Author: Danielle

Connected cars and autonomous vehicles may be the future but we are a still a ways off from the general public accepting their presence on public roads. According to a recent survey from AAA, 3 in 4 Americans are afraid of fully self-driving vehicles and this shows there is still a great deal of work to be done.

One of the companies currently trying to improve the security of connected cars as well as the Internet of Things (IoT) is BlackBerry which recently received $40m in funding from the Canadian government to further develop its QNX platform. To better understand the issues surrounding autonomous vehicles and connected cars, TechRadar Pro spoke with Grant Courville, VP of Products and Strategy at the company’s QNX group.

• Until your car can drive itself, stay safe on the road with the best dash cams

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When Huawei P30 deals first hit the market after the device’s release, we waxed lyrical to a rather obsessive degree about two deals in particular. While these offers were impressive enough on their release, they have both just got even better thanks to another price drop.

With these contracts from Mobiles.co.uk you can pay either £26 a month or pay a slightly cheaper £24, both getting you 5GB of data and neither pushing the upfront cost any higher than £40.

That makes these tariffs better than the top Galaxy S9 deal, Huawei P20 Pro deal and a whole lot cheaper than any iPhone 8 deal – a phone that came out almost two years ago.

So if you want to grab this brand new phone at one of the best flagship prices on the market, scroll down to see these deals in full. Or if they don’t quite fufill what you’re wanting from a phone, check out our guide to the best mobile phone deals. 

Fitness trackers are a dime a dozen these days, and so it’s hard for even established players like Withings to stand out. The Withings Move does its best by offering core features at a friendly price and letting the design do the talking – with a bit of help from you.

That’s because while the standard issue Moves look attractive enough, the real selling point here is customisability: you can get a Move in a load of different colour combinations and even pick the design of the watch face itself.

Price and availability

The Withings Move is out now, and costs for the base model, which is available in five different colour combinations. You can  or just grab it from Amazon if you prefer.

If you’re in the UK or Europe you can also , picking the design of the dial and the colour of the body, activity tracker dial, and strap from a set range of options. You’ll have to pay a little more for the privilege, but not a lot – a customised version will cost you £69.95. The feature will come to the US too, but isn’t available at the time of writing.

In terms of price, the Move is in line with other simple fitness trackers – the obvious comparison is the £69.99/$69.96 Fitbit Inspire, currently the cheapest product in the Fitbit line. The challenge at this price point is that for only a little more you can get a device with a heartrate sensor – the Fitbit Inspire HR is £89.99/$99.95 – which adds an important bit of extra functionality.

Withings is also releasing the Move ECG, a version of the watch that will include an electrocardiogram and heartrate sensor. That’s not out yet though – it’s still awaiting medical certification – and will cost a little more. It also won’t have any of the customisation options – a downside of rigorous certification requirements.

Design

The Withings Move looks more or less like a standard sporty wristwatch. The slim body comes with a rubber-y wrist strap, and is lightweight and unobtrusive enough that you’ll almost forget it’s there. There’s a single button on the right side, and that’s about it.

It’s available off the shelf in five colour combinations: a black body with black strap (pictured), black body with a mint strap, and a white body with mint, blue, or coral straps.

Head into the customisation and you get a lot more options: nine different strap colours, ten activity tracker dial colours, five case colours, and thirteen different faces ranging from plain colours to colourful Venetian speck designs.

Build quality is mostly solid, and the strap is comfortable, but whatever plastic the face is made of is definitely a bit too soft. After only a week or two of day-to-day wear it’s already picked up a few scuffs and scratches, and it’s only going to get worse. It’s not too bad – nothing that gets in the way of using the thing – but if you worry about keeping your tech pristine then this might get on your nerves.

The face boasts two dials: the standard watch face and a smaller central dial that goes up to 100. This is your step count for the day, measured not in steps (100 would be fairly manageable even for the laziest amongst us) but in percentage. That means you can use the accompanying app to set any step goal you’d like, and get real-time updates on your progress from your wrist.

Once you hit 100 percent the dial resets to zero and begins to climb again, so it will still track your progress beyond your goal. It then automatically resets to zero at midnight every night.

There’s other functionality baked in the Move of course, but Withings keeps it all in the app, freeing the watch itself to be simple, minimalist, and easy to read. That means the fitness tracking never gets in the way of the timekeeping, and this is a device you’d be happy to use to replace your existing watch, rather than merely supplement it.

Fitness tracking

So beyond how it looks, what does the Move actually do?

The core fitness tracking is the previously mentioned step counter – there’s a reason that’s the only bit of data that sits on the watch itself. The Move will record your steps during the day and sync that data with the accompanying Health Mate app, which lets you change your daily goal, get more detailed info on your days steps, and look at historic data.

