CES 2014 introduces Car’s powered by hydrogen gas or the sun

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While driveless cars is a major theme in the international CES 2014, Cars that use hydrogen gas are making big moves in the near future:

Toyota said Monday that it expects to sell more hydrogen-powered electric cars in the U.S. than previously planned.

The car, which Toyota calls FCV for now, uses hydrogen as fuel for a battery and emits only water vapor as exhaust. Toyota said the car will go on sale in the U.S. in 2015. Rival automakers Hyundai and Honda have also said they’d start selling cars with that technology in the U.S. that year.

At the International CES, the technology industry’s annual gadget show in Las Vegas, the Japanese automaker said it will focus on selling cars in California at first.

Bob Carter, senior vice president of automotive operations for Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. Inc., said the U.S. branch of Toyota had recently increased its request for vehicles to sell in the U.S. market. He said that a 95 percent cut in production costs from the initial prototype would help Toyota make fuel cell cars that are “a reasonable price for a lot of people.”

Toyota Motor Corp. has promised to sell its fuel cell cars for $50,000 to $100,000, aiming for the lower end of the range.

Toyota said the car will have a range of 300 miles, can accelerate from standstill to 60 miles per hour in 10 seconds, and can refuel its hydrogen tank in three to five minutes.

Working with researchers at the University of California, Irvine, Toyota said the first 10,000 vehicles can be supported with only 68 refueling stations from San Francisco to San Diego. It noted that California has approved $200 million to build about 20 fueling stations by 2015, 40 by 2016 and 100 by 2024.

What is 4K? What is it’s purpose for Netflix?

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Netflix’s show House of Cards will be the first to stream in 4k. But wait what is 4k exactly?

4K, or UltraHD, is the latest generation of TV screen technology, replacing 1080p. Before 4K, the highest resolution signal available for movies and such was 1080i/p, which amounts to 1,920 x 1,080 pixels on that gargantuan TV screen you stare at so often. 4K’s resolution is about 4,000 pixels wide and about 2,000 pixels high, good for about four times the resolution of 1080p.

The most weirdest things introduced at CES 2014

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If you were one of the 150,000 lucky participants at the CES 2014 then you must of seen the most weirdest gadgets ever. For those that weren’t at CES 2014 here is what you have missed:

1.) Dualo- one of the most weirdest instrument gadget that you will ever see

The Dualo, an electronic musical instrument that you wear around your neck and whose music can be controlled both by tapping on the little circles or leaning and back and forth, via motion sensor.

Can you imagine a composer instructed a musician to play the Dualo in a orchestra? The facility is meant to stay quiet, but I would stop laughing.

2.) Man covered in Tablets 

Can it get any weirder than this. Honesty I feel bad for the man for one its probably hot in that suit, and two how an see?

3.) I refuse to buy one of these would you?

A team of engineers likely spent a lot of time and money on the design of my smartphone. The last thing I want to do is cover it in a case that looks like it’s been vomited on by Paris Hilton.

4.) Great way to stay healthy?

Most distressing idea for soda addicts: This Aullor soda fountain, which is affixed to a tablet and displays how many calories you’re dispensing as you dispense them, and also tells you how long you would have to run to burn all of that soda off. Maybe I’ll stick with water?

5.) An app can tell the weather and give us directions at the same time?

WeatherSphere, an app that combines GPS navigation with live weather maps, featured the following endorsement on a placard in its booth at Eureka Park: “I would be dead if it wasn’t for this app” – iTunes user Gamer Tag weedy bird. Because if weedy bird likes it, you know it must be awesome.

Ladies and Gentlemen lets welcome the New App ChoiceMap

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Are you tired of getting stuck on a certain question? Well according to TechCrunch new app called ChoiceMap helps you overcome difficult problems by breaking them down step by step.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAFwoQHAEzg

Making complicated decisions is an emotionally fraught process and (if you are like me) the whole thing can leave you feeling paralyzed. ChoiceMap is a new free iPhone app that helps you break down complex dilemmas into a list of priorities, rate them by how they will affect your life, and then uses an algorithm to score decisions. You can use it for everything from figuring out the future of your relationship to just deciding what to eat for dinner.

It might seem a bit strange to use your iPhone to make the kind of decisions you’d usually talk over with a friend or hash out in your head (or a journal), but there are already several apps out there intended to help you make sense of your feelings. For example, TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez recently profiled Feels, which she described as “the pro/con list for the smartphone, emoticon-favoring generation.”

Both apps can help turn a mass of frazzled thoughts into cool, rational decisions, but I don’t think the two necessarily need to be seen as competitors. We all process things in different ways. For some people, seeing the emoticons Feels produces is helpful. For others, the bar graphs and percentages ChoiceMap uses to rank and rate your options are the way to go. Of course, the numbers only mean what you want them to mean, but looking at them gave me a much-needed moment of clarity on some issues that have been causing me a lot of anxiety.

Is the new Mac Pro worth buying?

