Facebook has just announced a slight tweak to the Newsfeed algorithm. The newest version of the Newsfeed will show fewer text-based status updates from Pages, but will serve more text-based status updates from users.

The good news for Pages administrators is that Facebook will probably be distributing more status updates from Pages that are media- or link-based, as opposed to text-based.

According to a blog post, Facebook leanred through testing that, the more simple, text-only status updates people see, the more they share. In fact, the initial test resulted in an average of 9 million more status updates written every day.

However, a text-only status update from Pages didn’t yield the same result as text status updates from regular users. Knowing this, Facebook has decided to pull back on text updates from Pages.

So what should Page administrators do to make up for the traffic?

Aside from the obvious switch to more media- and link-based content sharing, Facebook recommends using the link share tool rather than embedding a link in the text of the update, as it provides a more rich media experience for the consumer.

Last month, Facebook made changes to the feed that showed more links, likely an attempt to battle other news discovery tools. Of course, rumors suggest that tweaking the newsfeed is just a battle in the war on news discovery apps, as the social network is planning to launch a Flipboard-like newspaper competitor in the near future.

Here’s a copy of the announcement:

The goal of every update to News Feed is to show people the most interesting stories at the top of their feed and display them in the best way possible. We regularly run tests to work out how to make the experience better. Through testing, we have found that when people see more text status updates on Facebook they write more status updates themselves. In fact, in our initial test when we showed more status updates from friends it led to on average 9 million more status updates written each day. Because of this, we showed people more text status updates in their News Feed.

Over time, we noticed that this effect wasn’t true for text status updates from Pages. As a result, the latest update to News Feed ranking treats text status updates from Pages as a different category to text status updates from friends. We are learning that posts from Pages behave differently to posts from friends and we are working to improve our ranking algorithms so that we do a better job of differentiating between the two types. This will help us show people more content they want to see. Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types.

Many Page owners often ask what kind of content they should post. This is difficult to answer, as it depends on who your audience is and what they want to see.

Still, one thing we’ve observed is that when some Pages share links on Facebook, they do so by embedding the link in the status update, like the one below:

The best way to share a link after this update will be to use a link-share, so it looks like the one below. We’ve found that, as compared to sharing links by embedding in status updates, these posts get more engagement (more likes, comments, shares and clicks) and they provide a more visual and compelling experience for people seeing them in their feeds.

Others with gadget addictions will know these feels: Most of my life is spent questing for the Perfect Setup. That means different things at different times to different people, of course, and especially when it comes to tech, the goal posts keep moving. But it can still happen, and when it does, it can make the whole frustrating journey seem worth it.

Recently, I achieved a kind of overarching, macro-level Perfect Setup, marking the first (and likely last) time I’ve ever done so. That means that it’s not just my office that’s ideally outfitted: the whole house, my car, everything about my tech life is exactly how I need it to accomplish everything I want to get done.

Hitting that kind of perfection is an odd thing – in many ways I’d come to accept that my quest was quixotic, and couldn’t actually culminate in anything resembling satisfaction. The gadget over will know that there’s a process of looking for product reviews on Amazon, The Wirecutter, and everywhere else on the web that arises for each new component or ingredient you find you need for your setup, and that new needs arise based on satisfying old ones, as each new piece of the puzzle opens up a new possibility tree with branches that themselves multiply when addressed and so on.

At least for a given person at a given time, however, I realized that it’s possible to answer all needs and not have any new ones, and at first of course it felt deflating: Pursuit of ever-better gadgets isn’t a quest taken lightly, and generally at best achieving perfection in one area (aka home office) just means refocusing on another (aka portable office). Also, it’s possible that the standards of the quester in this case changed, making perfection more achievable. But whatever the case, after the momentary panic of boredom, I took stock and found nothing lacking

It won’t last. Anything could upset the balance – a new product launch, a slight shift in job description and requirements, an unpleasant experience with some portion of my current setup. I’m okay with that, since the quest itself has been kind of the point for a long time. But I’m also increasingly comfortable with this new thing called satisfaction: Here’s hoping it sticks around for a while.

