Riduan Mohamad Nor's Blog, page 2

Fake Lego Warehouse Raided, Boss Arrested

Remember Lepin, the Chinese Lego lookalike that recently had its trademark cancelled after a long battle with Lego lawyers (that’s lawyers for Lego, not lawyers made from Lego, sadly)? It’s in the news again after having its warehouses raided.

Shanghai Police posted on the Chinese social network Weibo that they’ve raided no less than three Lepin warehouses and arrested four people, including the company boss, a Mr Li.

Says the translated Weibo post:

“On April 23, with the cooperation of police in Shantou and Shenzhen, the Shanghai police successfully destroyed the criminal gang suspected of infringing the copyright of the “Lego” brand, arrested four suspects headed by Li, and smashed production and packaging.

3 warehouses, more than 10 assembly lines, more than 90 production moulds, nearly 200,000 manuals, more than 200,000 packaging boxes, more than 630,000 finished products, more than 200 million yuan.”

200 million yuan is about £23,000,000 – apparently fake Lego is big business.

The police also included some images of the infringing products, which not only look exactly like Lego products, but even have their own versions of lines like the Lego Movie 2, Lego Star Wars and Lego Cities:

Is this the end of Lepin? We thought we’d already seen that when the trademark was cancelled, but with sums like £23m at stake, we wouldn’t be surprised if it raises its little yellow head again before this saga is over.

Google Home’s Philips Hue integration can now wake you up gently

Maybe you love the sound of your alarm clock blaring in the morning, heralding a new day full of joy and adventure. More likely, though, you don’t. If you prefer a more gentle wake-up (and have invested in some smart home technology), here’s some good news: Google  Home now lets you use your Philips Hue lights to wake you up by slowly changing the light in your room.

Philips  first announced this integration at CES earlier this year, with a planned rollout in March. Looks like that took a little while longer, as Google and Philips gently brought this feature to life.

Just like you can use your Home to turn on “Gentle Wake,” which starts changing your lights 30 minutes before your wake-up time to mimic a sunrise, you also can go the opposite way and have the lights mimic sunset as you get ready to go to bed. You can either trigger these light changes through an alarm or with a command that starts them immediately.

While the price of white Hue bulbs has come down in recent years, colored hue lights remain rather pricey, with single bulbs going for around $40. If that doesn’t hold you back, though, the Gentle Sleep and Wake features are now available in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, Singapore and India in English only.

News About Tragedies Makes Us Miserable—and Hungry for More, Study Finds

A new study out Wednesday might just reaffirm your worst fears about staying glued to Twitter or TV news during a mass tragedy like the latest school shooting. It suggests that getting exposed to media coverage of these events can create a vicious emotional cycle that not only sends you into despair, but also makes you more likely to tune into the next widely broadcast atrocity.

For their study, published in Science Advances, researchers at the University of California, Irvine used the survey company GfK’s KnowledgePanel, a service that offers small cash rewards to users for every online or phone survey they take. Though the service has its limitations (people who regularly take paid surveys might not be representative of the general population), it also allowed the researchers to study the same group of people over a long time with relative ease, in this case around three years.

They surveyed nearly 4,500 people soon after the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing in the US, which left three people dead and more than 250 injured. Among other things, these volunteers were asked about their emotional reaction to the bombing, their exposure to media coverage of the attack, and how worried they were about future tragic events.

As other studies have shown, people who had the most exposure to media about the tragedy were more likely to feel stressed, even when they were asked again six months later. At the two-year-anniversary of the bombing, they were still more likely to feel worried about the future. And when they were surveyed at least five days after the June 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, in the US state of Florida, those same people were also more likely to report watching the media coverage of that event. As before, people who tuned in the most to coverage of the Pulse shooting were then more likely to feel distressed about it.

“These findings reinforce prior work from our lab (and others) that has consistently demonstrated an association between event-related media consumption and stress symptoms in the aftermath of a collective trauma such as a mass violence event,” lead author Rebecca Thompson, a psychologist at UCI, told Gizmodo via email. “Our study is unique in that it is the first to demonstrate the pattern of repeated media exposure to mass violence and distress over time and over the course of multiple events, among a large sample of individuals who were followed for several years.”

It’s fair to wonder just how responsible social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube might be for fuelling this cycle, given that they often amplify our worst impulses and regularly allow bad actors to spread false or misleading accounts of a public tragedy (including with the recent Notre Dame cathedral fire). Thompson and her team did take into account the various ways people get their news, asking the volunteers about their exposure to seven different sources of media consumption, including social media. But they didn’t tease out how often people got news from any one outlet, nor the individual impact these different outlets could have on our collective psyche.

