Here comes Hoverboard saga again..

2015-12-25T22:37:00.001-08:00

Hoverboards have had something of a renaissance this year. Segways-that-don’t-actually-hover have become a pop culture punchline, while Lexus made waves with its awesome-looking-but-not-that-useful levitating skateboard over the summer. Now another company called ArcaSpace is looking to join the party with something that works more like the hoverboards of our dreams, even though it still looks incredibly difficult to ride. Unlike the Lexus model and other iterations, it doesn’t have to be placed on a special surface to ride, which means there’s some degree of feasibility in the real world. In fact, ArcaSpace says it should work over land, water, snow or ice, though it’s only shown floating above solid ground in the video and – despite all the lofty claims – it looks utterly impractical to ride. Still, it levitates nearly a foot off the ground – leaving no doubt to passerby it’s actually hovering – and is powered by 36 electric fans, yielding 430 pounds of thrust or 272 horsepower. There’s also some self-balancing tech to keep you from falling off, and it can fly for a whole six minutes on a charge. It’s easy to be sarcastic about a product that doesn’t seem to be very useful, but the ArcaBoard is the closest thing to a street-ready hoverboard we’ve seen yet. Right now it looks like it’s more struggle than fun to ride, but hopefully it means a practical hoverboard is only a few years away. If you want be the earliest of early adopters, the ArcaBoard will set you back $19,900. Be sure to check out the much- too-serious demo video above if you’ve got a boatload of cash lying around. Though as The Verge points out, it seems you can’t actually go past the checkout page right nowwatch the video here

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft released Cortana for iOS and Android to the public, creating its own alternative to Siri and Google Now. But an update to the app released today removed one of the app’s most prominent features on Android: ‘Hey Cortana’ detection. Previously, you could utter ‘Hey Cortana’ to pull up the voice assistant from within any app, effectively serving as a replacement for the ‘OK Google’ feature on most Android phones (there’s no hotword detection on iOS, as it’s against Apple’s rules). Unfortunately, some users have experienced problems upon activating the feature – including malfunctioning microphones across apps and breaking Google’s own feature – leading the company to simply remove it from the US market in its latest build on the Play Store. We haven’t been able to replicate the issue, but it seems Microsoft chose to be safe rather than sorry. We’ve contacted Microsoft for more information and will update this post if we hear back.

2015-12-21T16:04:00.001-08:00

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OriginTech

Here comes Hoverboard saga again..