of raw data is available and abundance data collection exists. There are several mechanisms to collect data such as sensor based data collection where unique data will be provided.

For providing unique data using certain mechnisms, maintenance is required which are generally expensive. Computation of data item prices need to be calculated. This is one of the limitation in collecting data. To avoid such limitations, there are approaches auch as application allocation in E-ARL (Early Accurate Result Library). Revenue balance avoids starvation of mobile peers and E-Top incentive system which answers top-k queries in M-P2P networks by stimulating an economic market.

Data quality plays an important role. For good data quality there are key contributions from collaborative and non-collaborative methods. Here comes another limitation, the open research issue. An example for this limitation is the noisy data in photos which doesn't help in car plate recognition of traffic violations. Also, preserving data privacy is necessary to sustain long term data collection. Considering all this, incentives for crowd driven data collection can be linked. Data is obtained from crowd workers when incentives are given, the data obtained must be made into useful information.

However, the limitation incrowd sourcing is data reliability. Crowd sourcing and cloud serving are customer oriented where crowd sourcing is a potential labour.

Google search results for Apple's Siri

Apple is shifting from its default web search provider from Siri which is Microsoft's Bing to Google.

Google and Apple have a deal worth 3 billion dollars and it is unknown if this is a part of that deal or not. 

"Switching to Google as the web search provider for Siri, Search within iOS and Spotlight on MAC will allow these services to have a consistent web search experience with the default in Safari" Apple said in a statement to Techcrunch.

Image search being popular in Bing, the video results go to Google's youtube and the search for web images are recieved from Bing for Siri. The "search the web" results in both search interfaces will not point to Bing anymore. 

Beats studio 3

Apple's new pair of Beats studio 3 fetches adaptive noise cancelling (ANC) and battery life. Available at a premium price of $349 in the US, the wireless Beats studio 3 delivers 22hours battery life with pure ANC on and extends to 40 hours with ANC off.

The newest step for a headphone brand company being adaptive noise cancellation makes it a huge success. Using ANC, the headphones continuously assesses the surroundings and the level of noise and adjusts the strength of cancellation accordingly. The Beats studio 3 uses a W1 chip which means users can pair the headphones with iPads, iPhones and other apple devices within seconds.Apple's W1 chip has class 1 bluetooth and can be used with other non-apple devices as well.

Using these headphones users can answer phone calls, activate siri and control music with multifunction on ear controls.  Beats studio 3 has soft over-ear cushions and are available in six colors which are red, shadow grey, blue, white, porcelain rose and matte black.