SHAFAQNA

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Jason Koger is happy to be alive.

In 2008, the young husband and father was riding his four-wheeler on his grandfather's farm when he came in contact with a downed power line.

His body was jolted with 7,200 volts of electricity.

"I remember waking up from an induced coma a few days later and being told that they had to amputate my both hands in order to save my life," said Koger, now 34. "My mom and dad kept telling me that I would get through this."

And he has. Since his accident, Koger has had a variety of prosthetic hands to help him function with his "new normal" in everyday life.

"It's like I'm carrying a tool box, but only have one tool," said Koger. "You can't use a wrench for everything."

In recent years, the prosthetic devices field has seen remarkable developments.

And Koger is the first double amputee in the world to receive one of the most innovative products on the market: bionic hands that are, in part, controlled by an iPhone app.

The i-Limb Ultra Revolution is the latest innovation from UK-based prosthetic developers Touch Bionics.

FDA approves first bionic eye

The hand offers "unparalleled dexterity and control, enabling wearers to more easily perform activities of daily living and thus increase their quality of life," said Ian Stevens, CEO of Touch Bionics.

The company claims it offers the closest thing on the market to a real human hand.

Unlike most conventional prosthetics, this hand boasts five individually-powered fingers -- including a fully rotatable thumb.

"This is something we've never seen available for patients before," said John Miguelez, senior clinical director at Advanced Arm Dynamics, who is not affiliated with Touch Bionics.

The prosthesis also has an auto-grasp feature, which prevents accidental slippage when, say, holding a soda can or picking up an apple.

But the most unique part of the prosthetic is the app control. On an iPod Touch or an iPhone 5, users can select 24 different types of grip patterns that will allow more functionality.

"If you are holding a computer mouse (and) you want to right click, that is a complicated thing with a prosthetic. But this integrated app technology allows a person to do this with ease," said Miguelez.

These are basic movements many of us take for granted: a tri-pod grip to pick up a pen, or hand-shake grip for business meetings, said Miguelez, who has fitted hundreds of amputees with prosthetic devices.

Amputee scales 103 floors with mind-controlled 'bionic leg'

"For the first time in five years I can hold my daughter's hand," said Koger. "I can't tell you what a gift that feels like."

Users can also customize grip patterns through the integrated app technology.

"Let's say you want to go out and play pool with your friends. You can customize a grasp pattern that allows you to hold the pool stick -- or if you like to do handy work, you may customize one to hold an electric drill," said Miguelez.

The hands are not waterproof, which is one reason Koger says he'll still keep his other prosthetics, like his metal claw, available.

"Nothing is perfect, but I feel like I can be a more active participant in everyday life with these hands," said Koger, who now spends his time reaching out to new amputees about keeping a positive outlook on their situation.

"I can do pretty much everything I could before; it just might take me a little longer."-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source: CNN

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Could this be the deadliest smartphone app ever?

A German security consultant, who's also a commercial pilot, has demonstrated tools he says could be used to hijack an airplane remotely, using just an Android phone.

Speaking at the Hack in the Box security summit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Hugo Teso said Wednesday that he spent three years developing SIMON, a framework of malicious code that could be used to attack and exploit airline security software, and an Android app to run it that he calls PlaneSploit.

Using a flight simulator, Teso showed off the ability to change the speed, altitude and direction of a virtual airplane by sending radio signals to its flight-management system. Current security systems don't have strong enough authentication methods to make sure the commands are coming from a legitimate source, he said.

"You can use this system to modify approximately everything related to the navigation of the plane," Teso told Forbes after his presentation. "That includes a lot of nasty things."

He told the crowd that the tools also could be used to do things like change what's on a pilot's display screen or turn off the lights in the cockpit. With the Android app he created, he said he could remotely control a plane by simply tapping pre-loaded commands like "Please Go Here" and the ominous "Visit Ground."

