Embedding Wireless Charging into Your Laptop

Looking for a project to do [Jason Clark] thought it might be fun to integrate a spare wireless Qi charger into his HP Chromebook 14.

He started by cracking open the Qi charger — it’s held together by adhesive and four phillips screws hiding under the feet pads — all in all, not that difficult to do. Once the plastic is off, the circuit and coil are actually quite small making it an ideal choice for hacking into various things. We’ve seen them stuffed into Nook’s, a heart, salvaged for a phone hack…

Anyway, the next step was opening up the Chromebook. The Qi charger requires 5V at 2A to work, which luckily, is the USB 3.0 spec — of which he has two ports in the Chromebook. He identified the 5V supply on the board and soldered in the wires directly —  Let there be power!

While the coil and board are fairly small, there’s not that much space underneath the Chromebook’s skin, so [Jason] lengthened the coil wires and located it separately, just below the keyboard. He closed everything up, crossed his fingers and turned the power on. Success!

It’d be cool to do something similar with an RFID reader — then you could have your laptop locked unless you have your RFID ring with you!

Filed under: Cellphone Hacks, computer hacks

One Small Step For Magnification, One Giant Leap For Home Lens Manufacturing

There are some types of projects that we see quite often here on Hackaday; 3D Printers, Development Boards and Video Game Hardware to name a few. Once in a while we see an optics-based project but those use pre-made lenses. [Peter] felt it was time to give home lens manufacturing a shot and sent in a tip about his experience.

The typical lens manufacturing process starts off by taking a piece of glass and manipulating it into a rough lens shape, either by removing material or heating the glass and forming it in a mold. These lens blanks are then lapped using progressively finer grits of abrasives until the final lens shape and surface finish are achieved. The tool used to lap the lens is very specialized and specific to one lens contour shape. This lapping process can be very time consuming (and therefore expensive) depending on the quality and size of the lens being made.

Instead of using very specific tools to make his lens [Peter] wanted to use standard equipment so it was possible to make different lens sizes and shapes in the future. He did this by writing a parametric g-code file that can be used for any basic lens. The desired lens parameters are manually entered as variables in one location of the g-code file after which the machine control software, LinuxCNC, takes the g-code and drives a 3-axis CNC Machine to mill out a rough shape of a lens.

Three millimeter thick acrylic was used in place of glass for this experiment because it is easier to machine than glass. That is not to say there weren’t any problems during the milling process. [Peter] quickly learned that coolant was extremely important in the process. Without it, the acrylic would melt and fill up the flutes of the milling bit resulting in the bit pushing its way through the material rather than cutting through it.

The milling process did not leave a clear finish and required a lot of polishing. After becoming bored of polishing by hand [Peter] tried using a rotor tool… and then burnt a portion of the lens. Lesson learned!

The final lens is not anything special in comparison to commercial lenses but for a first DIY Lens attempt, it is amazing. If you are interested in making your own lenses the g-code file is available at the above link.

 

Filed under: misc hacks

Study: Patents hurt tech and startups, help pharmaceuticals

Image Credit: Flickr user opensourceway

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A new study adds some empirical firepower to the idea that poor patent laws are crushing innovation in the technology industry. Researchers from the London School of Economics studied citations from patents that were invalidated by U.S. judges and found that invalidation increased the number of subsequent innovations in technology, but not in pharmaceuticals.

“Patent invalidation has a significant impact on cumulative innovation only in the fields of computers and communications, electronics, and medical instruments (including biotechnology). We find no effect for drugs, chemicals, or mechanical technologies.”

The effect is greatest in the electronics industry. For instance, Linkedin VP of Engineering Alex Vauthey recently explained why much of the company’s software is open source. In essence, it’s better when the entire Internet community can help build an application. “LinkedIn really embraces open-sourcing,” he said. “We're actually leveraging the community of software developers that help with that. With traction, the software gets more secure, more reliable. At the end of the day you use better software to build applications.”

Additionally, open source software also helps out their employees, no matter where they end up next. “We want our employees to leave LinkedIn as much better professionals than when they arrive. By being able to contribute to an open-source project, you have the opportunity to get the code that you're writing looked at by a lot of people.”

The wide variety of contributors makes open innovation much more effective, as opposed to granting a monopoly to one firm in the form a of patent.

But in pharmaceuticals, there isn’t the same community of innovators, and a single drug can take billions of dollars to manufacture. In this industry, the researchers found, patents do not harm innovation.

