Pebble is putting up $1 million to support Smart Strap development, here are a couple of early prototypes

Pebble’s introduction of Smart Straps for the Pebble Time no doubt delighted technology fans everywhere, but how is Pebble going to develop public interest and incentive for developers to create them? Their answer was made clear recently: a million fund to help turn developer ideas into reality.

Pebble has issued an open call to any and all developers interested in making smart straps to put their projects up on crowdfunding platforms such as IndieGoGo and Kickstarter. They’re willing to throw money your way to help you reach your project’s funding goals and eventually get your smart strap to market.

They’ll be monitoring the popular crowdfunding sites to find projects on their own, but you can also get their attention via Twitter or devsupport@getpebble.com just in case. Pebble was quick to  note that they can’t and won’t promise to fund every project that pops up, so you’ll want to make sure you have a really good idea to get them to open their wallet (and you’ll also probably want to convince them that you actually know what you’re doing, so try to have a solid plan before doing so).

That said, they have suggested they can help in other ways such as highlighting projects to give them more exposure through Kickstarter updates, social media and their website.

With that, Pebble has revealed two of the earliest smart strap concepts to have spawned. One is from Seeed Studio and their Arduino-based Xadow modules. They offer small modules for NFC readers, OLED displays, GPS and even heart rate sensors. These will be available for developers and manufacturers as development boards to use in prototyping smart straps without having to spend a ton on reiteration and R&D.

Second is a prototypical module from Spark.io that can add cellular capabilities to the Pebble Time and use it without the aid of a smartphone. The picture above obviously isn’t indicative of what a final product might look like, but the idea is very interesting and we hope they’ll be able to stuff all of that inside a strap enclosure with some good engineering work. What kind of smart straps would you like to see for Pebble Time? Sound off below!

[via Kickstarter]

Google Photos developer apologizes for incorrectly identifying black couple as ‘gorillas’

In what can only be described as one hell of an awkward experience, Google Photos could be accidentally racist. Well, as much as a computer algorithm can be. In what appears to be a pretty big oversight by its developers, Google Photos — which recently added a new feature that can identify faces, objects, or even animals from stored photos — seems to have incorrectly tagged a black couple as gorillas. Yikes.

The person who made the discovery was quickly contacted by a Google developer on Twitter who sincerely apologized for the mix up, removing the “gorillas” tag from the service entirely until they can sort things out. As far as avoiding this mess in the future, Google developer Yonatan Zunger had this to say:

“We’re also working on longer-term fixes around both linguistics (words to be careful about in photos of people [lang-dependent] and image recognition itself. (e.g., better recognition of dark-skinned faces). Lots of work being done, and lots still to be done. But we’re very much on it.”

This isn’t the first time computers have been accused of semi “racist” mistakes. Not too long ago HP came under fire after their computer webcams couldn’t identify black people, and there was even a camera that asked if Asians were blinking.

It’s clear Google’s recognition software still needs some fine tuning. It’s only in the situation above that things get weird. Nobody really gets offended when Google Photos incorrectly tags your cat as a dog. Well, not unless you’re a cat.

[Twitter | via Ars Technica]