CLCKR, the mobile phone accessory company, reveals its tips to keep entertained, productive, and in contact with colleagues and loved ones during this period of home isolation. CLCKR’s patented phone grips and cases are invaluable and versatile products with numerous uses – both for work and for play.
Be Productive
Working from home is the new normal but very few of us have the ideal setup ready and waiting. Make things a little easier for yourself by placing your phone with CLCKR in portrait mode next to your laptop or desktop computer and use your device as another screen to easily communicate with colleagues via video conference, view documents, or access your calendar.
Stay In Touch With Family
During these unsettling times, we need to be checking in with loved ones virtually rather than visiting them in person. Put your phone with CLCKR in landscape mode to catch up with parents and grandparents through your favourite video call app. It’s easier than ever to show someone you care, even though you can’t be there in person.
Meet Up With Friends
Hanging out in the pub isn’t possible, but happy hour needn’t be cancelled! There’s a burgeoning trend for groups to have dinner together in their respective homes over Facetime and Skype, or clink glasses virtually through Houseparty or Zoom. CLCKR is a handy tool to keep your phone in place in either portrait or landscape orientations, and stop it slipping around while you enjoy catching up with friends.
Try Isolation Dating
If you scheduled a date before the current crisis and are now about to cancel it, why not try the new craze for isolation dating instead? Switch the date’s location from that pub/ bar/ restaurant to your own home and meet your match online instead. Standing your phone up with CLCKR means you can concentrate on the date rather than the angle of the camera. Sparks might still fly as you chat through your phone screens, but if they don’t, it’s much easier to hang up than climb out the bathroom window!
Keep Entertained
Binge-watching your favourite film or TV streaming service will keep you entertained for quite some time while in isolation. Switching CLCKR to landscape mode while lying in bed or on the sofa makes watching YouTube videos, movies, and all sorts of other content, easy and handsfree.
Boost Your Social Media
If you have a little extra time on your hands, why not create some content for your social media accounts? During isolation, many people are filming their home workout regimes for Instagram Stories, posting comedic clips on Facebook, or sharing their musical performances and creative challenges on Twitter and TikTok. CLCKR makes recording and taking selfies a breeze.
Above all, stay safe and stay home!
There are two different CLCKR products available: The Universal CLCKR fits onto any device, is slimmer than any other product on the market and comes in a variety of colours and designs, all while being compatible with most wireless chargers. The CLCKR case with in-built stand is available for various iPhone devices.
Twelve South today introduces the AirBag, a genuine leather micro-mini bag made exclusively to carry and protect AirPods and AirPods Pro. This petite vintage pouch can be worn over a shoulder, around the neck or users can ditch the strap for the little leather handle on top. The AirBag is available now in limited quantities from www.twelvesouth.com for $49.99.
The AirBag is perfect for those who don’t want to dig through their backpack, computer bag or handbag to find that tiny AirPods charging case. The AirBag’s convenient shoulder strap allows AirPods to be kept close to the body and within easy reach so users can listen to their favourite music, books and podcasts whenever they want.
The stylish leather carrier, which will be sure to turn heads, covers all sides of the shiny white AirPods charging case protecting it from scratches and scuffs. The AirBag supports wireless charging and features an opening for Lightning charging. A metal snap button keeps the AirPods Pro charging case safe and secure at all times.
The Twelve South AirBag is available now in limited quantities for $49.99 at www.twelvesouth.com.
New research indicates a massive 87% of Irish people would be willing to share their personal data and medical records if it helped to solve a global pandemic like COVID-19. While 84% believe technology will ultimately help to beat the outbreak. This has been a recent topic of discussion on social media and forums due to GDPR and it is good to see people have some sense around this crisis we are now under for god knows how long.
The research was commissioned by the Irish Computer Society as part of currently ongoing Tech Week 2020, which aims to provide new and creative ways to help students engage with technology and provide them with hands-on opportunities to learn about how computing and related technology are reshaping every area of life.
Undertaken for the Irish Computer Society by iReach, the research surveyed 1000 people across Ireland in a range of age groups, providing insights into perceptions of COVID-19, technology, privacy, working, and social media. It found that:
87% would be willing to share their personal data and medical records if it helped solve a global pandemic like COVID-19. This number rises to 93% in the 18-24 and 55+ cohorts.
60% (71% of the 55+ cohort) would be open to an implantable device/chip if it made medical conditions easier to manage and enhanced day-to-day life.
84% think technology can help to beat the Coronavirus outbreak. This increases to 92% in the 18-24 cohort and 90% in males.
83% think technology will change the way we work after the COVID-19 crisis.