Interestingly, the researchers also controlled for so-called “patent trolls,” entities that exist solely to sue others for patent breaches. “We find that only 12 patent cases in our sample involve a troll. When we drop these observations and re-estimate the model, we obtain estimates that are essentially identical.” In other words, patent trolls aren’t the only reason bad intellectual property policy harms the tech industry.

Indeed, startups seem especially vulnerable to bad patent policy, because they do not have the legal or economic negotiating power to deal with big business. “The results show that bargaining breakdown occurs when it involves large patentees,” the researchers write. “Small firms are less able to resolve disputes 'cooperatively' without resorting to the courts.”

Congress is making some movement to reform patent policies for software, but we’re unlikely to see much happen until after the 2014 election.

You can view the full report here [PDF].

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White House says it won’t help Elon Musk battle state regulators

Image Credit: fogcat5/Flickr

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The American people demanded that President Obama help Tesla battle state regulators so that it could sell its electric cars directly to consumers. But the White House says it won’t get involved.

More than 138,000 people signed a petition on the White House’s official online petition platform, WeThePeople, to “allow Tesla Motors to sell directly to consumers in all 50 states.” Since the petitioners reached the (difficult) 100,000-signature threshold, the White House was required to give a response.

But the White House skirted the issue in its blog post yesterday: “Laws regulating auto sales are issues that have traditionally sat with lawmakers at the state level,” wrote Dan Utech, special assistant to the president for energy and climate change.

Throughout the country, including in Texas and Arizona, car dealers have managed to block car manufacturers from bypassing them as middlemen in the sale of cars to consumers.

In many states, Tesla is only allowed to operate “galleries” for its cars, where consumers can look but not buy. Tesla wants to run its own network of physical retail shops. Many Tesla supporters see this as an issue of government overreach, even if they don’t want to buy the cars themselves.

Utech did give a slight nod to Tesla, however. “We’re excited about the next generation of transportation choices, including the kind of electric vehicles that Tesla and others have developed,” he wrote. But it looks like this symbolic high-five is all the support Tesla can hope to get from the White House.

Tesla has struggled to gain traction for its direct sales model. It was able to sign a deal with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to keep five of its existing direct sales spots, but it can’t expand.

Elon Musk himself has come out swinging against high-profile politicians who support dealers over Tesla. Aiming at New Jersey, he wrote:

The rationale given for the regulation change that requires auto companies to sell through dealers is that it ensures “consumer protection.” If you believe this, Gov. Christie has a bridge closure he wants to sell you! Unless they are referring to the mafia version of “protection,” this is obviously untrue. As anyone who has been through the conventional auto dealer purchase process knows, consumer protection is pretty much the furthest thing from the typical car dealer's mind.

Still, to be sure, Musk is doing fine. Tesla is at least doing well enough for him to contribute $1 million to a Nikola Tesla museum. I don’t think Utech will be invited to the opening.

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Google expands along San Francisco’s Embarcadero

Above: 188 The Embarcadero in San Francisco.

Image Credit: Google Maps screen shot

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Technology giant Google is once again snapping up more real estate for its employees.

The company has inked a deal to purchase 188 The Embarcadero, a eight-floor building with views of the San Francisco Bay, and has leased space at the 1 Market St. building two blocks away, according to a report last night from the San Jose Mercury News.

A Google spokeswoman confirmed the deal in an email to VentureBeat.

The expansions will considerably extend Google’s reach in the neighborhood. Google’s three-floor presence at 345 Spear St., a short walk from both of the new sites, has been open since 2007. Products such as the Google App Engine platform as a service have come out of Google San Francisco, and going forward, much more could result from Googlers in Fog City.

That’s especially true given that so much startup and venture capital activity happens in San Francisco, and top engineers could well prefer to be closer to the action here rather than at headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

Google was looking to expand near the intersection of 16th and Alabama streets in San Francisco’s Mission district, according to reports in February. One blog, SocketSite, said that no deal was on. Controversy over gentrification has arisen in the Mission as tech workers have migrated into the neighborhood. A Google expansion in San Francisco, where the company has operated for years, could create less of a spectacle.

The status of Google’s real estate dealings in the Mission are unclear. Google did not provide clear information on that subject.

"We are excited to expand in San Francisco, and we will continue to work hard to be a good neighbor in the communities where we work and live,” the spokeswoman told VentureBeat.

Meanwhile, Google has been adding office space in London and other cities around the world. Google has also started and paused work on a new Bay View campus not far from headquarters.

Google has also been growing its real estate footprint through the construction of more data centers to run its popular web services and, increasingly, its public cloud.

Google employs nearly 50,000 Google people.