“Such a question is the focus of ongoing work in our lab,” said Thompson.

Depressing as the study might be, it’s hardly the first to show a similar “contagion effect” from the media. Research has regularly shown that the media reporting surrounding a celebrity’s suicide can raise the risk of viewers experiencing suicidal ideation or attempting suicide themselves. But just as public health organisations have created guidelines around responsible suicide reporting for media outlets to follow (even if they often don’t), Thompson says that there are ways for the media to mitigate the despair they cause their audiences.

“For media outlets, we recommend a moderation of the sensationalistic aspects of the news coverage of these events, so as not to incite excessive worry and distress among viewers,” she said.

Viewers themselves can take steps to protect their emotional state when the next mass tragedy inevitably occurs.

“For those at home, we recommend more mindfulness when making choices about how much media coverage they are consuming,” she said. “Using the media for information during a mass tragedy is not in and of itself psychologically harmful, but not allowing oneself to become consumed by these events when they occur could minimise some of the distress we are seeing in our respondents.”

 

Blobs in Earth’s Core Could Be Causing ‘Geomagnetic Jerks’ in the Magnetic Field

Every several years, magnetic field observatories record quick changes to the position or strength of the planet’s magnetic field, so-called geomagnetic jerks. The cause of these shifts has remained a mystery.

Improvements to ground-based observatories and more magnetic field measurements from satellites have given scientists new insights into the planet’s magnetic behaviour. Though we can’t look directly into Earth’s core, these measurements have let scientists build models to help infer what might be going on in there. Most recently, scientists realised that that suddenly released, moving blobs inside the core could explain the geomagnetic jerks.

“The ability to numerically reproduce jerks offers a new way to probe the physical properties of Earth’s deep interior,” researchers Julien Aubert  from the University of Paris and Christopher Finlay  from the Technical University of Denmark write in a new paper, published in Nature Geoscience.

Earth scientists are pretty sure that the planet generates its own magnetic field thanks to the geodynamo: heat-generated motion of conductive liquid metal inside the core, combined with the planet’s spin. Changes are generally slow—like being on a fancy new train, where you barely perceive the forces of speeding up or slowing down. But sometimes the magnetic field experiences “jerks,” where it unpredictably goes from speeding up to slowing down, similar to the whiplash-inducing jolts you might feel on a rickety old train.

These “jerks” occur over the course of just a few years, and have appeared in 2007, 2011, and 2014, according to observed data. To better understand this, the researchers built a simulation of Earth, in which the outer core is represented as a rotating spherical shell filled with an electrically conducting liquid, and the inner core and mantle as solids sandwiching the liquid later. It’s like a spinning jawbreaker with a layer of goo between the centre and the outer shell.

The model revealed that isolated blobs appearing in the liquid could move upward and around the core, creating waves through the liquid’s electrically charged atoms. Once these waves are stopped by the solid mantle, they compress, leading to the temporary disturbances in the magnetic field that cause the geomagnetic jerk. It would take around 25 years from the release of the blob to the observation of a jerk.

This is a model based on what we know of Earth’s interior, and it’s worth taking it (and all models) with a grain of salt. Nor is this the only possible explanation for these jerks—others have suggested they come from a torsional, or twisting, oscillation in the core, though the researchers behind the new paper argue that torsional oscillations are too weak to generate the signals observed in real life.

Still, models are crucial for better understanding how motion deep in our planet manifests here on the surface, and understanding the jerks might help scientists predict them in the future. You might be aware that the magnetic field protects us from solar rays that would otherwise make the planet unlivable. So it’s nice to be able to understand it better.

Tonal raises $45 million to bring strength training to more living rooms

 

Tonal is today announcing its Series C financing that it hopes will allow the company to bring its at-home gym to even more homes. The funding round shows investors’ excitement around the new generation of personal exercise equipment that combines on-demand training with smart features. Tonal,  like Peloton, offers features previously unavailable outside of gyms, and with this injection of capital, the company expects to build new personal features and invest in marketing and retail experiences.

L Catterton’s Growth Fund led the $45 million Series C round, which included investments from Evolution Media,  Shasta Ventures, Mayfield, Sapphire Sport and others. This financing round brings the total amount raised to $90 million.

Tonal is based out of San Francisco and was founded by Aly Orady in 2015. The company launched its strength-training product in 2018. The wall-mounted Tonal uses electromagnetism to simulate and control weight, allowing the slender device to replicate (and replace) a lot of weight-lifting machines.

