Luke Wroblewski knows that all too well. The product designer says he lost his Google Glass last night, which, according to Google, is a major first for the device.

“[It's] pretty nerve-racking. It’s an expensive and still-rare item  – plus I’ve been using them to develop Glassware. So [it's] not good on a number of fronts,” he told me via email.

Wroblewski, who wasn’t wearing the device when he lost it, said that it slipped out his bag as he went through airport security. “[I'll] put them in a zippered pocket next time,” he said.

While losing the device was bad enough, Wroblewski also had it linked up to a number of his accounts, which makes the whole situation that much more troublesome. Fortunately, it’s possible to remotely wipe Glass from the web — though Wroblewski says he’s holding out for the possibility of them still turning up. (Most people don’t think that’s going to happen, however)

So does Wroblewski consider it an honor being the first person to lose the $1500 specs? “Not at all,” he says. “But I’m getting the word out in case it helps me get them back.”

The online food delivery service industry is getting a bit smaller.

Seamless and GrubHub, the two largest services of their kind in the US, are merging, the companies announced today.

The combined company, whose name will be revealed one the deal is approved by regulators, will cover 20,000 restaurants across 500 cities. The companies say that their efforts helped restaurants pull in $875 million in food sales last year, and, combined, they’ll be able to do so much more.

“GrubHub and Seamless share a common goal to generate more business for local takeout restaurants while providing the best possible service to diners. By combining our complementary restaurant and diner networks, we are well positioned for continued growth in a massive market,” GrubHub CEO Matt Maloney said in a statement.

The merger comes after nearly a decade of competition between the two companies, both of which have been aggressively going after the same market of hungry, busy Americans. Maloney will step up as chief executive of the new company, and Seamless CEO Jonathan Zabusky will serve as president.

As far as other competitors go, the new combined company will compete with companies like the aptly named Delivery, Ordr.in, and probably many more.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Say what you will about Windows Phone, but the platform’s greatest strength has always been Nokia’s Lumia phones.

And the latest phone in the series, the Lumia 928, is no different. The Lumia 928 is the first high-end Lumia for Verizon, which by default makes it a very important device for Nokia itself. But is it any good? Here are a few first impressions.

A camera to kill for, maybe

Above anything else, Nokia and Verizon are selling the Lumia 928 on the power of its camera. The phone’s 8.7-megapixel shooter “captures amazing blur-free photos and videos even in low light”, according to Nokia, which has gotten in trouble for making lavish claims about its phones’ cameras before.

The Lumia 928′s camera ain’t too bad.

So do those claims hold up with the Lumia 928? Sort of. I took a bunch of shots with the phone, and very few of them came close to the almost-flawless sample shots that the phone teases you with. That’s not to say my photos weren’t nice (the one of the Manhattan skyline is especially good), but they just didn’t consistently match the quality I was expecting. I wasn’t blown away.

Still, the camera is fast, and features like Smart Shoot (which captures a series of images and merges the best ones) and Cinegraph (which is Nokia’s answer to Vine) are neat, if slightly gimmicky, additions. The best part? The Lumia 928 comes with a hardware camera button, which, in full disclosure, I only just now remembered exists.

Nokia is also making a big deal out of the Lumia 928′s Xeon flash, which helps freeze motion in certain kinds of shots. I didn’t get a chance to try this out, but MyNokiaBlog gives a good idea of how it works.

Nokia ditches color for yet another black slab

One of the best, most immediately striking things about the Lumia phones is that they come in a wide, attractive variety of colors. They feel unique, interesting, and fun to hold. That color is gone with the Lumia 928, which, with the exception of its white back, feels like just another black slab. The phone is pretty, but there just isn’t much to care about beyond that. (And the giant Verizon logo on its front doesn’t help either.)

As far as the whole feel-in-hand goes, the Lumia 928 sits right on the line between being solid and uncomfortably bulky. Maybe it’s the squared edges or the plasticky back, but the phone just isn’t particularly enjoyable to hold. For lack of a better word, the Lumia 928 just feels, slimy.

In fact, the Lumia 928 would be a far, far better phone if it had the same aluminum casing as the Lumia 925, which Nokia annouced earlier this week.

One thing I do appreciate about the Lumia 928, though, is its power button, which is placed in the center of its right edge. It’s a tiny thing, but it shows that Nokia puts a lot of thought into how people are using their phones. So thanks, Nokia.

We’ll have a more detailed review of the Lumia 928 very soon.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 may be tasteless and unrefined, but that’s not stopping lots of people from buying it.

After a month on the market, the Galaxy S IV will hit its 10 millionth device sold next week, according to Samsung co-CEO Shin Jong-kyun.

That may not sound like a big deal, but the importance of the announcement is clear once you consider that it took Samsung 50 days to get to that point with the Galaxy S3 and five months to get there with the S2.

All of this underscores one clear and unsurprising point: Samsung still dominates the Android world, even though its phones lack the stylistic finesse of the iPhone or even our recent Android favorite, the HTC One. Tasteless or not, Samsung is pulling in the cash: According to recent estimates from market research firm Strategy Analytics, Samsung captured 95 percent of the $5.3 billion in profit made by Android in the first quarter of this year. If Samsung doesn’t own Android in influence, it definitely owns it in profit.

Strategy Analytics agrees. ”We believe Samsung generates more revenue and profit from the Android platform than Google does,” Strategy Analytics’ executive director Neil Mawston said in a statement.

That probably horrifies Google — or at least you’d like to think so. But instead of feeling threatened by Samsung’s devices, Google is embracing them — albeit in its own special Google way. Yesterday, the company unveiled its own Nexus-ified version of the Galaxy S4, which will be sold stripped of Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. Google’s message with the device was pretty clear: “Samsung, we love your hardware, but you can keep the software.”

Turns out there are a lot of other people who really love that hardware, too.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat 

Google thinks quantum computing is going to solve some of our biggest computing problems. So it’s bought a quantum computer.

The $15 million computer, created by D-Wave Systems, marks a major first for Google, which is teaming up with NASA to explore how quantum computing will change how the company processes all the information it collects.