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Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major glob... read more »

Starting in September, you can learn about data science through Kaplan

Above: Kaplan Test Prep

Image Credit: Kaplan International English/Flickr

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Test prep giant Kaplan is now in the data science bootcamp business.

Through the brand name Metis, Kaplan is launching its first data science bootcamp in New York City, starting in September.

The initial cohort will accept 10 to 20 students, instructed by two data scientists from the Chicago based data-science consultancy Datascope Analytics. The bootcamp is 12 weeks long and features five projects. Students will learn about web scraping, regression, the Naive Bayes algorithm, and unsupervised machine learning.

Applicants are required to have previous experience in coding and statistics. Good communication skills are also taken into consideration.

We hear about data science bootcamps all the time, but when we take a closer look, they are actually as a rare species as the data scientists coming out of them.

Some data science bootcamps require advanced degrees. Insight Data Science program in Silicon Valley and New York City is only for Ph.D.s and postdocs. The Data Incubator in New York City also requires one of those ranks.

Some are not located in the U.S. A round-trip ticket to Berlin for the Data Science Retreat might cost too much.

If you don't have a Ph..D, your choice is limited to Zipfian Academy and Insight Data Engineering, both of which are small education startups.

But the demand for data scientists is just insane. Startups, big corporations, and nonprofits all want data-driven insights to boost their operations and results.

It makes sense for Kaplan, a company that for years has prepared people for standardized tests, to explore the data science bootcamp market.

"We are still a new business, and we are committed to getting it right, and committed to ensuring we can deliver upon the outcomes, so it's not a question about how much money we can put into something, this is about ensuring the quality," Jason Moss, a co-founder of Metis and vice president of strategy at Kaplan, said in an interview with VentureBeat. "When we know we get that right, then I think you’ve got a $2 billion company that is behind that. The plan is to grow, and the plan is to scale. There’s a lot of support across all levels of Kaplan. In the future, they are fully expected in many more markets, etc."

When the Metis bootcamp first launched in December last year, it partnered with Thoughtbot, a consulting firm that makes web and mobile apps for early-stage startups, to offer Ruby on Rails classes.

This time, it's tapping DataScope Analytics to put on the data science classes. DataScope is responsible for designing and developing content for the bootcamp.

"They are very interested in education,” Moss said. “If you look at what they write about, if you speak to their team and their founder, you hear a company that is saying, We focus on data science, but we are also trying to figure out how to educate people about data science. That was a very natural fit with what we are trying to do."

In addition to designing and teaching the material, DataScope will draw on its data science project experience to help the bootcamp screen applicants.

It sounds like outsourcing, right? Where does Kaplan come into play?

"What Kaplan is doing is to work with that team, to make sure it still adheres to all the best practices of learning," Moss said. "It's more what's happening behind the scenes. So when we were originally thinking about the course design, Kaplan folks were sitting down with the DataScope folks and talking about sort of curriculum design and learning objectives, and talking about how do you build this out over time such that students will continue to stay motivated, and sort of gut checking it to make sure that lessons build upon one another, so you have the ongoing long-term retention of knowledge."

If things work out the way organizers want them to, Metis could become more effective at actually training people in data science technique than lessons from massively open online course providers like Coursera or Udacity.

The 12-week Metis program costs $14,000. It's now getting more data science hiring partners on board, to help graduates get jobs. Metis’ Ruby on Rails program in Boston has more than 20 such organizations.

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Kaplan Learning Technologies (KLT) provides authoring solutions for rapid eLearning and software simulations, as well as performance-based testing technologies that enable organizations to recruit, develop and maintain a highly skilled... read more »

Why Salesforce needed to buy RelateIQ

GUEST POST

Image Credit: Seesmic.com/Flickr

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Yesterday, Salesforce.com acquired RelateIQ for $390 million. With Dreamforce right around the corner, this was a significant — and smart — move on the part of Salesforce.com to show the industry that it is finally serious about data intelligence, which it completely lacked in its customer-relationship management (CRM) offerings to date.

Salesforce.com remains king

Some viewed this as a preemptive strike similar to Salesforce.com's 2011 acquisition of Manymoon. Manymoon had emerged as the No. 1 app on the Google Apps platform. It provided an incredibly simple application for managing tasks, which is a core part of CRM. While it didn't pose a serious threat, you could see how it might have taken off and eventually drawn interest from Google. There are many parallels with RelateIQ, only in this case LinkedIn might have been the more natural suitor (and a major threat to Salesforce.com's empire).

But in reality, I don't think this deal was a defensive one for Salesforce.com.