Looking back I’m amazed we all seemed so surprised. Over the last decade, pretty much every arm of American authority invoked “homeland security” as an excuse to acquire boatloads of new technology, and used it to help expand their power and authority to unprecedented levels. There is nothing at all exceptional about the NSA’s massive overreach. It was only keeping up with the Joneses — FBI, DEA, Border Patrol, police forces everywhere — who have all been busy doing exactly the same thing.

The impoverished city of Oakland is spending more than $ 10 million on a “Domain Awareness Center” surveillance hub for its cops, and cameras that track every license plate they see. Baltimore and NYC track license plates, too. Meanwhile, according to the LA Times, “Unmanned aircraft from an Air Force base in North Dakota help local police with surveillance,” and Motherboard reports: The Border Patrol’s fleet of Predator drones were loaned out 248 times in 2012, to “unnamed sheriff’s departments, the Department of Defense, the DEA, the Texas Rangers, and even the Bureaus of Land Management and Indian Affairs.”

Drones are just the tip of the hardware iceberg. Local police are now, as The Verge mordantly observed, “fighting crime with 18-ton military vehicles.” That’s just one example of the billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment given to police over the last few decades; and “a disproportionate share … has been obtained by police and sheriff’s departments in rural areas with few officers and little crime.” As Business Insider put it:

We produce so much military equipment that inventories of military robots, M-16 assault rifles, helicopters, armored vehicles, and grenade launchers eventually start to pile up and it turns out a lot of these weapons are going straight to American police forces to be used against US citizens.

A few choice examples from The Daily:

Cops in Cobb County, Ga. — one of the wealthiest and most educated counties in the U.S. — now have an amphibious tank. The sheriff of Richland County, S.C., proudly acquired a machine-gun-equipped armored personnel carrier that he nicknamed “The Peacemaker.”

And it’s not just equipment. It’s ethos and attitude. Police across America have increasingly begun to apply the military doctrine of using overwhelming force whenever possible. So SWAT raids rose over two decades from 3,000 a year to 50,000, including SWAT raids on illegal gambling, underage drinking, and Tibetan monks who overstayed their visas. Seven-year-olds are handcuffed and interrogated for hours over a missing five dollars (which they did not steal).

A few years ago, SF author Peter Watts* was arrested by the Border Patrol while trying to cross from America back to his native Canada, and eventually convicted (though, thankfully, not jailed) because, as he put it:

I just stood there, saying “What is the problem?”, just before Beaudry maced me. And that, said the Prosecutor in her final remarks — that, right there, was failure to comply. That was enough to convict.

As novelist Jo Walton* wrote:

One of the things that’s making me angry about the Peter Watts thing [...] is the way so many people [...] are saying that it must be his fault, that he must have done something to provoke it, that it wouldn’t have happened if he’d been polite and done what he was told and if he had, in effect, cringed more. This may well be the case. But is that the world you want to live in?

Unfortunately, it is in fact the world that many-to-most Americans live in today. The tech world — wealthy, educated, generally treated with respect by the authorities — seems to have been fairly blind to this fact … until cases began to crop up like Barrett Brown, weev, Aaron Swartz, and Jacob Appelbaum*, who recently observed:

There’s no real separation between the real world and the internet. What we’ve started to see is the militarization of that space. That isn’t to say that it just started to happen, just that we’ve started to see it in an incontrovertible, “Oh, the crazy paranoid people weren’t crazy and paranoid enough,” sort of way.

And so:

The NSA won’t tell congress what it’s doing, so they asked someone who reads files leaked by someone being called a traitor what is going on— Alex Gaynor ★★★★☆ (@alex_gaynor) January 16, 2014

while, as Sarah Stillman writes in The New Yorker, regarding the ongoing appalling abuse of civil-forfeiture laws, “Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes.”

This collective power grab — I really don’t think that’s too strong a phrase — actually about security; it’s about organizations like the NSA concluding that since they can use new technology and novel legal interpretations to increase their power (and their budgets), therefore it’s imperative that they do.