Quantum computing, which sounds like something out of science fiction, uses quantum mechanics to operate on data. I’ll spare you the specifics, but essentially the technology allows computers not only to work faster but also to do so with lots more information. (In theory, anyway; researchers are still validating the claims.)

The concept can be applied to a variety of ideas, but Google plans to focus its efforts on machine learning, which is a study of how computers learn from data. This, in turn, means better results for features like personalized search and real-time traffic monitoring, both of which rely on lots of data from many sources at once.

Google engineering director Hartmut Neven doesn’t understate what he thinks the project will do for computing. “We actually think quantum machine learning may provide the most creative problem-solving process under the known laws of physics,” he writes in a post on the Google Research Blog.

And Google’s not alone. Lockheed Martin (which bought a D-Wave Quantum computer in 2011), IBM, Microsoft, and BlackBerry creator Mike Lazaridis are all exploring the potential uses for quantum computing. As is the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) in Waterloo, Ontario, which is the second-largest quantum computing center in the world.

“The holy grail is a general purpose quantum computer. That will be many many orders of magnitude more powerful than all the computers in the world today,” IQC  executive-in-residence Rob Crow told VentureBeat.

If you’ve been waiting for the day when robot doctors will cut you open, monitor you recovery, and keep you company in your hospital room, you won’t have to wait much longer.

“We’re in the first inning of a nine-inning exercise. The average patient walks in a hospital and is not touched by robotics. That’s going to change in 10 years,” said John Simon, a partner at Boston-based investment firm Sigma Prime Ventures.

That adoption rate, Simon argues, is based on cost: As the price of robotics adoption decreases, hospitals may be more likely to invest in new technology. At their core, robots aren’t all that different from any other hospital gear.

The problem for hospitals, however, is that there’s a danger in pursuing robotics too far. “With medical robots,  if you automate something too much, people won’t accept it,” Simon said.

This results in a fine line that hospitals and doctors must manage. While some automation and robotics is good, the last thing a hospital wants to do is embrace robots to such an extent that they alienate patients.

Little of that, however, is on the minds of hospitals today. Right now, most of them are just trying to figure out how to get robots in the front door. Here are a few ways robots are changing hospitals today.

Zapping germs and cutting infection rates

In hospitals, fewer things are more lethal than the average bacterium. Approximately 1.7 million people get sick each year as a result of so-called “health care-associated infections,” and 99,000 of them die. So you might say that tackling this issue is a major problem for hospitals.

One potential fix is Xenex, a 5-foot, 2-inch robot that fights bacteria by flashing hospital rooms with ultraviolet light. This light, which comes from a Xenon bulb, damages the cell walls of bacteria, frying their DNA and preventing them from reproducing. (The light is so powerful that even humans have to leave the room while the Xenex is working its magic.)

While Xenex has only been around since 2009, evidence suggests that it’s working pretty well so far. Cone Health System, a health care provider in North Carolina, says that Healthcare-Associated Infections dropped over 40 percent after it started using Xenex. Another hospital, Massachusetts’s Cooley Dickinson Hospital, says that Xenex’s helped cut rates of infection of Clostridium difficile by 82 percent, according to a Xenex case study.

Keeping doctors present … even when they aren’t

Fewer companies are as well known in the robotics world as iRobot, the creator of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. But while iRobot is dominating the consumer space, it’s also doing some interesting things areas like defense, naval exploration  and, in particular, health care.

Among its health care products is Remote Presence Virtual + Independent Telemedicine Assistant (RP-VITA), a tablet-controlled telepresence bot it developed alongside InTouch Health. Unveiled last July, the RP-VITA lets doctors care for patients remotely, allowing them consult with patients even when they’re miles away.

Reception to the idea has been pretty strong so far. Not only has the device been commercially deployed in seven American hospitals but the RP-VITA is also the first telemedicine robot approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Telemedicine is officially a thing.

Letting amputees walk again

While some robots are mostly about improving patients’  in-hospital experiences, device’s like the BiOM prosthetic ankle system are improving their whole lives. Developed by Boston-based robotics firm iWalk, the BiOM solves one of the less-advertised problems with conventional prosthetics: They’re exhausting to use.

“When people wear prosthetics, they are providing all the power themselves and sort of dragging this leg around,” notes Sigma Prime’s John Simon, whose firm invests in iWalk.

The problem is one of angles. When we walk up ramps or take stairs, our ankles rarely stay at one angle — but that’s exactly how most prosthetics force wearers to walk around. This is why the BiOM is so effective: Instead of forcing the wearer to power it with their own bodies, it powers itself. And that makes a huge difference.

The only problem with the BiOM is cost: The device runs for $50,000. And while that’s not cheap, it’s a small price to pay for amputees looking to walk around freely again.

Helping doctors cut you open

If you’re a surgeon operating today, it’s hard not to be at least a bit enticed by robotic surgery. Surgical robots promise the capability to operate on patients quickly, accurately, and with fewer of the side-effects associated with traditional surgery. By creating smaller incisions, robotic surgery (which is mostly just robot-assisted surgery at this point) cuts blood loss and reduces recovery time (which means patients leave hospitals earlier). Adding to the intrigue is the possibility of remote surgery, which enables doctors to operate on patient from halfway across the world.

The interest is real: Market leader Intuitive Surgical, which creates the da Vinci surgical robot, says its product was used in 450,000 procedures last year.

The problem is that robotic surgery systems are really expensive.  Systems like the da Vinci cost at least $1.5 million, and for a lot of hospitals, it’s tough to justify that sort of investment. More, robotic surgery systems carry with them significant liabilities, as Intuitive Robotics found out earlier this year. In February, the FDA launched a probe into claims that the Da Vinci was causing post-operation complications for patients. Intuitive surgical maintains that adverse event rates are low, but the debate over the company’s products is ongoing.

Still, in spite of this recent skepticism, robotic surgery remains a popular option for procedures like prostate cancer extraction, which, due to the, er, difficulty of access, is often better left to robot hands than those of humans.

Keeping patients and the elderly company

If all of this talk about amputees, bacteria, and botched operations has got you down, I offer the Paro, a well-known therapeutics robot developed by Japanese research company AIST. Paro has a very simple but very important job: It’s supposed to feel like a pet. Similar to the that ancient tabby that your grandmother’s nursing home keeps around, Paro relaxes patients in ways that other humans can’t. Aist, which was developed over 10 years ago, still remains one of the most well-known robots of its kind.

