An e-scooter is an e-scooter is an e-scooter. Right?

It may seem that way, but companies are developing new designs for the two-wheeled machines. As the scooter-share industry continues to grow, it’s becoming clear that the motorized devices are increasingly important. 

Superpedestrian, a transportation robotics company, works behind the scenes on scooter development. This week it introduced its vehicle intelligence software system that the Cambridge, Massachusetts company wants to pair with a new rugged, “industrial-grade” e-scooter. It thinks it can take on fundamental flaws with scooters: overuse, quickly drained batteries, easily hackable, and more.

The new software system comes as several operators admit to issues with the scooters themselves. Lime recently pulled certain scooters off the road after reports of battery fires and cracked baseboards. The bright green scooter company earlier unveiled its next generation machine that includes some smarter features, like a screen that displays no-go zones and parking rules.

Another scooter company, Bird, has been rolling out a steady stream of updated equipment, switching manufacturers and adding proprietary features and designs. Even Skip, one of two San Francisco scooter operators, introduced a new scooter design within weeks of launching with a permit in the city.

Bird then opened its platform to regular users to operate their own scooter-sharing fleets. Austin, Texas-based company Goat is trying a similar thing with its purple scooters.

Superpedestrian wants to put some “brains” into the scooter fleets out there. The same software system is already used for e-bike-sharing with Superpedestrian’s Copenhagen Wheel. Now the MIT lab spinoff company based in Cambridge, Mass., wants scooter companies to use their vehicles and operations platform to take care of these over-used and abused fleets.

CEO Assaf Biderman highlighted the scooters’ economic benefit for fleets in a recent conversation. “It’s built to survive in the streets a lot longer,” he said. He said it also has a longer life expectancy from nine to 18 months.

The sturdier design and wider wheel is designed to handle potholes and curbs. Then there’s the battery. The Superpedestrian scooter is supposed to last three to seven days. Biderman sees this as the biggest benefit for companies spending money collecting or paying independent contractors to charge scooters every night. 

The operations software that tracks what’s up with all the scooters in real time in one handy platform is where Biderman sees the real savings coming in. Hardware problems like battery, sensor, or wiring problems, are flagged and risky vehicles are spotted. Remote software restarts can fix other issues. Complying with city regulations, like no-riding zones or speed limits can also be controlled through the software. 

Instead of relying on users and chargers to flag device issues this system is all cloud-based. The fewer humans involved in fleet management, the cheaper it is. “[The scooters] can live longer because you can maintain them,” he said.

I took a quick ride in downtown San Francisco on the “smart” scooter and most noticeably the big, thick wheels made going over a curb or rutted SF street not as harrowing of an experience. 

Image: sasha lekach / mashable

I haven’t started my own scooter operation yet, but for when I want to build my e-scooter empire a platform like Superpedestrian’s could be pre-fabricated way to maintain, organize, and attempt to actually make money off the scooter craze. 

Also released on Tuesday was the Acton M Scooter Pro, an e-scooter with a 30-mile range on a single charge. Most of the scooters on the street have about 15 miles on a charge. It’ll be available in the start of the new year. The Bay Area-based company echoes a lot of what Superpedestrian says about scooters used for fleets. 

In a release about the new motorized scooter, co-founder Peter Treadway said, “we noticed a gap in the market for a dependable, long-lasting, sustainable scooter.” He added, “It’s built like a vehicle, not a toy, to withstand the everyday wear and tear of commercial use.”

Playtime is over for e-scooters.

Image: Ambar Del Moral / mashable

It turns out that hackers are an equal opportunity bunch. 

During the lead up to the 2016 U.S. election, much ado was made of the hack of the Democratic National Committee and subsequent publishing of stolen emails. 

Now, thanks to a report by Politico, we know that in 2018 the National Republican Congressional Committee suffered a security breach of its own. 

Specifically, email accounts belonging to four senior aides working for the House Republican campaign organization were said to have been “surveilled” for months. Yup, you read that right: The Republicans’ emails were hacked, too. 

It’s unclear at this time who or what organization directed the latest digital excursion. The 2016 hack of the DNC has since been blamed on the Russian intelligence agency known as the GRU. No such accusation has been made in the latest hack, at least publicly. 

