Takin’ Selfies

For individuals who want to record everything, a new life-logging camera will be hitting markets tomorrow all throughout Europe.

Priced at 400 pounds, OMG Life’s Autographer is described as the world’s first intelligent wearable camera. Instead of working like a traditional point and shoot camera, the Autographer is worn, and it operates on autopilot.

Five sensors monitor changes in color, temperature, magnetometer, motion and acceleration, and they choose when to take shots. Using a special app, the Autographer can take advantage of your iPhone’s GPS, and photos can be split up into chapters based upon the photo’s time and location. The device collects, and tags photos with all sorts of information, such as acceleration, orientation, GPS coordinates and color.

A US launch date has yet to be announced, but the company has promised that American life-streamers will have access to the Autographer sometime in the future.

A Touchy Subject

A new kickstarter project wants to use the power of touch to give its users more control over their musical keyboards.

Using a touch sensitive, Do-It-Yourself stick-on overlay, the Touchkeys smart keyboard can sense multi-touch inputs, similar to the screen of a typical smartphone. The keyboard can sense up-and-down or side-to-side finger movements with up to three touches, all of which can be mapped to different effects. For instance, shaking your hand from side to side can make a chord vibrato, or sliding your fingers up and down the keys can create sounds similar to bending a guitar’s strings.

Multi-touch pinches and slides change midi mappings, and a skilled keyboard player with a light touch can even play different sounds by multi-tapping.

Most of the kits will come as sensors that stick directly onto standard-sized keyboards, and the kits start at 330 pounds for 25 keys. A limited number of pre-installed kits will also be available for 660 pounds. Touchkeys is looking for a relatively modest 30,000 pounds to successfully complete their kickstarter goal.

Space, The Final Frontier, Turns 55

Today, July  29th, NASA celebrates its 55th birthday.

In October of 1957, the Soviet Union greatly injured the pride of the United States by launching Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, into orbit. By that time, the United States had not given much priority to launching rockets into space, and much of their rocket research was done by the military to develop weapons.

Thankfully, the Russians changed everything, and with Sputnik, launched the space race. Public opinion held that Soviet technology was ahead of the U.S. and “something” had to be done.

That “something” finally began when President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act fifty-five years ago today, which created NASA.

The space agency would start operations two months later in October with 8,000 employees and an annual budget of one hundred million dollars.

Amazon Expands

Amazon has announced that they’ll be expanding American operations by nearly a quarter, by hiring an additional five thousand fulfillment staff members.

Currently, Amazon’s fulfillment business has over twenty thousand employees that manage various aspects of the company’s operations, including business analysis, inventory management, customer delivery, and engineering processes. Over the last three years, the Seattle-based retail giant has more than tripled its staff, bringing the company’s current payroll to a total of ninety-seven-thousand employees across all divisions.

That places them well ahead of Google, and just two thousand short of Microsoft’s full-time employee roster. News of the additional expansion comes only days before President Obama is scheduled to visit one of Amazon’s fulfillment centers in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Coincidence? We think not.

Guys With Huge Discs

A new joint-development by Sony and Panasonic could provide a big boost to the amount of data that can be housed on a single disc.

The two companies will work together for the first time since they co-developed the OLED TV, and this time it’s to create a new standard for an optical disk capable of recording at least 300GB of data.

Targeted towards professional users who need to archive huge amounts of data, the goal is to unveil the technology before the end of 2015. By comparison, today’s current standard Blu-ray only holds about 50GB on a dual-layer disk.

Cutting Edge Breakup Tech

Technology is supposed to make life easier, and a new app called Breakup Text promises to make some of the most difficult situations in life as easy as sending a text.

Now, when you know its time to end a relationship but you’re not sure how to break the news, all you have to do is open the BreakUp Text app. It will send a light-hearted message to end things with your soon-to-be ex.

The app has a level of humor about it, auto-generating long, heartfelt messages that, if you’re lucky, will elicit sympathy – such as telling them that you were eaten by a bear.

Jake Levine, one of the app’s creators, spoke about the app’s purpose, saying, “As much as we did it as a joke, it has sort of captured a moment in time when tech is becoming more pervasive in our lives and relationships.”

Now that celebrities like Russell Brand and Katy Perry have asked for and received divorce requests via text, breaking up over your phone has became more socially acceptable. So don’t be surprised to see text breakups, as well as reports of random bear attacks increase in the years to come.

And that’s all for this morning’s NewsDesk with Kristin Feledy. If you want to keep up with these stories and more, be sure to join us every weekday at 8:30am central on SiliconANGLE.TV

photo credit: Raymond Larose via photopin cc
photo credit: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center via photopin cc
photo credit: *** Fanch The System !!! *** via photopin cc