20 Gadgets That Make Your Smartphone Even Smarter

It’s called smartphone, but is it really smart? After all, most people use the smartphone to browse social networks, listen to music, play games, make memes and upload photos to Instagram. Not much advanced intelligence needed to run those things. However the smartphone is essentially a small computer. You can do pretty amazing things with it including launch it into space as a nanosatellite.

But that is for dedicated use. In cases where you want to keep using your smartphone for your online activities, you can also set your smartphone to do other things like locate your missing car, lock and unlock your homes, watch your health and contact your relatives if you get into an accident, etc. Check out a few other ways you can make your smartphone smarter, and your life easier. You’ll probably look at your smartphones differently now.

RECOMMENDED READING:30 Famous Tech Gadgets Disassembled

Viper SmartStart

Make the Mercedes-Benz owner envy you, with Viper SmartStart, a device that allows you to perform regular tasks your remote key can do, for instance lock the door, honk the car and release the trunk, all with your smartphone. On top of that, with Viper SmartStart you can even check your vehicle status to ensure it’s safe, and ready to rock and roll. [$149-$399]

Hone

Keys have a special ability to disappear right when you are looking for it. Hone is a Bluetooth device for iPhone and iPod that helps you find your key. The setup is easy – just tie the device to your key and press the Find button on your iPhone. The device will light up and emit a sound to indicate its position. That’s it, smart and elegant. [$49.00]

Lockitron

The Lockitron not only lets you unlock the door with just a touch on the smartphone, but also notifies you when someone is knocking at the door. With the right customization, you can even set your door to unlock whenever you get near the door – no more fumbling around with your house keys especially when your hands are full. [$179.00]

Square Register

Square Register is a revolution that’s disrupting the current old, statictransaction system. It takes the advantage of the smartphone’s mobility to let you accept any credit card payment anytime, anywhere. The buyer signs on the smartphone to authorize payment and avoid potential fraud, and the information is encrypted before any processing initialize.

Geode

Geode can convert all your physical credit cards, loyalty cards, and membership cards into digital information. To use the cards, you can transfer the card information to the provided Geode card temporarily. Flick to activate the card, say a credit card, then swipe it through the terminal as normal.

You can also store all the barcodes from your loyalty cards and display it at the back of the Geode to allow for scans. [$159.00]

Tōd

Use these smart beacons, called Tōd, to track the location of your child, a beloved pet or even your car. Get notifications via email or text when they make an unscheduled departure from the compound or if they wander off too far from you. [$32.00]

Pico Genie A100

Heavy projectors are so last-century. I’m going for the Pico Genie A100, a speaker-enabled projector as mini as the iPhone! The outcome is a 60″ viewing area with sound-boosting effect, not to mention that you could carry the Pico Genie 100 around during presentations. But honestly, I think it fits better as agaming device! [$262.00]

Botiful

Just plug in your smartphone to Botiful, the robot, and you can move it anywhere and communicate with any human using the minimalistic Skype interface. What’s even more fun here is that you can also explore everywhere that your big human body cannot reach with this feet-sized robot. It makes me feel like a god that’s omnipresent, only I’m a little bit mini! [$199.00]

Scanbox

You can use your smartphone to help you scan codes such as QR Codes but even better, you can get a simple, portable Scanbox to stabilize your camera to perform bulk scanning tasks! The Scanbox comes with LEDs that light up from the bottom, providing prominent light sources for the best scanning quality possible. [$15.00]

NODE Chroma

You can call NODE Chroma a real-life Photoshop color picker, as it really is. Place the Chroma on the colored object, and the color will be saved into your smartphone or personal computer with the standard formats of RGB, HEX, CMYK and LAB for your future reference and even comparison. [$149.00]

Sensordrone

Sensordrone is a sensor computer that harvests vital information around your environment, such as air quality, gas leaks, temperature, humidity etc – practically anything that can be sensed! Great for people with jobs that require technical measurements while on the go. [$175.00]

Crash Sensor

Your life will be safer with the ICEdot’s Crash Sensor. All you need to do is mount the device on your helmet before you take off to any of your extreme sports or cross-country races. The device will notify your emergency contacts and send GPS coordinates to initiate rescue attempts should an accident occurs.

