Find: Nvidia throws in the towel on its smartphone modem business

Pretty big deal. No Tegra smartphones. 

*** 

Nvidia throws in the towel on its smartphone modem business
// Ars Technica

Nvidia is getting out of the smartphone business. The company announced plans this week to "wind down" its Icera modem segment by the second quarter of fiscal 2016, and it's open to selling Icera's technology and operations, which Nvidia purchased for $367 million back in 2011.

Icera is known primarily for its software modem technology—while companies like Qualcomm and Intel design specific modem hardware to work with specific wireless bands and technologies, Icera used low-power generic hardware that could be configured in software to support multiple wireless standards. In theory, one could create a single chip that supported CDMA or GSM networks depending on the software running on the phone, or one that initially supported 3G but could be upgraded to use LTE at a later date (remember, this was 2011).

In practice, Nvidia has always been something of a nonentity in the smartphone business. It had a handful of victories with its Tegra 3 SoC, though that chip predated the inclusion of Icera technology in its processors. The Icera-equipped Tegra 4i, on the other hand, has ended up in just a bare handful of devices since it was unveiled in early 2013, including the niche Blackphone.

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Find: Smartphone shipments in China decline for the first time in six years

Smartphone shipments in China decline for the first time in six years
// The Verge - All Posts

For years now China has been one of the main drivers of growth in the global smartphone market, but it looks like demand in the country is beginning to slow down. For the first time in six years, smartphone shipments in China declined year-on-year, contracting by 4 percent to 98.8 million units in the first quarter of 2015. This represents a fall of 8 percent compared to the previous quarter, reports US market researcher IDC, although the firm notes that this is partly due to large amounts of unsold inventory left over from the end of 2014.

Despite the perception of China as an emerging market for smartphones, the country is now broadly comparable to nations such as the US and UK, says IDC China's managing director Kitty Fok. "Just like...

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Hey,

Grades have been updated for the assignments(max 2 per assignment), extra credit reading(max 5), participation(CSC 563-max 10, CSC495-online-max 5) and critiques(max 42 ; 7 critiques per round). I have tried to make sure all your issues have been resolved.

Please let me know in case of any other issues.

Regards,
Juhi
(jddesai)

Announcement: project deliverables

Hi folks,

Great seeing your final work! Here is a reminder of how to deliver your project, though many of you have already figured it out:

  • You can find your list of deliverables here.
  • Assemble your deliverables and put them online. You can put them on github for example.
    • Every team should have received a couple invites to github repos by now, or you can use your own. You can host even non-coded stuff on github. In fact github is also gaining favor among writers and experiementers.
    • If your client has asked that you don't make everything public, please put as much as you can on github, leave the private stuff out.
  • Create a post on the site as described in the list, include links to the deliverables and a picture.
    • Every team should also have received a couple invites to be authors on the class site.
    • Make sure you discuss your evaluation!
That's it! Let me know if you have any questions.




Professor Watson

Project: BookPhysics (also known as Tilt-A-Story)


Tagline: Reinventing storytelling through tilting

Team :
Nikhil Talele
Priyadarshini Rajagopal
Joseph Sankar
Chang Wang
Ira Ramtirth


Core problem:

Books are one of the best source of knowledge and reading is a great way for children to learn. However the problem with reading is that it is a bit static. Children would absorb information better if reading is more engaging, where children can actively participate. This is the underlying issue our application is trying to solve. It solves the problem of children being passive listeners of stories. We hope to create interactive stories, primarily tilting the device to control the flow of the story. Children will relate more to the characters as they are actively participating in the unfolding of the story; thus making storytelling an all new experience.


How the app works:


The current build is a prototype. The app can take on different appearance depending on the designs. However, the inner workings of the app are generally the same.