78% don’t trust social media in spreading awareness about COVID-19 prevention. (55% in the 18-24 cohort do not trust social media for this purpose).
Jim Friars, CEO of the Irish Computer Society said: “Researchers, businesses and innovators around the world are putting technology to work to alleviate the effects of the global health crisis. From applications that collect data to track the spread of the virus to 3D printed ventilators for hospitals, it is no wonder that 84% think technology can help to beat the Coronavirus outbreak.
“Our survey further suggests that there is also a considerable cohort, 60% who would be open to an implantable device/chip if it made medical conditions easier to manage and enhanced day-to-day life. This figure rises to 71% in the over 55’s age cohort.”
“Efforts to contain the spread of Coronavirus have also reached new levels. As the pandemic spreads further, it has become clear that personal data will play an essential role in understanding the virus and ultimately containing it. Our survey indicates that the vast majority of people are happy for medical researchers, practitioners, and public health officials to collect and analyse their personal data in a bid to better track the virus, learn more about how it spreads, and predict its movements.”
“One of the most common tools being employed around the world has been the gathering of location data using smartphones and data from mobile networks. Our phones track our steps and many people have wearable devices that can collect statistics on our vitals and lifestyle. Potentially, this data could now be used to track and accelerate a cure for COVID-19.”
“With this data available intelligent machine learning algorithms could identify trends that human experts can miss, then raise insights and recommendations for professionals to review and validate. The process could ultimately speed up detection in the case of COVID-19.”
“Governments around the world are already using technology to track the coronavirus outbreak as they race to stem its spread. China, Singapore and South Korea are using a combination of location data, video camera footage and credit card information, to track COVID-19 in their countries. There are also proposals to introduce track and trace technology here by way of an opt-in mobile phone app that will allow people to be notified if they were in close proximity to confirmed cases.
“However, while this presents many opportunities, it also raises important questions on data ownership, access and privacy. Concerns have already been raised by privacy activists about the use of temporary ‘symptom tracker’ applications used in the fight against the outbreak. Any personal data collected should be protected to the maximum extent of the law, anonymised as much as possible and disclosed only to health authorities, and not under any circumstances shared with other authorities without explicit consent.”
Today, Amazon Web Services Inc, announced the general availability of Amazon Detective, a new security service that makes it easy for customers to conduct faster and more efficient investigations into security issues across their AWS workloads. Amazon Detective automatically collects log data from a customer’s resources and uses machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory to build interactive visualizations that help customers analyze, investigate, and quickly identify the root cause of potential security issues or suspicious activities. There are no additional charges or upfront commitments required to use Amazon Detective, and customers pay only for data ingested from AWS CloudTrail, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) Flow Logs, and Amazon GuardDuty findings. To get started with Amazon Detective, visit https://aws.amazon.com/detective/.
When customers face a security issue like compromised user credentials or unauthorized access to a resource, security teams must conduct an investigation to understand the cause, assess the impact, and determine the remediation steps. Before an investigation can even begin, customers must first collect and combine terabytes of potentially relevant data from network, application, and security monitoring systems, and make it available in a way that allows their security analysts to infer related anomalies. In order to explore the data, analysts rely on data scientists and engineers to turn seemingly simple questions like “is this normal?” into mathematical models and queries that can help produce answers. Customers then typically build custom dashboards that analysts use to validate, compare, and correlate the data to reach their conclusions. Security teams must continually re-establish baselines of normal behavior, understand new patterns of activity, and revisit application configurations as resources, accounts, and applications are added or updated in an environment. These complex and time-consuming tasks impede security teams’ ability to quickly investigate and respond to security issues.
Amazon Detective helps security teams conduct faster and more effective investigations. Once enabled with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, Amazon Detective automatically begins distilling and organizing data from AWS CloudTrail, Amazon VPC Flow Logs, and Amazon GuardDuty findings into a graph model that summarizes resource behaviors and interactions observed across a customer’s AWS environment. Using machine learning, statistical analysis, and graph theory, Amazon Detective produces tailored visualizations to help customers answer questions like “is this an unusual API call?” or “is this spike in traffic from this instance expected?” without having to organize any data or develop, configure, or tune their own queries and algorithms.
Amazon Detective’s visualizations provide the details, context, and guidance to help analysts quickly determine the nature and extent of issues identified by AWS security services like Amazon GuardDuty and AWS Security Hub. Amazon Detective’s graph model and analytics are continuously updated as new telemetry becomes available from a customer’s AWS resources, allowing security teams to spend less time tending to constantly changing data sources. By letting the Amazon Detective service perform the necessary data sifting, security teams can more quickly move on to remediation.