Automatic exercise detection means the Move will track your walking, running, cycling, or swimming by default, but you can also manually activate a workout mode to track those or other activities, running from tennis and squash to weightlifting, yoga, and even windsurfing.

Holding down on the button for a second begins the workout, resetting both dials to zero. The regular watch hands then become timers, recording how long you’ve been exercising, while the step counter displays only your steps during that period. Holding the button again ends the workout while a quick double-tap lets you see the time and your overall step count before returning to the workout.

Head into the app after you’re done and you’ll find a recording of the duration, distance and pace (if applicable) and an estimate of your calorie burn – though without a heartrate sensor you should definitely take this with a pinch of salt. As long as you keep your phone with you you’ll also get a map of your route on a run/walk/cycle, driven by the phone’s GPS.

The Move won’t just track your activity though – it’s also great at inactivity. Wear it overnight and it’ll track your sleep, giving you info on the duration and depth of your rest. It then factors in how regular your sleep schedule is to give you a daily ‘Sleep Score’ along with feedback on how you can improve it.

You can also take advantage of that sleep monitoring for your alarm – you can use the app to set an alarm window, and the Move will try to detect the optimum moment in your sleep cycle to nudge you awake.

You can link the app up to the likes of Google Fit or Apple Health, along with more specific apps like RunKeeper or MyFitnessPal, so it’s easy enough to keep all your health data connected. Data should in turn sync from the Move to your phone automatically every few hours, but this seemed a little shaky on my Huawei P30 – though opening the app forces a sync, so as long as you keep an eye on the app every now and then you shouldn’t lose any data.

I’ve already mentioned swim tracking, but in case that didn’t give it away, the Move is waterproof. It should be able to survive up to 50m depth – so it’ll definitely survive a few laps in the pool or a shower. Pressing the button underwater breaks the seal and risks damaging it though, and prolonged saltwater exposure isn’t good for it either.

There’s one final edge that the Move has over most of its rivals: battery life. Forget counting in days or even weeks, the Move is expected to last a whopping 18 months at a time, so you really won’t ever have to think about charging it or worrying about it dying.

The downside is that it uses a standard CR2430 watch battery, and to replace it you’ll probably need to go to a jeweller or watch shop – especially since botching the job yourself could accidentally ruin the waterproofing.

Verdict

The Move is a slick fitness tracker from Withings that’s ideal for anyone who wants to keep things simple. It only does the basics, but it does them well, and the analogue form factor keeps things clean and easy to read.

18-month battery life is obviously a major selling point, and the customisable designs are a big appeal too. A heartrate sensor would really seal the deal, but it’s an understandable omission at this price point, and with waterproofing, sleep tracking, and great app support, everything else about the Move is easy to love.

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With the release of a range of brilliant new Huawei and Samsung devices still fresh in our minds, the world of mobile phone deals has never had more possibility. But if these award winning new devices aren’t enough to convince you now is the time to switch phone contracts, maybe an incentive from phone retailer Carphone Warehouse might sway you. 

The massive UK phone retailer is offering up a generous voucher offer with any Carphone Warehouse phone deal ordered before May 5. The value of the gift card is £25 and gives you the option between Uber Eats, H&M, M&S or Tesco – something for everyone.

So if you want to earn yourself a saving on your new phone deal, scroll down to see how to make use of this promotion and check out our guide to the best Carphone Warehouse deals. Make sure you go through this link first as it will not count if you buy the phone contract first.

PLEASE NOTE that you will not be able to claim your voucher if you click through and buy straight from the site. In order to make sure you do not lose out on that reward, you must register at this link first and follow the below instructions.

How to claim your eGift Card:

From The Jetsons to Blade Runner via The Fifth Element, flying cars are a mainstay of science fiction, and for Australian entrepreneur Matt Pearson, owning one was a boyhood dream.

Pearson is the founder of Alauda Racing, and creator of Airspeeder – a new sports league specifically for what he calls “Ferraris of the sky”. Manned drones will compete head-to-head, streaking around a track at speeds up to 200kmph. The company has already presented showcases featuring three-quarter scale prototypes, and will unveil its first full-scale prototype at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in July. 

It’s an incredibly ambitious project, but Pearson makes it sound like the most natural thing in the world. His first business was a software startup, but he found his attention drawn skyward.

“I wanted to do something a little bit bigger, so I founded a space startup aiming to put small satellites in space for internet connectivity,” he tells TechRadar. “Australia and a lot of other parts of the world really suffer from terrible internet connectivity, and there’s a lot of industrial equipment and things outside of cities that need to be connected, and so I started working on that and last year we put four satellites in orbit, which is pretty cool.”

The company spend five or six years getting a foothold in the space industry, but again, Pearson got itchy feet. “I thought, well, that that seems to be going well enough,'” he says. “Let’s do something really crazy and found a flying car manufacturer.”

