Whether you’re doing a book report or trying to show someone how to boil an egg: video can make it a heck of a lot easier for you to get your point across. Adobe’s new iPad app, Voice, hopes to make the often time-consuming experience of creating your own such videos a lot faster and easier. The app guides you through making a sharable vid, from the conception of your idea to the finished product. We’ve had a chance to try it out for the past week. We found that the app makes it easy to create some pretty professional looking stuff without having any special skills or a lot of time, but there’s just one thing missing. To kick things off with Voice, you’ll need to pick a topic and a story type. Once you do, the app will launch a project for your video — complete with instructional cards that give you an idea of how to tell your tale. The app is broken into several types of stories, which you may not realize are formulaic, but they are. For instance, a “Hero’s Journey” will start with a Setup Card, followed by a Call to Adventure, Challenge, Climax and finally, a Resolution. Each card provides a bit of detail on what you should be saying (and showing) on each card. It seems a bit elementary at first, but it’s surprising how that little bit of direction can help you stay on track and create a video someone is actually going to be able to follow and want to watch. Simple is the name of the game with Voice. The app’s instructions are really easy to follow, as is adding desired elements to your story. Tapping on a card opens it up for editing. For each part of your story you can add a still photo, text or an icon from the app’s built-in library. Voice doesn’t support video elements (yet), which keeps things simple, but is a huge downer for someone who wants to include, you know, some actual moving pictures in their project. That said, the built-in photos and the icons are really great looking — we considered them an asset rather than something we had to settle for. All of the (over 100, 000!) images you can access from within the app are available under a Creative Commons license, so you’re free to add them as you please. Even better, Adobe keeps track of everything you use, and includes proper attribution in the credits at the end of your video. Rather than recording audio for the full video at once, Voice does it one card at at a time. Once you’re done, Adobe enhances your voiceover to make it sound like it was recorded in a studio rather than on your iPad. It also adds a soundtrack to your monologue from its library. Track options are organized by the type of emotion they’re intended to evoke — i.e. playful, relaxed — and are mixed in like the score to a good movie, so you barely notice them. Each video also gets the benefit of one of 32 different themes. Built by graphic artists, the themes take a page from Adobe’s professional motion graphics program After Effects , and handle things like timing and transitions for your vid. The end result is a polished, professional-looking job (seriously) suitable for your business, or just making all the others kids in class look like rank amateurs. Filed under: Cellphones , Wireless , Mobile Comments

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Adobe Voice lets amateurs make videos like a pro (sort of)

Many green energy sources only generate power in a narrow range of conditions. Solar panels won’t work when it’s dark, for instance, and wind turbines are useless when everything is still. If Solar Wind Energy Tower has its way, though, we’ll soon get clean electricity around the clock. It recently received permission to build a tower in San Luis, Arizona that produces power through hot air downdrafts; water injected at the top of the tower cools the desert winds, dragging them toward turbines at the bottom. Since it’s almost always hot in the area, the plant should run all day and night for much of the year. An ideal summer day could have it churning out a healthy 1, 250 megawatts per hour. The downdraft tower should be ready for action in 2018, and Solar Wind Energy Tower hopes to license the technology to others. As you might imagine, the need for a hot climate is going to narrow the customer list — you won’t see this system in more temperate regions. However, it could be a boon to both the southern US as well as Africa, the Middle East and other places where heat is far more abundant than eco-friendly energy. Filed under: Misc , Science Comments Via: Phys.org Source: Solar Wind Energy Tower , Accesswire (MarketWatch)

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Arizona will get non-stop clean energy from hot air drafts

It’s good that Lockheed Martin’s ADAM laser can shoot down drones and rockets , but there are threats much closer to Earth — say, small boat crews bent on destroying large warships. Never fear, though, as we now know that ADAM can take care of those targets as well. Lockheed has successfully wielded the weapon against small boats , burning holes through their rubber hulls from a full mile away. The laser’s automatic infrared tracking makes targeting a piece of cake. Even with the pitching of the waves, it’s easy to aim at a specific point on a vessel. While the weapon takes close to 30 seconds to deal its full damage, Lockheed hints that speed isn’t really the focus here. ADAM is relatively cheap to use, since the biggest cost is powering its 10-kilowatt laser; you’re not firing missiles or legions of cannon rounds. As such, it’s not hard to see the technology finding its way to cash-strapped navies fighting pirates and other small-time seaborne enemies. Filed under: Misc Comments Source: Lockheed Martin

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Watch Lockheed Martin’s laser weapon take down boats from a mile away