“Even when customers tell us their security teams have the tools and information to confidently detect and remediate issues, they often say they need help when it comes to understanding what caused the issues in the first place,” said Dan Plastina, Vice President for Security Services at AWS. “Gathering the information necessary to conduct effective security investigations has traditionally been a burdensome process, which can put crucial in-depth analysis out of reach for smaller organizations and strain resources for larger teams. Amazon Detective takes all of that extra work off of the customer’s plate, allowing them to focus on finding the root cause of an issue and ensuring it doesn’t happen again.”
Amazon Detective is available today in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Paris), Europe (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and South America (Sao Paulo) regions, with more regions coming soon.
T-Systems, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, is one of the world’s leading digital service providers. “As part of protecting our clients’ cloud applications and services, T-Systems’ security experts analyze billions of security-relevant events every day,” said Andrej Maya, Cloud Solutions Architect for T-Systems. “This has traditionally required using custom log management solutions that take considerable time and resources to maintain. Amazon Detective simplifies our security monitoring and helps our security analysts quickly understand potential issues without the complexity of managing the underlying data ourselves.”
WarnerMedia is a leading media and entertainment company that creates and distributes premium and popular content to global audiences. “Large security organizations are tasked with protecting huge environments with diverse workloads from a multitude of threats, while the smaller organizations I talk to often don’t have the resources to replicate the tooling and expertise of their bigger counterparts,” said Chris Farris who leads public cloud security for WarnerMedia and teaches Cloud Security for the SANS Institute. “Amazon Detective will help both of these groups reach faster, better-informed conclusions to their security investigations. It does the hard work of aggregating and analyzing high-volume telemetry sources like VPC Flow logs and CloudTrail. Larger organizations will see major efficiencies, and small teams will have access to information and tooling that they’d have a hard time collecting and building on their own.”
Expel provides transparent managed security, on-prem and in the cloud. “We have customers of all shapes and sizes running a diverse array of workloads on AWS, so it’s critical that we have high-quality data sources that can aid us in conducting fast and accurate security investigations,” said Peter Silberman, chief technology officer at Expel. “Amazon Detective offers our customers an additional layer of insight about what’s happening in their environment, which gives our security analysts more data and context to use during investigations without adding complexity to that process. With Amazon Detective, we’ll be able to process specific types of alerts faster, which means reducing investigation time and getting quicker, more detailed answers to our customers about what happened.
Taskade, a Y-Combinator backed startup, launches a real-time organization and collaboration platform for remote teams. This week, it announced it will be offering a 6-month free upgrade to its Pro version to support businesses and individuals adopting remote work amidst the COVID-19 situation.
Taskade is a real-time workspace for remote teams to manage tasks, write notes, and video chat together, on the same page.
In the past few weeks, the world has witnessed an unprecedented transition to work-from-home as businesses and organizations try to keep staff safe. But the overnight pivot to remote work has left many employees who haven’t previously worked off-site struggling with productivity and without access to adequate tools.
And these problems are all too familiar for the Taskade founding team.
“By the time we started Taskade, we had been working together as a remote, distributed team for many years. Despite our experience working remotely, we were frustrated about having to hack together multiple tools in order to get things done. Taskade is truly a remote-first tool.” says John Xie, Taskade’s Co-Founder and CEO.
Employees need a quick and easy way to dive into the work without the need for extensive training or high-level technical support. That’s why Taskade provides a user-friendly solution that lets fully distributed teams organize work, communicate via chat and video, share documents, manage tasks and collaborate in real-time.
If you have used tools like Asana, Trello, Todoist, Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Slack, you will feel at home as Taskade combines all the essential ingredients needed for remote collaboration into one simple tool. Another good news is that it’s available on all popular operating systems, including Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and as a browser extension and syncs in real-time.
”We believe Taskade is fundamentally changing remote team collaboration by providing one tool that teams need to get work done effectively. Taskade provides a real-time, device-agnostic and cross-platform experience to end-users. We are excited to be part of the journey with the Taskade team,”said Dmitry Grishin, managing partner at Grishin Robotics.
If you’re interested in taking the app for a spin, head over to https://www.taskade.com/ to create a free account. You can also download Taskade’s mobile and desktop apps for all your devices at https://www.taskade.com/dow
Urbanista, the Swedish lifestyle audio brand, revealed today that 2019 was a record year for the company. Last year, Urbanista’s revenues grew 70% on those of 2018, bolstered by more than 500,000 sales of its true wireless headphones, and online sales with annual growth in excess of 1,000%. Urbanista finished 2019 with revenues of 241 million SEK, compared to 145 million SEK in 2018, corresponding to a growth of 70 percent, year-on-year.
