Category: Tech news

Breaking news: The point-and-shoot camera market has seen better days. Smartphones are eating their lunch and going back for seconds and thirds. But they’re not dead, and a few things have helped compact cameras weather the smartphone revolution–and they involve situations in which you’d think twice about using your mobile device to take pictures.

For example, smartphones generally don’t have optical-zoom lenses (with one exception), big sensors, or extensive manual controls. And they certainly don’t have everything-proof bodies. You’d be a bit nuts to take your average smartphone snorkeling or into the thick of a haboob to snap a few shots. It’d risk the hub of your entire mobile existence.

The problem is, outside of pricey weather-sealed interchangeable-lens models, most rugged point-and-shoots are basic, boring compact cameras wrapped in resilient shells. But Olympus has straddled the line between “premium compact” and “rugged camera” for a few years now with its well-equipped Stylus Tough TG iHS lineup.

Like its predecessors, the new Tough TG-3’s solid hardware starts with an F2.0 wide-angle lens and a 4X-optical-zoom range (25mm to 100mm) with mechanical image stabilization. It doesn’t have full manual exposure controls, but it does have an aperture-priority mode in addition to panorama, time-lapse, and an extensive array of well-implemented art filters. You can pair it with an iPhone or Android phone via Wi-Fi and use your smartphone as a remote viewfinder and shutter release. Unfortunately, those remote-control Wi-Fi features will only work on dry land, so you’ll need to take handheld shots of that shark.

It’s built as much for butterfingers as scuba divers, with a waterproof rating to 50 feet, shockproofing rated to withstand drops of up to 7 feet, and crushproofing rated to withstand 220 pounds of force. It’s also dustproof and freezeproof, and it has on-board instruments including a compass, GPS, a manometer to gauge underwater depth, and an altimeter.

Unlike most rugged cameras, this one seems like it might actually be practical for everyday use. Along with its faster-than-most F2.0 lens, aperture-priority mode, and Wi-Fi capabilities, the TG-3 has an interesting take on a focus-bracketing mode. Called “Focus Stacking,” the camera snaps 8 images in rapid succession at different focal lengths. The camera is able to blend the bracketed images together as a single, completely-in-focus image at a wider aperture than most deep depth-of-field shots, and it also lets the user select one image from the sequence to use — sort of like a more-manual Lytro.

Available in June, the Olympus Stylus Tough TG-3 will cost $350. The camera will also have some unique accessories available for it, including an LED ring light that’s built to enhance the camera’s “Microscope” macro-photography mode, as well as fisheye and telephoto lens converters.

Lawmakers looking to relieve traffic congestion in Nashville have hit upon an improbable solution: a monorail.

The stretch of I-24 between Nashville and Murfreesboro is one of the most congested in the state, and it’s projected to get even worse as the population grows.

So State Senator Bill Ketron, a Murfreesboro Republican, proposed building a monorail along the highway median. While it may sound ridiculous at first, the idea is getting some traction.

In fact, the Tennessee Senate voted 31-0 to conduct a monorail feasibility study. If it passes the state House of Representatives, the Tennessee Department of Transportation will have to determine whether it makes economic sense to build a 30-mile elevated monorail for suburban commuters.

Yes, we saw two monorails torn down this year, and the concept hasn’t caught on in the U.S. outside of Seattle and Disney World. But hold the Lyle Lanley jokes, because the Nashville monorail might just make sense.

See, there are two major costs when it comes to building a brand new public transit system from scratch. First, there’s the cost of construction. Building a monorail can be extremely pricey–it’s a lot harder to put up an elevated track than to lay one on the ground.

But monorails can come out ahead when it comes to the second major cost, and that’s land acquisition. You can’t just put a train through a built-up area without buying up land first, and that can get extremely expensive.

The Nashville monorail would be built on the median of I-24, so the state wouldn’t have to acquire land from private owners.

That was one of the main reasons why São Paulo decided on monorails for its latest public transit service: Putting trains underground would be too expensive, and the city was too congested for more surface-level transit.

We’ll have to wait and see. Ketron’s plan could cost as much as $1 billion, and calls for public and private funding sources include a potential 90 percent contribution from the federal government.

