Thoughts on Self Driving cars

Auto pilot or Self driving car is now becoming a hype these days. It should be, because few companies have already proved that this feature in a car in no more just a dream. That being said, implementing this on a regular basis is yet to achieve and when we say achievement, we should also consider how practical it is.

Self-Driving car

Consider Elon Musk's motor company "Tesla" and its extraordinary venture in developing eco friendly automobile. They started manufacturing with costly electric cars, power storage, electric vehicle powertrain components, battery products etc. and got attention with their first fully electric car Tesla Road star, then came the Model X, consequently Model S and Model 3. While offering automobiles using power was their first concern, gradually they introduced "Auto pilot" option in their current cars.

Tesla Model S

Heres the fun part, when we hear the word auto pilot/ self driving cars, first thing that can pop up in our head is cars those drive itself, meaning no involvement of our hands/legs whatsoever. However, Tesla takes a more realistic approach in bringing autopilot system in driving experience.

When Autopilot is turned on in a Tesla, the car can drive itself within a lane; Although to move to another lane, driver need to give a single tap on the turn signal and it will shift to next lane. Moreover, driver also needs to put one hand on the steer to confirm the lane shifting after tapping the turn signal.
From this, it is clear that Tesla does not want you to go full idle while driving and i think its a good thinking. Because in my sense, self driving should be built to give a short period of relaxation instead of long to the driver so that accidents due to falling asleep or lack concentration can be avoided. So Human interaction is obvious part of our life and if we maintain so, we can avoid being robots, right?

Just like above, auto steering, auto parking are many examples of Tesla's creative engineering in their latest models. As safety is the primary concern, so Elon musk wants us to interact manually time to time to avoid any sort of collision.

Other than Tesla, there is another company who is making headlines for last couple of days for its inauguration of self driving cars. Its Uber. Uber technologies is smart transportation system and unlike Tesla, they only embed their technology for turning a normal car to a self driven one.

Uber Ford Fusion

The mechanism here, however, is completely different. Uber has no intention of half auto piloting their cars as Tesla did, rather they have put Lidar on top of the car and some array of sensors and cameras on the side of the car to make it happen. While auto lane shifting is still to take place in Uber car, they certainly want to continue in developing the features for future smooth operation. The intention of Uber, in my opinion, is to establish this self driving project into a real one so that they can commercially dispatch more cars without drivers which definitely be beneficial to them in terms of cost and time reduction. Heres a brief look at Uber self driving car experience below:

A fully functional auto pilot car is therefore not introduced to us yet. Needless to say, what we have got so far from these two companies (not to mention Google cars) is just the beginning of a new era for automobile industry and surely the technology of collaborating electric car with autopilot will draw a lot of attention to other automobile manufacturers to get into this business, at least thats what i am hoping for. 

SGNL: A NEW GENERATION OF COMMUNICATION

Communication is an obvious part of our life and with the invention of smart phones and its applications, it is becoming more convenient day by day. Surely these new innovations will never stop; Sgnl is yet another example of that.

What is Sgnl, you might ask? Its quite simple, its a smart strap that will let you make phone calls with your fingertips. 

Sounds amazing? lets dive into it then

Sgnl is a project, initiated by CEO, Hyunchul Choi who once noticed an embarassing situation of a colleague speaking using his smartwatch; He noticed that his colleague had to talk so loudly that other people can overhear what he was saying. Thats when Choi felt the idea of creating such tech that could help avoid these kind of circumstances. 

Sgnl has its strap which needs to be attached with users smart watch dial(need not to be a smartwatch only) and you are good to go. When a call appears, users need to press a button in the strap and place fingertip to ear to hear the words, meaning that you dont even have to take your phone out of your jeans.

These all sound facsinating; but how does this actually work? Well there's obviously a science behind it. First Sgnl receives voice signal via bluetooth from your phone. It then creates a vibration through BCU, short of BODY CONDUCTION UNIT and this BCU consequently transmits the vibration through hand to your fingertip. 

