Facial Recognition App to Find Missing Children

Facial recognition software can have many useful applications, most notably for online identification purposes and secure access to a location or an account. A new app is now taking this technology even further, using it to help find and identify missing persons.

The facial recognition app was developed in China, with the purpose of helping find missing children, but the software could be successfully used in any other country.

The app was developed jointly by advertising agency JWT China and Baby Back Home, a missing children listings website. The facial recognition software is designed to help identify any missing or kidnapped children and is based on the idea that anybody using the app can become a search volunteer.

Approximately 20,000 children disappear in the world’s most populated country every year. Most of these children end up begging in the street or are sold into slavery or prostitution. And in a country the size of China, it is almost impossible to actually find any of these missing kids.

And this is where the facial recognition app comes in. Users of the app can take photos of children they think might be lost with their phone. The application will analyze the photo using facial recognition software and will run the image against a missing persons database, looking for a match. In case a match is found, the missing child’s family is notified.

JWT China and Baby Back Home hope that anybody using a camera phone will download and use this application. In the first week after the launch, the app has been downloaded 20,000 times. What’s even more impressive is that in the same week, two children were found and reunited with their families with the help of the facial recognition application.

Another part of the JWT-Baby Back Home campaign consists of spreading awareness of the plight of so many families with missing children. To achieve this, the organizations set up several interactive sculptures in major cities across China. The plaster sculptures were installed in areas that are frequently visited by families. When somebody takes a photo of a sculpture they can view the story of a missing child or their parents’ emotional pleas for help.

[Image via Mashable]

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Review: iTunes Folder Watch does what it promises

R-Kaid 42 Wooden Retro Console for Nostalgic Gamers

Do you miss some nice joystick-driven arcade gaming like you used to enjoy back in the 1980s or ‘90s? Apparently you’re not the only one. A Swedish design company is trying to breathe new life into arcade gaming with an amazing two-player wooden retro console.

Love Hultén’s R-Kaid 42 (read Arcade for two) not only comes with 20,000 arcade gaming titles, but also has a very elegant design that makes it a beautiful addition to any home.

On the outside, the arcade system looks like an old wooden box skillfully crafted by hand. The 3x7x13 inch box is made of dark walnut and has some eye-catching brass fittings. The entire assembly is held together by strong magnets and it opens to reveal a console with two controllers.

The R-Kaid 42 is built around a regular PC rig that packs a CPU of 1.8 GHz, 4GB RAM and 32 or 64 GB of SSD storage, specs that should be more than enough to handle the 20,000 arcade titles dating back to the 80s or 90s. Designers did not specify the make and model of the CPU.

If you want to play a game, you will first have to unpack the unit from the wooden box state, but this process is very simple and takes little time. The R-Kaid 42 practically consists of four sections: the actual console, a storage area for various accessories and two joystick pads that are charged via USB.

The system is sold with a screwdriver, so you literally won’t need anything else to get going. With the accompanying screwdriver, you will be able to easily screw-in the joysticks to get the unit ready for action. Connect the arcade to a monitor or a TV set with the supplied video cable and you’re ready to go.

When you turn it on, the R-Kaid 42 displays an arcade interface with over 20,000 titles to choose from, for many hours of nostalgic, old-school gaming pleasure.

As expected, this retro gaming console that doubles as a handsome wooden art object has an impressive price tag of around $1,000. Which is a lot in an age where the latest gaming consoles cost less than half that sum. But the R-Kaid 42 is more than that, it is a beautifully wrapped gaming system that you buy for its sentimental value and won’t throw away when the next-gen model comes out.

What do you think of the R-Kaid 42? Would you buy this good looking wooden retro console?

[Images via joyme]

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Samsung's Galaxy Ace 3 underscores LTE's burgeoning move to simpler phones

What Android Has That iOS Hasn’t

The comparisons between Android and iOS are numerous. Perhaps the most notable is that iOS has always been designed for ease but not customisable. With iPhone users demanding more personalisation, things might be about to change. Tim Cook said at D11 “I think you will see us open up more in the future, but not to the degree that we put the customer at risk of having a bad experience.” In this article we’ll look at what Apple could do to help iOS catch up with Android.

Keyboard Replacement

The default keyboard on iOS is the most common requested customisation from iOS users. A typewriter keyboard on a tiny touch screen is probably not the most efficient way to type, especially one-handed. Android on the other hand, allows you to replace the default version with third-parties keyboards like Swiftkey (it learns how you type to predict your words) and the popular Swype gesture typing keyboard. Both of these can drastically speed up communication.

Widgets

The iOS lock screen and home screen haven’t really changed and with all the real-time feeds of information available, it makes iOS look static and somewhat boring. Android lets you pull all the data you want from different apps and displays it across your lock and home screens. So although Apple have sought to keep the interface consistent, experienced users are ready to customise their own.

Cross-App Functionality, Data Sharing & Defaults

There are no boundaries between apps with Android. You can easily share information and content with someone else, sending photos from one editing app to another for example. Android also lets you pick which app you want to set as a default. This is something iOS doesn’t let you do; surely we’re all capable of choosing whether we want Chrome as our default browser or Google maps as the default navigation tool.

There are plenty of other possibilities of personalisation on Android so as WWDC starts, it will be interesting to see what Apple can introduce to make iOS users feel like their Apple devices are something unique to them.

[Image via google-android]

SOURCE: http://techcrunch.com/2013/06/09/many-shades-of-android-apples-all-the-same/

The post What Android Has That iOS Hasn’t appeared first on TechBeat.

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Automatically delete a huge amount of duplicate files

Add a hard drive-activity LED to a laptop that lacks one