The driving experience – airborne

Pearson’s ultimate aim is to take flying cars mainstream and make them accessible to everyone – as easy to pilot as a terrestrial car is to drive – but the technology is still in its infancy.

“We formed a company called Alauda Aeronautics and we set out to scale drone technology bigger and bigger and bigger, and see if we could turn it into something that could carry a person,” he says.

“This was before everyone else came out – before EHang revealed itself to the world, CityAirbus, Volocopter – so when we started talking about how we were going to build flying cars, everyone thought ‘OK, you’re certifiably crazy’. But after about a year of work, articles started to come out all over the place, and suddenly they went ‘Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.'”

Alauda’s flying cars will be different, though. Companies like Boeing and Bell are are working on flying taxis as an easy way to get from A to B.

“This is what revolution looks like, and it’s because of autonomy,” said John Langford, president and chief executive officer of Boeing subsidiary Aurora Flight Sciences at the launch of Boeing NeXt – a prototype air taxi. “Certifiable autonomy is going to make quiet, clean and safe urban air mobility possible.” 

Such projects are cool, Pearson says, but he wants to preserve the driving experience as much as possible. His vision of a flying car is something that’s as simple to operate as an ordinary sedan, but airborne: “instead of the complexity of flying a helicopter or plane, having something that’s easy to control as a car that anyone can drive, but through the air.”

A Ferrari of the sky

A totally new form of transport involves a lot of research and development, but Pearson had a plan – a way to step on the accelerator and drive the technology forward.

“I really wanted to build something really, really exciting,” he explains. “Something necessarily expensive. And the very first version we created was going to be a very low volume, high cost vehicle. So I thought well, let’s start with a sports car or, you know, or hyper sports car – essentially a Ferrari of the sky.”

Rather than waiting 10 years for the aerial mobility industry to catch up, Alauda set about building a market for flying cars from first principles with a dedicated racing league.

“Since the beginning of motoring you’ve had racing, and so much good stuff comes out competition, right?” Pearson says. “You have enormous amount of money and expertise and talent just poured into pushing the technology further and further. So that really made a lot of sense.

“And we’ve seen things like Formula One spinning off Formula E, drone racing has come up, Roborace has come up – they’re trying to find the next step in racing. And we figured merging those things into electric vehicle racing makes total sense.

“I always say that building a race around this, you capture an enormous audience. We build a market for our vehicle at Alauda.”

That market is Airspeeder – a prestige sport featuring four-meter-long electric vehicles racing head-to-head in some of the world’s hottest locations.

“it captures the motorsport audience,” says Pearson. “It also captures the esports and the drone-racing audience, and I always say ‘Who is not going to watch a flying car race?’ 

Taking flight in 2020

The showcase at Goodwood in July will mark the start of a new stage for Alauda and Airspeeder. Manned test flights will take place later this year, and the team are hard at work ensuring the vehicle meets safety standards.

“You see a lot of things on YouTube, like people hovering a lawn chair, or hovering a bathtub or whatever,” says Pearson, “but we’re doing something quite different. If you want to do something for performance you need much bigger motors, bigger propellers, a lot more power.”

Alauda is working closely with regulators to make sure it’s playing by the rules. As Pearson notes, certifying a vehicle is one thing, but certifying it for sport is something else entirely. The company is working to a tough timeframe, but it’s determined to do everything by the book.

It’s also in talks with big landmark sponsors and broadcasters for the first world championships, which are scheduled for next year. Pearson isn’t giving too much away just yet, but he says things are taking shape and Goodwood really marks the kick-off.

One thing Alauda’s not struggling with is finding pilots to strap themselves in for some serious G-forces.

“There’s this really interesting mix of people who are current motorsport racing drivers, drone pilots and then ex-military people as well,” Pearson says. “But we also get a surprising number of people who are just like, ‘Sign me up! When can I get in one? Let’s do this!’”

For more info, keep an eye on Airspeeder.com. From July, things are going to move fast.

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Marketing is arguably the most vital lifeline of any business; it is and has always been an integral part of how business gets done. Developing the best product the world has ever seen is all well and good, but without proper marketing, the product might never get to the market or perform so badly the business will have to shut down. With the widespread adoption of technology in carrying out a lot of our day to day activities, technology has opened a new frontier for marketers to get their products to the target audience. 

Digital marketing, which focuses majorly on marketing using technological tools, is not just a buzzword; it is now a behemoth in the marketing world. With predictions of marketers spending over $375 Billion on digital adverts by the time the year 2021 rolls in, it is clear to see it is actually a big deal.