Urbanista’s Scandinavian design and quality audio engineering inspired by urban life resonate strongly with an ever-growing audience that values the freedom of a mobile lifestyle. As such, the company’s true wireless headphones – named Stockholm, Paris and Athens – have all proven popular with consumers and made Urbanista a strong presence in this growing category*. Since the product launched in May 2019, Urbanista has sold approximately 2,000 Stockholm units per day, while Paris and Athens (both first available in late 2019) have also been in high demand.
2019 was a period of global expansion for Urbanista, primarily in Germany, UK and US, as well as through e-commerce channels including Urbanista’s own online store. In addition to the company’s revenues growing 70% year-on-year from 2018 to 2019, Urbanista is proud to reveal that its total revenues have increased 1,000% during the past five years – from 20.8 million SEK in 2014 to 241 million SEK in 2019 (representing growth of 1,072%).
Anders Andréen, CEO of Urbanista, commented: “We are proud to be able to maintain good organic growth year after year. We will continue to develop in everything we do and are excited for the years to come.”
Urbanista has also grown in headcount at its Stockholm headquarters. In February, Tuomas Lonka was appointed Brand & Marketing Director – a newly-created role for this growing business. The perfect match for Urbanista’s next phase and promising growth trajectory, Tuomas has gained extensive experience in growth companies such as Happy Socks and Rovio (Angry Birds), as well as larger organisations like Telia and Nokia. Tuomas confirmed: “I’m thrilled about joining the team at Urbanista.Our brand has been growing across all our key markets and we have many new and exciting projects coming in 2020 and beyond.”
Chris Michael, Director of leading UK air treatment manufacturer Meaco, recommends the use of a fan to help maintain health as families spend more time indoors and in close proximity.
With a large number of people now working from home and turning living spaces into offices, it is important to circulate air to help focus and maintain calm. With spending so much time indoors the air can become stuffy and can quickly make people feel uncomfortable and unwell. Using a fan keeps the air moving, and as we edge towards warmer summer weather will help us keep our cool at this difficult time.
Air treatment specialist Meaco has a range of best-selling, award winning fans, the MeacoFan range, designed to suit all room sizes. Advanced DC technology means the MeacoFan range has extremely low noise levels, and are low on energy usage, making them a popular choice for use in the bedroom and home office. Meaco fans can be powered from a PC or laptop USB port or even a powerbank.
Chris Michael, managing director of Meaco, comments “We have experienced a large spike in sales since more people have begun working at home. We are flattered that so many people are using the MeacoFan to bring them some comfort when so many are stuck indoors at the moment and we are working hard to get all orders out as quickly as possible whilst maintaining the safety of our own staff.”
There are three products to choose from; MeacoFan 1056AC, MeacoFan 650 and the MeacoFan 360. All have been awarded a QuietMark in recognition of being amongst the quietest cooling fans tested to date. Quiet Mark is the international approval award programme associated with the UK Noise Abatement Society charitable foundation.
The bigger MeacoFan 1056 has twelve fan speeds capable of cooling the largest of rooms. Multidirectional oscillation ensures that cool air circulates throughout the whole room by bouncing the air off walls and ceilings, so that every part of the room and everyone in the room feels the benefits. This is a major differentiator to a standard pedestal or tower fan. An ECO mode automatically changes the fan speed as the room temperature changes, providing a simple, one touch control.
The smaller MeacoFan 650 and 360 models are ideal for home office use, as they take up little space and can be placed on desks, bedside tables and windowsills. As well as being stylish and lightweight, the MeacoFan range is very low on energy consumption.
All Meaco products come with a two-year parts and labour warranty, with the option of extending the warranty to five years.
These stylish light weight fans will help create a better home working environment for all the family, and once the hot weather arrives, can contribute to a good night’s sleep when used in the bedroom which can help to keep you healthy.
With everyone working from home and in self-isolation, the Houseparty app has rocketed to number 1 of the download charts.
But there’s a lot of hysteria (and scaremongering) out there about it stealing all your data and being ‘hacked’, so cyber security expert Jonny Pelter, founder of internet safety membership site SimpleCyberLife wanted to set the record straight with a quick app review..
What is Houseparty?
Know the game ‘Fortnite’? Sure you do. The same guys (Epic Games) created this app. In short, it is a multi-person video calling app. Friends and family, or, even strangers (if you’d like) can connect with you and chat face-to-face much like Skype or FaceTime.
Is Houseparty safe?
1. I’ve Been Hacked – on Monday there were numerous rumours circulating on social media that the app has been hacked but all of these have been unjustified, with no evidence and Houseparty themselves have confirmed there hasn’t been a breach of any kind.
