Spanish Wi-Fi sharing company Fon has raised $14 million from Qualcomm Ventures, VentureBeat reports. It’s an indication that Fon’s collective approach to sharing bandwidth, while slow-growing, still has some attraction to investors — particularly a strategic investor like Qualcomm, which makes chips for broadband wireless communications. It might also be finding some traction now that the notion of “collaborative consumption” is catching on, thanks to startups like AirBnB and Lyft — although Fon predates those startups by several years. Fon will use the funding to develop a new device, based on Qualcomm’s Atheros chipset, that enables users to share music as well as their broadband signals, Recode reports. In addition, Qualcomm will build Fon’s Wi-Fi sharing capabilities into its own Atheros chipset, GigaOm states…
…Read MorePodcast Series: Innovations in Education
Explore the full series of eSchool News podcasts hosted by Kevin Hogan—created to keep you on the cutting edge of innovations in education.
Zuck’s first major ed-tech investment? Panorama Education, the brainchild of a Yale coder
When Aaron Feuer was in high school, he helped write a bill for students to give feedback on their classes, VentureBeat reports. By the time he matriculated at Yale University, Feuer had picked up computer programming skills. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the bill wasn’t enough. School districts still needed a better way to poll students and teachers and incorporate the results. So he began building Panorama Education, which works with school districts to gather the requisite data they needed to improve education. Today, at the age of 22, Feuer closed $4 million in funding from Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million fund, Startup: Education. This is Startup:Education’s first national equity investment…
…Read MoreWhy video is the unlikely common denominator in ed-tech
Anyone who has attended an ed-tech conference is bound to hear one of the following terms and acronyms: flipped classroom, MOOC, BYOD, personalized or social learning — all pretty diverse area of the education tech space. Yet, the one common denominator each of these areas have is the presence of video, VentureBeat reports. That means video’s role in ed-tech is very important. Video has been penetrating the education market like no other technology and is slowly becoming one of the most popular activities on the Web. In 2012 alone, Internet users watched 4 billion videos per day. Between 2012 and 2017, mobile video will grow 75 percent per year, the highest growth rate predicted among any mobile app, including Facebook and Twitter…
…Read MoreChina now has the most powerful supercomputer in the world
China’s supercomputer is better than yours, VentureBeat reports. The Tianhe-2 was ranked No. 1 on the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. This marks China’s first return to the top position since November 2010, when the Tianhe-1A was named top dog. Also known as Milky Way-2, the system was developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology. Most of the features were developed in China although TOP500 editor Jack Dongarra said it uses Intel products for the main computing part. Tianhe-2 has 16,000 nodes, each with two Intel Xeon IvyBridge processors and three Xeon Phi processors for a combined total of 3,120,000 computing cores. It will call the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China its home…
…Read MoreSony launches new digital binoculars that record what you see
Sony has unveiled a pair of binoculars with digital technology that allow you to record whatever you view, VentureBeat reports. This is a kind of digital device that may actually be an improvement on its analog counterpart. The second generation of Sony’s digital binoculars, dubbed the DEV-50V, lets you record what you’re looking at while you’re still looking at it through lenses that can give you up to 25 times magnification. The new model is great for everything from watching your kid’s school play to filming wildlife from a distance. You can use them to watch sports events and capture “the wow moments” at the same time…
…Read MoreGoogle is bringing voice control to Chrome
As the rise of Siri and its competitors has shown, voice control has become a huge part of how we interact with mobile devices, VentureBeat reports. So you shouldn’t be too surprised that Google is bringing voice control to the desktop as well. With the latest Chrome beta, Google is giving developers some big new voice-centered tools that will allow them to integrate speech recognition into their web apps. There are a lot of pretty obvious applications for the functionality, which will eventually allow Chrome users to dictate search queries, documents, and other text inputs. While there’s not much new ground being broken there, it won’t be long until developers figure out other, more interesting uses for the new voice API. Google has been making a lot of headway with voice search as of late, having introduced its voice-focused Search app for iOS in October…
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