DaveAlviso

Last year I locked up my bike over on Pike street for an evening out with my friends. When I came back a few hours later, both my headlight and taillight had been stolen. What a crackhead was going to do with my budget headlight I don't know, but the real problem was that I had to ride home in the middle of the night with no lights. Brad Geswein and Slava Menn had a friend in a similar situation, except unlike me, he was actually hit by a car. They decided that they'd make a bike light that was not only impossible to steal, but pretty much indestructible as well. And here it is, on Kickstarter. - DaveAlviso

Android was doing voice recognition for a long time before Siri came around, but the truth is Apple's implementation of voice commands made Google's look limited and out of date. And that hasn't changed in the last few months, despite a few Siri-like apps that have attempted to cash in on the "talking at your phone" craze. This app, called Utter!, is the first one that actually makes voice control on Android look better than Siri. It hooks into applications, handles compound and stacked phrases, and may actually be useful. - DaveAlviso

First, a word of caution: the Manhattan Research survey that yielded this data was performed online, so that's going to skew the results straight away. But even taking that into account, it's powerful data. According to the survey, just over a quarter of all doctors in the EU — primary care and specialist — use an iPad for professional purposes. That's a big number for a device primarily aimed at content consumption and not hardened against a hospital environment. - DaveAlviso

In 2009, Arjun Dev Arora left Yahoo to start ReTargeter In the interview above, he explains what retargeting is and why it matters. He also talks about building his company culture, the shift in how people are buying advertising and social ad platforms like Facebook and Twitter. - DaveAlviso

Have you ever wanted to shoot a stream of liquid powerful enough to propel a small car 35 miles an hour for a hundred feet? You know you have. This is the BeAmazing Geyser Car and we got an eyes-on at Toy Fair 2012 where this thing just about stole the show. - DaveAlviso

Windows Phone is great. Really, if you're a phone geek and you haven't played with it before, you owe it yourself to give it a shot. Windows Mobile on the other hand... wasn't. It was arguably good enough for the time, but despite Microsoft's efforts to breathe new life into it, Windows Mobile ultimately fell into disuse while more robust mobile operating systems took over. Thanks to a new project from Windows Phone hacker Cotulla though, Windows Mobile is back and running smoother than ever from inside Microsoft's modern smartphone OS. - DaveAlviso

This guest post was written by Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu, a site that serves as a platform for academics to share their research papers and to interact with each other. Note that Price is not unbiased in this discussion — should the Research Works Act pass, it would decrease the number of papers the site would be able to easily distribute among researchers. But, as he explains, his viewpoint is shared by many academics. Poorly thought-through copyright bills seem to be popular in Congress these days. Congress is currently considering a bill called “The Research Works Act”, whose purpose is to restrict public access to publicly-funded research. The bill is sponsored by large academic publishers who are keen to keep all research, including publicly-funded research, behind paywalls in perpetuity. - DaveAlviso

After a week of confused coverage around which mobile app developers access user address books and how they do it, we are finally getting a product-level resolution. Apple says today (in time to beat back some inquiring congressmen) that it will start requiring developers to ask for explicit user permission in order to access these contacts. The new interface, slated for its next iOS operating system release, will provide a permissions notification to users after they install an app, similar to how it currently requires users to approve location sharing or push notifications. This change will add some arguably unnecessary friction to users of apps that pull address books -- and a lot of developers will be affected, as 11% of free iOS apps were accessing address books as of the start of last year, according to one study. - DaveAlviso