Here we must consider that if vibration is acutally stated safe or not from medical point of view. There are many scientific evidences that low level, mechanical signals, delivered with vibrations can be beneficial to health; however that being said, not all vibrations are healthy, in this regard we have to consider the intensity of vibrations too.

Moving forward, the biggest advantage Sgnl has that even you are using your finger, you dont have to worry about background noise as its blocking the noise and keeping the volume loud enough to hear at the same time. Here is a real life demo of people using Sgnl and their reactions:

Moreover, when using Sgnl, users will only hear the voice from other end without being overheard by surrounded people.

Heres another demonstration showing the science of how Sgnl works:

Now i am not going to be all chatty about every little magic that Sgnl pulls; you have to find it out yourself from link below where you can find this Kickstarter project and be able to contribute to make it successful and become real in life.

      Sgnl-Make phone calls with fingertips kickstarter

This project really caught my attention due to its futuristic approach of communication. If Apple can restructure the wireless communication by ditching headphone jack and building up chip that uses true wireless activity then in my point of view, this innovation is worthy enough to take place in the market, in real life and therefore should be backed by people. 

Because innovations like these cumulatively bring revolution.

Trestle Watch: A modern watch with war incarnation

Here we are talking about an American watch company founded by a watch connoisseur and history enthusiast focusing on giving modern look while keeping war memory embedded within the watch itself. The name is "Trestle watch co" and it was born in orange county in California.

When most of the watch brands are traditionally branding their watches with their own style, this company took a different step. The design language is created with the combination of vintage and bauhaus homages, according to trestle. Customers will find a great resemblance of world war 2 with the watches.

Although history and design both are their strongest points, they haven't forget about the quality parts either. So they collaborate superior quality materials like swiss movement while other watch brands in the same price range use Chinese or Japanese quartz movements.

Moreover, to make the watch more rugged, they use sapphire crystal glass on top while you will find mineral glass on the other brands. Those of you who don't know about the difference between these two type of glass, check below link for better understanding

Mineral or sapphire crystal?

Even further Trestle uses surgical grade stainless steel and genuine leather straps that are joined with butterfly clasp both of which could not be found in other similar valued watch brands.

Now that we know of the satisfactory quality of Trestle, its time to know about their watch brands. They have two classic WW2 inspired watches both of which are named after two great persons.
One is called McGuire and other one is Roosevelt.

Named after Thomas McGuire, a top scoring combat pilot during WW2, this watch is a unisex product and is inspired by watches worn by American fighter pilots.

Trestle McGuire

The Roosevelt is name after WW2 president Franklin D. Roosevelt and is a combination of bauhaus and modern watches. Trestle brands this watch to match the personality of those who represents leadership and courageous attributes like president Roosevelt.

Trestle Roosevelt

Currently they are on Kickstarter to look for people like us who can back their project. 

More information regarding their product design, packaging and shipping can be found below-

Trestle watch co-modern watches with a vintage edge

Kickstarter Project "Life Inside"

To talk about the project "life inside" first, we need to know where this project comes from.

 Life inside is yet another bold project from a non profit online news organisation called "The Marshall project", focusing on feature stories from anyone's experience related with criminal justice system. Instead of describing inside stories in a regular manner, here, someone will give a first-person narrative from his/her personal point of view.

From lawyer to prisoner, victim to convicted and whoever from inside or outside of the system can share their personal experience/feelings towards the justice system. Most of their authors are men and women incarcerated in USA. The project team always mention the crime and punishment of their authors in each article in life inside. Typically, they accept 400 to 1400 words with non-fiction genre to publish feature stories.

Here are some recent life inside articles that are worth reading-

The horrible things i saw driving a van packed with prisoners

My father killed two people

What It’s Like to Almost Get Executed

What It’s Like to Be Gay in Prison

Its worth mentioning here that to get this project running and live all the time, it takes approximately $1400 to create each life inside column. Therefore Life inside project now can be backed at "Kickstarter" through any amount of pledging. They have set a goal of $20,000 to achieve this year in order to bear the compensation and in just eight days, they achieved it.  Now its quite apparent that American people are eager to hear the voice of first hand inside prison experience.

