Ideaforge

I travel with a Canon DSLR and two primes, a 35mm f1.4 and an 85mm f1.2 (endearingly nicknamed, “the fat kid”). Switching lenses is cumbersome and not ideal in certain environments, like a Saigon street market, densely crowded with vendors, tourists and thieves.

After lugging this camera kit through six countries last year, I upgraded my iPhone to the X in hopes of replacing the DSLR as a travel camera. Despite our Editor in Chief’s praises for the iPhone X’s camera, it wasn’t enough for me. I needed more creative control and didn’t want to rely on mobile software.

The first few Google search results for “best iPhone lens” led me to Moment, a company that started off with a 2014 Kickstarter fund and since has grown into a well-respected smartphone lens manufacturer.

Moment recently released a new version of their four lenses: Superfish (fisheye), Wide, Tele Portrait and Macro. The update includes a new attachment interface where the lenses are slightly larger in diameter to provide a more secure attachment to the Moment smartphone cases. Their Wide lens also received a glass upgrade to a multi-element aspherical design for edge to edge clarity.

Prices range from $89.99 to $99.99, with an additional cost of $29.99 for the Moment smartphone case — you’ll need it to attach your lens.

Hardware

These lenses are not cheaply made of plastic, mass-produced in some dingy factory. They’re heavy little nubs handcrafted with aerospace-grade metal and the same high-end glass used in 4K film lenses.

They mount to the Moment case using a twist and lock system. Snapping it in was quite simple and I roughly shook the phone to make sure the lens was secured — it was.

I opted out of the Superfish lens (it’s not really my aesthetic) and packed the other three with me on a recent trip to Little Corn, a remote island several miles off the Nicaraguan coast.

Although I had planned to extensively use the lenses, the week was spent mostly napping in hammocks and eating lobster tacos, as one does when on a tropical island far away. I did, however, spend a couple of afternoons testing them out.

New Wide Lens

By far, this was my favorite of the three. The images produced were clear, dramatic and without much edge distortion.

It’s ideal for landscapes and cityscapes, but I would probably use it as an everyday lens; it adds character and a certain quirk to portraits.

New Macro Lens

With the macro lens, I was able to capture the tiniest details, from the filaments of a hibiscus flower to its petal veins. The removable diffuser hood softened the light so whites weren’t blown out.

Image quality is almost on par with my Canon macro lens, which also happens to be about 9x its cost. On the London map below, the letters in the street names are approximately 1mm tall.

There’s one drawback to the Macro Lens: you have to get close to the subject, real close (less than an inch away).

I would not recommend using this lens on a black widow or rattlesnake.

New Tele Portrait Lens

As a portrait lens, I was disappointed. I took pictures of Sam in several locations around the beachfront and wasn’t thrilled with any of them. Bokeh was barely noticeable and I’m pretty sure I could’ve just taken a few steps closer to achieve similar results.

After finishing the first draft of this review, I decided to try the lens again before I made a hasty assessment. I was wrong; moving a few steps closer doesn’t achieve similar results. I had forgotten about distortion when up close on iPhone X’s semi-wide lens; however, the difference is subtle.

I’ve actually grown fond of this lens after testing it out one rainy morning in Brooklyn. While the 60mm focal length gets you closer to subjects without having to resort to digital zoom, the blurred edges add a nostalgic element similar to film cameras.

The iPhone X has a built-in telephoto lens, so I did a quick comparison.

There’s a faint, faint difference. If you’re on an iPhone X and are fussed about soft edges, skip this lens. On smartphones that don’t have built-in telephoto lenses, this would be my second choice to break away from sterile smartphone picture-taking.

Moment lenses add a bit of charm and perspective to mobile photography, to the point where you can trick the average person into believing the pictures were taken on a real camera.

I can’t completely switch over to a Moment lens mounted iPhone X as a travel camera just yet. It has nothing to do with Moment. Their lenses are impressive, but they’re not going to magically transform smartphone photos into DSLR-quality images. (I had naively hoped for this.) The iPhone X’s camera is great for daily snapshots, but the image files lack enough detail and information for my anal retentive Lightroom and Photoshop workflow. For now, I’ll stick with my clunky 5D.

For everyone else, step up your Instagram game. Moment’s reputation for producing the best smartphone camera lenses is well deserved.

Source: Tech Crunch

ClearVoice recently launched a new feature to give freelancers a better way to show off their work and get new jobs.

CV Portfolios offer an easier alternative to personal websites that are often sparsely populated, out-of-date or otherwise neglected.