We also don’t know what information, exactly, was accessed. 

“We don’t want to get into details about what was taken because it’s an ongoing investigation,” a senior party official told Politico. “Let’s say they had access to four active accounts. I think you can draw from that.”

Notably, many senior Republican officials were reportedly not made aware of the hack at the time of its discovery. According to the Washington Post, the breach was discovered in April of this year. 

“The cybersecurity of the committee’s data is paramount, and upon learning of the intrusion, the NRCC immediately launched an internal investigation and notified the FBI, which is now investigating the matter,” NRCC spokesperson Ian Prior told the Post. “To protect the integrity of that investigation, the NRCC will offer no further comment on the incident.”

Interestingly, the media recently asked Donald Trump about the 2016 DNC hack. His response, essentially, was that it was the DNC’s fault. 

“I heard that they were trying, or people were trying, to hack into the RNC, too — the Republican National Committee — but we had much better defenses,” Trump said on Face The Nation in July. “I’ve been told that by a number of people. We had much better defenses, so they couldn’t. I think the DNC should be ashamed of themselves for allowing themselves to be hacked.” 

Assuming the Washington Post’s reporting is correct, the fact that RNCC’s hack was detected months before Trump gave the above interview only helps to paint an uglier picture of the head of the Republican party. 

But that reality is just as shocking as the fact that our political parties continue to be the target of malicious actors – that is to say, not very shocking at all. 

We regret to inform you that yet another Baby Boomer doesn’t understand websites. 

Last week, someone turned one of Rudy Giuliani’s Twitter typos into a website that declares, “Donald J. Trump is a traitor to our country.” 

But Giuliani doesn’t understand how the internet works, and seems to be convinced that “Twitter allowed someone to invade” his tweet with a “disgusting anti-President message.” 

Giuliani inadvertently added a live “.in” link to a tweet complaining about Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign as the president traveled to the G-20 summit. Then a brilliant soul got hold of G-20.in and turned it into a page calling out the president (.in is the internet domain for Indian sites). Giuliani finally responded to the sneaky move on Tuesday — and he obviously doesn’t understand how the internet works.

“The same thing-period no space-occured later and it didn’t happen,” he ranted in a follow-up tweet. “Don’t tell me they are not committed cardcarrying anti-Trumpers.” 

Twitter users didn’t hold back on mocking him for completely missing the point. 

Just wait until he finds out about the magic of gifs! Pictures that move! 

Although the PlayStation Classic is a faithful miniaturization of the original console, it’s simply an emulator, and the people at YouTube channel Retro Gaming Arts have managed to find a way to access the console’s secret menu.

Using a simple USB keyboard (although the video creators note only Corsair and Logitech keyboards seem to work) and hitting the Escape key when a game boots up, you can access the menu which allows you to manipulate frame rates and what appears to be the ability to enter cheats. 

Of course, there’s the risk of messing up your system, so be wary if you’re going to try this at home. 

Given the PlayStation Classic’s annoyingly limited range of games, it’s a first step into figuring out if the system can be hacked to do more than what’s been prescribed by Sony.

Hollywood chimed in Tuesday on something it actually knows a thing or two about: film and video technology. And you should be glad it did.”

In a short video attached the home video release of Mission Impossible: Fallout, ageless star Tom Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie explain, plainly and directly (from the set of Top Gun: Maverick no less) about the modern scourge of TV technology: video interpolation, better known as the “soap opera effect.”

You know it. The effect happens when you’re watching a movie and for some reason the motion onscreen looks too smoo… ah, I’ll just let Cruise explain:

The unfortunate side effect is that it makes most movies look like they were shot on high-speed video rather than film.

Yes. Video interpolation is often turned on by default in many TVs, so it’s already engaged when you unbox the TV and turn it on for the first time. It’s mainly intended to reduce motion blur in sports and live events, and Americans certainly like to watch those, so there is some justification for the setting.

Still, one might argue that because sports look just fine without it, and the setting has the effect of making most movies and TV shows look like they were shot on your iPhone, it should be kept off – at least as a default. 