When the user opens the app, he will be presented with instruction to start the game. The user starts the app with a tilt of his device per instruction on the screen, which brings him to the first chapter of the story. Each level has multiple scenes. There is an objective that the user needs to complete at each scene such as collecting all the red triangles. Additionally,  there will be audio guides that nudge the user into performing the right tasks. If the user fails to perform the tasks as instructed, the app will play quick audio warning such as “Wrong triangle”.  After the task at each level is completed, the user tilts its way through a dotted line path to the next story. Each path has barrier set up so that user can only move along the path and not all over the place.  At the end of the chapter, the app takes the user down a rabbit hole to the next chapter.

Extra Credit :
We have integrated GetHomeFatty idea proposed by one of the student from College of Design. In that level, we have to make sure that the Fatty reaches home faster than the bus. There are some obstacles in the way of Fatty such as fatty can lose time when he collides with bus, he will also lose time when the stones throwed by the bullies hit him and the last obstacles we have done is the girl, upon seeing the girl fatty loses his control.


Future work:

If possible, we would like to add the following features to the app in the future:

  • Puzzles: Add some puzzles to some of the levels in the story to make it more engaging for children. Additionally, children can collaborate with each other to complete certain puzzles.
  • Achievement system: Users will score certain amount of points for each level they complete. And there will be rewards, such as stickers, unlock new animated characters, etc. after they reach certain point milestones.
  • Enhanced and richer animation: More graphics, sound and animation to make it more interesting to children and increase their engagement.

ScreenCast : 


Link : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IT00EnF8uM

Github : 

There are two branches to this repository.
main branch points to the project without extra credit.
extracredit branch points to the project with extra credit level.

https://github.com/niks11101991/Tilt-A-Story


Project: Remedy


Pain Management Made Easy
TEAM

David Zager, Viktor Uhnyuck, Arjun Aravindan, Nikhil Chinthapallee, and Shashank Pulimamidi

TAGLINE

A pain tracking application that helps its user's find a Remedy quickly.

PROBLEM

Everyone has, at one time or another, experienced pain: a crick in the neck, soreness in the back, or numbness in the feet. All we ever want is for this pain to go away as quickly as possible. When we make an appointment with a health care provider, we want to find a solution to our ailment without wasting time or money. Unfortunately, much data is lost in the time between pain occurrences and appointments with a health care provider. Furthermore, the provider often only has a few minutes to discuss and may fail to see how this pain impacts our daily life. In short, patients can't communicate enough data the providers need to make timely decisions that increase quality of life for those in pain.

SOLUTION

Remedy is a pain tracking application that serves two purposes. For users (patients), it provides a means for communicating with a provider the facts about pains: when it started, where it hurts, how much does it hurt, and what triggered the pain. For providers, the application provides a more detailed picture of the pain a patient is dealing with and a view of patient's pain trends.

The current mobile interface prototype affords its users (patients) a view of all their pains currently being tracked, the ability to add new pain entries, and create new pains. Detailed charts and graphs have also been developed for this prototype.

FUTURE WORK

Currently, the future development of this application rests in the hands of the Remedy team. Expanding on the work already done would include having non-local storage of user data, user (patient) to provider linking, and a web portal for providers to access and view important client data. Further improvements to the work done in the prototype would likely require an application to be written natively for iOS, Android, etc.

Project: Recognize

Tagline: Beat the Blur


Team: Gabi Ghali (gghali@ncsu.edu), Xavier Primus (xjprimus@ncsu.edu), Justin Toniazzo (jjtoniaz@ncsu.edu), Sakthi Narayanan Thirukonda Viswanath (sthiruk@ncsu.edu), Chetan Pawar (chpawar@ncsu.edu)

Recognize is a simple image-based quiz game. There are plenty of apps out there that let you participate in quiz games, but most of these are primarily text based. Recognize is different in that it uses images. Specifically, players are asked to identify the origin of a specific image as it slowly depixilates on the screen. For example, one of our categories is "Famous Moustaches". Players might be shown a heavily distorted image of Burt Reynolds and challenged to select his image from a group of similar looking people as the main image slowly becomes more clear.

