Tag / GigaOM

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

X-ray smartphones are being researched at the University of Texas

Have you ever dreamt of having x-ray vision? If so, new research from the University of Texas that could lead to x-ray cameras built into smartphones should be right up your street. The range of vision would be restricted to 4 inches for privacy reasons, and such cameras are years away from commercial availability, but these developments are exciting nevertheless.

Gigaom

While the smartphone of today has become a pretty amazing sensor for discovering the real world, the smartphone of tomorrow may just give you the ability to have X-ray vision. That’s the potential implication of a breakthrough at the University of Texas, Dallas, where researchers say they have taken a big step closer to enabling a phone to see a short distance through wood, walls, plastics and other objects.

It comes down to the ability to bridge what’s called the terahertz gap in the infrared band. The terahertz band is largely unused because the band is too high for electronics and too low for light-based systems. But an engineering team at the University of Texas at Dallas has found a way to create images with signals in the terahertz band without having to use multiple lenses inside a device. Basically, they’re able to focus light without using a lot of big lenses and…

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by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Google wants to make the web more mobile

Google wants to make the web more mobile, and is willing to splash the cash to do so.

Gigaom

Google(s goog) wants to bring more small websites to mobile phones, and to help nudge those sites along it’s willing to foot the bill for a year. Google, with the help of mobile Web optimization startup Duda Mobile, is offering for 12 months free hosting and customization of Web sites for mobile browsers in an effort to make more Internet content mobile-friendly.

Fortune first broke the story Thursday morning, reporting that the initiative as a new service, but according to The Next Web, the offer is really an extension of the Go Mo program Google launched in November. TNW cited a post on Duda Mobile’s blog that has since been removed from its Website:

“Our hope is that by offering both the education AND the service at no cost for one year, we can help businesses make the shift to mobile more quickly, benefiting both their business as well…

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by Xavier Voigt-Hill

How Draw Something became an overnight hit

Over the past few weeks, Draw Something has become massive, with over 30,000,000 downloads on iOS and Android. GigaOm‘s interview with the CEO of OMGPOP, Dan Porter, explains how it all happened.

Gigaom

Draw Something, the No. 1 app right now on iOS (s aapl) and Android (s goog), is listed as a game and draws a lot of comparisons to the family game Pictionary. But the funny thing is that it’s not really a game at all.

It doesn’t have scores or leaderboards, and the players in the game aren’t actually competing against each other. They’re working together in a cooperative manner, but they’re not taking on anyone else or a computer.

Instead, it’s more of a social communications app masquerading as a game, said OMGPOP CEO and Draw Something game designer Dan Porter.

I sat down with Porter Friday at OMGPOP’s New York office and asked him about how he pulled off the immense success of Draw Something, which has racked up 30 million downloads on iOS and Android in about five weeks. The app has generated about 2 billion…

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by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Vevo redesign shifts away from YouTube towards Facebook

Vevo, the music video service that causes more problems than it solves, launched a major redesign of its site today, notably emphasising Facebook connection and shifting away from YouTube hosting. Why can’t they just hurry up fix the iOS app?

Gigaom

Over the past two years, Vevo has become the default place to watch music online. But, like many other streaming video providers, it had a problem: For users, the act of watching videos tends to be a very disjointed process.

Users search for something they want to watch, find it, watch it and then have to search for something else all over again. Most sites have recommendations when the videos end, but they can be hit or miss — and they tend not to be very personal, not reflective of a user’s viewing history or his social graph.

I’ve written about this a lot in the past — about how the success of streaming video will be driven by improved discovery and through the implementation of a more TV-like playback experience where the user doesn’t have to continually search for the content he wants to watch.

Anyway, the latest update…

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