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UberEats food deliveries come to Edinburgh
After launching in London last summer, Uber's food delivery service UberEats has expanded to Manchester, Birmingham, and recently, it added the useful option of scheduling post-pub burger drop-offs ahead of time. Tomorrow, UberEats is heading further north to its first Scottish city of Edinburgh, where deliveries from over 70 partner restaurants will be available from 11AM (no breakfast option yet, we're afraid). Deliveroo has been operating in Edinburgh for the best part of two years now, so expensive on-demand grub isn't entirely new to its residents, but more choice is never a bad thing.
Uber launches in Edinburgh, its second Scottish city
Scotland, get ready for your second dose of Uber love. The company is launching UberX, its cheapest service, in Edinburgh this afternoon following a successful roll-out in Glasgow last month. Once you've downloaded the app and set up an account, you should be able to request a car starting from 4pm. It's promising rates that'll make it cheaper than alternative modes of transport -- a journey from Edinburgh Airport to the Balmoral Hotel, for instance, should cost £16, while Edinburgh Castle to Royal Yacht Britannia should set you back £8.25. While the demand for such a service is never guaranteed, Uber does have some data to go on; in the last six months, more than 65,000 people have opened the app inside the city. Given the service was never live, that's a pretty good indicator for pent-up demand.
Edinburgh Apple Store finally opening after being announced in 2010
Good things come to those who wait. Fours years after being announced, Edinburgh, Scotland is getting an Apple store. The long delayed location will open on October 18, according to a banner posted outside of the store. MACNN is reporting the store's building was originally built in 1769 as the Crown Hotel, and has been home to a number of businesses in its existence including Burger King and Woolworths. Reportedly the delays were caused by finalizing a location, and then figuring out a design layout for the older building. This will be the third Apple Store to open in Scotland.
Edinburgh becomes the first UK airport to openly trial Google Glass
Google Glass is still a rare sight in the UK, but it's proving popular amongst brands and businesses, especially when customer service is involved. Virgin Atlantic previously used the headset to welcome passengers to Heathrow, but only now is it making it's airport debut in Scotland. Edinburgh Airport today announced plans to equip its customer service teams with Google's smart eyewear, becoming the first UK airport (not airline) to use it on the front line. Staff will be fed real-time flight information, language translations and information about the local area, allowing them to provide assistance to travellers throughout the airport and not from behind a check-in desk. The airport says it will test Glass until December, meaning you might hear the phrase "OK Glass" if you find yourself, like many recent Ryder Cup golfers, passing through Scotland's busiest terminal in the coming months.
Caption Contest: A heaping helping of wearable music
Is this the new musical Power Glove? Imogen Heap thinks so. The Grammy winner rocked the stylish hand warmers at a TEDGlobal 2011 event in Edinburgh, Scotland, creating gesture-based music during a four-minute demonstration, with the gloves wirelessly connected to a nearby laptop. Could this be the death of the theremin as we know it, or just another good excuse to do a caption contest? Brian: "Imogen there's no heaven." Terrence: "Ms. Heap hard at work on a sequel to the NES "classic" Bad Street Brawler, tentatively titled Street Corner Complainer." Darren: "Seriously? Wires?" Brad: "Now if only I could find some oven mitts that would magically bake cookies for me, I'd be set!" Jon: "Force enhancing gloves allow Imogen to one up Luke, raise X-Wing." Tim: "Do I look intense enough now? Too pensive? What if I tilt my head up a bit further?" Amar: "And then they handed me the Grammy and I grabbed it like this and then -- oh, have I already told you this story?" Dante: "What do you mean they aren't cashmere?!?!" Joseph: "So I was holding Bjork's leg up like this, but she still couldn't get over Madonna's gate." Sean: "To sleep, perchance to dream – ay, there's the rub..." Christopher: "Please sir, I beg you -- don't take my Flowbee away." Richard Lai: "Ceiling cat, come to momma." [Image credit: University of the West of England]
Whiskey byproducts turned into biofuel, scientists prove they have a sense of humor
Did you know that gasoline was originally considered a waste byproduct of kerosene production? Seriously, people would take crude oil, refine the kerosene out of it, and dump the rest. Working along similar lines of harnessing what had heretofore been considered useless, researchers at Edinburgh Napier University have come up with a way to turn leftovers from whiskey distillation into a biofuel. Using the spent grains (or "graff") and liquid from the copper stills (called "pot ale"), they've been able to produce biobutanol -- a fuel that's 30 percent more efficient than ethanol and, importantly, compatible with gasoline-fired vehicles without the need for engine mods. We honestly had to check the calendar to make sure it wasn't the beginning of April, but the university says its next stop is taking this thing to market. More power to them.