Thanks a technology that the company is calling VoiceGraph, writers no longer have to keep the pages updated themselves. Instead, co-founder and CEO Joe Griffin said VoiceGraph indexes stories from the top publishers online (about 250,000 currently) and matches them to their authors. It also aggregates metrics around social sharing and connecting to the authors’ own social media accounts.

“At the end of the day, what we want to do here is give freelancers very robust tools that make it as simple as possible to address one of the biggest hurdles freelancers were having: creating a portfolio and maintaining it,” Griffin said.

So for example, you can visit my CV Portfolio to see many of my latest TechCrunch articles. Granted, that’s not that so exciting, since you can do the same thing on my TechCrunch author page, but this could be pretty useful if I was a freelancer with a variety of publishers, or if I wanted to highlight articles I wrote for past employers.

There were around 400,000 automatically generated CV Portfolios at launch. Authors can claim their profiles, then edit them by creating new sections, moving articles around, deleting work that they’re not proud of, adding links or uploading files. And again, it’s a lot easier because they’re starting with a portfolio that’s already populated and automatically updated with new stories.

(And yes, if you’re a freelancer with an automatically generated portfolio that you don’t want on ClearVoice, Griffin said you can just delete it.)

The product is free. Sure, you can can use your CV Portfolio to promote yourself on ClearVoice’s talent marketplace, where freelancers get hired by companies to help with content marketing. But Griffin said he’s perfectly fine if people just want to create CV Portfolios and don’t participate in the market at all.

Source: Tech Crunch

Tim Cook took a break from criticizing Facebook on Tuesday to present the next step in Apple’s big education plans. But the CEO is back at it. Sitting down with MSNBC and Recode at a town hall event, Cook was once again asked about consumer privacy in the wake of fallout over Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica quagmire.

Cook interviews that while he believed self-regulation is best in the case of these tech giants, “I think we’re beyond that.” Asked what he would do, were he in Zuckerberg’s position, he added, simply, “I wouldn’t be in this situation.”

The executive has never shied away from criticizing Facebook, of course. In 2015, he indirectly criticized the approach of internet companies like Google and Facebook, stating “They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”

Just this weekend, he echoed that statement, with a more direct jab at Facebook, following the Cambridge Analytica revelations, telling the audience at a conference in China, “The ability of anyone to know what you’ve been browsing about for years, who your contacts are, who their contacts are, things you like and dislike and every intimate detail of your life — from my own point of view it shouldn’t exist.”

Cook echoed those statements onstage this week, adding, “The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer — if our customer was our product. We’ve elected not to do that.”

The company reflected that sentiment in an updated privacy policy posted back in January, explaining that,

Apple believes privacy is a fundamental human right, so every Apple product is designed to:

• Use on-device processing wherever possible
• Limit the collection and use of data
• Provide transparency and control over your information
• Build on a strong foundation of security

Source: Tech Crunch

Actress-turned-entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow is getting more capital to accelerate her startup’s growth.

Goop, the lifestyle brand which she founded ten years ago, is announcing a $50 million Series C round from NEA, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Felix Capital. It brings the total outside investment to $82 million. A source close to the situation tells us that the latest round is being done at about a $250 million post-money valuation, although the company denies it. Pitchbook has separately reported Goop’s post-money valuation to be $250 million.

Paltrow is more than just a celebrity attached to the company. She also runs it as creative director and CEO and has become nearly as well-known for her unusual diet and beauty rituals as for her Oscar-winning acting.

Goop, meanwhile, is growing. Not only does its digital property feature content about fashion, travel, and beauty, but it increasingly sells relevant products, something the company calls “contextual commerce.” These include categories like apparel, skincare, vitamins and bath products.

Some of the more unusual items the company promotes are gem-infused water bottles that are said to promote positive energy. Such claims have landed Goop in hot water; a handful of the wellness products have been accused of false advertising.

Consumers may be less interested in the controversies, however. The startup says it has tripled its revenue each of the past two years. (Goop didn’t share specific sales numbers, however.)

We’re also told that a large portion of the company’s 2018 growth will come from continued international expansion. Goop’s commerce business recently launched in Canada, and it expects to ship to Europe by the end of the year.

Goop says that new product lines like home furnishings may also be on the horizon.

 

Source: Tech Crunch

As HBO prepares itself for the end of Game of Thrones, it’s apparent that they’re putting weight on Westworld to take over as the network’s dominant fantasy epic. A new trailer dropped today for the show’s second season and it’s clear that the robot uprising is going to take the brutal, violent spirit of the season-one finale and pour it over the existential questions that are the backbone of the show.