Misfit Shine

Misfit Shine helps you track your physical activities on-the-go. Upon equipping it on your body, Shine will track your physical activities and inform you at the end of the day that if your body movements are well enough to keep you fit and shiny. [$79.00]

Health Appliances

While Withings Blood Pressure Monitor helps you monitor your blood pressure intelligently, Medisana ThermoDock checks if your body temperature is beyond dangerous parameters. Your data is stored within the VitaDock app for future reference. Smart health management for smartphone holder! [$158.00, $80.00]

Deeper

I have never imagined that my smartphone can detect fish underwater, butDeeper makes the impossible possible. The magic is made possible by the Friday Lab’s sonar that can detect movement of fish within a 50m radius, and reflects its ‘catch’ on your smartphone’s screen. The best app for tech-savvy fishermen. [$149.00]

Smart Radiation Detector

The nuclear meltdown happened in Japan has raised awareness about the absorption of radioactive materials into the food and water. The Smart Radiation Detector can detect and confirm radiation levels to help you avoid contaminated resources. Medical professionals and rescue team operators could use this when working in nuclear-related disasters. [$100.00]

SkyLight

The SkyLight could connect your smartphone camera to a supported microscope, and let you capture microscope photographs with the option to switch the focal planes with a touch of your finger. [$65.00]

Smart Baby Monitor

After the installation, the Smart Baby Monitor will start sending live streaming audio and video through secure connection. The monitor gets even more awesome with the WithBaby app that let new parents check on their baby via wireless connection. The monitor can even detect your baby’s activities as well as the room’s humidity and temperature. [$352.00]

Wise-Pet

Built to protect your phone, the Wise-Pet doubles as a tech pet, promising 5 different pets possessing 5 different personalities. The app is also built with some educational features, like the video feature that broadcasts fun lessons, or the recording feature that saves up your voiced bedtime stories, and let the Wise-Pet reads out for you! [$20.00]

iPhly

Tired of losing the remote controls for the TV, air conditioner, garage door opener or even your toy car/plane? Store up all your controls in iPhly. With the iPhone/iPod Touch combined, you can steer the R/C car, or swipe it up to throttle up the R/C airplanes, or run your devices all with your smartphone. [$70.00]

Full > http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/innovative-smartphone-gadgets/

7 incredibly simple inventions that are changing the world

1. Menstrual cups

• Many women and girls around the world do not have access to basic sanitary protection -- especially in parts of the developing world where periods are seen as taboo, or where the cost of sanitary pads exceed the average person's income.
  The menstrual cup is one affordable and reusable solution. The bell-shaped product, made of surgical-grade silicone, is worn inside the vagina and collects menstrual fluid. Once the cup is removed, it simply needs to be washed before reusing, providing a sustainable and safe option for women in developing countries.

  IMAGE: ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS

• 2. The 'penguin'

• 
• • We've seen a sharp decline in global child mortality over the past 25 years, but there's still work to be done. According to the latest statistics from UNICEF, 17,000 children under age five die each day around the world, often due to otherwise preventable illnesses or circumstances. The region with the highest rate of child mortality is sub-Saharan Africa.
    In Malawi and other African nations, some midwives have begun using a "penguin" -- a plastic, bird-shaped suction device that can remove obstructions from babies' airways immediately following birth. The simple device is a game-changer in saving children's lives.

    IMAGE: MASHABLE, CASEY KELBAUGH

  • 3. Q Drum

  • 
    
  • • Approximately 750 million people around the world still don't have access to clean drinking water, and many of those who do must travel long distances from their homes to get it. In various cultures, women and children are typically the ones tasked with collecting water, often carrying the full containers on their heads. Studies show this poses a significant risk to neck and spine injuries.
      The folks behind Q Drum want to make the process safer and easier. The Q Drum is a wheel-shaped water canister that's designed to roll while it's easily pulled by a rope through the central hole. Traditional containers are often limited to 15 liters of water, but the Q Drum can hold 50 liters.
      There are similar concepts created to help the process, such as the Hippo Water Roller.

      VIDEO: YOUTUBE, TRIFILM, INC.

    • 4. GravityLight

    • 
    • • According to the International Energy Agency, more than 1.3 billion people -- 18% of the global population -- lack access to electricity, the majority of whom rely on kerosene for lighting.
        The GravityLight offers a safer alternative, offering light through energy generated by the weight of a small bag filled with rocks, sand or soil. User trials are still being conducted in the field, but the GravityLight is expected commercially later in 2015.