It’s not that it’s bad for the authorities to use new technology. A lot of the time it’s an excellent idea. The NSA wants to listen in on high-confidence bad-guy cell-phone conversations in Yemen and Somalia? Fair enough. You can make a case for many aspects of Oakland’s Domain Awareness Center. And I’m a big fan of always-on chest/helmet cameras for police and others, for example, at least in theory … although of course, in practice, the authorities don’t like it at all when that footage gets out to the public.

But simply transposing military technology into the civil realm — or foreign surveillance techniques and tech into the domestic arena — seems really hard to justify to me, especially when violent crime is at a 40-year low across America… which is probably because of less lead, not more cops.

But nobody ever got a bigger budget and shinier tech toys by pointing facts like that out. The anthropic law of bureaucracies dictates that the ones which thrive are the ones which make self-perpetuation their first priority. And so now the police, and just about every American agency you care to name, and the contractors who supply them — call them the “security-industrial complex” — are implicitly colluding in the business of fear. The more shadowy enemies we have, and the more dangerous they seem, the more money the security-industrial complex gets, the bigger and more powerful it becomes, and the more secrecy it can justify.

So Chinese hackers, although they can hardly hold a candle to the NSA’s klieg lights, are trumped up as deadly online foes who might launch a so-called “cyberwar” at any moment. Important People somehow still manage to pretend, with straight faces, that the prohibitively counterproductive modern-day Prohibition called the War On Drugs is not evil, insane, futile, and doomed. And the War on Terror (which is a tactic, not an enemy — what’s next, a War On Pincer Movements?) means trumping up a diffuse group of of disorganized crazies who got lucky thirteen years ago into a deadly enemy on a par with mighty Soviet Russia.

Terrorists will attack America again, but they’re unlikely to be as lucky as they were in 2001, when they killed as many Americans as are killed by car crashes every six weeks. Drugs do ruin lives, although an overwhelming number of their users don’t become addicted, and experts say alcohol is worse than crack or heroin. And there are indeed many bad-news black-hat hackers out there.

But it seems painfully apparent to me that, in juicing the alleged defenders against these shadowy enemies with the steroids of military technologies, rules, and attitudes, we have transformed them into a cure almost worse than the disease. Alas, nobody seems to have the incentive — or maybe, soon, the ability — to stage an intervention and send them to the detox and rehab they so desperately need.

* Disclaimer/disclosure: Peter, Jo, and Jake are all personal friends.

This isn’t Google Glass in a contact lens, but it may just be Google’s first step in this direction. The company’s Google[x] lab just teased a smart contact lens on its blog that is meant to help diabetics measure their glucose levels.

The company says it is currently testing prototypes of this contact lens that use a tiny wireless chip and a miniaturized glucose sensor. These chips are embedded in between two soft layers of lens material.

According to Google, the sensor can take about one reading per second and it is working on adding tiny LED lights to the lens to warn users when their glucose levels cross certain thresholds.

Google says it is working with the FAA to turn these prototypes into real products and that it is working with experts to bring this technology to market.

Some consolidation afoot in the online travel space: UK-based Secret Escapes, which focuses on luxury travel flash sales, is buying Germany’s JustBook, a mobile-based specialist in bookings in the business travel sector. The companies are not disclosing the financial terms of the deal, but JustBook co-founder and MD Stefan Menden says the cash and shares deal “makes sense for everyone involved.” This is Secret Escapes’ first acquisition.

The merged company will become one of Europe’s bigger purveyors of “discretionary travel” services, and gears Secret Escapes up to launch in the U.S. — a move that will come later in 2014, according to its co-founder and CEO Alex Saint. There, the big competition will be Jetsetter.com, acquired last year by Trip Advisor, Saint tells me. In Europe, he views Voyage Privee in France as a rival.