Sexist computers: male voices are apparently harder to recognize than female ones
Researchers up at the University of Edinburgh have determined that the male voice is harder for voice recognition software to pick up and understand than its female counterpart. This conclusion was reached after telephone conversation recordings were run through a battery of tests, which revealed that men seem to say "umm" and "err" more often, while also identifying that the greatest difficulties arise with words that sound similar and can arise in the same context, such as "him" and "them." Equally troubling is the first word in a sentence, as it comes without context and therefore doesn't benefit from any predictive assistance. Done in partnership with Stanford, the study was aimed at identifying and overcoming the major hurdles to producing usable and reliable voice recognition -- something Google's universal voice translator phone is also aiming to achieve. Let's hope somebody figures out how to get around all our hemming and hawing, eh?
LotRO: Mines of Moria to be shown at Edinburgh Interactive Festival
Codemasters has announced that they will be attending the Edinburgh Interactive Festival from August 10th through the 12th to show off some of their upcoming titles. Their Vice President and General Manager, David Solari will be presenting Lord of the Rings Online's first expansion Mines of Moria, as well as their new sci-fi MMO Jumpgate Evolution. In addition, they'll be giving away free copies of LotRO to the first 200 people attending the presentation.This festival will also play host to such giants as Nintendo, Sony and Activision. Be sure to check out the festival's official website for more information on scheduling, attendance and a full event guide in pdf format.
Nintendo supports Edinburgh Interactive Festival 2008
Nintendo UK, along with the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, are teaming up to offer patrons of this year's show a chance to try out some Nintendo products. The show itself is a 3-day event, which is held at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre, and will be conducted between Sunday, August 10th and Tuesday, August 12th of this year. We have no idea exactly what Nintendo will have available on the show floor, but you can bet the Wii will be there.David Yarnton, Nintendo UK boss, said Nintendo is "very proud to continue our support of EIF for the third year running. Edinburgh Interactive Festival raises our industry's profile into the wider cultural arena and celebrates the input, talent and creativity from all with a common interest in video games." EIFChairman Chris Deering also chimed in, commenting that "Nintendo's support of Interactive Festival in Edinburgh is great news and demonstrates an understanding of the importance of a cultural games event within the landscape of the world's biggest cultural Festival. Games and EIF have been embraced this year by Scotland PLC like no other year and the support of Nintendo is an important factor in encouraging these respected organisations' commitment to us." So, you Edinburghians are in luck, yet again!Having never been to the UK, we honestly don't know what to expect from these shows. Sure, the official website provides some insight, but we'd much rather hear from folks who've attended. So, have you been to EIF in the past?
Scottish researchers reveal cameraphone-enabled 'invisible art'
Granted, we've already seen what wild colors can hide behind a shutter, but now a team of Scottish researchers are hoping to "bridge the virtual and real worlds" by applying invisible artwork to buildings around Edinburgh. Put simply, users who snap pictures of landmarks and MMS them back to the database can receive "an image with extras added to it." Dubbed Spellbinder, the invisible graffiti project uses image-matching algorithms to analyze the image and send back tagged snapshots of the location a user just photographed. Additionally, location projects and "virtual games" are also being looked into, which should thoroughly please both the social networking fanboys and hide-and-seek lovers alike.[Via mocoNews]
Okami wins Edge award at Edinburgh festival
Okami won Edge magazine's "favourite" title of the last year during an awards ceremony closing the first day of the Edinburgh Interactive Festival. The game beat out Generation GBA, Bully, Dead Rising, DEFCON, Final Fantasy XII, Test Drive Unlimited and Wii Sports. The winner was decided by the five staff members of UK magazine Edge. They say the game won because it "takes your breath away" and "it proves the PlayStation2 is still capable of giving us fun, innovative games."That may be true, but it doesn't look like Edge's winner is going to take a victory lap. Clover Studios, which created Okami and Viewtiful Joe, was a division of Capcom that was uncermoniously dissolved late last year. Members of the Clover team are now working on Resident Evil 5 and a Wii game the last we heard. Looks like Okami got a lot of attention, but not a lot of sales. Guess Capcom can take their award and pretend they got it for their latest Mega Man title.