If the feasibility study is approved, the Department of Transportation will have to report its findings by Feb. 1, 2015. And after that, the U.S. could get its first monorail in decades.

Both Microsoft and Google have long worked on getting users answers without having to click through a number of websites. At Google, the current result of this is the Knowledge Graph and at Bing, it’s the company’s entity engine (previously referred to internally as Satori). Both search engines currently offer very similar experiences related to these engines. Search for “Albert… Read More

Late last night, a tweet was spread far and wide showing that a DMCA notice had blocked a file from being shared on a Dropbox user’s account. What was going on? Was Dropbox suddenly doing something sketchy? Were they suddenly lurking around their users folders, digging for copyrighted material hiding amongst personal files? Nope. The system is neither new, nor sketchy. It’s been in place for… Read More

One month ago, I got dumped. It was the third in a series of failed, long-term relationships over the past five years. All relationships end differently. Some exes stay friends, or fail to stay friends, or continue hooking up, or cut each other out entirely. Some exes combine any number of those things to form a symphony of chaos. But no matter how it ends, or how it evolves after it’s over,… Read More

This week, Chris Velazco joins me, Darrell Etherington, to talk about HTC’s new One (M8) flagship smartphone, which we already like quite a bit. The new device is HTC’s big chance to make a splash in the smartphone market, and they haven’t squandered it; let’s hope consumers are willing to give it a look. We also catch up on the Nvidia Shield, the handheld Android-powered… Read More

Compact wireless HiFi systems are pretty common these days, but what is less common is startups thinking more deeply about how the same systems could move into home automation and the Internet of Things. That’s the implication behind a new system launched by device startup Musaic, recently launched on Kickstarter. It now plans to go up against much bigger audio-based companies, such as Bose.… Read More

Holy incremental music startup, Batman! Spawnsong is a (very) new music platform startup with a strategy to elbow into the crowded digital music space by focusing on a very thin wedge: individual songs. Read More

We crave approval, but we already knew that. Conventional thinking would suggest we seek digital validation because it means we’ve impressed people and raised our social status. But what anonymous apps like Secret are highlighting is that we don’t care if our name is attached to that approval. We are simply addicted to little dopamine hit we get when someone said we did well. Read More

The post-Ballmer Microsoft is slowly taking shape now that Satya Nadella has become the company’s CEO. At the same time, though, those executives who were passed over for the CEO role and those who lost power in last year’s reorganization are starting to leave the company. The latest executive to depart, Re/Code reports today, is Antoine Leblond. A Microsoft spokesperson has… Read More

Finally, Microsoft’s flagship Office suite (Excel, PPT, Word) is available on one of its key rival’s mobile operating systems: Apple’s iOS. Nearly seven years after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, Microsoft has finally built native products for Apple’s iOS to extend its popular, high revenue-generating Office suite to another platform. It begs the question: Why so long? The easy, quick, and… Read More

Microsoft had become an oft-ignored, behemoth to the North, despite $77 billion in revenue and $57 billion in profits. It seemed that the mobile revolution had passed it by. Although Steve Ballmer was already making many of the right moves, it took new CEO Satya Nadella to fully accept that Microsoft had to move beyond Windows into a new future of apps and cloud services. Read More

We’ve focused on getting the tests setup, which includes deciding on a specific thing to test, when and where to conduct the user study and what type of users to study. We then covered actually running the tests. This final installment will focus on taking all that amazing feedback you just gathered and parsing it into useful, actionable intelligence. Read More

When Ursheet Parikh sold his company StorSimple in 2012 to Microsoft, it was one of the largest deals in the cloud infrastructure sector to date. But that wasn’t the only thing unusual about it. It was also a fairly large deal for which he played the “banker” and negotiated the deal. This is not unheard of, but it is an interesting example of how such a process can work in a startup… Read More

In this special “Between Two Co-Editors” edition of Crunchweek, I was joined by my fearless bosses, co-editors Matthew Panzarino and Alexia Tsotsis at the White Table. We tackled Facebook’s $2 billion acquisition of Oculus VR, and Zuck’s aggressive acquisition strategy in 2014; Microsoft’s release of Office for the iPad, and tales from Y Combinator’s recent Demo… Read More