Teso says he developed SIMON in a way that makes it work only in virtual environments, not on actual aircraft.

"His testing laboratory consists of a series of software and hardware products, but the connection and communication methods, as well as ways of exploitation, are absolutely the same as they would be in an actual real-world scenario," analysts at Help Net Security wrote in a blog post.

Teso told the crowd that he used flight-management hardware that he bought on eBay and publicly available flight-simulator software that contains at least some of the same computer coding as real flight software.

Analyst Graham Cluley of Sophos Security said it's unclear how devastating Teso's find would be if unleashed on an actual airplane.

"No one else has had an opportunity to test this researcher's claims as he has, thankfully, kept secret details of the vulnerabilities he was able to exploit," Cluley said. "We are also told that he has informed the relevant bodies, so steps can be taken to patch any security holes before someone with more malicious intent has an opportunity to exploit them."

Teso said at the summit that he's reached out to the companies that make the systems he exploited and that they were receptive to addressing his concerns. He also said he's contacted aviation safety officials in the United States and Europe.

"From the sound of things, this researcher has got himself a lot of media attention, but still believes in responsible disclosure, rather than potentially putting aircraft and passengers at risk," Cluley said.

Teso isn't the first so-called "white hat" hacker to expose what appear to be holes in air-traffic security.

Last year, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, computer scientist Andrei Costin discussed weaknesses he said he found in a new U.S. air-traffic security system set to roll out next year. The flaws he found weren't instantly catastrophic, he said, but could be used to track private airplanes, intercept messages and jam communications between planes and air-traffic control.-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source: CNN

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Facebook’s new super-app wants to live off Google. The social network’s Home software, unveiled on Thursday, sits on top of the Android smartphone operating system. That encourages people to use Facebook over rival services. Google built Android, but Mark Zuckerberg’s company plainly Android came to exist partly because Google didn’t want one company, Apple, controlling the software running all the world’s smartphones and tablets. By developing its own operating system, Google could ensure that services such as Gmail, YouTube and its search engine would run smoothly on phones and tablets – and that it would collect advertising dollars.

The huge success of Android – now powering over half of all U.S. smartphones, according to Comscore – owes much to its being freely available to any hardware maker, in stark contrast to Apple’s closed approach. Now, though, just as Google marshalled the Internet through its service and made money out of doing so, Facebook’s new software largely supplants the Android interface for users.

In Home, pictures and messages from friends will appear on a device’s lock and home screen, users can text each other directly, and notifications will pop up. Other services like video and search will surely appear soon. In short, people will have more reasons and require fewer screen-taps to use Facebook’s tools than Google’s Gmail, YouTube and the like. That in turn will probably mean more advertisements served by Facebook and fewer by Google, especially considering the 680 million active monthly users that Mr. Zuckerberg’s company claims.

Google’s wariness over Facebook has increasingly morphed into active rivalry, as evidenced by the search giant’s attempts to build its own social network, Google+. Facebook in turn moved into core Google territory, launching a search service earlier this year. The nature of the Home software potentially aggravates these tensions.

Google faces limits, however, in how it can react. Restricting access to Home might annoy users and bring antitrust regulators calling. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone if future tweaks to Android make Google’s services slightly more prominent, smooth and speedy than Facebook’s. If the social network wants to take a bite out of Google, the feeling assuredly is mutual.likes the idea of grabbing a piece of it.-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source: The Globe and Mail

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Just this week Rosetta Stone acquired Seattle-based online language-learning community Livemocha for $8.5 million in cash. At exit Livemocha had a 16 million member online language-learning community. It had also raised $19 million over six years. But today Busuu, a competing language-learning community based out of London, announces that it has reached 30 million users and its launched a dedicated iPad app for kids to learn Spanish.

It now reaches into 200 countries, and could lay justifiable claim to being the largest language learning community in the world. They also say they are growing at 40,000 new users a day with growth mainly coming from emerging markets like Brazil, Russia and Turkey, where clearly learning a language can help you get on.

