An Android keyboard for people too lazy to type

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N IT COMES to text-based communication tools, we’re experiencing a kind of Cambrian Explosion. Emoji has long gone mainstream, leading to a wave of niche Ikea emoticons and Saturday Night Live pictograms. Even this week’s New Yorker is a riff on emoji.

Amidst all this frivolous growth, it’s a welcome relief to find an app that gives you a shorthand to say what you really need to say—which, if we’re being honest, is oftentimes no more than: “kk,” or “damn.” That’s the premise of Lazyboard, an Android keyboard extension that lets you swiftly get one-tap access to all the lazy text lexicon you’re already relying on anyway.

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Lazyboard
“I realized that on an off day, I type ‘k,’ ‘kk,’ ‘hmm’ and ‘lol’ more than anything else,” says developer Prem Adithya. “I also saw that these words were used in politely turning down an annoying conversation—or a conversation that I didn’t want to have with an annoying person. So then I thought, ‘Hey, what if there was a keyboard with just the essential words required to reply to people quickly?’” That became Lazyboard, a suite of canned replies such as “no,” “yeah,” “oh,” “haha,” and “cool.” The app also has a palette of sorta-kaomojis and this guy: ツ.

Adithya’s timing is hot, and not just because we’ve grown accustomed to speaking in a pictoral slang. If wrist-worn communication devices like the Apple Watch are going to be useful smartphone substitutes, they’re going to need to supply users with an easy way to stay in touch. So far, a lot of Apple’s context-sensitive predictive text offerings haven’t gotten much better than the painfully pre-packaged “On my way!” or “Talk later?” This is effectively the uncanny valley of automated texting, and no one wants to be there.

“Kk” and “cool” may be universal, but Lazyboard will soon become even more personal: Adithya is busy working on Lazyboard Pro, which will let users customize and program their own shortcuts.

Built By A Parkinson’s Sufferer, MyHealthPal Tracks Symptoms, Creates Research Data

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The development and availability of wearables is running hand in hand with the exploding interest in the digital health space. Managing our health via apps and devices is slowly becoming the norm. And patients that need to monitor their condition day-to-day have even more to benefit from this powerful combination. Startups are of course entering this space in droves.

The latest is a startup which launches out of stealth today: MyHealthPal, an iOS app and analytics platform that enables people with long-term health conditions to manage their condition, is initially focusing on Parkinson’s Disease, but could be applied similar diseases.

It’s now secured an initial seed funding of £500,000, and launched a trial with the highly respected Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

The investors include a mix of private and institutional investors. Venture Capital firm Proxy Ventures is participating. But the lead investors are Andrew MacKay, chairman of Yapp Brothers and previously director of IG Group Holdings, and angel investor Will Armitage. They are joined by health and medical business expert Terence Bradley.

It’s often the case that the best startups are created by entrepreneurs who want to address problem they’ve encountered personally. In founder Mike Barlow’s case, it couldn’t be more personal. The tech entrepreneur founded the company after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s at age 41, two years ago. He discovered there was no effective way to manage and measure the effectiveness of his medication, track symptoms, log mood, diet, exercise and other metrics and their impact on his quality of life.

So MyHealthPal aggregates patients’ day-to-day data points into a dashboard for the patient.

Now, the space is already well populated by mpower, Gluko and GlucoSuccess. Not to mention the launch of Apples HealthKit and ResearchKit. NEA is also a significant investor in this space, amongst others.

However, myHealthPal thinks it has a better solution because it’s been designed by an actual patient for other patients.

The clever move with this startup is that is also allows users to donate their anonimized data in return for a share of the revenues that data generates to scientific research institutions and charities supporting research and care. Boom. This is like the ‘share economy for patients’.

To achieve this, MyHealthPal says it complies with EU and US data privacy requirements and uses HIPAA certified technology.

Mary Keane-Dawson, Group CEO, MyHealthPal, says ultimately, MyHealthPal analytics platform will enable research and data scientists “to query large volumes of data, which is why MyHealthPal is such an interesting business for both investors and medical research institutions.”

The startup says it’s now in “advanced discussions” with other institutions and charities both in the UK and US.

The ‘market’ if you can call it that, is, unfortunately big. There are over 421 million people living with long-term chronic conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease, Diabetes, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Irritable Bowel Disease, HIV/AIDS and Alzheimer’s according to the World Health Organisation.

Snowden Does Reddit

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Edward Snowden, who you might have heard of by now, took to Reddit a couple days agoy along with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Poitras won an Oscar last night for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Poitras’ winning film, CITIZENFOUR, covers when Greenwald, the filmmaker, and Snowden were together in Hong Kong, right before the documents were leaked and the world changed.