Recognize is a continuing project. That is, the current version of the application is the summation of work from a series of past semesters. The last iteration (Spring 2015) was primarily focused on user experience and interface design. While making these UX improvements, however, we noticed several backend changes that would make the application much better from a development perspective. The primary area of improvement we see is in the pixelation of images. Currently, all images are stored statically, but this means the application is rather large. Applying these pixelations programmatically would significantly improve both application size and performance. It would also make it considerably easier for new albums to be created, which is another area in which we think the app could use work. Currently, new albums need to be created manually by people with access to the project’s source code, but if it were possible to create these albums from within the application itself it would make for a much more interesting social platform.

Key features


Once user opens this game application, he can play this enjoying game with different types of albums.
  • Friendly detective greeter: For fun, we have added a friendly detective greeter character on top of home screen which shows different random texts each time you come to home screen. Purpose of this function was to make our app more interactive.
  • Help overlay screen: User can click on Help(?) button and there is help overlay screen opens up on top of main activity which shows all the actions that you can take on the main page. This is good for first time users to tell them how to start the game, how to scroll through albums, how to open settings option, click on particular album from the scrollable album menu and play.
  • Settings button: User can click on Settings (gear icon) at the bottom right to open settings. It allows user to select the difficulty level as Easy, Medium and Hard. User can choose to turn on/off the sound in the game.
  • Once user clicks on album from the scrollable album options, a modal window opens up showing the highest score for that particular album for that user. Then user can cancel or go ahead with playing for that album.
  • Game play screen: On the game play screen, one main image in pixelated form will be shown to user and timer will be set to 10. Main image will depixelate itself as the timer reduces to zero. There will be 6 answer choices given below from which user have to select the correct answer, based on which points will be added to score.
  • Fun Facts: Fun facts are displayed for each question about the correct answer for some of the albums. Also at the end of game, when scores are shown, fun fact about an album is shown in 'Did you know?' window along with the score.
  • Once all the questions are over, score will be displayed with option to replay with the same album or go to home screen to choose different album or he can share the score result with any other application. For example, user can post on facebook or twitter or share with friend on watsapp that "Hey, I just scored x on xxx album on Recognize application. Download this app from (link)"

Future Work:

  • The apk is very large now. It has all the images, for all the intermediate depixelation levels stored as separate image in the source code, which makes it very bulky. If we can incorporate the pixelation and depixlation algorithm, then we would need to store only the original image and not all the intermediate images.
  • It would be cool if user can create an album from the app with his/her own choice of photos. This again would be possible if we can have pixelation algorithm.
  • Difficulty settings to play at easy and medium level is not currently working now. We can have this functionality working by allowing user to choose from less number of options during the game based on difficulty level selected.

You can view the application’s most recent source code on Github: https://github.com/chetanpawar0989/Recognize-App

And here’s a video of our app in action:
https://youtu.be/kM9TsPP2Gfc

Bæcon



[v. to “Beckon” for bacon from bae]

TEAM

Christopher Stroud, Nischal Shrestha, Danial Zaki, Kevin Marko

TAGLINE

A walking directions navigation app which exploits binaural audio to expose left and right directional cues to the user.

PROBLEM

Navigation can be a difficult task especially in unfamiliar places and in cases where the user's hands are busy. Holding a phone while walking can be a frustrating experience since the user has to keep looking down at their phone for the next direction and it can be distracting on a busy street. Bæcon tries to solve the problem by aiding the user with audio cues to help them get to their destination using the Apple Watch. 

SOLUTION

The binaural audio, which is possible by wearing headphones, is meant to give the user spatial awareness of where the next waypoint is going to be; users will hear the pings at the waypoints as if they originated from those locations and this gives the user a general idea of where to walk next. This can be helpful for the users since they won't need to constantly glance at their phone for the next step. The goal is to alleviate the user with the visual task of both looking around their environment and their device to get feedback on their progress.

Using the watch as the device also allows users to do quick glances for visual cues as well, if the audio cue isn't enough; a map is presented to the users on their iPhone with a visual cue of where the current audio ping is beckoning them, and the distance remaining until the next direction. Bæcon allows the user to set up their destination either by checking out nearby or related places of interests (POIs) or use the search feature. Since Bæcon will be running both on the phone and on the watch, users still have the option to use the phone to acquire a more in-depth overview of the destination; however, the idea is to primarily use the watch and headphones to guide the user towards their destination to allow a freedom of movement and attention to the environment.