In October last year Busuu raised a Series A investment round of €3.5 million from PROfounders Capital in London and private investors. So as you can see, this is potentially going to be a much bigger exit than Livemocha if or when it happens.

Cofounder and CEO Bernhard Niesner told me: “Having raised 19m usd and selling for 8m usd [Livemocha] is obviously not a great exit. But this goes back to what you actually do with the money you have raised and it seems that they burned through their cash focusing on the wrong areas. We have raised only 4.2m EUR in total and grew to 30m users, simply because we had been very careful in looking at the user metrics and trying to improve our product day after day. We still have a long way to go and online education in general is at a very early stage, but it´s as simple as in any other industry: if people like your product because it works, they will come back, recommend it to their friends and actually pay for it.”

Developed after the startup created its ‘Kids learn English with busuu’ app (which has been downloaded over 200,000 times) the new app is aimed at kids aged 4-7 years and teaches children 150 words of Spanish through 30 learning units.

A free basic version, containing three learning units, is available for download from the iTunes app store. Parents can then choose to upgrade to the full app for £6.99 / €8.99 or buy learning units in bundles of three for £1.49 / €1.79.-www.shafaqna.com/English

Source: Techrunch

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) –According to analysts at ABI Research, Android will surpass iOS in smartphone app downloads during this year. The report forecasts that 58% of smartphone app downloads this year will be Android apps, while iOS will get only 33% share. However, if you also include tablet app downloads in the forecast, Apple will stay on top.

The firm suggests that out of 56 billion smartphone apps that are expected to be downloaded in 2013, majority will be either iOS or Android-based. ABI analysts are also claiming that Android now has a bigger piece of the overall smartphone market worldwide, and they’re expecting that this trend will continue this year. However, Apple continues to be the revenue leader when it comes to how developers are monetizing their applications both as paid apps as well as through in-app purchases.

ABI also says today that iOS has the lead in tablet app downloads – another reason why the Android-first predication seems a little shaky. Of the around 14 billion tablet apps it’s expecting in 2013, 75 percent will be for the iPad, with Android (excluding the Kindle Fire) accounting for just 17 percent. Amazon will see around 4 percent market share here, and Windows tablets will barely eek out 2 percent, the firm claims.

The report also highlights that new developers are still gravitating towards the Apple App Store as compared to Google Play when it comes to their revenue generation efforts.-www.shfaqna.com/English

Source: Iphoneincanada

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Social networking apps are beginning to pay off quite nicely after monthly revenues for the category  on the App Store jumped 87% year-over-year in January, according to a new study from App Annie.

The app store analytics service found that the social networking apps category is now the third highest in terms of monthly revenue, behind only games and productivity. It’s an impressive showing, given that it was placed 12th last January.

In terms of downloads, social networking was sixth overall among categories on the App Store in January. According to App Annie, monthly downloads were up 30% year-over-year and now account for 5% of total downloads.

“This kind of growth is perhaps not as stellar as that of other categories, but speaks to a category that has reached a certain level of maturity,” the company said in its report.

Japan in particular showed a huge increase in social networking revenue on Apple’s App Store, largely due to the success of messaging app Line, which has been climbing the country’s top-grossing charts since last April.

Fueled by services like Tencent’s WeChat and Sina Weibo, China has risen to become a top downloader of social networking apps on the App Store. A new couple’s app and a photo/audio sharing service took the top spots in terms of monthly downloads in China in January.

Globally, the list of top social networking apps with respect to downloads was predictably dominated by Facebook, Apple’s Find My Friends, Twitter and Skype, though WeChat made an impressive sixth-place showing.

Line was the top social networking app for revenue, displacing WhatsApp. Dating apps like Zoosk, Badoo, Grindr Xtra and eHarmony also proved capable at monetization.