        IMAGE: GRAVITYLIGHT

      • 5. Low-cost uterine balloon tamponade

      • 
      • • Postpartum hemorrhage (PPH), also known as postpartum bleeding, is the leading cause of maternal mortality in the world, according to PATH. Yet many women and their doctors don't have access to the tools and methods needed to prevent and treat it.
          The uterine balloon tamponade (UBT) is an effective method of treating PPH, saving countless women's lives. However, a professional-grade UBT can be extremely expensive. It can cost more than $400 in the U.S., for example.
          Massachusetts General Hospital's Division of Global Health and Human Rights has created a $5 version of the UBT, which can be assembled using readily available materials in developing countries: a condom tied to a catheter, inflated with clean water through a syringe and a one-way valve.
          According to USAID, this isn't the first homemade UTB, but it's one of the most easy-to-use innovations that includes a pictorial checklist, which is helpful for illiterate health workers.

          IMAGE: MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL

        • 6. Clean cookstoves

        • 
          
        • • More than 4 million people -- mostly women and children -- die every year from from health problems associated with inhaling carbon monoxide or pollutants from stoves that burn wood, biomass or coal. But the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves and the companies it partners with are advocating for cleaner alternatives, which can save lives and advance gender equality (women can use the money normally spent on fuel to pursue other opportunities).
            The ACE 1 (in the video above), from African Clean Energy, is a popular, relatively inexpensive model that produces fewer emissions. Other innovative cookstoves include EcoZoom's Zoom Jetand the K2 cookstove, created by two students at the University of California, Berkeley.

            VIDEO: YOUTUBE, AFRICAN CLEAN ENERGY

          • 7. SOCCKET

          • 
            
          • Perhaps the most high-tech innovation on this list, Uncharted Play's SOCCKET ball converts the kinetic energy generated from play to electric energy to power an energy-efficient, 3-LED lamp, providing much-needed light and power to those who need it.
            For every SOCCKET purchased, Uncharted Play gives a child in the developing world access to its energy-generating play products.
            VIDEO: YOUTUBE, UNCHARTED PLAY

          • BONUS: 3 Inventions Improving Water

          • Interactive
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          • Full > http://mashable.com/2015/03/23/simple-inventions-developing-world/#5IbTbAjN_uqi
          • 
            

The 7 Best Facebook Alternatives You Didn’t Know About

People are connecting on more than just Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter

Your Facebook friends are boring. Your Twitter followers sound like a bunch of parrots. And your LinkedIn contacts, well, who wants to talk about work all day, anyway? Amazingly, in 2015, it’s still possible to feel like you’ve reached the end of the Internet, especially if you rely on your social networks for news and amusement.

But there are more ways to connect with people online than the three most popular social networks. In fact, smaller networks are some of the best places to dig into topics you care more deeply about. So sign up and check out at one of these great alternative social networks:

App.net: Two of the largest complaints about Facebook are how the company gives your data to third party applications, and the way the company manipulates its News Feed to show things that aren’t necessarily updates from your friends. App.net is a great alternative to signing into third party sites (where it’s supported) with your Facebook account. But it also has a news stream where many media outlets post their stories. So, if you like to keep your friends’ updates and news stories separate, un-follow the media accounts on Facebook and add them to your App.net account, instead.

BeMyEyes: Technically speaking, BeMyEyes is not a social network. That said, it provides one of the most intimate interactions you’ll ever have with another person via technology. Designed to help blind people to solve everyday problems, the iPhone app connects the vision-impaired with fully-sighted users via video chat. Users can then point their iPhone’s camera to show their remote helpers the situation at hand — a door sign, an expiration date, a piece of mail. The sighted person lends their eyes to help the blind user solve their problem. It’s that simple, but it’s also that amazing.

DeviantArt: While image-oriented social networks like Pinterest and Instagram have rocketed in popularity, DeviantArt has held steady as the world’s largest online art community for 15 years. With more than 300 million original works of art submitted by at least 34 million members, this forum is home to artists from more than 190 countries posting everything from anime to 3-D landscapes for their peers to comment on. Whether you’re interested in traditional techniques like oil-painted landscapes, or off-the-wall topical themes like #cosplayfriday, you’ll find artists who appreciate your efforts and whose expertise will push your craft forward.

Doximity: Whether it’s for finding a new opportunity or making contacts to grow your business, LinkedIn is great for networking. But what happens when you’re already locked into your job and just looking to navigate your field? Doximity is a social network specifically for doctors, allowing them to network with other medical professionals in this secure, closed network. By using the National Provider Information Registry to authenticate doctors signing up, it assures all users are legitimate M.D.s. And with HIPPA-secure and encrypted interactions, safety is built into the network. Simply by reading their personalized news feed, doctors can even get continuing medical education credits using the iOS or Android app.