The Tonal machine costs $2,995, and for $49 a month, Tonal offers members access to personal training sessions, recommended programs and workouts. Since launching, CEO Orady tells TechCrunch there have been virtually no returns. He says their customer care teams proactively work with members to ensure a good experience.

Orady is excited to have L Catterton participating in this financing round, saying their deep network and unparalleled experience building premium fitness brands globally is an incredibly exciting new resource for the company. The Connecticut-based investment firm helped fund Peloton,  ThirdLove, ClassPass and The Honest Company.

“As the fitness landscape continues to evolve, we have seen a clear shift toward personalized, content-driven, at-home workout experiences,” said Scott Dahnke, Global co-CEO of L Catterton in a released statement. “Tonal is the first connected fitness brand focused on strength training and represents an opportunity to invest behind an innovative concept with tremendous growth potential. We look forward to leveraging our deep knowledge of consumer behavior and significant experience in the connected fitness space to bring Tonal’s dynamic technology and content platform to more homes across the country.”

Tonal shares a market with Peloton, and Orady says a significant amount of Tonal owners also own Peloton equipment. Yet, feature-by-feature, Peloton and Tonal are different. While they’re both in-home devices that offer on-demand instructors, Peloton targets cardiovascular exercises while Tonal is a strength-training machine. Orady states his customers find the two companies offer complementary experiences.

“The common thread with our members is that they understand the value of investing in their fitness and overall health,” said Aly Orady, “All of our members are looking to take their fitness to the next level with strength training. Tonal offers the ability to strength train at home by providing a comprehensive, challenging full body workout without having to sacrifice quality for convenience.”

This is an enormous market he says the company can rely on for years to come. The majority of Tonal’s customers are between 30 and 55 years old and live in, or adjacent to, the top 10 major metro U.S. markets. There’s an even split, he says, between male and female members.

Tonal is similar to Mirror, another at-home, wall-mounted exercise device that costs $1,495. While Tonal focuses on strength training through resistance, Mirror offers yoga, boxing, Pilates and other exercises and activities with on-demand instruction and real-time stats. Mirror also launched in 2018 and the company has raised $40 million.

Going forward, Tonal expects to expand its software to provide new personalization features to its members. The hope is to build experiences that motivate users while serving up real-time feedback. This includes building new workout categories and additional fitness experiences, even when users travel and don’t have access to their Tonal machine.

The company sees it expanding its retail and marketing presence. Right now, just eight months after the product’s debut, customers have very limited access to try the Tonal machine. It’s only on display at Tonal’s flagship San Francisco store and is coming to a pop-up store in Newport Beach, Calif.

Tonal is hiring and looking to hire in hardware, software, design, video production and marketing.

At-home exercise equipment is a massive market, and Tonal offers a unique set of features and advantages that should allow it to stand apart from competitors. This isn’t just another treadmill. Tonal is a strength-training super machine the size of a thick HDTV. Challenges abound, but the company seemingly has a solid plan to utilize its latest round of financing that should allow it to reach more customers and show them why the Tonal machine is worth the cost.

(source: techcrunch.com)

Scientists Say Octopus Farms Would Be ‘Unethical’ and Awful for the Planet

I still remember the first time I tasted octopus. After an exhausting day reporting the troubles in Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria, Gizmodo video producer Raúl Marrero and I headed to a seaside restaurant where I tried ensalada de pulpo as an appetiser. It was love at first bite.

What I didn’t know, then, was that scientists have been exploring the intricacies of octopuses’ brains and learning just how intelligent they are. Now, researchers are making me think twice—again!—about eating octopus as they make the case against octopus farms in a new essay published in the latest edition of Issues in Science and Technology. This time, they’re highlighting the potential environmental impact of octopus farms as countries like Spain and Japan start looking into the idea—and even preparing to open an octopus farm by next year.

People do like their octopus, and the market is trying to figure out how to meet growing demand as overfishing hits wild octopus populations. So why not farm them, right? After all, the animals grow fast and live just a few years. The authors of the new essay, however, disagree.

Finding seafood that doesn’t harm the planet is, well, complicated. For starters, we don’t always know where our food comes from. And while something may be “sustainably” raised—say by a company that practices aquaculture responsibly—it could still be travelling hundreds of miles on a plane to reach your plate. Then there’s the fact that some sea creatures eat other sea creatures, and if we’re raising these animals to eat ourselves, that could pack more pressure on the rest of the ecosystem.

 

Don’t judge me, but doesn’t this dish of octopus tostada look tasty? Hence my dilemma. 