Things are going to get even darker very quickly, it looks like.

The new trailer captures all of the actions and struggles of Dolores, Teddy, Bernard, Maeve and the Man in Black with an orchestral cover of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” playing in the background. While the end of the last season suggested that a new Shogunworld destination would play a major role in season two, our peeks at the destination have been pretty limited in the first pair of trailers.

We’re still seeing the show’s central characters traverse through the desolation of the old West and the high-tech opulence of the world behind it.

Westworld’s second season begins April 22 on HBO.

Source: Tech Crunch

Hulu has added the live, linear version of the CW to its Hulu with Live TV platform.

Hulu has had a deal with the CW to offer streaming on-demand content from the network, but this is the first time that the CW will be available live on Hulu.

The company first launched Hulu with Live TV in the summer of 2017, offering more than 50 channels for $39.99/month, complete with access to Hulu’s on-demand content library and 50 hours of DVR storage.

The service launched with some competition from YouTube, which launched a similar offering called YouTube TV in April 2017.

According to a report from January, Hulu with Live TV has around 450,000 subscribers, while YouTube TV has 300,000 subscribers.

Live CW on Hulu is not available everywhere, but will be on Hulu with Live TV in the following markets: Philadelphia, San Francisco, Atlanta, Tampa, Detroit, Seattle, Sacramento, Pittsburgh. The company says it’s rolling out live CW to more markets soon.

Source: Tech Crunch

Users of Grindr, the popular dating app for gay men, may have been broadcasting their location despite having disabled that particular feature. Two security flaws allowed for discovery of location data against a user’s will, though they take a bit of doing.

The first of the flaws, which were discovered by Trever Faden and reported first by NBC News, allowed users to see a variety of data not available normally: who had blocked them, deleted photos, locations of people who had chosen not to share that data, and more.

The catch is that if you wanted to find out about this, you had to hand over your username and password to Faden’s purpose-built website, C*ckblocked (asterisk original), which would then scour your Grindr account for this hidden metadata.

Of course it’s a bad idea to surrender your credentials to any third party whatsoever, but regardless of that, this particular third party was able to find data that a user should not have access to in the first place.

The second flaw involved location data being sent unencrypted, meaning a traffic snooper might be able to detect it.

It may not sound too serious to have someone watching a wi-fi network know a person’s location — they’re there on the network, obviously, which narrows it down considerably. But users of a gay dating app are members of a minority often targeted by bigots and governments, and having their phone essentially send out a public signal saying “I’m here and I’m gay” without their knowledge is a serious problem.

I’ve asked Grindr for comment and confirmation; the company told NBC News that it had changed how data was handled in order to prevent the C*ckblocked exploit (the site has since been shut down), but did not address the second issue.

Source: Tech Crunch

General Motors’ self-driving car unit, Cruise Automation, is parting ways with CTO A.G. Gangadhar, Bloomberg first reported. This comes after public complaints pertaining to his role in fostering an alleged unsafe work environment for women.

“After serious consideration, Cruise and AG have elected to part ways,” a Cruise spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement. “We wish him the best in all future endeavors.”

Before Cruise, Gangadhar had most recently worked at Uber, where he led the company’s storage, machine learning and infrastructure groups. Gandadhar, who left Uber in July, was reportedly a director former Uber engineer Susan Fowler referenced in her blog post about mismanagement, sexual harassment and other issues at Uber. His departure, however, was reportedly unrelated to Fowler’s claims.

Source: Tech Crunch

Public places may soon be filled with secret pieces of art unlocked by looking through the lens of AR, if Artopia’s cheerily creative app catches on. It essentially lets you geocache your 3D scribbles so anyone else can find, appreciate, and share them.

Artopia, currently in beta for Android and iOS, is a straightforward combination of AR painting and real world discovery. You make your art by selecting brushes, colors, and so on and moving your phone as you would the brush. Grab objects and move them around, attach them, etc.

When you’re done, save it and its precise location is saved to Artopia’s service. Now anyone passing by will be able to see it (a map shows nearby creations) and who made it, give it a like, and maybe draw some complementary work nearby.

It’s simple (in concept, not in execution), but also a thoroughly pleasant and natural combo. Of course, there will also be a report button in case someone draws a fence of phalluses around your house (for example), and the usual caveats of crowd-sourced content and moderation apply.

Artopia was created by Kuwaiti developer Omar Khalil, so the density of art might be a bit higher around the American University of Kuwait. But if this sounds like something you’re into, apply to get into the beta and start filling the parks and streets around your neighborhood with color and shape.

Source: Tech Crunch