Over on Google Play, social networking apps were also among the top downloaded non-game titles. Facebook, WhatApp, Skype, Instagram, Twitter, Line and Viber cracked the top 10. Line was the top grossing non-game app on Google Play in January, while Korea’s KakaoTalk took third place.

Messaging apps out of Asia have been leading the charge in terms of monetization, and western services are taking notice. Path recently took a page out of Asia’s stickerbook with the addition of premium sticker shop in the 3.0 release of its service.

Many of these regional services are looking to go truly global in the long term, so we can expect to see a coming showdown between messaging apps as they compete for your time and money. App Annie notes that social networking app revenue growth is nowhere near its ceiling, and after looking at the numbers, we’re inclined to agree.-www.shfaqna.com/English

Source: The Next Web

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – Social networking apps are beginning to pay off quite nicely after monthly revenues for the category  on the App Store jumped 87% year-over-year in January, according to a new study from App Annie.

The app store analytics service found that the social networking apps category is now the third highest in terms of monthly revenue, behind only games and productivity. It’s an impressive showing, given that it was placed 12th last January.

In terms of downloads, social networking was sixth overall among categories on the App Store in January. According to App Annie, monthly downloads were up 30% year-over-year and now account for 5% of total downloads.

“This kind of growth is perhaps not as stellar as that of other categories, but speaks to a category that has reached a certain level of maturity,” the company said in its report.

Japan in particular showed a huge increase in social networking revenue on Apple’s App Store, largely due to the success of messaging app Line, which has been climbing the country’s top-grossing charts since last April.

Fueled by services like Tencent’s WeChat and Sina Weibo, China has risen to become a top downloader of social networking apps on the App Store. A new couple’s app and a photo/audio sharing service took the top spots in terms of monthly downloads in China in January.

Globally, the list of top social networking apps with respect to downloads was predictably dominated by Facebook, Apple’s Find My Friends, Twitter and Skype, though WeChat made an impressive sixth-place showing.

Line was the top social networking app for revenue, displacing WhatsApp. Dating apps like Zoosk, Badoo, Grindr Xtra and eHarmony also proved capable at monetization.

Over on Google Play, social networking apps were also among the top downloaded non-game titles. Facebook, WhatApp, Skype, Instagram, Twitter, Line and Viber cracked the top 10. Line was the top grossing non-game app on Google Play in January, while Korea’s KakaoTalk took third place.

Messaging apps out of Asia have been leading the charge in terms of monetization, and western services are taking notice. Path recently took a page out of Asia’s stickerbook with the addition of premium sticker shop in the 3.0 release of its service.

Many of these regional services are looking to go truly global in the long term, so we can expect to see a coming showdown between messaging apps as they compete for your time and money. App Annie notes that social networking app revenue growth is nowhere near its ceiling, and after looking at the numbers, we’re inclined to agree.-www.shfaqna.com/English

Source: The Next Web

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) – The developers of an application called Vintage Camera say Facebook has unjustly banned users from uploading their photos to the social network.

The app, which works on Apple devices, provides various effects to make pictures look dated.

French studio Presselite, which developed the app, says it has more than eight million users worldwide.

Facebook told the developers the decision had been made following negative feedback from account holders.

After Presselight appealed against the ban, Facebook sent the company an email saying: "We've checked out the circumstances of your app's restriction, and we found that your app received strong negative feedback from users and their friends.

"Unfortunately, we will not be able to restore your app's functionality."

But Presselite co-founder Antoine Morcos said that, according to administration data provided by Facebook itself, there had been about one negative report per 1,000 images shared via the app, which he believed had been due to "inappropriate use".

"We don't understand how Facebook could block the access to millions of users of the Vintage Camera application who want to share their photos on Facebook, only because of a few negative feedback reports," Mr Morcos wrote in a press statement.

"As you all know, Facebook has acquired the Instagram photo-sharing application, and we hope this acquisition is not influencing this kind of access limitation for other photo applications."