FUTURE WORK

For the future, the GPS functionality needs to be added so that the application can guide the user to their desired destination. The binaural audio also needs to be implemented so that users can take advantage of audio directional cues for efficiency and safety. Since this could potentially be used for blind people as well, there needs to be more work done to ensure exactly how to create safe paths. The application needs to ensure that the waypoints are in safe places and the paths leading to the waypoints don't instruct users to walk out in the middle of the road, for example. 

Video:



Project: BucketMap (Map Centric Team)

BLR_Intro_Screen_Logo_Medium.png

Tagline: "Explore the city from the eyes of a Raleigh'ite"

Team

Tamilthaaragai Muthukumar, Nupur Mallik, Nithya Pari, Viralkumar Sanghavi, Haizhou Wu

Problem

Usually, when a tourist decides to visit a new city, they rely on information in the internet or mobile application to find out spots that they can visit. Recently a lot of mobile apps have come up to inform users of the top spots to visit in a particular city. While these apps indeed provide information and photos of the top spots, they do not interact in any personal way with the user apart from just providing information required in a list format.

Our solution

We address this problem by creating ‘Bucket List Raleigh’, a mobile app that provides an interactive map of Downtown Raleigh to users. The map highlights the most important spots that ought not to be missed by new visitors. The mobile app users can actually play around the app by clicking on buildings and discovering sticky notes that project photos, videos and reviews about them. The isometric maps that are created by expert designers project Raleigh in its true fun spirit and help users get a personal experience with the city.

Key features of the App
Once user opens the application, there are many features helping the user explore the city from the eyes of a Raleigh’ite.
·        Lose yourself without getting lost.
Guide user to explore downtown Raleigh in an isometric view with zoom in and out functionality, as an offline map. No need to worry about roaming and data plan.
·        Enjoy famous sights and hidden gems.
The most popular entertainment and fun places recommended to user by clicking one of three colorful buttons on the top right corner of the application. Each of them represents most popular “drinks”, “food”, and “fun” places in downtown Raleigh. Once user clicks one of those buttons, some clickable buildings will be highlighted on the map.
·        Smart planning of self-guided tours.
After user clicks one of the highlighted buildings, a sticky note pops up and provides practical and essential information for the user, such as, why recommend this place, history of the building, photos taken in the place, reviews collected from other users, etc.
·        Peer recommendation.
User will be ask to sign in or sign up for a new account in order to interact with other users. Once a user taps on some highlighted place, he or she can post valuable review of the place based on his or her personal experience.
·        Imagine being able to personalize.
Showing friends the direction of tonight's dinner or draw out a meeting spot as a reminder. After user clicks the draw button at the left bottom corner of the application, user is able to draw colored paths or color buildings on the map. No need to wait for GPS directions, just draw your own. Free yourself from waiting and searching for GPS directions.
Future Work
  • Handle memory management in a better way
  • Extend the concept to other cities
  • Upvote/downvote a place
  • Enhance doodling features
  • Enhance user interaction features such as adding pictures, adding more places to visit
Link to GitHub Repo: https://github.com/npari/BucketMap
Link to Screen-cast: http://youtu.be/RzW07dxkzNE
Link to User Evaluation Video: https://youtu.be/zpmPYqsV1Fo



BucketList

The Team:

Alexis Covington, Nikhil Nayak, Kurt Spencer, Abhinav Srinivasan, Neha Vinod Ahir

Core Problem:

We wanted to create a mobile application that allows users to find places of interest, group them together in buckets, rate the places they've visited and share this information with friends. Our application lets users create buckets, find places using google maps, and add them to buckets.


Application features:

Sign in through Google+: A user can sign in to the application using a Google+ account. This avoids the overhead of creating a new account with new credentials.

Creating a bucket:  A user can create different types of buckets through the application. The application provides various options for bucket styles.