A crazy reality of the world we live in is how fast technology evolves. We have moved on from a world where mobile phones were novelties to one where we carry around smartphones with processing power greater than the computers used to put the first men on the moon. So, the $375 Billion question is, how will technology influence the future of marketing in 2019?

Branding

Small and large organizations have found several ways to use technology in the launch, promotion, and awareness of their brands. 

With innovations such as electronic billboards and the internet, it is now easier for brands to optimize their primary touch points, thereby fostering positive relationships between them and their target audiences.

Customer service

The use of tech to enhance customer relationships is also scoring significant points across the world of business. Back in the days, it used to take a lot to identify potentially harmful customer service red flags. 

Today, the ability to monitor brand conversations in real time and also attend to PR issues before they become full-blown controversies is a big boost in the world of customer/public relations.

Feedback

Given how vital the need for interactions between brands and customers is, one other thing that technology has added to the mix is the immediate feedback.

Through media such as internet surveys, social media, live video sharing and so on, brands are now able to know which of their products or services should be scrapped or improved upon even before such products/services are released into the market for public consumption. This kind of interactions also breeds trust between brands and their customers and technology is a big part of that.

Reach

The sheer number of potential customers that can be reached by brands via the help of technology is staggering. Organizations in the corporate world are capitalizing on this to try and establish competitive advantages over their competitors. Technology has taken over the way brands develop contact with their target audience, and 2019 will only make the competition even fiercer. 

The world has largely gone away from using old media like TV, radio, and print to reach the target audience, where the people are nowadays is online, on social media. As of March 2019, Facebook recorded 2.38 billion monthly users, compare this to the 23.2 million views Roseanne, the TV show with the highest viewership in 2018, had. The gap between the two is astronomical. It is only reasonable to embrace the platform where you have the highest possible reach and find a way to utilize it optimally. 

Categories of tech models used in marketing

While the use of technology in marketing is not limited to the areas mentioned above, of more importance to a marketer of this new world are the specifics of the technological models and categories involved. This is because aspiring modern marketers must have an in-depth knowledge of the evolving terrain to make it on the field. I shall examine some of the categories below:

Artificial intelligence (AI) – AI is the self-development and efficiency improvement of machines to perform human tasks with little or no room for errors. With regards to marketing, it helps a lot of businesses gather more insights into the type of audiences their marketing strategies attract by recommendations, engines, predictive search, and chatterbox. AI is guaranteed to play perhaps the most crucial role in marketing going forward, as is the case already.

Internet of things (IoT) – The IoT is a network of physical devices, digital machines and other objects that allow for a smooth transfer of data over the network without any real-time interactions. This will improve on the way marketers gain insights and understanding of their consumer base.

Digital data – To marketers, data is life. Businesses use insight from data to know what the users are more into, their likes and interests. This can help businesses to draft plan B’s to salvage certain situations. The internet is a goldmine for data miners, and the ease of collecting, evaluating and using such to plan future marketing campaigns is a marketer’s dream.

Virtual reality (VR) – This will continue to be at the forefront in 2019 what with the array of fascinating new practical applications. This will no doubt be the key to distributing as much content as possible via digital channels as well as enhance user experience no matter the costs in future digitalization.

Numerous examples abound in the world of marketing of how these technological models have been used to optimize marketing campaigns. 

For example, the Alexa Lost, Her Voice campaign by Amazon, aired initially at the 2018 Superbowl event used the power of voice and video technology to win the hearts of over 47 million viewers who came in contact with the ad spanning the various channels on which it was distributed. 

Also, eBay and Myer brokered a partnership that resulted in the launch of a Virtual Reality inspired tech that let Australian users browse over 12,500 products using gaze recognition tech. Cherry Ripe also demonstrated how data insights could be used to optimize marketing campaigns with its OOH ad campaign.

Impact of technology on marketing

Attracts and converts customers. Once the ad is catchy, there’s a hundred percent tendency that it would attract and convert more customers.

 VR and AR are both used by advertisers and marketers for short-form storytelling for brands and companies; both technologies allow for interactive experiences to be created.

 It closes the loop between print and digital by helping businesses bring their audiences into a virtual storefront where they bring the real world into a digital reality customizing everything.

Exploration of new products and services; Imagine a world where everyone reads reviews or looks at photos before clicking on them.

Looking to the future

In 2019 and beyond, the business industry will continue to focus on mobile and optimized content with the number of smartphone users globally now up to over 3 billion. With regards to online trade and commerce, businesses must react and optimize digital marketing. The upgrade to 5G network connections will enable speedy running of business marketing and transactions. 

More technologies and trends will rise to the fore, allowing business owners to make better marketing choices that will bring about progressive and thinking forward goals and increase consumer base. However it goes, you can rest assured that we will continue to keep you updated.

Guy Sheetrit , CEO at Over The Top SEO

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