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I don’t use Google + and chances are you don’t, either. Google, however, really, really wants to change that.

Google is rolling out a major overhaul to the design of Google+, which now looks like a freakish three-column lovechild between Pinterest and Facebook.

The updates, which are among the 42 new features that are headed to Google+, adds a lot of polish to a social network that has so very been awfully bereft of it. I can only applaud Google’s decision to change things up.

In addition, Google+ will now automatically tag your photos, which is either horrifying or awesome, depending on how you look at it. During the presentation, Google senior VP Vic Gundotra used the example of a photo of the Effiel Tower, which, after being analyzed, was tagged with, um, #effieltower.

“We are incredibly grateful to the millions of you who’ve joined Google+, and we can think of no better thank you than to keep innovating,” Gundotra said.

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 is a nice phone hindered by one glaring fault: Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. Where stock Android is refined and sensible, TouchWiz is tasteless and glaring. It’s not a great experience.

Google, however, is offering a fix. During its keynote at Google I/O today, Google announced a version of the Galaxy S4 that’s stripped of Samsung’s often-intrusive software skin. It’s a Samsung phone with all the best features of Google’s Nexus devices.

“What you’re seeing here is real: this is a Samsung Galaxy S4 with the same software experience we ship on our Nexus devices. It’s Google’s take on Android and it feels awesome on the S4,” Android VP Hugo Barra said today.

The unlocked 16GB LTE version, which works on T-Mobile and AT&T, will sell for $649 via Google Play next month. Best of all, the device will receive prompts to update with each new version of Android, which is one of the best things about owning a device with stock Android.

Google’s Nexus-ified Galaxy S4 may just be the best Android phone yet.

Android finally has its answer to iOS’s Game Center.

At the Google I/O conference today in San Francisco, the company announced Google Play game services, a new set of  features that expands what developers can do with their games.

The most notable feature of Google Play game services is that it’s cross-platform, which means it also works on both iOS and the web. Apple (and maybe even console makers such as Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony) should take note.

Another major feature is support for cloud saves. You can save progress on one device — say, a tablet — and pick up where you left on completely different one.

Google Play game services also supports matchmaking and multiplayer games. But Google’s demo of this functionality failed, so we couldn’t get the best idea of how it looks in action.

This also touts achievements and leaderboards, which are mandatory features for any gaming service these days. Players can see how they rank compared to both friends and the rest of the world. (This, as you might expect, links to back Google+.)

We’ll have more as Google announces it.

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While there probably won’t be any big hardware announcements from Google today, here’s one thing we can expect: a newer, more fabulous version of Google Maps.

A signup page for the new Maps briefly popped up last night, and Droid Life got a peek at it before Google took it down. Here’s the scoop.

Core to what Google is pushing with the new version of Maps is an experience that’s tailored to how you use it. As Google says, “The more you use the New Google Maps, the more helpful it becomes.” In all, Google seems to be positioning the new Maps as an alternative to Foursquare’s Explore feature, which probably isn’t good news for Foursquare.

The new Google Maps also combines features from Google Earth, flight search (which also offers ticket prices), and information for other forms of transportation, which it can combine and compare to help you find the best route.

Another neat improvement comes from Google Earth’s 3D map viewing. Unlike with the current version, the new Google Maps won’t require you to install a plug-in to use Google Earth — which should make this work better. The one drawback: The improvements to the Google Earth functionality only work with browsers compatible with the WebGL rendering engine, which means Internet Explorer users are out of luck for the time being.

Overall, the new Google Maps looks like a much cleaner, powerful version of the service. Let’s hope Google sheds more details on the update later today.

BlackBerry’s decision to bring BBM to Android and iOS was, in many senses, inevitable.

The world of mobile messaging apps has changed since BlackBerry introduced BBM in 2006. While the service still has a whole bunch of users (60 million of them, by BlackBerry’s latest count), those numbers are small compared to those of, say, WhatsApp, which claims it has 200 million active users, and China’s WeChat, which claims 190 million. There’s also Kik, which recently hit 50 million users.

Those numbers should speak for themselves: The smartphone world is moving away from BBM. But don’t tell that to BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins, who’s arguing that the opposite is true.

“Why are we doing this now? It’s a statement of confidence. The BlackBerry 10 platform is so strong and support has been so good that the time is right for BBM to become and independent messaging solution,” Heins said, possibly out of sorts with reality.

Source: giaomeng/Flickr

Services like WhatsApp are rapidly eroding BlackBerry’s command over the mobile messaging market.

BlackBerry’s strategy here is clear: Rather than cede the messaging app world to the likes of WhatsApp, the company is piggybacking off the marketshare success of iOS and Android, which have many more users than BlackBerry could ever hope to attract with BlackBerry 10 alone.

In fact, BlackBerry’s move isn’t very different from its decision to allow developers to port Android apps to its own smartphone platform. As an underdog, BlackBerry doesn’t have much to lose from taking these sorts of bold moves — even if they betray some of company’s current weaknesses.

Unlike the Android move, however, BlackBerry’s decision to bring BBM cross-platform comes with its own set of risks. Despite BlackBerry’s shrinking smartphone influence, BBM remains one of the central, most enticing things about owning a BlackBerry, and it’s possible that BlackBerry could cannibalize its BB10 ambitions while trying to increase its BBM user numbers.

Still, considering how successful BBM has been over the years, maybe we should give BlackBerry the benefit of the doubt. This, could after all, turn out to be one the savviest things the company ever done: While the initial set of Android and iOS BBM functionality will be limited to chat, BlackBerry also plans to adds features like screen sharing and video chat as time goes on.

Those are the sort of things that could give BlackBerry the edge over its newer competitors. While WhatsApp and company are attracting the users, it’s BlackBerry that has the experience. The question is whether experience alone will be enough.

Bringing BBM is both smart and inevitable – but it may also be happening a few years too late.

Augmented reality and 3D printing, while very different technologies, circle around the same general concept: bridging the gap between the physical world and the digital world. 3D printing makes the digital physical, and augmented reality enhances the physical world with digital overlays.

