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Augmented Reality Wizards Blippar Will Unveil New Tech At TechCrunch Disrupt London

What if you could learn about anything just by taking a photo of it?  Blippar already has 3 million people doing that every month plus another 62 million signed up. Now Blippar is ready to unveil the next phase of its technology and business, and it’s going to do it onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt London. Blippar CEO   Ambarish Mitra   is basically tech’s version of Slumdog Millionaire. After running away from home and living in the slums of Delhi, India, Mitra sold magazines door-to-door. But then he won $10,000 in an e-business plan competition and used the money to form an Internet portal for women that was free to those with low incomes. He eventually IPO’d that business, studied at the London School Of Economics, and sold his next business, Swiftcover, to AXA Insurance. Mitra started Blippar when augmented reality was just in its infancy. And while devices like the Microsoft HoloLens promise a future where we see digital graphics overlay information atop ou...

New touchscreen material to end daily smartphone charging

British scientists have invented a new type of touchscreen material that requires very little power to illuminate, with vivid colours and high visibility in direct sunlight.                               The team is already in talks with some big players in consumer electronics to see if their new material can replace current LCD touchscreens over the next few years, sciencealert.com reported. Developed by Bodie Technologies, a University of Oxford spin-off company, the new technology could spare the consumers the pains of charging their smartphones daily.                 "We can create an entire new market. You have to charge smartwatches every night, which is slowing adoption. But if you had a smartwatch or smart glass that didn't need much power, you could recharge it just once a week," one of the researchers, Peiman Hosseini, was quoted as saying by The Telegraph....

Lost your Windows 10 laptop Here's how to find it

One of the headline features of Android for some time now has been a utility that lets you easily find your lost phone. Whether it's truly lost or god forbid stolen, or simply stuck between the sofa cushions, finding it has never been so easy. By popular demand, Microsoft brought this utility to Windows phone with Windows 10 recently. The number of phones that run Windows 10 are however very few as of the moment, and the ones that are there are not available across the globe, but in select markets. Two of these recently launched phones, the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950XL are expected to launch in India soon. But more on that later. Windows 10 was designed primarily as a cross platform operating system so that it could work seamlessly across devices: phones, tablets, laptops and PCs. To that effect, Microsoft's first major Windows 10 upgrade (Windows 10 November update) brings in new features, that are both evident and 'out there' as well as also secretly tucked away in...

Powdered glue goes on dry and sticks when squished

Dried-up glue may come in useful. A new powdered form of adhesive developed by researchers in Japan could help in building hard-to-reach parts of cars or smartphones. Most glues are either liquids that dry to form a bond, or solids that are heated to make them viscous and sticky, and then bond when cooled. Now Syuji Fujii of Osaka Institute of Technology in Japan and his colleagues have come up with a dry powder that becomes a sticky glue when squished. The powder is made up of “liquid marbles” – beads of liquid coated in solid particles that trap the fluid inside. In this case, the team rolled spheres of a latex liquid in a layer of calcium-carbonate nanoparticles. The resulting drops are a few millimetres across and pour easily, but when put under pressure for a few seconds the nanoparticles are pushed inside, exposing the sticky liquid within to the surface.

Self-Folding Minirobots Possible with Origami-Inspired Graphene

Origami-inspired graphene paper that can fold itself could be used to create anything from miniature robots to artificial muscles, according to a new study. Scientists from Donghua University in China have demonstrated that gently heating a sheet of graphene paper, which is extraordinarily strong (about 200 times stronger than steel by weight), could make it fold into a device that is able to walk forward and backward. And, in a first for this kind of self-folding material, they showed it could also change directions. The research could help scientists develop self-folding structures and devices for modern applications, including wirelessly controlled micro robots, artificial muscles and devices for tissue engineering, said Jiuke Mu, a Ph.D. student at Donghua University and one of the material’s inventors. [The 6 Strangest Robots Ever Created] "In the near future, it even could bring changes to people's lives," Mu told Live Science, giving the example...

Nano-scale 'fingerprint' could boost security

An atomic-scale fingerprint could boost the security of connected devices, according to British scientists who have developed it. The tiny identity tags are essentially tiny imperfections in the building blocks of matter, making them virtually impossible to clone They could be used as the basis of a robust system for authenticating hardware and software, The researchers from the UK universities of Lancaster and Manchester built tiny, layered metallic structures in the lab and incorporated "design flaws" that were unique to the item. "What you do is shrink these systems down as far as they will go," Dr Jonathan Roberts from Lancaster told BBC News. "And the interesting thing is that you can't clone them. To clone them, you'd effectively have to measure [the fingerprints] atom-by-atom. You just can't do it." "And the interesting thing is that you can't clone them. To clone them, you'd effectively have to measure [the finge...

Google Maps gets full offline support on Android, coming soon to iOS

There are so many things that Google Maps can do...when it's online. Not so much when it's offline though. All this just changed. In a major revamp, Google has given Maps -- its popular navigation and mapping tool -- full offline support. It is now live and running, on Android. Meanwhile, an iOS overhaul -- with the full set of features -- is coming soon, it announced. Starting Tuesday, users can not only search (for a destination) but get turn-by-turn driving directions for the same as well, online or offline, doesn't matter. Users basically have to download the map -- of an area -- to their device, while it is online. Selecting (and downloading) an area is as simple as specifying a city, state or pin code, and tapping on download. Size of the area they want to save has been left to users' discretion. Once downloaded, you can use the piece of map the same way as you'll use when it's online, with some difference in features. "Whereas before you coul...