Your hub for Blerd news, mobilized by AT&T.
Destruction of Data
The recent Sony attack revealed that hackers, believed to be from North Korea, were capable of getting data and destroying it as well. Data destruction is not a common occurrence in the U.S. This attack causes the victim to spend time and money to rebuild systems.
Ransomware
This threat locks up documents and access to the victims’ systems. The hacker asks for a ransom in order to give access back to the user.
Utah
The state’s tech sector is growing primarily because of Google Fiber, a faster broadband provider, being moved and expanded there. Tech jobs are on the rise to feed Google Fiber’s work force.
Omaha, Nebraska
The city has five Fortune 500 companies that all require tech workers. Berkshire Hathaway, Conagra and Union Pacific are major players in the city. SmartAsset ranked the city as one of the top ten cities to be a tech worker.
Self-Parking
Parallel parking is difficult for a lot of people. In a few years, this feature will be offered in many cars. A feature like this could possibly solve urban parking issues. Self-parking cars may prevent traffic jams, allow the cars to park in smaller spaces and making parallel parking faster.
Medical Emergency Detection
In a few years, cars will have sensors that produce injury reports when car accidents occur. These reports will help doctors diagnose symptoms much quicker.
Hoverboard
As seen from Back to the Future II (1989), the hoverboard is one of the coolest ways to get around, and recently there has been progress in making this a reality.
Flying Cars
Flying cars are present in almost every sci-fi film. It will be a long time before this will happen.
The National Occupant Protection Use Survey reveals that at any given daylight moment across America, approximately 660,000 drivers are using cellphones or manipulating electronic devices while driving, a number that has held steady since 2010.
The use of electronic devices increases the possibility for fatal car accidents, so Ford and Life360 have partnered to improve car safety by offering in-car use of Life360.
Since its 2008 launch, Life360 has gained 48 million families on its location and communication platform. The free app was retooled for Ford when Drive Mode was launched in 2014.
Life360 will be accessed in Ford vehicles with the new Drive Mode feature that alerts friends and family when the user is in a car and requests that they avoid getting in touch while the user is driving.
By requesting a person’s location who is in your circle, the system pinpoints the person’s location on a map and offers an address.
As technology takes over our lives, it can become a helpful tool to protect us and our families. The Drive Mode feature is just one step to improve the way people drive and prevent accidents.
Samsung’s curved-design for HDTVs now comes to its PCs.
On Dec. 30, the company announced a brand new Ativ One 7 Curved, an all-in-one Windows machine. The 27-inch display has a 1920 x 1080 panel with vivid color and amazing viewing angles.
It is supposed to trick your eyes into believing the display is larger. Samsung has listed the display at 4000R. There is more immersion and less glare.
The Ativ One 7 Curved features a slight curve in its screen that isn’t as clear compared to recent 4K TVs.
The actual computer aspect features an Intel Core i5 chipset and 8GB of RAM standard. The Ativ One 7 is not a traditional powerhouse type of PC. However, it should be sufficient enough for basic gaming and movie watching.
Inside, there is a 1TB, 5400 rpm hard drive with an embedded flash drive. There are four USB ports and two of them are USB 3 types. There is also an SD / media card reader.
In terms of software, there are Samsung’s extra features built over Windows 8.1. The program SideSync 3.0 lets you receive texts and calls from your phone on the PC. You can also fully control your smartphone by mirroring the phone’s screen to the PC’s screen on the Ativ One 7’s 27-inch display.
Samsung will start releasing the Ativ One 7 in the first few months of 2015 for an estimated $1,299.
Doctor in the Car
Researchers at the University of Michigan International Center for Automotive Medicine have created the technology to determine likely injuries in an accident before help arrives. Predictive models were made by cross-referencing crash data from sensors on cars. The speed and location of impact, along with 3-D scans of accident victims, will be available for doctors.
Exercise Underpants
The Finnish company Myontec has begun marketing underpants embedded with electromyographic sensors that tell you how hard you’re working your quadriceps, hamstrings and gluteal muscles when working out. This technology could help with weight loss and diets.