Octopus farms would face that last issue, in particular. The animals require three times their body weight in food, according to the essay published by researchers from New York University, the University of Sydney, and the University of Sussex. They argue that feeding octopus comes at the cost of human nutrition and “will act counter to the goal of improving global food security,” by ramping up pressure on wild-caught fish and shellfish.

Environmental arguments aside, the essay authors want us to consider whether this is something people should be doing. There’s some evidence to suggest octopuses experience a form of consciousness, although whether any non-human animal can experience true consciousness is debatable. Regardless, we know octopuses are smart. Individuals can decide if that warrants a total ban on eating them, but the authors of this essay make a good point about whether they should be farmed given that reality.

Octopuses may become sick or more aggressive when they’re contained. They even eat other octopuses if they’re kept together. The authors suggest larger enclosures “with significant enrichment” to help mitigate some of this, but even that may not be ideal—not for the planet and not for octopus well-being, either.

iOS 13 could feature dark mode and interface updates

According to a report from 9to5mac’s Guilherme Rambo, the next major version of iOS for the iPhone and iPad will present many new features, such as universal dark mode, new gestures, visual changes for the volume popup and more.

Dark mode should work more or less like dark mode on macOS Mojave. You’ll be able to turn on a system-wide option in Settings. Apps that support it will automatically switch to dark mode the next time you launch them. Let’s hope that third-party developers will support that feature. Otherwise, it would be a bit useless if Facebook, Instagram, Gmail or Amazon still feature blindingly white backgrounds.

The other big change is that you’ll be able to open multiple windows of the same app on the iPad. You can already open two Safari tabs side by side, but it sounds like Apple  plans to expand that feature beyond Safari with a card metaphor. Each window will be represented as a card that you can move, stack or dismiss.

Other iOS 13 features sound like minor improvements that should make iOS less frustrating. And it starts with new gestures. Instead of shaking your device to undo an action, users will be able to swipe with three fingers on the virtual keyboard to undo and redo a text insertion.

Similarly, Apple could be working on a new way to select multiple items in a table view or grid view. You could just drag a rectangle around multiple items to select them. Once again, Apple is reusing a classic macOS feature on iOS.

Some apps will receive updates, such as Mail and Reminders. The default email client will sort your emails in multiple categories (marketing, travel, etc.) just like in Gmail.

Finally, that annoying volume popup could be on the way out. Apple could replace that popup with a more subtle volume indicator.

Overall, the most exciting change is probably the ability to launch multiple windows of the same app. It’ll be interesting to see how Apple plans to implement that feature and what you’ll be able to do with that. Moving away from the traditional “one app = one document” metaphor could open up a lot of different workflows.

Asda’s Selling £2 Doughnut Burgers

You know what our burgers have been missing up to now? A whacking great hole in the middle.

That’s what Asda reckons, anyway, having just launched ‘doughnut burgers’ (they’re spelling them ‘donut’ but we disapprove) at £1.97 for two.

While the circular burgers with central hole would be ideal for bagel burgers or a burger with two doughnuts instead of a bread bun, they’re not actually something that needed to exist. It’s not very hard to dig out the middle of your burger if you so wish.

The Metro reports that the hole is there to fill with a foodstuff of your choice, like a fried egg, or Asda’s suggestion – pulled pork. Again, though, you could just put those things inside the burger bun and achieve the same effect. It makes no sense to us.

Mind you, it worked for Polos.

The hole-y burgers (sadly too late for Easter) are now available at all Asda stores and online, where they’ve already received one positive review:

“Burger & Beer the perfect match Fits perfectly over neck of beer bottle so no plate needed. Can you bringing out a doughnut bun to put it in.”

Over the neck of your beer bottle, you say? OK, consider our beef cancelled. We’re in.

Myneral.me wins the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech

It’s been a long night at VivaTech. The building hosted a very special competition — the TechCrunch Hackathon in Paris.

Hundreds of engineers and designers got together to come up with something cool, something neat, something awesome. The only condition was that they only had 36 hours to work on their projects. Some of them were participating in our event for the first time, while others were regulars. Some of them slept on the floor in a corner, while others drank too much Red Bull.

We could all feel the excitement in the air when the 64 teams took the stage to present a one-minute demo to impress fellow coders and our judges. But only one team could take home the grand prize and €5,000. So, without further ado, meet the TechCrunch Hackathon winner.

Winner: Myneral.me

Current mining operations lack transparency and clarity in the way they are monitored. In order to understand how a material went from initial discovery in the mine to end product, a new tool is necessary to monitor operations. Myneral.me offers an all-encompassing platform for the metal and mining sector that showcases CSR to both industry partners and end users. Find out more on Myneral.me.