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According to yahoo news the New MAC Pro is a very powerful PC that worth over $10,000 dollars. The question is, is it worth it?:

It’s hard to say if the Mac Pro is pricey, per se, given that there’s nothing else quite like it. There are plenty of Windows-based workstations, certainly, but none are quite this small or quite this portable (many aren’t quite this quiet, either). And if you’re a creative professionalalready hooked into Mac-only apps like Final Cut Pro, this is really your only choice: The new Mac Pro is a serious improvement over the old model in every way, and is likely worth the upgrade. So, while $2,999 (let alone $10,000) is indeed a big investment, it’s well worth it for people who live and die by their workstation, and for whom (rendering) time is money.

Top four tips that will help you after your credit card is hacked

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If your one of the 110 million victims don’t worry I have four suggestions that will benefit financially:

1) Check your statement. It may seem obvious, but the first step you should take is looking for any charges you don’t recognize on your statement.

Don’t just look for large charges, either. Hackers often ping an account with micro payments of only a few cents to check the viability of the account. So if you see purchases of 6 cents or 11 cents, that could be a sign your information has been compromised.

 

2) Call your credit card company, bank and Target. Credit card companies generally offer customers fraud monitoring services at no cost, and customers aren’t on the hook for any fraudulent charges. Typically, the card issuer or the merchant is responsible for those costs.

But don’t wait for your card company or bank to call you. Let them know you’ve shopped at Target recently. All you have to do is call the number on the back of your card.

Target has also set up a phone line for customers who suspect there has been unauthorized activity on their accounts. Shoppers can call 866-852-8680.

 

Hacking your credit card as you shop

3) Replace your credit card, change your PIN. If the bank didn’t already do this for you, do it yourself. This will put an end to any more fake charges.

Once you receive your replacement card, make sure to update your new card information with any companies that have your account on file for automatic payments or monthly fees, like your Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) iTunes account or cable provider.

4) Sign up for a fraud monitoring service. If you’re concerned about credit card theft going forward, LifeLock and other similar threat detection services claim that they can monitor your card activities and alert you when your account has gotten into the wrong hands. Most credit card companies offer similar services for free, but threat detection services say they go above and beyond, including offering protection of credit card information on the Internet and even lost-wallet insurance.

Hack of the week

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Its been a drastic year for hacking, but this is by far one of the worst data preach in a decade:

Target’s disclosure that credit card thieves hacked a database of 70 million customers is a wake-up call. “It’s like an arms race for consumers’ information at this point,” said Susan Grant, an advocate for the Consumer Federation of America. It’s become standard for many retailers to ask for personal details at checkout. Then there’s online shopping, in which you have to turn over certain info. Among other things, stores want the information so they can shower you with catalogs and emails.

So my suggestion is to think twice before using any card whose magnetic stripe is not encrypted. Which includes Visa, Mastercard, Discover and other card companies:

The problem is that you are trusting the stores to safeguard it. Criminals who steal your credit or debit card information can do more damage if they have your contact information. It’s easier for them to commit fraud or even trick you into revealing more via fake emails, letters and phone calls.

Your information is “toxic” if it gets in the wrong hands, said Rob Shavell, CEO of Abine, a company whose software enhances privacy while shopping. “The more of it they store, the more it becomes a danger to the consumer and the business.”

The idea behind Abine shows just how far wholesale data collection has gone. The service lets you create a shopping avatar — with its own new phone number, address and credit card — to create more distance between you and the retailer

Today’s data breach doesn’t necessarily mean that thieves can gain access to customers’ bank or credit card accounts. But it does put them at greater risk for identity theft. There is also a risk that thieves can use the information to try to create new accounts in a customer’s name.

Top five well known businesses that will struggle in 2014

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A new year usually signals a new start. But 2014 may be the end of well known businesses.

Here are the list f five household names that won’t last this year:

1.) Mitsubishi Motor 

Japanese company just sold 50,000 cars in 2013 in the first ten months in 2013, which was the lowest ever since 2011 when the y sold 80,000. With these stats I think they would have a hard time to compete against other brands.

2.) Barnes & Nobles:

This year holidays sales put another nail in the coffin for the book seller tablets.

This year’s holiday sales tallies haven’t brought any cheer to this story. The company says that Nook sales plummeted by 60 percent for the 2013 holiday season compared to the previous year. In addition, Barnes & Noble claimed that its share of the e-book market has declined to 20 percent.

The list of reasons for the Nook’s continued struggles are legion. It faces unyielding competition from Apple’s iPads as well as Amazon’s Kindles (not to mention Amazon’s abilityto sell its e-books generally for less than B&N on those Kindles). Throw in all of the other Android tablets and the ever-increasing range of Windows slates, and the Nook has a hard time standing out.

3.) Living Social:

Percent off sales company living social may say fair well after a plunge on retail sales and according to Washington Post, CEO Tim Oschaughnessy is stepping down.