Exploring the map to add places to the bucket list: The user can explore a map, find a place of interest and add it to any of the buckets.

Rating and reviewing a place: Once a user visits any of the places, he can rate the places and add reviews about it.

Sharing a Bucket: The application also allows a user to share buckets through Google+. The buckets can either be shared publicly or with specific users. Buckets can be shared with or without pictures.

Top Bucket Listing: The app provides a list of top rated places based on ratings given by the user for visited places.


Application technology stack:

We have developed this application to work on the android operating system.

Google+:
We used Google+ for authenticating a user.
We also used Google+ to share buckets and places with other users.

Google maps API:
We display the map screen based on Google Maps APIs.
The Google geolocate API is used to retrieve addresses during searches.

SQLite:
All our data is stored per user in a SQLite database on the device.
This lets multiple users use the app, while allowing each user to have a private list of buckets and places.


User Evaluation Results:

The positives:

  • The home screen and UI is well designed which big icons that pictorially describe actions well.
  • When places added to bucket, the icon changing to show the bucket is a good feature.
  • Places can be added with multiple ways: Long click as well as search. This makes it flexible and easy to add places to the map.

The negatives:
  • App icon should be changed as it doesn’t stand out
  • Share Buckets button on home page is misleading since you actually need to go into a bucket to share it with our current implementation
  • Difficult to figure out that long click is how you add a place to a bucket without a tutorial
  • Place information page has a lot of free space when viewed on tablet (needs improvement)


Future Work:
  
  • The application currently needs the user to input the entire word for searching.  An important utility could be to add an auto-complete feature for search.
  • The application supports Google+ login. One of the future works could be to integrate Facebook login as well.
  • Sharing of buckets, in the future, could be done directly through the app instead of using Google+, which is the current technique.
  • One of the future items is integrating the Places API for information about places on the map, so that more information can be displayed.
  • The bucket icons can be customized to the choice of the user.
  • The overall look and feel of the user interface can be improved upon as a future work item.
  • The places of pictures can be added to the place information page.


Project: Traces

Tagline:
"Exploring the surrounding digital footprint"

Core Problem:
Social media is a major part of today's digital landscape. 
There is currently no way to view social media sources
such as Twitter in a location-based manner. Traces fills
that gap by giving the user a graphical, location-based window 
into the Twitterverse. Our application queries Twitter's servers,
and displays to a user all of the tweets that have been made
within a 1 mile radius of their current location. The user can
also search for tweets in a different location either by long
pressing on the map, quick search, or using an advance search.
Tweets can also be viewed in a list view, sorting the most
popular tweets at the top of the list.

How:
This application was developed in Android Studio. All of us
were new to Android development at the beginning of this project,
however, we really like the way the final product turned out.
The backend is written in Go, and runs on Google App Engine.
The back-end produces a JSON response from the Twitter API,
which the Android app consumes, then displays the results
to the user in an easy to interface.

End-User Evaluation: 
We conducted a lightweight end-user evaluation to determine how successful we were in the execution of the app. We made the app live in the Google Play store, posted a questionnaire via Google Forms, and asked friends and family to download it, try it out, and complete the questionnaire.Below are portions of the results that we found were interesting and a few conclusions drawn from the comments and data.

Interface/Usage:

  • Some form of instructions are needed to guide the user through the initial use of the app.
  • Units of measurement for numeric values should be provided.
  • Participants were able to navigate the maps view easily. 66.7% responded that it was easy to navigate the map view, and 27.8 percent responded that it was fairly easy to navigate the map view.
  • Half of the participants found that ranking the tweets was helpful or interesting. Another 39.9% responded neutrally.
  • 83% of participants were able to find an interesting or humorous tweet during their evaluation.
  • Over half of the participants (55.6%) responded that they would use both views if they used the application again, 33.3% responded they'd use the maps view the most, and only 11.1% responded that they'd use the list view the most.
Demographics/Audience:
  • Daily Twitter users would be much more likely to use the app:
    • Of the 18 users that completed the evaluation, only 5 of them use Twitter daily and 8 of them don't use twitter, at all.
    • Of the five users that use Twitter daily, three indicated that they would be likely to use the app again, while the other two gave neutral responses.
    • Of the eight users that don't use Twitter at all, two of them indicated they would be likely to use the app again, while the others gave neutral responses or indicated they wouldn't be likely to use the app again.
  • Younger users (ages 18-24) would be more likely to use the app:
    • 60% of participants in the 18-24 years old range, compared to 25% of participants in the 24-34 years old range.
    • 20% of participants in the 18-24 years old range and 42% of participants in the 24-34 years old range would not be likely to try the app again.
    • 66.7% of participants gave a strong indication that they would be likely to recommend the app to a friend. No participant responded that they would be unlikely to recommend it to a friend.
Future work:
In an ideal world, we would have liked to have been
able to allow users to pin, and save tweets of interest. We also
would have liked to allow the user to share interesting tweets
via other social media sites, implement a Webview to allow links
to photos and videos to be visible in the list view (or have the
links open in a web browser), cluster nearby tweets together and
display each one individually when zoomed, and a unified display
design to brand our application better. 

Link to app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.ncsu.mobile.traces

Link to video: http://youtu.be/796xuZgvIxc

Link to GitHub: https://github.com/NCSUMobiles/Spring15-traces

References: 
Google App Engine
Google Play Services
Google Map API
Android David Webb REST - https://github.com/hgoebl/DavidWebb
Google Geocoder API / Golang Geo - https://github.com/kellydunn/golang-geo
Twitter API - Anaconda - https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/anaconda
Google GSON - https://github.com/google/gson
Ion Framework - https://github.com/koush/ion
Golang JSON-REST - https://github.com/ant0ine/go-json-rest
 

Walk Potato

Walk Potato




Inspiration and Initial Pitch

We have a lot of fitness apps on the app store but all of these apps are often just bookkeeping tools which only provide the statistics about what we have achieved so far. This is good to start with, but not sufficient to keep people motivated or punish them in case they become lazy and start procrastinating. A lot of people just waste time using their phones for entertainment. Watching YouTube videos, movies on Netflix, playing games are common activities most of the people spenda lot of time on, thus ignoring their fitness and becoming potatoes. We aim to build an app thathelps people strike a balance between fitness and digital relaxation. Ergo the name “Walk Potato”.An app for the couch potato who walks. Humans in general exhibit two kinds of behaviors.. Someprefer rewards to motivate them, while others prefer restrictions as the medium of controllingprocrastination. Our app target both these kinds of people. People can block the apps they thinkwhich they spend a lot of time on and also get rewards for walking consistently and thus motivate them to walk more to get more and more rewards. Our app is more about being proactive inmaintaining better fitness and enjoying life with occasional pizzas and beers rather than turning intoa potato and then working hard to get fitter.

Future Work

The feedback from the initial survey and from the app evaluation, we found some key additionswhich will add more value to the app and increase its user base. Some of these enhancementsinclude integration with social media like Facebook and twitter to add a competitive aspect to theapp. This not only makes the app even more fun but also keeps people motivated by looking atfriends achieving bigger goals. Other key feedback we received from Lulu eGames was to make abetter business plan. Apart from the just advertisements and discount coupons from localbusinesses, we need to have a better business model. One of the example can be where people canbuy potatoes on days when they are too busy so that they can still access the apps. We can evenmake a paid pro version where we can suggest users on which apps they should be blocking to meettheir goals, give them a better statistics of what their goals should be depending on the Body MassIndex (BMI). Such personalized assistance will help users stay motivated and focused.The main future goal is to release a completed application to the Google play store. Based on thesuccess of the application we would consider releasing iOS and web versions of the app.


Pitch Video


Project Demo




Github : https://github.com/parthsatra/WalkPotato
Project Report

Announcement: our WalkPotato team took third place at the Lulu eGames!

Congratulations to our WalkPotato team for taking 3rd place in the Lulu eGames competition this year! Great work folks!

Professor Watson