Guitar Hero III Euro debut at Edinburgh festival
Europeans will get their first chance to play the game on the continent when Activision debuts Guitar Hero III at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival in a couple weeks. Codemasters will also premiere Turning Point and Rise of the Argonauts.The new Red Octane wireless controllers for Guitar Hero III are pretty sweet, especially now that they are travel and storage friendly. The festival runs August 13-14 and tickets are still available. If you can't make it to Edinburgh, Leipzig is sure to have your chance at Guitar Hero III the following week.
Scottish brainiacs develop spray-on computer for medical analysis
Spray-on gadgetry isn't exactly new, but the possibility of spritzing a computer on your epidermis most certainly piqued our interest. A team of Scottish scientists have reportedly "developed a computer the size of a matchstick head, thousands of which can be sprayed onto patients to give a comprehensive analysis of their condition." The device(s) joins the ever-growing array of communication-enabled health sensors aimed at helping the elderly stay in contact with their doctors even in remote locations, and can compute a variety of inputs such as blood pressure, muscle movement, and pulse rate. The technology, dubbed speckled computing, can even be rigged to transmit information via radio waves, meaning that a full-fledged diagnostic report could get a whole lot less invasive if this stuff pans out.[Via MedGadget, photo courtesy of EISF]
University of Edinburgh crafts energy efficient FPGA supercomputer
Considering that ATI and NVIDIA don't seem to be making any substantial strides in reducing the amount of energy required to run their products, it's a tad surprising to hear of an entire supercomputer running a bit leaner than the competition. Hoping on the ever-growing green bandwagon, University of Edinburgh developers are at it again, this time crafting an uber-speedy machine that's reportedly "ten times more energy efficient and up to 300 times faster than its traditional equivalents." Based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), the chips are not only very difficult to program, but they can currently only be used "to perform very specific tasks." Of course, the creators are more interested in the extreme number crunching and power saving abilities than anything else, and while no commercial uses have been identified just yet, the machines could purportedly be used in fields such as "drug design, defense and seismology."[Via CNET]
Edinburgh scientists craft microscopic nanomachines
There's apparently a good bit of conflict at the University of Edinburgh, as we've got one esteemed fellow claiming that nanotech products are potentially dangerous, and now we've got a professor of chemistry insinuating that his nanomachines can change the world. Regardless of their personal differences, David Leigh has borrowed an idea from 1867 in crafting "a minuscule motor that could lead to the creation of microscopic nanomachines," and while he credits the "Maxwell's Demon" as its inspiration, he hopes these plans will actually lead to something substantial. The bantam motor is entirely solar-powered, and has been "devised to trap molecules as they move in a certain direction under their natural motion." Preliminary tests have shown a nanomachine moving a drop of water uphill by using molecular force, which gives researchers hope that this discovery will allow these diminutive machines to "do things that are much closer to what biological machines do." Of course, even Mr. Leigh admits that predicting just how this can or will effect society is difficult, but considering that he's aiming to to bring things that "could happen in a Harry Potter film" to fruition, we won't count him out just yet.
New "imaging machines" distinguish between grass and camouflage
While we've got robots that can sniff out faux wine, and cyclops cameras that distinguish between humans and blow-up dolls (saywha?), Dr. Andy Harvey's latest invention could actually prove useful in battle and on the operating table. Although he hasn't tied the latest rounds of DIY artillery to this technology, the camcorder-styled machine can reportedly "distinguish the world's best camouflage from real foliage," not to mention its ability to "spot buried landmines" and "hidden enemies." Developed in Edinburgh, the imaging machine could be toted by soldiers to tip them off to unusual patterns in the grass (like carefully painted iRobots) before they come too close, as it can supposedly "identify 30 times more colors than the human eye." Interestingly, it is possible that the technology could eventually be used to "detect forms of cancer that are currently hard to pick up." While £800,000 ($1.56 million) have already been invested by the Department for Trade and Industry and QinetiQ, we don't imagine this project slowing down anytime soon, and it looks to be just one more reason we ought to simply let robots do all the fighting, anyway.