Both Secret Escapes and JustBook count Index Ventures a common investor, with Secret Escapes having raised between $ 15 million and $ 20 million and JustBook around $ 3 million. (Menden says that this was more of a coincidental rather than deciding factor for the acquisition. The investments were managed by two different partners, both of whom were “supportive” of the deal.)

As with other areas of e-commerce like books, food delivery and design/fashion, travel been undergoing a lot of consolidation, with smaller players coming together to compete better against behemoths like Sabre (which owns Travelocity, among others), Priceline (Kayak, Booking.com and more) and others in a business that is built around margins that are always under pressure.

In the case of Secret Escapes and JustBook, the deal makes a lot of product sense, with Secret Escapes wanting to follow more of JustBook’s mobile-first approach, and JustBook wanting to do more on the web and with flash sales — two areas where Secret Escapes has been most active.

“We were weighing both options of going alone and raising more money or joining with someone,” he says. “When we met Secret Escapes, we thought after ten minutes of talking we have to do this. It just made sense from a product and vision perspective to have them together.”

Saint adds that there may be more acquisitions up ahead. “There are quite a lot of smaller players with great skills,” he says. “The great test is to pick the guys that will help you grow the business. JustBook are a great team and technology. Mobile is a real core competency for them, but it’s not something we’ve focused as much as we would have liked.” It also gives Secret Escapes a major entry point into the German market.

While Secret Escapes plans for a U.S. launch, more mobile business and perhaps more M&A activity, one thing that Saint says will not change is the company’s focus on “discretionary travel.”

The differece with OTA-based travel sites like Travelocity.com or Booking.com, he says, is that Secret Escapes “inspires travel by communicating great travel deals,” rather than existing as a place where people visit to book trips they already have in mind. “We can create incremental trips that other portals and OTAs cannot do.” He says nine out of 10 people who book through Secret Escapes weren’t even planning trips to those destinations before doing so.

Right now, Saint says there is no immediate need to raise more money.

“The UK business is generating cash and we’re using that to expand,” he tells me. No details on how much cash that is, although Secret Escapes has had year-on-year revenue growth of over 300% with some 4 million members in the UK, its biggest market. “Capital raising is not really on the horizon until later this year or even 2015.”

Thanks to microcontrollers and mini computers it’s become far easier to build intelligent robots. But, until recently, you’ve had to jury-rig most of your off-the-shelf components to work in unison. That’s why Rex, a new “robot brain” is so important. Like Hardware Battlefield finalist ModBot, Rex offers one important part of your robot project and streamlines the process of implementing intelligence into your robotic projects.

Created by former Carnegie Mellon Master’s students Mike Lewis and Kartik Tiwarti, Rex is a cross between a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino. Not unlike Udoo before it, Rex allows hobbyists to add powerful hardware control I/O to a powerful on-board processor without connecting multiple shields together with various tools.

“It’s designed specifically for robots,” said Lewis. “It’s a higher price than the RPi, but the experience of building a robot is less of a pain – no hassles for wiring, it has built-in battery inputs, and it boots up directly into a robot programming environment.”

The team is also offering online support and a fully featured help site for robot builders who are using their platform. The basic model starts at $ 99 for a fully-featured board with OS preloaded and a power supply. It also includes a serial cable. They are looking for $ 90,000 in pledges.

“Kartik and I knew we were both interested in consumer robotics and building things that could solve problems for regular people,” said Lewis. “Robotics is such a complicated field where the requirements for a system depend so much on what the system will be used for, that none of the platforms out there were really what I wanted, so I proposed that we attack this issue directly. As we continued to think about it, Rex seemed to make more and more sense for people who had already built Arduino-based robots but were having a difficult time stepping up to a more advanced platform.”

Interestingly, the team built their own OS, Alphalem OS, to run their boards and by building a developers platform right into the board they were able to offer a way to program your robot directly without uploading to a microcontroller. Most importantly these boards are about as big as an Arduino Uno, one of the smallest general-purpose micro controllers available. The board also includes a DSP and camera and microphone inputs, making it far more powerful for the robotics hobbyist and engineer.