And now it looks like that might actually happen. In addition to being an extremely needed and useful PSA, the video includes a hint of hope for the future. Cruise and McQuarrie mention that Hollywood is in talks with TV manufacturers to get them to rethink how video interpolation is accessed, hopefully leading to more viewers seeing films and TV shows as they were intended to be seen.

We can hope. In the meantime, your mission is clear: Google how to turn off the motion smoothing or interpolation on your TV and turn it off before you watch any more films on it. Listen to the movie people on this — they know of what they speak.

Where to even start with this dude? This year alone, the ever-polarizing rapper managed to: change his name to just “Ye,” meet with President Trump at the White House, claim slavery was “a choice,” try to make “MAGA” hats happen, repeatedly deactivate and reactivate his social media accounts, and insist he was writing a philosophy book on Twitter. Ultimately, his “shocking” behavior became more and more numbing to the point where it… actually wasn’t that shocking at all. In fact, perhaps the most surprising thing about Kanye’s year is that, amidst all the controversy and drama he fueled, he also had an incredibly productive run in the studio. G.O.O.D. Music released five Kanye-produced albums over the summer, including a collaborative project with Kid Cudi and his solo effort Ye, which became his eighth straight No. 1 album. Even so, the rapper’s 2018 was marked by a public consensus that maybe someone should grab the mic from his hands and tell him not to finish.

False advertising is not a good look, Samsung.

Photographer Dunja Djudjic is accusing the world’s largest smartphone maker of using one of her photos and presenting it on their website as a photo taken with its Galaxy A8 Star phone. 

In a post on , Djudjic explains how Samsung is using her photos, taken with a DSLR camera, to showcase the Galaxy A8’s portrait mode. The photographer made the discovery after noticing one of her pictures uploaded to the photo community EyeEm was sold through its partner, Getty. 

Excited to see who purchased the photo and find out how they were using it, Djudjic executed a reverse image search. That’s when she discovered the image being used on the Samsung Malaysia website, presented as a photo taken with the Galaxy A8 Star.

Djudjic notes the bad photoshopping displayed on Samsung’s version of her image. The biggest difference between the two is the background in the photo, which was completely swapped out with a new pic. This change was likely due to the fact that Samsung was using Djudjic’s image to showcase its phone’s portrait mode, which can blur the background in a photo. The background in Djudjic’s photo was already out of focus, leaving Samsung with no way to show the before and after effect for portrait mode, resulting in the photoshopped image.

Even worse, it’s Samsung has been dishonest with its customers. Earlier this year, the company used stock photography in a social media campaign and presented the images as samples of the Galaxy A8’s camera.

A new generation of smartphones is nearly upon us.

Starting in 2019, Android phone makers will start shipping new devices with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 855 system-on-a-chip (SoC), which’ll be the first chip to support 5G. That’s right, mobile 5G — which has been mostly company promises and marketing hype up to this point — is now a step closer to being something you can hold in your hand.

In a meeting in advance of the announcement, Qualcomm Senior Vice President and General Manager of Mobile Alex Katouzian was light on specific details about how much faster the Snapdragon 855 is compared to the current Snapdragon 845.

Katouzian also didn’t share with me any stats on how the new chip stacks up to Apple’s industry-leading A12 Bionic and A12X Bionic chips found in the iPhone XR, XS, and XS Max and new iPad Pros, respectively.

More details on the the 855 will be forthcoming on Dec. 5, the second day of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Technology Summit in Hawaii, but for now here’s what we know about the chip and what it could mean for your next phone.

1. 5G phones coming soon

Phone makers who choose to use the 855 chip in their devices will have support for 5G out of the gate. That depends, of course, on the particular carrier network you want to connect to and whether the phone’s manufacturer has enabled the modem. You may need to wait for network availability, and it may take a firmware update after that, but the capability will be there.

At the Summit, Cristiano Amon, president of Qualcomm, announced the chip would support “multi-gigabit connectivity” consisting of 5G, 4G LTE, and WiFi.

Presumably, the chip will integrate Qualcomm’s previously announced X50 modem in order to achieve 5G data speeds or include the X24 LTE modem to get download speeds of up to 2 Gbps.

Ahead of the Summit, Samsung and Verizon announced they’ll show off a concept 5G phone this week. 