Apple continues to be the forerunner of technological innovation. For those of you dreaming of having your own on-board computer in your car, Apple’s CarPlay is the closest thing to turning your car into a starship from Star Trek.
“CarPlay features Siri voice control and is specially designed for driving scenarios. It also works with your car’s controls — knobs, buttons or touchscreen. And the apps you want to use in the car have been reimagined, so you can use them while your eyes and hands stay where they belong,” according to Apple.
This system is available in only one make and model — the very expensive Ferrari FF. This is the first and only commercially available vehicle in the world with Apple CarPlay right now.
Earlier this year, Mercedes and Volvo were ready to deliver the same iPhone-compatible experience, but they were delayed into 2015.
Next year, the Volvo XC90 SUV and Mercedes-Benz C-Class will join Honda, Hyundai and Jaguar as models that will feature CarPlay.
More car manufacturers like BMW, Chevrolet, Ford, KIA, Land Rover, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Opel, Peugeot-Citroen, Subaru, Suzuki and Toyota will work on adding CarPlay.
Features
CarPlay allows you to use all your iPhone’s capabilities and features without touching it. Your music, navigation to your favorite stores, taking phone calls, reading and texting messages can be controlled without holding your phone.
You can even play your iTunes music, navigate Apple Maps and watch videos from your dash. In the future, Apple plans to allow third parties to build CarPlay compatibility into their own apps, making them available through the CarPlay system.
Ways to Use
One option you can use is the touchscreen display.
In the next year, some CarPlay cars will come with touchscreen displays made into the dashboard. Users can use this display to open and close apps using a very simple home screen. This is the most straightforward method of using CarPlay.
Another option you can use is iPhone’s Siri.
By using Siri, you can talk to your vehicle and tell it what to do. That does not mean autopilot. That includes selecting music from your library or requesting a playlist. You can also have your messages read out to you before you reply.
The third option is using your physical buttons, knobs and controls. The volume controls, track skip and other features are all integrated and will work.
As 2015 approaches, keep an eye out for this new feature from Apple.
With increased government surveillance, the iCloud and the Sony hacking scandals and hacktivist groups on the rise, Internet security and privacy may be a thing of the past.
According to a Pew Research Center report released Dec. 18, 2,511 experts are on opposite sides of the issue on whether privacy is a feasible thing to achieve by the year 2025.
“This report is a look into the future of privacy in light of the technological changes, ever-growing monetization of digital encounters and shifting relationship of citizens and their governments that is likely to extend through the next decade,” according to researchers and writers Lee Raine and Janna Anderson of Pewinternet.org.
The report looked at a range of criteria and asked questions involving the issue.
Pew asked experts to think about “if policy makers and technology innovators could create a secure, popularly accepted, and trusted privacy-rights infrastructure by 2025 that allows for business innovation and monetization…”
The political issues around privacy on the Internet may create unwanted gridlock for an issue that needs fixing immediately.
“I do not think 10 years is long enough for policy makers to change the way they make policy to keep up with the rate of technological progress. We have never had ubiquitous surveillance before, much less a form of ubiquitous surveillance that emerges primarily from voluntary (if market-obscured) choices. Predicting how it shakes out is just fantasy,” wrote John Wilbanks, chief commons officer for Sage Bionetworks.
Out of the experts polled, 55 percent believed that privacy was unable to be a reality in today’s technological landscape. The remaining 45 percent seem to be more optimistic about it. All of the experts believed that the Internet is inherently public entity.
This issue will continue to be debated for the next decade and beyond as long as the Internet remains a vital part of modern life.
Sound Recording
There are many recording apps out there such as Easy Voice Recorder, RecForge Lite and many others. Your phone can be used to produce podcasts, songs and audio journals.
Edit Videos
There are a lot of really good video-editing apps for your iPhone. Some include iMovie, ReelDirector, Magisto and many others.