The team isn’t stopping at basic motor controls, however.

“The OS will offer an easy-to-use development environment that is similar to Arduino’s ‘sketches’ and a task manager (MCP) that will allow you to launch multiple ‘sketch’-style processes in parallel for different tasks. It will have built-in drivers for devices that are useful for robots, like cameras and USB WiFi adapters. In the future, we will also be adding a layer for AI and Machine Learning applications.”

There’s also a motor kill switch in case your robot becomes sentient. In short, Rex has it all. It makes it easy to build great robot projects and, at about the same price as a few really nice stepper motors, the total cost isn’t very high. Now if only there were pneumatic controls so I could finally build my robotic soup taster.

]]>http://www.managed.com/rex-gives-your-robot-a-brain/feed/0I’ve Seen The Future Of Health Tech And It’s Going To Improve Your Life In 2014http://www.managed.com/ive-seen-the-future-of-health-tech-and-its-going-to-improve-your-life-in-2014/
http://www.managed.com/ive-seen-the-future-of-health-tech-and-its-going-to-improve-your-life-in-2014/#commentsSun, 12 Jan 2014 07:04:09 +0000adminhttp://www.managed.com/ive-seen-the-future-of-health-tech-and-its-going-to-improve-your-life-in-2014/

I just returned from the most exciting Consumer Electronics Show I’ve ever covered. Thanks to extraordinary demand for gadgets that make us healthier, stronger, and smarter, the technology industry is putting some serious brain power behind the next generation of wearable health devices. Over the next year, a torrent of new devices is hitting the market to provide automated elite coaching, a pocket-sized clinical lab, and your own personal assistant.

Labs In Your Pocket

It seems that nearly every time I rush head-first into a new diet or exercise program, I find months later there’s some crucial oversight that’s holding back my progress or actively destroying my body. Exasperated in frustration, I drag myself to a clinic for expert diagnostics, only to discover simple advice I should have been following from the beginning.

Now, nearly every expensive lab test I’ve gotten over the past year is coming to the delightful convenience of my smartphone. The Sensoria smart sock correctly diagnosed that I make the runner’s rookie mistake of heel striking, leading to a workout-stopping knee pain (available this spring).

Valencell’s PerformTech in-ear heart-rate monitor calibrated my V02Max (a common measure of endurance) in a nearly painless five minutes of light stair-stepper work on the CES show floor (available now). The results were within 5 percent of lab-test results I received months earlier and helped me know that two months of running San Francisco’s hills are probably paying off.

Quality rest is just as important as hitting the gym. The Basis B1 wristwatch, Sleeprate app, and Withing’s Aura bed pad will diagnose the quality of the major stages of sleep, including crucial REM cycles.* I got a preview of Sleeprate’s heart-rate-monitor-powered app, and apparently I’ve got a nasty restless sleep cycle (Basis update coming January 21, Sleeprate January 23rd, and Aura in the spring).

Unlike a lab test, these devices can follow you wherever you go, ensuring you actually follow through with the advice. Many of us work so hard at self-improvement; it’s nice to know that our time isn’t going to waste.

Automated Elite Coaching

The defining feature of the world’s sharpest coaching minds is a broad novel strategy that is meticulously applied to each student. The delicious replicability of elite coaching makes it ripe for automation.

While last year was all about fitness gadgets that monitor activity, “what’s going to happen next is teaching technique,” said Ruth Thomason of Cambridge Consultants. Cambridge was showing off the ArcAid basketball free-throw technique video analyzer. Normally available to college sports teams with budgets larger than the entire Humanities Department, this kind of video technology could bring elite coaching to the masses.

The marathon-enthusiast fitness company, Polar, is releasing what claims to be the most advanced training watch on the market. The Polar V800 meticulously tracks heart rate to advise athletes when they’re overtraining, analyzed through a free online web app, Polar Flow (available in April).

