Your Daily Posterous Spaces Update

	February 26th, 2013 揺れ Posted 1 day ago by Koichi Mitsui to s a s u r a u 2 再び。 Thalmic (YC W13) launches the Myo armband for gesture control Posted 1 day ago by Garry Tan to Y Combinator Posterous As stuff like Google Glass becomes mainstream, we’re going to see a lot more wearable computing devices around. But one thing that isn’t clear is how we’ll control them. One idea is to use gesture control, which would enable users to communicate with wearable computers without having to use a whole separate smartphone or other device to do so. But so far, gesture control for most devices — like the Xbox Kinect, for instance — has depended upon cameras watching user movement. That means remaining in a fixed space and using pre-programmed gestures that are not exactly natural, but can be picked up by cameras. As a result, today’s gesture control technologies are far from perfect. In fact, most to date are just downright bad. Y Combinator-backed startup Thalmic Labs believes it has a better way of determining user intent when using gesture control. To do so, it’s developed a new device, called MYO, which is an armband worn around the forearm. Using Bluetooth, the armband can wirelessly connect to other devices, such as PCs and mobile phones, to enable user control based on their movements without directly touching the electronics. See it in action here: Embedded media -- click here to see it. Read the full article on Techcrunch Preorder at getmyo.com From Triceratops excavation to Anthrax therapeutics: Microryza (YC W13) launches a Kickstarter for scientific research Posted 1 day ago by Garry Tan to Y Combinator Posterous Do you want to know whether cannibalism existed amongst Tyrannosaurus Rexes or whether specific viruses contribute to lung cancer risk? Better yet, do you want to be part of making this research happen faster? A Y Combinator-backed startup called Microryza is positioning itself as a “Kickstarter” for science research. The idea for Microryza sprouted when Cindy Wu, then an undergraduate at University of Washington, found that she had little hope of getting funding for studying a potential anthrax therapeutic. She had discovered it after helping to create a video game that let regular people fold and create virtual enzymes. They came up with 87 different mutants that summer through the video game, and found that one could potentially treat anthrax infections after winning an MIT-based synthetic biology competition. Read the full article at Techcrunch Visit microryza.com and fund original scientific research Semantics3 (YC W13) launches the one Consumer Products API to rule them all: Over 20M products with clean metadata Posted about 22 hours ago by Garry Tan to Y Combinator Posterous As more merchants flock to the web to sell their products, there has been a deluge of data to be indexed by retailers who are looking to see where certain products are being sold and for how much. Parsing and extracting the value from all of this data is a huge challenge. YC-backed Semantics3 has created a database that aims to track every product sold online, and every price it has ever been sold at, providing retailers with an API to this database. The company, which was founded by classmates at a computer engineering college program in Singapore, indexes several dozen of the top e-commerce sites online and provides a self-serve API so developers can tap into its constantly updated database of consumer products. Why would developers want to index this data? Retailers need to do UPC lookups, get detailed data for products (i.e. consumer electronics or clothing) sold on the web, price histories and more. Read the full article on Techcrunch Save your business from password hell: Meldium (YC W13) launches secure cloud password service for all your SaaS apps Posted about 21 hours ago by Garry Tan to Y Combinator Posterous If you’ve been part of a small- or medium-sized business or organization recently, you’ve dealt with “the spreadsheet.” It’s that document that’s tacked up on the wall (or shared via email) where all the group’s important login names and passwords are kept — the team's Twitter DropBox LexisNexis subscription, et cetera. It’s a mess to maintain in itself, of course, but the real problems come when people leave the team. Right away, an admin must go one by one through shared apps such as Yammer and WordPress and disable access to the group version. As for the spreadsheet? Well, here’s hoping nobody copied the information to take with them (and take the official Twitter account for one last joyride.) It’s awful, but it’s the status quo. The good news is that a brand new company has created something much, much better. Meldium, a company that’s set to graduate next month from Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator, has created a way for small- to medium-sized businesses and teams to securely share access to all the apps they use. Read the full article on Techcrunch Sent by Posterous. Change your email settings or unfollow. Other questions? We'd love to help.