In fact, these claims that the app had been hacked were all so similar in nature to be honest it felt like a commercial smear campaign (probably by a competitor) and low and behold, about 30 minutes ago the BBC posted that the owner of Houseparty is now offering a $1 million reward for evidence that it is indeed a smear campaign.
In short, it hasn’t been hacked. Ignore the rumours, they are wholly unfounded.
2. Privacy – again, many on social media have claimed that Houseparty steals all your personal data. Houseparty does not access third-party apps like Netflix or Spotify, though it does ask for access to user’s contacts and connections on Facebook and Snapchat. This is basically to help them grow by inviting your friends to the app too – loads of apps do this. You can of course turn this off.
3. Gate-Crashers – yes it is true that friends-of-friends (so in effect, strangers) can gate-crash on your video calls. Yes, this is a little creepy especially if adults are crashing on your kids conversations. This is easily turned off in the settings by ‘locking rooms’ so that people have to be invited to ‘rooms’ in order to enter. Easy.
4. Cyber Bullying & Inappropriate Content – as the video chats are unmoderated, as with all social media there is of course a possibility for people to be nasty to one another or kids seeing inappropriate stuff. We suggest parents try to for themselves to assess this. With the settings below which restrict your chats to friends only, this shouldn’t be too much of an issue.
Our Recommendation
1. Use Houseparty! In a covid-19 world in self-isolation, it’s a great way of catching up with the whole family all at once and you can even play some pretty fun games. Resist the scaremongering!
2. Turn Private Mode On…so strangers can’t walk into your or your kids’ chats.
When in the app, click the white smilie in the top left of your screen and then click the red cog icon in the top left of the screen.
3. Update Your Settings. Review settings and ensure you’re happy. Definitely turn location off. Camera and Mic is the only one that is absolutely necessary. The notifications can be highly irritating so you may want to turn them off too.
4. Reject Friends Requests From People You Don’t Know. Ensure your kids know that they should be denying requests from strangers too (even if they are a friend-of-a-friend).
With our world shrinking and the majority of people now working from home, indoor air quality experts, Airthings, wanted to share some information on an issue that is easily fixed but often forgotten: humidity. Issues with humidity are a problem for everyone. It can cause mould growth, exacerbate eczema, bring on dust mite allergies, and has even been linked to asthma and respiratory illnesses. As if that wasn’t enough, the link between low humidity and infection has recently been investigated, and the results aren’t good. Since Airthings specialise in indoor air quality, they have generated a quick summary to demonstrate how healthy humidity levels impact everyone’s new temporary place of work; their homes.
The issue:
Researchers for the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention found that when humidity levels were at 23%, 70 to 77% of flu virus particles were still able to cause an infection an hour after coughing. Raising humidity levels to 43% reduced the percentage of infectious particles to just 14%.
New research:
Yale University recently unveiled ground-breaking research that discovered the link between low humidity and the increased risk of contracting the flu virus. The lead researcher found that the body’s natural defence mechanisms were hindered in fighting the flu virus in environments of low humidity.
Why should I care?
The CDC research shows that the flu virus survived for longer in low humidity. The Yale researcher found that low humidity also made it more difficult for the body to remove inhaled particles and therefore reduced the test subject’s natural defences and increased the chances of contracting flu.
The risk:
The tricky thing about humidity levels is that they fluctuate and vary depending on the home, daily activities, the seasons and much more. Excess humidity levels can result in mould growth on window panes and in the home whereas very low humidity levels can help the spread of the flu virus as shown in the research.
Correct humidity levels:
Healthy indoor humidity levels are between 30-50% according to Environmental Protection Agency recommendations. By keeping the home in between these recommended levels, it can reduce the risk that comes with poor indoor humidity.
How to maintain healthy humidity levels:
Humans find it hard to detect when humidity levels are changing, that is why we are so good at adapting to different environments. The problem is, we only notice when humidity levels are really bad, where we start scratching our skin or notice mould growth. The best solution is to monitor humidity, that way you can be alerted to when levels get too high or low. Airthings Wave Mini helps to monitor humidity, or by upgrading to Airthings Wave Plus, the device offers complete indoor air insights including humidity and radon gas.
In addition, Airthings have compiled their top tips to fix humidity in your home. The important thing to remember is that as long as humidity is monitored, it will show when is the right time to make these small changes to fix the issue before it becomes a bigger problem. With regards to the Coronavirus, the World Health Organisation warns that everyone can be at risk including those living in hot, humid conditions. For information and support on the Coronavirus, read what the WHO says here.
Want to find out more? Airthings take a further look into the research and the importance of healthy air when working from home, here.