NextDoor: One of the curiosities of the social media age is how we can be so well-connected with people on the other side of the world, yet still not know our next door neighbors. A network designed for building and strengthening communities, NextDoor connects people within geographic neighborhoods, helping them talk about things that are important to the places where they live. Part Craigslist (with a classified section), part Yelp (where users can recommend local businesses), and part Facebook (with neighbors able to post updates and comments on other people’s posts), NextDoor pulls the seemingly invisible layer of social interaction out of the web and lays it onto the real world. Also, there’s some really catty online neighbor spats on this forum that you’re totally missing out on.

RallyPoint: Service members often equate being in the military with being in a family. If that’s so, RallyPoint is the largest family gathering online. A site that mixes the professional side of serving in the Armed Forces with the personal, RallyPoint lets users weigh in on discussions on everything from military policy to post-military life. It also connects to a variety of other networks to help you find your friends and contacts on its own Android and iOS app. And you don’t need to be an active-duty member to use the service — even military family members can sign up to connect.

Untappd: Of all the things we post for friends on social networks — pictures of our kids, recipes, news stories — beer might be the only one we’d actually share in real life. A social network for people who enjoy great tasting suds, Untappd lets users check in at bars, write a review of their pint, check in to see what their friends at other establishments are sipping, and of course, take that highly-filtered half-drunken beer picture for all to enjoy. If this sounds boring to you, you might want to try ordering something a little more expensive other than Miller Lite once in a while.

Chemical Attraction: Why Mosquitos Zone In On Some People, But Not Others

Everyone who has ever been camping or walking in the wild with friends can’t have failed to notice how insects seem to prefer some people’s flesh to others. Some unlucky souls are totally covered in itchy red blotches and others are miraculously spared. Sometimes only some family members are affected. My mother has never been bitten by a mosquito (though fleas like her) while my brother and I are often the targets.

Previous observations have shown a higher mosquito preference for larger people (who produce more CO2), beer drinkers and pregnant women, and although diet was often suspected as a factor, nothing in what we eat (even garlic) stood up to scrutiny.

The authors of a new study in PLOS One claim to have found the answer. They studied the differences in attraction of skin odours to mosquitoes, specifically Aedes aegypti, in a group of brave volunteers drawn from a group of female identical and non-identical twins – part of the large national TwinsUK cohort that I set up 21 years ago. The reason for using both kinds of twin was to separate the effects of nature and nurture (or genes and environment). In humans this is the only way to get a good estimate of the contribution of genetics to the differences between people.

Our valiant twins put their hands into a specially constructed plexiglass sealed dome where the odours either attract or repel 20 female mosquitoes without being allowed to bite. Each subject was given an attractiveness score compared to the other hand at the other end of the dome. Sure enough the identical twins, who share all their genes, had consistently more similar scores compared to fraternal twins – showing a clear genetic component. This comparison estimated that 67% of the differences between people (called heritability) was down to their genes.

Repel With Smell

Why might this be? Many years ago in another twin study we showed that underarm body odour as perceived by human sniffers had a genetic basis – with huge variability in how strong smells were perceived. This showed that we have gene variations controlling both the odours we perceive and the chemical odours we produce. In this way we are similar to mosquitoes because they also have big differences in which odours and chemicals attract and repel them.

Different mosquitoes prefer different parts of our bodies to others. The species Aedes Gambiae prefers the odours of our hands and feet to other bits like groins and armpits. Some animals use their body odour to keep insects away and companies have been trying to unravel what the best chemicals are.

The twin study authors realised that the chemicals could come from glands in our skin or from the billions of microbes on the surface. They discounted the bacteria as a cause as the dogma is that bacteria can’t be influenced genetically. It turns out they were wrong.

Your Own Personal Microbes

We all have very different and unique microbial species in our mouths, guts and on our skin. We share only a small fraction of our microbial species with each other - but still have a unique microbial signature fingerprint. Until recently it was thought this variety was random or due to where we lived. But recent studies, again using UK twins, have shown the importance of genes in influencing which type of gut bacteria flourish inside us – and the same is likely to be true for our skin.

Our 100 trillion microbes outnumber our own human cells ten to one and it turns out we don’t pick them - they pick us - based on our genetic makeup. This means that, just like mosquitoes, certain microbes prefer to coexist with us and other find us rather unpleasant and settle elsewhere.

Our microbes produce many of our vitamins and chemicals in our blood, and far from being the bad guys, their diversity contributes to our health. They are also probably responsible for most of our smells and odours. Even regular hand washing can’t remove these bacteria.

Fill Article > 

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