Project short link can be found below-

The Marshall Project Repot on Life Inside

Say Hello to Cute Personal Robot Courier From Starship Technologies

Just like movies, Starship technologies are bringing future more closer to us and six-footed delivery robot is quite the example of that. The main intention is to deliver goods locally without any human help.

The self driving robot is capable of holding up to two shopping package in its central trunk and with six wheel, it can deliver goods up to two or three mile radius from beginning point. Moreover, it has cameras and loudspeakers for anti theft purpose.

Starship delivery system is based on as the same as you find it in self driving cars. It will have sensors to identify objects and humans to avoid collisions. Even further, it is well behaved too, when scanned people ahead in road it will stand aside to make room for the person to pass. At the time of receiving goods, customers will be texted with PIN code with which they will be able to open up the trunk.

The idea of starship is not only just time effective delivery, also to become cost effective courier service for local businesses. Founded by Skype co-founder Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis and based in London, Starship creaters hope to pull down the delivery cost to almost zero. According to them in central London, it takes about 12 pounds to make a delivery on demand, whereas with this bot, they can drop the cost to 1 pound.

More interestingly recently "JustEast" and "Pronto" have announced their affiliation with starship for takeaway service. However, in these initial trials, humans will control the robot to avoid any unexpected circumstances and also it will enable starship to build its own map along the way with its buit-in intelligence. 

With their bold claim, this service will roll out initially in Europe's top cities like London, Bern, Düsseldorf and later in north america. 

Delivery robots are not new to us really if you consider Googles self driving delivery trucks (yet to come, only patented so far) and amazons drone. So starship has lot to prove its credibility in the market and to sustain with its future competitors. That being said, Starship could really be a revolution for small businesses as it addresses one thing perfectly which is and I quote:

"Say hello to your personal courier. I’m here to deliver anything you need. Just tell me what, when and where and I’ll do the rest. Because I follow your schedule, you’ll have more time for the things that matter in your life"

Apple allegedly will be starting with 32GB iPhone this year

According to new report from wall street journal, Apple is planning to say goodbye to 16GB variant from iPhone; instead they will start at 32GB storage which would be a huge relief for consumers having serious storage problem even after using cloud system.

In recent years, 16GB is not enough for customers due to vast number and size of apps, games, pictures, not to mention 4K videos. Because of continuous pop us of limited storage notification, customer satisfaction and IOS experience was decreasing. Since then customers were complaining and requesting Apple to ditch 16GB and offer 32GB as basic option. 

Since the introduction of iPhone 4, Apple is offering phones with 16GB model. Apple's SVP, Phill Schiller seemed to care less about the issue on a live podcast last year rather he directed customers with 16GB to use cloud storage to backup. Apple also came up with bunch of new features including shrinking the size of IOS updates and cutting down the size of apps in 2015 WWDC to make the limited storage users experience more positive.

Nevertheless their consistent effort in forcing customers to use cloud, considering the huge urge of 32GB as basic model, Apple has probably shifted from their old views and therefore we are hoping that with new iPhone we will get 32GB as a first option. 

As usual Apple will release their new iPhone in September this year.

Top Gear Host "Chris Evans" Quits from presenter

Just a few days earlier in my latest article, i was talking about how re designed Top Gear was losing the game in motor show business. Today we have got confirmation from Chris Evans himself stating that he is stepping down from the hot seat of hosting Top Gear.

In twitter two hours ago of the time of this article he twitted his official resignation from Top Gear.

On the same day however, Chris is also being accused of sexual assault, a non recent allegation made to police on May 23. In brief, the allegation was made by a women to a man regarding an incident placed in 1990s in Tower Hamlet.

According to Metropolitan police, until now there has been no arrest and no one has been interviewed for the accusation.

Since the declaration from Chris, neither Top Gear nor ex Top Gear hosts made any comment on the hot news.