So what happens when you combine them? This question was at the heart of a project created by Dutch new media artist Sander Veenhof and designer Joris van Tubergen, who fused the worlds of 3D printing and augmented reality in a really interesting way.

The concept, dubbed the “UltimARker”, allows 3D printer owners to get a real-time preview of their 3D designs as their devices create them. Along with the design overlay, the UltimARker (which is a play on the name of the Ultimaker 3D printer and “AR” or “augmented reality”) also displays information like how long the printer’s been at work, and, in theory, how long it will take a job to complete. You can see how this works in the video below.

While the project doesn’t seem to have all that many practical applications yet, it is a very interesting proof of concept of what happens when you combine two technologies that don’t seem to have very much in common. With the idea of augmented reality glasses and 3D printing both becoming increasingly popular, you can expect to see projects like this a lot more often.

Here’s a link to the project’s Thingiverse page.

If you’re not a fan of the polycarbonate frames of Nokia’s Lumia phones, the company’s latest device should make you stand up and cheer.

This morning, Nokia announced the Lumia 925, its latest and arguably most well-designed smartphone yet. A slightly upgraded follow-up to the Lumia 928, the Lumia 925 comes with a slimming, attractive aluminum frame. Translation: It’s nice, and while I haven’t held it yet, the device’s aluminum exterior reminds me of the HTC One, which we’re very, very fond of.

As far as specifications go, the 139-gram Lumia 925 comes with a 4.5-inch (1280 x 768) display, a dual-core processor, and a 8.7-megapixel camera that Nokia says takes sharp photos even in low-light situations.

In fact, of all the Lumia 925′s features, it’s that camera functionality that Nokia seems most intent on pushing. Along with the formidable camera hardware,the Lumia 925 comes with Smart Cam, and app that captures  photos in bursts of ten and lets users chose the best shot. It’s a feature that we’ve seen in a number of recent Android devices, and one that should make the Lumia’s photography situation a pretty good one.

While the Lumia 925 clearly stands on its own hardware-wise, the one drawback with anything Lumia these days is the still-underdeveloped Windows Phone, which is preventing devices like the Lumia 925 from being an instant buy for me. Hopefully Microsoft can improve the situation — at least for Nokia’s sake.

The Lumia 925, which is being released globally, should hit T-Mobile at some point in June.

While there’s a lot of talk about how Google Glass could one day find use in hospitals, hackers are creating that future today.

A group of programmers has created an app for Glass that doctors could use to pull up patient files just by looking at their faces. The app, dubbed MedRefGlass, is still in its early stages, but it showcases a potential future for Glass that’s not just interesting but also extremely useful.

“Some people I talked to said hospitals are full of very busy people, often with their hands full, working with a lot of information — so Google Glass making it wearable is especially looked forward to there,” Lance Nanek, one of MedRefGlass creators, said on his blog.

In addition to face recognition, MedRefGlass also enables doctors to create patient folders by voice, take photos, and add voice notes.  The future of hospitals, it seems, is (mostly) hands-free.

Watch the video below to get a better idea of how the app works.

Photo: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

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One of the great fears in the 3D printing community is that overeager politicians will use concerns over 3D printed guns to regulate 3D printers themselves.

That fear may soon be realized. State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) says he wants regulation that would track 3D printers and figure out what people are doing with them. This means measures like background checks and a system that would force printer owners to register their devices before they can use them.

The source of Yee’s concerns is, of course, the Liberator, the 3D-printed firearm Defense Distributed announced last week (and was forced to take from its website soon after).

“We must be proactive in seeking solutions to this new threat rather than wait for the inevitable tragedies this will make possible,” Yee said in a press release .

Yee is no stranger to the gun debate. The state senator has been on the most outspoken critics of assault weapons, which he proposed legislation to ban last year. “It is extremely important that individuals in the state of California do not own assault weapons. I mean that is just so crystal clear — there is no debate, no discussion,” he told CBS San Francisco last May.

But while Yee’s attitudes toward assault weapons seems pretty well grounded, there are more than a few problems with his desire to regulate 3D printers. For one, while 3D printing is a relatively new technology, it doesn’t give bad guys any tools they didn’t already have access to. If you really want to create a gun in your garage, there are plenty of existing ways for you to do it that don’t require a 3D printer.

The other problem with Yee’s idea is that … well, it doesn’t make much sense. The 3D printer is closer to the personal computer than the AK-47, which makes forcing owners to register them seem excessive. (This assumes that the 3D printer can even be regulated, a notion that’s still up for debate.)

Even prominent anti-3D-printed gun advocate Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) didn’t go as far as to implicate 3D printers themselves in a recent letter. For him, it was all about the undetectable nature of the plastic firearms, not what created them. That, as Public Knowledge vice president Michael Weinberg pointed out, was a welcome sign that the 3D printed gun debate was maturing.

Fortunately for the 3D printing community, Yee says he isn’t quite sure how his regulation would work — which means that your 3D printer is safe, at least for now.

Cody R. Wilson is disappointed.

Sitting in front of him at a conference in New York City are fifty or so 3D printing enthusiasts, investors, and reporters, all of whom are eager to hear what the face of the 3D printed gun movement has to say about his dangerous new pastime.

But there’s one problem: The room is half empty. Wilson was expecting more interest, more animosity.

“This is bizarre to me. I’ll have to think about what this means,” Wilson said at the podium, mostly to himself.

Wilson’s disappointment is perhaps understandable: Over the past year, the 25 year-old law student has become the face of the budding, controversial 3D-printed gun movement. Reception to this, however, has been less than positive. Wilson’s exploits have not only upset those in the 3D printing world, but they’ve also been severe enough to warrant death threats, questioning from the U.S. government, and a persistent concern that he may one day have to flee the country.

Like most troublemakers, Cody Wilson lives for the fight and the controversy (though the more cynical take is that just likes the attention).”I want that feeling of opposition. That animates me,” he told me.

That opposition is in great supply these days. Earlier this week, Wilson unveiled the Liberator, the first gun created entirely with a 3D printer. The gun’s only metal components are its firing pin and a slug of steel designed to set off metal detectors.