Runner-Up #1: Vyta

Vyta takes patient information and helps doctors understand which patient needs to be treated first. A simple tool like this could make things smoother for everyone at the emergency room and improve treatments.

Runner-Up #2: Scrub

SCRUB = SCRUM + BUGS. Easily track your errors across applications and fix them using our algorithmic suggestions and code samples. Our open-source bug tracker automagically collects all errors for you. Find out more on GitHub.

Runner-Up #3: Chiche

Finding the future upcoming brand depends on the set of data you are using to detect it. First, they do a simple quantification of the most famous brands on social medias to identify three newcomers. Second, they use Galerie Lafayette’s website as a personal shopping tool to propose customers the most adequate product within the three newcomers.

Judges

Dr. Aurélie Jean has been working for more than 10 years as a research scientist and an entrepreneur in computational sciences, applied to engineering, medicine, education, economy, finance and journalism. In the past, Aurélie worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Bloomberg. Today, Aurélie works and lives between USA and France to run In Silico Veritas, a consulting agency in analytics and computer simulations. Aurélie is an advisor at the Boston Consulting Group and an external collaborator for The Ministry of Education of France. Aurélie is also a science editorial contributor for Le Point, teaches algorithms in universities and conducts research.

Julien Meraud has a solid track record in e-commerce after serving international companies for several years, including eBay, PriceMinister and Rakuten. Before joining Doctolib, Julien was CMO of Rakuten Spain, where he improved brand online acquisition, retention, promotions and campaigns. Julien joined Doctolib at the very beginning (2014), becoming the company’s first CMO and quickly holding CPO functions additionally. At Doctolib, Julien also leads Strategy teams that are responsible for identifying and sizing Doctolib’s potential new markets. Julien has a Master’s degree in Marketing, Statistics and Economics from ENSAI and a specialized Master in Marketing Management from ESSEC Business School.

Laurent Perrin is the co-founder and CTO of Front, which is reinventing email for teams. Front serves more than 5,000 companies and has raised $79 million in venture funding from investors such as Sequoia Capital, DFJ and Uncork Capital. Prior to Front, Laurent was a senior engineer at various startups and helped design scalable real-time systems. He holds a Master’s in Computer Science from École Polytechnique and Télécom ParisTech.

Neesha Tambe is the head of Startup Battlefield, TechCrunch’s global startup launch competition. In this role she sources, recruits and vets thousands of early-stage startups per year while training and coaching top-tier startups to launch in the infamous Startup Battlefield competition. Additionally, she pioneered the concept and launched CrunchMatch, the networking program at TechCrunch events that has facilitated thousands of connections between founders, investors and the startup community at-large. Prior to her work with TechCrunch, Neesha ran the Sustainable Brands’ Innovation Open — a startup competition for shared value and sustainability-focused startups with judges from Fortune 50 companies.Renaud Visage is the technical co-founder of San Francisco-based Eventbrite (NYSE: EB), the globally leading event technology platform that went public in September 2018. Renaud is also an angel investor, guiding founders that are solving challenging technical problems in realizing their global ambitions, and he works closely with seed VC firm Point Nine Capital as a board partner, representing the fund on the board of several of their portfolio companies. Renaud also serves on the board of ShareIT, the Paris-based tech for good acceleration program launched in collaboration with Ashoka, and is an advisor to the French impact investing fund, Ring for Good. In 2014, Renaud was included in Wired UK’s Top 100 digital influencers in Europe.

In addition to our judges, here’s the hackmaster who was the MC for the event:

Romain Dillet is a senior writer at TechCrunch. Originally from France, Romain attended EMLYON Business School, a leading French business school specialized in entrepreneurship. He covers many things, from mobile apps with great design to privacy, security, fintech, Apple, AI and complex tech achievements. He also speaks at major tech conferences. He likes pop culture more than anything in the world. He now lives in Paris when he’s not on the road. He used to live in New York and loved it.

 

 

Watching This Artist Paint on Water Is Like a Relaxing Massage for My Brain

Popular in Turkey and parts of Asia, ebru is a unique form of painting that swaps a canvas for a liquid-filled pan that’s sprinkled and splattered with vibrant coloured pigments. Using specialised tools, unique patterns can be created by carefully mixing the floating pigments through a process that might be even more satisfying than the resulting artwork.

Once a pattern has been perfected, the pigments are transferred to a blank canvas by simply dunking it face down into the mixture, producing a permanent piece that more often than not looks like an expensive marble. But I’m less interested in the final product, which probably takes a lot more skill and patience than I have to perfect. I just want to spend the rest of my days as stress-free as possible, dribbling paints and smearing colours. It’s like finger painting for adults.