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Windows 10 Pops Up As A “Green Shoot” Among Microsoft’s Slipping Mobile Market Share

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For Microsoft’s mobile strategy, the only direction available is up. Today, IDC reported that Android and iOS controlled 96.3 percent of the mobile market in 2014. That means that Microsoft’s Windows 10 strategy, which will see a single operating system stretch from the smallest to the largest screens, is starting in many ways from scratch.

Interestingly, Microsoft actually grew its device volume in 2014, but saw its market share as a percentage of the global market decline, as the market expanded at a faster pace.

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Apple’s Latest Betas Bring More Diversity To Emoji

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Apple is adding more diverse emoji options to both iOS and OS X, new developer preview builds reveal. These includes various skin color options for emojis featuring people, faces, hands and other exposed skin, as well as new country flags that add to the rather limited original set.

The new skin tone options are available as alternates when a user clicks (or taps) and holds on any of the face, hand or people emoji, offering a further six skin color selections for any given enjoy in the People section where it’s applicable (meaning not the space invader, ghost, poo, skull or mask emojis, for instance).

The additional flag set adds 32 to the total collection, including a range of new countries that go beyond a few European, Asian and North American choices. These are offered on their own in the Travel & Places section of the emoji keyboard on iOS, or special character palette in OS X.

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One Year In, Nadella Is Planning Microsoft’s Long And Short Game

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Golfers like to talk about their long game and their short game. Maybe it’s useful to look at Microsoft’s strategy that way too. Since Satya Nadella took over just over a year ago as CEO at Microsoft, he has started to redirect the company, looking at the short term, while perhaps beginning to formulate a plan for the next wave of computing.

Microsoft is the quintessential personal computer company. It came of age with the rise of the PC and thrived in the 1990s and early 2000s by giving us the tools to operate and be efficient on those machines. Surely, we complained about it — and made many a joke about blue screens of death — but in the end Microsoft provided the fuel for the PC revolution, making its founders rich beyond measure as a result.

 

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Short Surfaces Quick Reads To Help You Power Through Your Saved Article Queue

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A new app called Short from Enric Enrich, a developer at Todoist, and his friend Alex Muench aims to parse your endless queue of saved articles into something a little more manageable. Using popular services like Pocket or Instapaper that users are already working with to build up a list of reading material, Short sifts through saved items to bring out articles that require 10 minutes or less reading time, so a user can pick out a 2 minute read while they wait in line at Starbucks, for instance, or a 5 minute piece if they’ve got a few minutes to spare before a friend arrives at a lunch meeting.

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What Is HTTP/2?

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Have you heard? HTTP/2 is finally finished. That means that pretty soon webpages will load faster; connections will last longer; servers will respond to requests with more content. What’s not to like! But hold on a sec: What the heck is HTTP/2, again?

Put simply, HTTP/2 is a very overdue upgrade to Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the basic protocol that handles connections between a web server and your browser. The original development of HTTP happened way back when Tim Berners Lee first imagined his World Wide Web project in the late 1980s. However the version of the protocol we currently use, HTTP/1.1, was officially introduced in 1999. Needless to say, the web has changed quite a bit in the past 15 years.

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Google doodle honors Italian physicist who invented the battery

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google_doodle_alessandro_volta

Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (February 18, 1745 – March 5, 1827) was an Italian physicist. He is credited with the invention of the first electrical battery, the Voltaic pile which he invented in 1799 and the results of which he reported in 1800 in a two part letter to the President of the Royal Society.With this invention Volta proved that electricity could be generated chemically and debased the prevalent theory that electricity was generated solely by living beings. Volta’s invention sparked a great amount of scientific excitement and led others to conduct similar experiments which eventually led to the development of the field of electrochemistry. Alessandro Volta also drew admiration from Napoleon Bonaparte for his invention and was invited to the Institute of France for demonstrating his invention to the members of the Institute. In fact Volta enjoyed a certain amount of closeness with the Emperor throughout his life and he was conferred numerous honours by him. Alessandro Volta held the chair of experimental physics at the University of Pavia for nearly 40 years and was widely idolized by his students. Despite his professional success Volta tended to be a person inclined towards domestic life and this was more apparent in his later years. At this time he tended to live secluded from public life and more for the sake of his family until his eventual death in 1827 from a series of illnesses which began in 1823. The SI unit of electric potential is named in his honour as the volt. [Source: Wikipedia]

1.2B Smartphones Sold In 2014, Led By Larger Screens And Latin America

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Apple is reaping the biggest rewards right now when it comes to selling its smartphones and other devices, but the overall picture for the smartphone market in the year ahead may be a little less rosy. According to the analysts at Germany-based GfK, in 2014 there were 1.2 billion smartphones sold, up 23% on the year before and crossing the billion-unit point for the first time. But they predict sales will slow down to 14% growth in 2015, working out to total sales of 1.368 billion devices.

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