Within hours of the news,Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) responded, writing a letter expressing his distaste for what Wilson had created.

“When I started talking about the issue of plastic firearms months ago, I was told the idea of a plastic gun is science fiction. Now that this technology is proven, we need to act now to extend the ban [on] plastic firearms,” Israel said.

Israel wasn’t alone. Days later, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) also chimed in, confirming that he would support legislation to ban 3D-printed firearms.

Source: Defense Distributed

Cody Wilson’s Liberator was both groundbreaking and controversial. (Source: Defense Distributed)

The worst of the opposition came just a few days ago, when the U.S. State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Compliance ordered Wilson to remove the Liberator design files from his site. Wilson, however, didn’t seem too perturbed: The files had already been downloaded over 100,000 times. They were everywhere.

“Because the files are all over the Internet, the Pirate Bay has it — to think this can be stopped in any meaningful way is to misunderstand what the future of distributive technologies is about,” Wilson told BetaBeat.

The U.S. government still isn’t letting Defense Distributed host the files, but Cody Wilson’s mission to distribute them is already complete.

3D printing your way to freedom

While much of the talk on Defense Distributed focuses on firearms, Wilson says the effort is about so much more. ”This project is a way for me to do everything I was ever interested in all at the same time. I want to represent this position in a very pure, forceful way, and I think we did it,” he said.

To understand that position, you first have to understand the idea of “crypto-anarchy,” which holds that the most effective route to political freedom is a combination of unhindered access to information protected by the hard math of cryptography. Wilson, a crypto-anarchist himself, argues that everyone has a right to download their own firearms regardless of how many governmental bodies say they shouldn’t.

Cody Wilson, a known troublemaker, lives to create headaches for regulators. (Photo: Ricardo Bilton/VentureBeat)

That’s where 3D printers come in. Because the technology enables us to digitize and replicate physical objects, 3D printers give crypto-anarchists (or even just gun enthusiasts) a powerful new tool to circumvent governmental control: Once people digitize and disseminate 3D gun files, it becomes a lot harder for law enforcement to regulate them — which is exactly Wilson’s goal. Defense Distributed is blurring the line between gun regulation and censorship by making guns information rather than just objects.

The 3D-printed gun movement isn’t about guns, then, but about what guns represent. As Wilson noted in a Reddit AMA last month, guns are soaked with symbolism.“Printed guns aren’t even proven technology and are extremely impractical devices from my experience. But there is a symbolic advantage to the individual in being at least capable of printing one,” he said.

Click, print, kill?

Keep in mind that we’re talking about guns here. Is Wilson prepared for the possibility of someone one day using his inventions to kill?

”I recognize that this tool might be used to harm people. That’s what it is — it’s a gun,” he told Forbes this week. While that isn’t the most morally sound stance, it’s clear that Wilson is beyond concerns over the harm his inventions could cause.

More, Wilson doesn’t argue against claims that his project will give people increased access to guns because giving people increased access to guns — digital or otherwise–  is his organization’s mission:

“[Defense Distributed's goal is] to defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, through facilitating global access to, and the collaborative production of, information and knowledge related to the 3D printing of arms; and to publish and distribute, at no cost to the public, such information and knowledge in promotion of the public interest.”

Here’s the reality: Anyone who’s really looking to get their hands on a gun already has more than a few options at their disposal — including CNC-milled firearms, $2 dollar zip guns, and AK-47s created with garden shovel parts. 3D printing really isn’t giving the bad guys of the world anything they didn’t already have access to. But the tech could make procurement easier.

“This technology would probably not increase total access but rather the convenience in procuring some type of gun,” RJ Miller, a 3D-printed gun enthusiast told me.

Right now, though, 3D printing a gun is anything but easy. While getting your hands on a gun design file is as simple as a few mouse clicks, actually printing that file is almost the complete opposite, as The Atlantic’s Phillip Bump extensively details.

It won’t always be that way, of course. 3D printers are becoming more common, and Wilson is already working on improvements to the Liberator — so all of this bound to get easier. As much as politicians and gun regulation proponents hate to hear it, what Defense Distributed is working on is going to be really difficult to stop.

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zcopley/5914558006/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Like Bitcoin, Defense Distributed is all about using technology to fight regulation. (Image source: Flickr/Zcopley)

Gunning for the future

Defense Distributed, at its core, isn’t just a technical exercise in the possibilities of 3D printing; it’s a political statement meant to show governments how technology can disrupt their capability to create and enforce laws. 3D-printed guns are Wilson’s answer to Wikileaks and Bitcoin: He wants to use information to engineer both freedom and governmental impotence regardless of the possibility that bad guys will do the same.

“If we begin second-guessing every potential illicit use of a technology and restricting it from the outset because of fear, we’re not going to progress as a society,” said Michael Guslik (aka Have Blue), the mind behind the original 3D-printed lower receiver design.

The 3D-printed gun movement also means a lot to 3D printing itself, as it takes the technology’s “make anything” imperative and pushes it to its most logical extreme: If 3D printers can create whatever you think up, why not create a gun, a sex toy, or even a car?

“Why would I run a 3D printer if I can’t make the things that are worth making? 3D printing is all about unintended uses,” Wilson said.

And if all of this talk about guns is too glum for you, just know that these “unintended uses” extend beyond that of dangerous objects like firearms. Seeing as some people are printing out prosthetic hands for kids, it’s clear that 3D printing enthusiasts can take take the technology just about wherever their minds go.

Cody R. Wilson’s mind just took him to guns.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

For someone running on less than two hours of sleep, smartphone unlocking activist Sina Khanifar is feeling pretty good.

That’s because members of Congress today introduced “Unlocking Technology Act of 2013“, a new bill that would make it permanently legal for you to not only unlock your smartphone, but also circumvent the digital rights management on any device (as long as there’s no copyright infringement).

The bill comes after 114,000 people, along with the White House, decried the Librarian of Congress’s decision to outlaw smartphone unlocking last October. As one of the primary activists opposing the ban, Khanifar is, in a word, enthused. “This new bill checks all the boxes,” he told me.