What do you do to improve a service with over 50 million active users? Why, totally revamp it of course. It sounds crazy, but that’s exactly what TuneIn, an audio service that lets you listen to podcasts and radio stations from around the world, did. Before, TuneIn was more like a directory with a search engine. Now, it’s a full-blown audio network, which CEO John Donham says is the first of its kind. “We have over a 100, 000 radio stations and millions of on-demand programs, and that’s a good experience as long as you know what you’re looking for, ” explains Donham to us. Unfortunately, however, discovering new content was a problem. There was no good indication as to what’s going on right now for all the stations that you were interested in, he said. The company launched a TuneIn Live feature some time last February to help amend the issue by letting you create a customized tile layout of favorite genres, but even that didn’t quite capture the ideal. “We wanted a way for all of your favorite stuff to accumulate for you all in one place.” In the new TuneIn interface, that one place is now your “feed.” It’s sort of like a personal radio dial that you can populate with your favorite radio stations and shows. Think of it as Twitter, but for audio. The feed will update in real-time, showing you what’s playing and if there’s a new episode to a particular podcast, thus combining live and on-demand programming in a single view. Further, just like on Twitter, each content provider can have its own TuneIn page that you can “follow” to get those updates. Some content providers, like radio stations, will list its entire repertoire of programming on their pages as well. Hundreds of brands are already on board and will have TuneIn pages ready at launch. They include ESPN Radio, NPR, the BBC, CBS Radio, The Wall Street Journal and even TV partners such as Sky News and CNN. In fact, according to Donham, TuneIn will be the only place you can listen to CNN for free. “We know that some stations, such as KQED for example, have more listeners on TuneIn than followers on Twitter and Facebook combined, ” said Kristin George, TuneIn’s VP of product. For them, she says, an audio-based network just makes more sense. To help that along, TuneIn also plans to roll out little social “Follow us on TuneIn” widgets that content providers can embed on their sites. Aside from just following brands, you can also follow other TuneIn users. Similar to Rdio and Spotify, following your buddies helps you discover what sort of programs they’re into, and vice versa. To take it a step further, you can even send “Echos” of what you’re listening to and share it with your followers or to other social networks like Twitter and Facebook. You may also follow a music genre instead of a particular station — following the indie rock category, for example, will show all of the radio stations that have just started playing a new indie song. Another key addition to TuneIn is a new Explore page that shows recommended shows, stations and genres. If you’re new to TuneIn, the page will just show what’s trending and popular. As you add more of them to your feed, however, the service will be smart enough to learn your behavior over time and will surface related content to the top. “We have all this popular content but we didn’t have a way to expose it to you, ” said George. “Explore makes it sort of like an audio Netflix.” The new TuneIn rolls out today to iOS, Android and the web.”This is a big change for us, ” said George. “We had to completely redo everything.” Now it’s time to wait and see if the gamble was worth it. Comments Source: TuneIn

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TuneIn tries reinventing itself as a social network for audio

Even with fancy Hi-Fi equipment, the weak link is often our ears and their limited 20Hz-20, 000Hz hearing range. As pointed out by Motherboard , artist Jane Winderen wants you to get a feeling for what it’s like to be a whale or bat with her new album, “Out of Range.” To do that, she used special equipment to record bat echolocation signals, marine vocalizing and other sub- and ultrasonic sounds from glaciers , oceans , and forests. From there, she slowed frequencies as high as 100KHz until they became audible, then mixed them with other exotic sounds that are within our hearing range. The end result (below) is hypnotic 40 minute recording of sounds that normally pass you right by. Filed under: Science Comments Via: Motherboard Source: Jane Winderen

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Album of inaudible animal sounds puts you inside the head of a bat

Fact: everyone likes doing business with the guy who remembers them. With that in mind, LinkedIn and Evernote just announced a new partnership to bring the Rolodex into the 21st century, and it all starts with a photo of a standard business card. Evernote will instantly digitize it and bring in any relevant LinkedIn info. You’re then given the option to connect with that CEO, secretary or digital prophet on LinkedIn or add their contact info to your address book. However, things get interesting as your business relationship blossoms. Over time, you can add things like audio from a meeting, documents, or even key emails with him or her to the card’s page in Evernote. Evernote and LinkedIn are already in the business of digitizing business cards with Evernote Hello and CardMunch , respectively. However, t oday’s joint effort will ultimately sunset LinkedIn’s offering and bring all those users over to Evernote. Want to give it a try? The feature is available now for iOS, Mac and Windows users, with Android support headed down the pipeline soon. Card scanning is free for everyone for one year (after which it will require a premium Evernote subscription). Existing CardMunch users can port their existing cards into Evernote and score a bonus year of free service before they have to shell out any cash. Image source: Shutterstock Filed under: Software , Mobile Comments Source: Evernote

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LinkedIn and Evernote partner to make business cards useful again

As the medium of virtual reality progresses, its applications only get more incredible. Take Untold Games’ Loading Human , for instance. It takes Unreal Engine 4 and infuses it with the tropes of the adventure game genre, only instead of pointing and clicking, you’re in that world. Solving puzzles and exploring narrative are at the heart of Loading Human , and it shows in the eerily realistic gameplay clip the studio’s released. The game’s intended for Oculus Rift , naturally, and Sony’s Project Morpheus headset as well. That’s if the studio achieves its Kickstarter goal of $30, 000, of course. The 11-person team claims it can create the first episode of a planned three episode game for that paltry sum, with backer benefits ranging from the basic (a thank you in the game) to the extreme ($5, 000 gets your face in the game in place of the main character — creepy!). But when will you get the game itself, given the total lack of a release date (or even a window) for consumer-ready VR headsets? Untold Games is anticipating “Q1 2015” for Rift availability (though, ya know, that’s not from Oculus), so maybe then? Only time will tell. Filed under: Gaming , Peripherals , Wearables , Software , HD , Sony Comments Source: Kickstarter

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Hyperrealistic virtual reality adventure Loading Human headed to Oculus Rift and Project Morpheus