After being contacted by the BBC, Facebook said that Presselite had received warnings about the app before it was blocked.

"While we provide an open platform, every application on Platform is required to meet our policies. We take both automated and manual steps to detect violations and ensure compliance," the firm said.

"Pending on the violation, we give developers an opportunity to come into compliance via a warning system. In the case of this application, the application was not in compliance with our platform policies and had received three warnings prior to our systems taking action on the application."

The app has a four-star average rating on the Apple store, although some users have written in reviews it does not always work and others complain it is too similar to Instagram,

In 2010, Presselite accused London-based developer Q Mapps of infringing its copyright, after both firms released an app called Paris Metro for Apple devices.

Presselite asked Apple to remove the Q Mapps app from its store but was found to have had its trademark application rejected by the US Patent and Trademark Office.

At the time, developer Malcolm Barclay described the allegations as "utterly baseless and false".-www.shfaqna.com/English

Source: BBC

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- Apple today announced that it has seen over 40 billion app downloads, half of which were downloaded in 2012 alone, from a total over 500 million customer accounts.

The company says that December 2012 was a record-breaking month, with Apple seeing more than 2 billion downloads during the last month of the year alone. What’s even more impressive about the statistic is that Apple is excluding re-downloads and updates.

Apple’s current App Store count lies at the 775,000 apps mark (with more than 300,000 native iPad apps) and a total of $7 billion paid to developers for their apps. Those apps are available to users in 155 countries around the world.

That’s an average of 80 apps per person, which could be spread across numerous devices.

“It has been an incredible year for the iOS developer community,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “Developers have made over seven billion dollars on the App Store, and we continue to invest in providing them with the best ecosystem so they can create the most innovative apps in the world.”

In comparison, Apple announced in June 2012 (during its WWDC developer event in San Francisco) that it had reached 30 billion downloads, with over 400 million accounts on the App Store and 650,000 apps available to customers.

This means that in a little over six months, the company has added 100 million new customers, 125,000 apps and seen 10 billion additional downloads on the App Store.

The last valuable figure Google gave for its Play Store was 25 billion downloads, encompassing 675,000 apps. Google’s marketplace launched after the App Store, but the search giant does not disclose how much money it has paid to developers.

www.shafaqna.com/English

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- It’s fair to say there’s no shortage of music apps to help you blast out your digital music collection. But Turnplay for iPad is well worth your attention, as it brings the classic interactivity of playing a vinyl record to life on your tablet.

Firstly, it’s worth noting there are other similar apps, such as Vinyl Tap, AirVinyl and My Grooves, but Turnplay is a worthy addition to the slew of turntable simulation apps out there, offering an incredibly authentic and beautiful way to listen to your tunes.

How it works

The app automatically reels in any music you have on your iPad, alongside its artwork. When you first launch the app, you’ll want to hit the little music symbol at the top left to access your library of tunes, then hit the ‘+’ symbol at the bottom right to browse by playlists, artists, albums or songs.

You’ll have no difficulty figuring out how the app works, but the real value in Turnplay is the realism associated with all your interactions – this includes the sounds (scratching, slowing down etc), flickering lights, 33-45 RPM switches, and all the rest.

You can lift the arm, as with a genuine vinyl, and place it on a specific part of the song. You can even manually rewind the track to get that lovely garbled audio you get when scratching a real record.

The app actually shows you the time-stamp where it will start playing from as you hover over a specific part of the track, and there’s even a +/- 8 pitch control which lets you control the speed the record plays at.

The one downside to the app is that you can’t seem to just select an album and let it play in its entirety. You add songs to a roster which you can build up into a playlist-style compendium. Also, it won’t let you play a song that’s less than a minute in duration, or longer than 22 minutes…but most music fits within those limitations.

There’s nothing more to say really…Turnplay’s a really nice app to use, but it will set you back $1.99 or your local currency equivalent.

www.shafaqna.com/English