Unlike previous bills (which Khanifar previously described as “Band-Aids” ) the latest bill tackles all of the largest issues activists have identified in the current laws. In addition to legalizing smartphone unlocking, the latest one also legalizes unlocking tool as well. This, Khanifar, says, is a big deal. “Every bill we’ve had so far has only tackled one piece of the issue. This one gets all of them,” he said.

California representative Zoe Lofgren, one of the bill’s proponents, says the legislation is all about consumer rights.

“Americans should not be subject to fines and criminal liability for merely unlocking devices and media they legally purchased. If consumers are not violating copyright or some other law, there’s little reason to hold back the benefits of unlocking so people can continue using their devices,” she said in a press release.

“It’s such an important consumer right to modify devices after you buy them,” Khanifar said, noting that there many hackers who have learned how their devices work by taking them apart.

Khanifar isn’t alone in his appreciation for the bill. Public Knowledge legal affairs vice president Sherwin Siy also praised it, noting it “not only makes it clear that consumers can, of course, unlock their phones without fear of legal repercussions; it also addresses a longstanding problem with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While most of our attention in the mobile world is focused on smartphones, there’s a massive opportunity for any company that can take over so-called developing markets, i.e. places where people are still mostly using relatively simple ”feature phones.”

Taking another stab at that space is Nokia, which is unveiling the colorful Asha 501, a Asha-running touchscreen phone that comes with the features of a smartphone but the $99 price of a feature phone. The device isn’t particularly flashy: Nokia’s only given it a three-inch 320 x 240 display, 2G (!) radio, and a camera without a flash —  so this is by no means a particularly high-end device.

The other, plausibly more important thing, about the Asha 501 is that it’s not running Windows Phone, which is potentially bad for Microsoft for two reasons. One, it makes it very clear that Nokia is still hesitant to invest all its resources in Windows Phone, and, two, it shows that Nokia still can’t create a cheap phone that also matches the minimum hardware requirements for Windows Phone. (Phones running Windows Phone 7 need to have displays with a resolution of at least 480 x 320, for example.)

Neither reality is great for Microsoft, because while the high-end smartphone market is cutthroat and brutal, the market for low-end smartphones in developing markets is wide open, at least for now. While Mozilla and Nokia are making some big moves in this area, Microsoft is still being left out of it.

While a lot of the focus on 3D printing these days is people can use it to take lives, the technology can be used to improve them as well.

One example of this is the Robohand, a prosthetic appendage created in part by a MakerBot 3D printer. The idea was born after Richard Van As, a South African woodworker, lost his fingers in an on-the-job accident.

Enter the 3D printer, Van As, along with prop designer Ivan Owen, used to create the Robohand, a $150 alternative to more expensive prosthetics.

With the invention, Van As and Owen could restore hand functionality to those afflicted with diseases like amniotic band syndrome, which causes children to be born without fingers and toes.

While there’s not much that I can tell you that the video below can’t say better, there are a few key takeaways here. One, while MakerBot has traditionally shown off the Replicator’s capability to print out a variety of rather useless widgets, it’s clear that the technology has use cases that extend far beyond that. 3D printing can — and clearly, has — changed lives.

Also, as Van As points out in the video, 3D printing was vital to the creation of the Robohand, which the designers were able to prototype much faster thanks to MakerBot’s technology.

“The Makerbot and being able to swap files up and down via the Internet cut our prototyping down from a week to 20 minutes. It was incredibly fast,” he said.

More notably, Van As and Owen placed the Robohand’s design files on Thingiverse, MakerBot design file repository. The move means that anyone with access to a 3D printer can download the files and create their own Robohand (though Van As recommends consulting an occupational therapist to help with the fitting of the device).

As amazing as the project is, it’s not the first of its kind. Last year a Delaware hospital developed a 3D printed exoskeleton for a 2-year-old born without use of her hands. The project, like this one, shows that there are uses for 3D printers that not even their inventors have thought of yet.

And while some have taken that idea an applied it to firearms, others are going in a different, but equally interesting direction. And we can only applaud them for that.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The last few months have been huge for T-Mobile. Not only has the company ditched the contract and smartphone subsidy, but it’s also finally completed its merger with MetroPCS.

In spite of all those big moves, however, the company’s most important news is that it’s finally started selling the iPhone, which, unsurprisingly, lots of people have been interested in buying. In fact, T-Mobile said it’s sold 500,000 of the Apple phones since they went on sale last month.

While commendable, T-Mobile’s numbers are far behind, say, the 4  and 4 .8 million iPhones Verizon and AT&T respectively sold last quarter. Still, T-Mobile’s iPhone has been on sale for less than a month, so we’ll wait until the device is around for at least a whole quarter before we judge how well T-Mobile is actually doing.

As for the rest of the company’s earnings, well, we got a good look at them a few weeks ago. It’s customer numbers are increasing (though most of those customers didn’t sign up for actual T-Mobile branded services), it’s losing fewer branded post-paid customers, and it’s revenue slid seven percent.

So is the new T-Mobile also the improved T-Mobile? We’ll have to wait a few more quarters before we can say for sure.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As with a child’s first years, every little Windows Phone development demands its own bit of fanfare.

The latest update comes from Foursquare, which is updating its Windows 8 app. The app, which Foursquare says is optimized for Nokia’s Lumia phones, adds features like lock screen notifications, voice search, and the ability to pin certain people or venues to the home screen.

The biggest improvement, however, is the app’s new Metro-fied interface, which is a significant step up from the design of its predecessor. In fact, the new Foursquare app doesn’t feel like a Foursquare app at all — it feels a Windows Phone 8 app.

That, I assume, is exactly the point. While Windows Phone 8 offers a number of things that iOS and Android don’t, the most distinctive of these features is the operating system’s design language. As a result, it’s always a big deal when developers take the time to create native, optimized versions of their apps rather then poorly port design elements from elsewhere. (It’s also a major vote of confidence: Obviously, Foursquare sees the use in taking the time to do all of this extra work, even if it did get help from Microsoft and Nokia.)

And Foursquare isn’t alone. Another big Windows Phone 8 app addition came just yesterday, when Hulu finally released a native version of its app for Microsoft’s mobile OS. The Windows 8 YouTube app also saw a big update today.