“He was feeling that he had exhausted his well of capabilities to take this from a large company to a very large company, and had the personal sense to know when to ask to pass it on to new leadership,” said Tige Savage, a LivingSocial board member and investor with Revolution, a venture capital firm led in part by former AOL chairman Steve Case. O’Shaughnessy will continue to own a sizeable stake in LivingSocial.

4.) Olympic Cameras:

Olympic camera are doing well, but for this year they have to be great as they compete against tech company Samsung.

5.) WNBA:

Sorry ladies but this year if the organization doesn’t generate a fan base then they will suffer this year.

But most WNBA teams — even the Lynx — still have trouble attracting fans like Sylte. Ticket giveaways are common, and average league attendance this year was below 8,000. Still, there are a few positive signs. The WNBA is reporting its best TV ratings in six years, and it just signed a reported eight-figure sponsorship deal with Boost Mobile. The cellphone carrier’s logo appears on most WNBA uniforms — something rare outside NASCAR.

Lynx Chief Operating Officer Conrad Smith says this shows the league may be turning a corner. And while the team doesn’t make its finances public, he says the Lynx could turn a profit this year for the first time in nearly a decade.

“The first couple of years we were profitable, but then we got away from it,” Smith says. “But this year — and obviously the playoffs and how that all shakes out — we’ll know at the very end how we did, which is great news for the league and our ownership group.”

This is the year for all five well known companies to prove to everyone that they can still keep a prosper business going.

Why Neiman Marcus Customers Credit Card may have been hacked

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There’s a very good chance that a criminal operation has hacked just about every major retailer in the U.S., or at least has the capability of doing so:

Luxury department store chain Neiman Marcus said on Friday that hackers may have stolen customers’ credit and debit card information, the second cyber attack on a retailer in recent weeks.

The data breach comes after Target Corp on Friday said an investigation found a cyber attack compromised the information of at least 70 million customers, in the second-biggest retail cyber attack on record.

Neiman Marcus does not know the number of customers affected by the intrusion, company spokesperson Ginger Reeder said.

Neiman Marcus said its credit card processor alerted the retailer in December about potential unauthorized payment card activities and the U.S. Secret Service is investigating.

A third-party forensics firm confirmed the cyber-security intrusion on January 1, the company said.

Reeder declined to comment if the breach was related to the Target cyber attack.

This isn’t an amateur operation and it’s certainly not small. There are likely international ties to this, and finding and prosecuting the culprits won’t be easy. There’s no reason to believe any retailer is safe. The best bet is to leave your debit card at home and stick to credit cards. At least the banks eat the losses that way and inconvenience to the consumer is minimal.

Top five addictive app games to look for

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Its safe to say that Apple’s giving the gaming industry a hard time concerning both Sony and Nintendo. Although great games are the driving force behind the success of Apple gaming, low prices have also helped.

Here are the top five games to look out for:

1.) Candy Crush Saga:

Explore the sweet and colourful world of Candy Crush in this fun candy switcher, where you can mix and match sweets in a combination of three or more, to gain points and other bonuses as you progress! Start your game on Facebook or mobile and seamlessly continue your saga between platforms. Your game play will be fully synched across all devices.

2.) QuizUp: The Biggest Trivia Game

Join over 7 million people who love and play QuizUp! Challenge your friends and connect with others around the globe in the largest real-time trivia game ever. Go head to head in over 150,000 questions and 280 topics ranging from your favorite TV shows and books to sports and music. With new topics being added all the time, QuizUp is sure to keep you entertained and test your knowledge for hours on end!

3.) Hot or Not! 

 a rating site that allowed users to rate the attractiveness of photos submitted voluntarily by others. The site offers a matchmaking engine called ‘Meet Me’ and an extended profile feature called “Hotlists”. It is owned by Or Not Limited , and was previously owned by Avid Life Media. ‘Hot or Not’ was a significant influence on the people who went on to create the social media sites Facebook and YouTube.

4.) Angry Birds Go! 

 starts off strong with a familiar character, a basic go kart, and a fun course with polished visuals. Despite the solid start to this racing game, this is one of those free-to-play games that quickly gets bogged down by in-game purchases.

The different racetracks are fun, particularly the ones that involve great leaps and flying, and various types of races are included to spice up the the game. One involves collecting a certain amount of fruit by driving into them, while another requires you to quickly maneuver around ice, rock and wood obstacles before the timer runs out and a bomb explodes. 

Unfortunately, purchases and sponsored ads are constantly dangled in front of you, interfering with your enjoyment of the game. This is a case where unless you make the in-game purchases, the the races quickly become tedious.

5.) Jet Car Stunt 2 

 same game you know and love, but with a bunch of new content added on top, and controller support. You might think this is just a standard racing game, but once you actually give it a try it’ll probably change your genre conventions a bit, to say the least. Your main objective is to get from point A to B through any means necessary, usually through massive jumps, nitro boosts, and healthy amounts of speed. Each level has a three medal rating scheme as well as a general score system, so you’ll always strive to get better.