2. Faster AI and mixed reality performance

Injecting AI in more places in phones has been an ongoing trend for a few years and Qualcomm has tripled the AI performance with the 855 chip, at least on paper.

Qualcomm says the 855’s four-generation multi-core AI Engine offers up to three times the AI performance compared to the AI Engine on the 845.

A more powerful AI Engine should improve everything from advanced camera features (like object and scene detection or processing depth-of-field for portrait mode photos) to making digital assistants more responsive, and more.

The improved AI engine will also improve augmented- and mixed-reality experiences, further blurring the lines between the real and the digital.

3. Built-in computer vision

The future of mobile photography and video capture isn’t just about cramming in more megapixels or more lenses (although it’s certainly one way forward for some phone makers). Instead, it’s looking more and more like computational photography, which leverages AI and machine learning to achieve photos and videos not possible hardware alone, is the way forward.

Google was quick to pioneer computational photography with the Pixel 2, using machine-learning techniques to produce portrait photos with blurred backgrounds without the need for a second camera. Apple followed this year, leaning on the A12 Bionic’s Neural Engine in the iPhone XR to achieve the same (albeit only for people shots).

The Pixel 3 took computational photography to the next level with Night Sight, a mode that takes night shots and literally turns them into photos that look like they were shot during the day.

With the 855, Qualcomm says the chip is the first with a CV ISP (computer vision image signal processor) that’ll enable “cutting-edge computation photography and video capture features.” What exactly that means is unclear. Perhaps portrait mode or Night Sight-like modes for video? That would really be something! Hopefully, we’ll learn more soon.

4. Snapdragon Elite Gaming

Mobile gaming (especially in Asia) continues to grow like there’s no tomorrow and with more people playing performance-taxing games like Fortnite on their phones and more companies releasing gaming-centric phones, it’s no wonder Qualcomm’s putting more eggs into improving the experience.

We don’t know what exactly the “Snapdragon Elite Gaming” features cover, but safe bets probably include faster GPU performance with less power draw and better heat management from ramping up the 855’s clockspeed.

Ultimately, mobile games running on the 855 will likely look even better with richer details (graphics always get better year over year) and play smoother with smoother frame rates.

5. More accurate in-display fingerprint sensor

A good number of Chinese phone makers made the risky jump to include in-display fingerprint sensors in their phones. The OnePlus 6T and Huawei Mate 20 Pro are two phones with the fastest and most responsive sensors.

But these optical in-display fingerprint sensors still aren’t on par with a physical sensor like Touch ID on some iPhones and the Pixel Imprint on the Pixel 3.

Qualcomm wants to change that with its “3D Sonic Sensor.” Instead of shining a light from underneath the display to illuminate your fingerprint for authentication, the sensor uses ultrasound.

The chipmaker says the sensor is a marked improvement over current optical in-display sensors because it’s more accurate and more secure, enables thinner designs, and works even if your fingers are dirty or wet.

It sounds great, but we’ll reserve judgement for when phones ship with these sensors.

We’ll have lots more to day about the Snapdragon 855, Qualcomm, and 5G in the coming days.

Starting a business

Millennials are starting businesses at an unprecedented rate. Many consider it to be one of the most exciting moments of your life, and certainly one of the most stressful. FinTech proves a natural fit for small business owners looking for adaptable, efficient, and inexpensive solutions.

The study also shows that Business Starters are among the most open consumers to using FinTech, especially seeking more efficient payment methods and account management tools. Global payments continue to be top of mind, showing usage rates of 16% in the U.S., 30% in Singapore, and 11% in Australia)—which includes peer-to-peer mobile payments, digital currencies, and international money transfers.

Today’s Business Starters, may be looking to keep overhead low and innovate their way to success in their own businesses. They might also look to rising all-digital banks for solutions. Meanwhile, other FinTech services claim to offer lines of credit and loan management more simply than traditional banks. Kabbage, for instance, touts mobile loan management and no-fee applications as primary drivers for its small business loan programs. 

However modern entrepreneurs choose to manage their small businesses, FinTech can help them streamline their efforts. It’s a new day for anyone wanting to start their own business, and FinTech is here to power the future of business with the future of banking.