Foursquare is on a design update streak as of late, having last month updated both its iOS app and web interface to focus on core features like Explore and user ratings.

What do you get when you combine the electric car with self-driving technology? Elon Musk’s vision for the future of Tesla.

The Tesla CEO is in talks with Google to get self-driving technology into Tesla’s future cars, according to Bloomberg.

Musk, who says he prefers the term “autopilot” over “self-driving”, argues the move is a natural step in the evolution of the automobile. Still, the Tesla CEO is also quick to note that self-driving technology isn’t a priority for his company — at least not currently.

“We’re not focused on autopilot right now; we will be in the future. Autopilot is not as important as accelerating the transition to electric cars, or to sustainable transport,” he told Bloomberg.

Yeah — this happened.

One problem with the idea, at least as far as Tesla goes, is cost: Cars like the Model S already run for at least $69,000, and slapping on self-driving tech would only make things more expensive. Musk, however, is optimistic, and it’s tough to fault him for his vision — however unrealistic and zany it often feels.

Musk says that Google’s self-driving sensor system is too expensive. One alternative, he says is the camera-based system Toyota showed off earlier this year.

The other big problem is, of course, safety, which is a concern for any company looking to invest in self-driving cars. The technology is still unproven, and if car makers are correct, it’s going to be at least a decade until it’s ready for widespread adoption.

Google isn’t commenting on Musk’s remarks, but considering that Google’s Sergey Brin himself is a (hot pink) Model S owner, it’s fair to assume Google is very much interested in helping Musk along. Both Brin and fellow Google founder Larry Page are also Tesla investors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

When it comes to smartphones, Nokia is nothing if not very, very prolific.

The company is teasing its newest device, the long-rumored Lumia 928, in the latest issue of Vanity Fair. While there aren’t too many details to share, Nokia’s stressing the device’s PureView camera, which it says thrives in low-light situations. (The device will also come with a Carl Zeiss lens.)

The other notable detail here is the massive Verizon logo slapped onto the phone in the print advert, which confirms that the Lumia 928 will indeed be Verizon’s first high-end Windows phone. Fortunately, that logo is gone in the online version of the print ad, which hopefully means it won’t appear on the final version of the phone itself.

Nokia is expected to officially announce the phone at a press event in London next week.

The Lumia 928′s launch comes as things are starting to look up for Nokia, which sold 5.6 million Lumias last quarter. That’s a 27 percent increase from the same time last year and poof that maybe, just maybe, people are buying these Lumia things after all.

If you’ve experienced the first-person shooter Bioshock Infinite, then you probably know that while you play as Booker DeWitt, its actual main character is Elizabeth, your perpetual companion and emotional anchor.

Since the beginning, BioShock creator Ken Levine has stressed that his goal was to make Elizabeth feel like anything but a video game character. And while half of that effort is good writing and voice acting, the other half is good technology: Elizabeth had to look and act real — otherwise, the Bioshock Infinite experience would fall apart.

And pulling that off, as you might expect, takes a lot of work.

“It’s actually amazing how dedicated these game developers are about making their characters as believable as possible,” Anna Zevelyov, the development director at 3D scanner maker Artec, told me.

A similar amount of effort was put into Bioshock Infinite’s technically impressive television commercial, and 3D scanning technology was a part of its production. Using Artec’s EVA scanner, Irrational Games scanned Russian cosplayer Anna Moleva, capturing, processing, and animating her facial expressions.

The result is what you see in this video:

As amazing as all of this is, 3D scanning has been around for decades — so none of this is new. But what is notable is just how cheap 3D scanners are getting.

“Scanners that would have cost $150,000 five years ago are much more affordable today. It’s still not supercheap, but it’s 90 percent cheaper than it used to be,” Zevelyov said.

For game developers — many of whom are cash-strapped and under increasing pressure to perform under strict budgets — this is significant. Expect to see lots applications of 3D scanning as time goes on.

For a good look just how much work went into creating Elizabeth, watch the video below.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If BlueStacks’ latest numbers are any indication, lots of people are interested in bridging the gap between the smartphone and PC.

BlueStacks announced today that its Android App Player has been downloaded 10 million times since its launch last March. Over four million of those installs came during the first quarter of this year, thanks largely to high-profile partnerships with PC manufacturers like Lenovo and Asus.

BlueStacks’ “LayerCake” technology lets users run Android apps on the much larger screens of their Macs and Windows PCs and tablets. And while that sounds like a fairly niche application, the niche is obviously a sizable one.

“Our story for the past year has been simple: We take the best of mobile and bring it to other devices. We’re as amazed as anyone by the traction and look forward to bringing mobile content to an even broader set of platforms,” BlueStacks CEO Rosen Sharma told VentureBeat.

Founded in 2009, BlueStacks was recently joined by VC firm Intel Capital, which invested an undisclosed amount in the company back in March.

Politicians aren’t too crazy about this whole 3D printed gun thing.

At a press conference on Sunday, New York senator Charles Schumer said he would support legislation to ban 3D printed guns like the one Defense Distributed announced on Friday (and has been teasing for quite some time).

“A terrorist, someone who’s mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon can essentially open a gun factory in their garage,” Schumer said.

Schumer joins fellow New York  politician Steve Israel, who has been one of the most vocal critics of what Defense Distributed is working on.

“When I started talking about the issue of plastic firearms months ago, I was told the idea of a plastic gun is science-fiction. Now that this technology is proven, we need to act now to extend the ban [on] plastic firearms,” he said.

While Israel and other politicians have been on the 3D printed gun case for months now, the situation has gotten a lot more dire now that Defense Distributed has created a completely plastic gun that fires real bullets.

Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson understands the dangers that could come of his controversial project. ”I recognize that this tool might be used to harm people. That’s what it is — it’s a gun,” he told both Forbes and the BBC.

The design files for Wilson’s firearm, dubbed the “Liberator”, are freely available online, which means anyone — yes, including you — can download it. For Wilson, it’s a dream fulfilled, but for gun control advocates, it’s a nightmare realized.

In case you haven’t seen what everyone’s so upset about, take a look at the video below.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The so-called post-PC world has made computer manufacturers more than a bit crazy. Laptops that used to just open and close now flip, fold, and bend backwards. Oh, and they all have touch screens.