Playing defense against a LinkedIn acquisition is a very interesting take with wild imaginative possibilities, but I think LinkedIn is a very focused company, and they're not ready to take on something as big as CRM.

Now, RelateIQ stepped up to the plate and postured themselves from day one as the CRM killer. They've got guts, because anyone in sales will tell you that even if you have a great product, it’s going to be a long, uphill battle if you want to take down Salesforce.com. There's a saying for a reason: No sales vice president gets fired for picking Salesforce.com as their CRM system, but you can certainly get fired for moving off of it.

As such, RelateIQ ended up focusing more on the lower end or gray spaces of the market where CRM maturity didn't exist — think smaller, early-stage sales and marketing shops and even business development and venture-capital groups. You could make the argument that they could have built an island and served this niche market, but RelateIQ did the right thing by joining forces with Salesforce.com to take their technology to the masses.

Predictive is here

Salesforce.com has been dinged for a while now for not having a big data intelligence story. Now they have one with RelateIQ — backed by a stellar team — with the likes of DJ Patil, one of the top data scientists around, and Heather Phillips, one of the best designer thinkers I know. This is the main reason why I think Salesforce.com ponied up the big dollars for RelateIQ.

The movement to predictive from these big automation players is finally happening. Just look at Marketo, Oracle’s Eloqua, and Salesforce.com. Their experiences and workflows feel ancient and messy. With the rise of innovative companies applying big data intelligence, such as Waze, Amazon.com, Facebook, and many others, considerable interest, expectations and thus pressure has been placed on sales and marketing-automation companies to step up the intelligence of their applications too — to move beyond being just basic data bookkeeping services. There’s just too much hype, demand and real results to shy away from predictive (we at Infer are seeing 100 percent improvements in conversion rates across our customers).

As the world moves to predictive, the big question is if these automation players can integrate predictive properly. Is Salesforce.com ready to make the hard trade-offs to support predictive-first by designing a system around data intelligence? Or will third parties be able to innovate faster outside the core?

Only time will tell, but there's no space that's hotter than sales and marketing right now. In the past 18 months, Pardot/ExactTarget was acquired to the tune of $2.5 billion by Salesforce.com, Marketo and Eloqua went public (and shortly thereafter, Eloqua was acquired by Oracle for close to $1 billion) and Oracle's acquisition of BlueKai occurred. Given these moves and how fast they took place, I think we’ll have answers sooner rather than later.

Thanks to Jamie Grenney for the insightful comments and feedback on this piece.

Vik Singh is a co-founder and chief executive of Infer, a provider of data-powered business applications, with customers such as Tableau, SurveyMonkey, Zendesk, New Relic, AdRoll, Box, and Cloudera. You can follow Vik at @zooie.

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With more than 100,000 customers, salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing company that is leading the shift to the social enterprise. Social enterprises leverage social, mobile and open cloud technologies to put customers at t... read more »

Infer delivers data-powered business applications that help companies win more customers. Its cloud-based solutions leverage proven data science to rapidly model the untapped data sitting in enterprises, along with hundreds of external... read more »

RelateIQ began in 2011 when co-founders Adam Evans and Steve Loughlin got fed up with manual data entry. In the age of big data, cloud-computing, and mind-blowing consumer electronics, they couldn't understand why they had to spend h... read more »

Vik Singh is CEO and co-founder of Infer, a company that delivers data-powered business applications to help sales and marketing teams win more customers. Prior to founding Infer, Vik was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Sutter Hill Ven... read more »

Add a Bluetooth Interface to Your Kitchen Scale

When [Adam] found himself in need of a force meter, he didn’t want to shell out the cash for a high-end model. Instead, he realized he should be able to modify a simple and inexpensive kitchen scale to achieve the results he desired.

The kitchen scale [Adam] owned was using all through hole components on a double-sided PCB. He was able to easily identify all of the IC’s and find their datasheets online. After doing some research and probing around with a frequency counter, he realized that one of the IC’s was outputting a frequency who’s pulse width was directly proportional to the amount of weight placed on the scale. He knew he should be able to tap into that signal for his own purposes.

[Adam] created his own custom surface mount PCB, and used an ATMega8 to detect the change in pulse width. He then hooked up a Bluetooth module to transmit the data wirelessly. These components required no more than 5V, but the scale runs from two 3V batteries. Using what he had on hand, [Adam] was able to lower the voltage with just a couple of diodes.

[Adam] managed to cram everything into the original case with little modification. He is now considering writing an Android application to interface with his upgraded kitchen scale.

Filed under: Microcontrollers