Acer’s new Apsire R7 is a good example of how bad it’s gotten. Announced today, the device is a bizarre hybrid of laptop, desktop, and tablet that flips and folds its way out of and into each category. It’s essentially a portable, multi-touch all-in-one PC.

The R7, which starts at $1,000, comes with a 15.6-inch HD touchscreen display, which, along with its trademark “Ezel” hinge, pretty severely limits it in the portability category. So don’t expect this one to replace your Macbook Air when it goes on sale May 17 (exclusively at Best Buy, interestingly enough).

Of course, the real news here is how much the device looks like the Starship Enterprise, a similarity that probably explains why Acer teased the device alongside the latest Star Trek movie.

Acer has also announced the Iconia A1, its answer to the Nexus 7. The device, which will run for $200, comes with a 7.9-inch 1,024 x 768 display, which gives it a similar feel to the iPad mini. More notably, users of the A1 can turn the device on simply by pressing five fingers on its screen — a simple gesture that seems a lot more intuitive than pressing a button. The A1 will be available in June.

What does it mean when the world’s largest retailer of office products starts selling 3D printers? It means 3D printing has finally hit the big time.

Staples announced plans today to sell its first 3D printer, the 3D Systems Cube. With the announcement, Staples becomes the first U.S. retailer to embrace 3D printing, a technology that is slowly but surely bubbling up into mainstream consciousness.

Released last year, the Cube can print in 16 colors and is designed with 3D printing newbies in mind. 3D systems CEO Abe Reichental says the device is all about taking what Apple did to the tablet market and bringing it over to the world of 3D printing. “My assertion is that everyone can be creative if you remove all the friction and intimidation,” Reichental told me way back last year.

The device will run for $1,300 when it hits select stores in June (though its available through the Staples online store today).

While selling its first 3D printer is obviously a big deal for Staples, the move is the latest in the company’s larger effort to embrace the technology. Back in November, Staples announced that it was working with 3D printer company Mcor on a new in-store 3D printing service. That move, while limited to an initial trial run in the Netherlands, was also a major first for a company that’s known more for selling Post-It notes and paper than pushing developing technologies.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

“Creepy” is a word that often gets thrown around when we’re talking about Google Glass, somewhat rightfully, and somewhat not. Creepy, however, is mostly an emotional appeal; like Justice Potter Stewart’s views on pornography, while it’s tough to describe what “creepy” is, most of  know it when we see it. And right now, Glass is pretty creepy (and, no, Robert Scoble isn’t helping.)

But does Glass have to be creepy? Judging from the basics of how Google is advertising it — as a camera that you have strapped to you face all day, recording everything and everyone — I’d say the creepiness is unavoidable. It’s going to be a long time before people don’t automatically flinch when someone wearing Glass looks their way. And that’s going to have major effects on how fast the technology is adopted and accepted.

But while Glass seems doomed to the world of the creepy, augmented reality glasses themselves don’t have to be. This is clear judging from devices like Epson’s Moverio BT-100, a pair of augmented reality glasses that’s targeting a very different audience than Google’s catch-all Glass experiment. While Epson actually announced the device years ago, the company is trying to get its specs back into the conversation now that Glass is getting big.

Eric Mizufuka, Moverio’s product head, sums it up the Glass situation well: “Glass has been around for over a year, but Google is still struggling to say what they want to do with it. Right now it’s just photos and video,” he said.

Moverio, on the other hand, was designed with its killer app in mind: workforce training. Because the specs function as true augmented reality displays, developers can create overlays for things like car repair and thermostat installation  – basically anything that would benefit from the use of a hands-free walkthrough.

Here’s another example: Say you are a hapless plumber trying and failing to repair someone’s toilet. Rather than give up — or, worse, do a crummy job — you flip on your augmented reality specs and someone sitting at a distant computer uses  overlays to take you through the repair process step by step. It sounds farfetched, but it’s the very sort of thing companies like Scope Technologies are working on. (It’s also completely opposite of the thing that Google seems to be concerned with.)

This video gives you a good idea of how such a system would look. It’s pretty  neat.

Of course the tough thing to ignore here is that Moverio is ugly, bulky, and not all the type of thing people would want to walk around with all day. These realities would be a kiss of death if  Moverio were a consumer device, but it’s not a consumer device. This, Mizufuka argues, gives the device a bit more wiggle room in the aesthetics department.

“For a lot of enterprise applications, if a technology provides a return-on-investment, style isn’t as important. I think that’s one of the real struggles with going real heavy after the consumer market,” he said.

The same goes for the creep factor: In the commercial marketplace, people are going to be less worried about being photographed or recorded and more concerned with getting their jobs done.

The takeaway here, again, is this: Augmented reality is more than just Google Glass, even though it’s Glass that’s dominating our current discussions — and fears — of what augmented reality can be. There’s a whole world outside of Glass, and more companies than just Google are looking at it.

There’s an old adage in the menswear world that says that a cheap, well-fitted suit will always look infinitely better than an expensive, poorly fitting one.

But while the casts of shows like Mad Men and How I Met Your Mother seem to effortlessly pull off the well-dressed look, doing so for most guys tends to be too expensive, too intimidating, or too time-consuming.

Offering a solution to this sartorial snag is Tailor Truck, a mobile suit store that will use 3D scanning to create suits that are ideally, er, suited to customers’ body types.

Carlos Solorio, the co-founder of Tailor Truck parent company Arden Reed, says this is a use case that 3D scanning was made for.

“3D scanning gives us accurate measurements to the scale of millimeters. Before that it was inches, which doesn’t make sense for measuring clothing fit,” he told me.

The 3D body scanner Tailor Truck will use is powered by 14 sensors at multiple heights and angles, allowing it to measure over a million points of information.

The technology, of course, is nothing new, but plunging prices means that 3D scanning is finally getting to the point where it’s affordable for small businesses and, in some cases, individuals. (We’re seeing the same trend with 3D printing.)

Solorio wants to use the project’s eventual Kickstarter funds both to finish building the truck and to take it on a cross-country tour of cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. If Solorio is right, those cities may see a major influx of well-dressed gentlemen very soon.