There’s also hope for my fellow ADHD brethren: Interaxon’s Muse headband is like a mind-reading meditation coach. Using classic techniques from the field of neurofeedback, the behind-the-ear mounted EEG device measures brainwaves to coach users into a state of meditative peace. Unlike its competitor, Neurosky, which is mostly used for brain-controlled computing (and women who love to wear rotating cat ears in San Francisco), the muse will track improved mindfulness over time.

In the same way online education is bringing the teachings of world-class professors to anyone with an Internet connection, the future of health tech will be to essentially roboticize elite coaches in the devices we wear on our bodies.

The Digital Mother

“Sit up straight and brush your teeth!” Sometimes, we know exactly what we’re supposed to do, but just aren’t very good at following through. The latest health tech is here to gently nag you into better health.

The Lumo Lift is a vibrating shirt pin that buzzes whenever it detects slouched shoulders. It’s pretty much impossible to answer 5,000 emails a minute and remember to sit up straight for eight hours. This little guy helps you remember (available in the spring).

For objects around the house, the aptly named “Mother” device imbues everyday objects with the nagging power of our lovely moms. Sen.se’s Mother interacts with satellite “cookies” that know when and how an object is being used; for instance, whether a bottle of pills is being picked up and poured upside down. The same goes for a jar to water the plants (available in the spring).

2014 is going to be an exciting year for digital health. For years, technology has conspired to transform our upright bodies into hunched-back zombies. Now, it can make us all ubermen. Bring on the gadgets!

]]>http://www.managed.com/ive-seen-the-future-of-health-tech-and-its-going-to-improve-your-life-in-2014/feed/0FOBO Launches In San Francisco To Become The Fastest, Easiest Way To Sell Your Consumer Electronicshttp://www.managed.com/fobo-launches-in-san-francisco-to-become-the-fastest-easiest-way-to-sell-your-consumer-electronics/
http://www.managed.com/fobo-launches-in-san-francisco-to-become-the-fastest-easiest-way-to-sell-your-consumer-electronics/#commentsFri, 10 Jan 2014 17:21:11 +0000adminhttp://www.managed.com/fobo-launches-in-san-francisco-to-become-the-fastest-easiest-way-to-sell-your-consumer-electronics/

By now you probably know that Craigslist sucks as a way to sell stuff. You have to contend with spam emails, buyers who promise to purchase your goods but flake, and people who show up then try to haggle down the price after the fact. But somehow, no one has figured out a way to make it better or provide a real alternative.

Well, there’s a new app out called FOBO that aims to solve all those problems, providing users with a local marketplace for selling consumer electronics.

FOBO launches in San Francisco today, offering its users a new way to sell goods via mobile app. It gets rid of all the hassle that is usually associated with local marketplaces and makes it ultra-simple and ultra-fast to do so. The app guarantees sellers will get a certain price for their devices and will be paid upfront, and ensures that their product is sold fast — within 97 minutes.

When you list an item on FOBO, the app instantly prices your item, usually based on the average sales price on eBay. It then starts up an auction that lasts a little more than an hour and a half, during which time other FOBO users can bid on your goods.

But, if by some bit of bad luck your item doesn’t sell to another user, FOBO will buy it for the guaranteed starting price and do the hard work of reselling it. So there’s really only upside to listing your item.

FOBO doesn’t want to be a Gazelle-like reseller — it’s mainly just guaranteeing sales prices to seed the marketplace with good stuff. Getting the supply side of a marketplace rolling is the hard part, after all. And it seems to be working: FOBO sold 92 percent of items listed in its 1,000-person beta run over the past few months.

There are other advantages to listing with FOBO, other than just getting a guaranteed amount for a consumer electronics device in 97 minutes. Buyers pay for the good in-app, which means there’s no haggling once they show up to pick up the device. And they agree to meet at a time that works on the seller’s schedule.

On the buyer side, FOBO also makes things easy. When you first sign up, you’re prompted to subscribe to certain types of electronics. And then you get notifications when they go on sale.

The team had raised $ 1.6 million in funding from Index Ventures, Greylock, Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Y Combinator, and a few others.

Urban commuters are getting more and more comfortable with the idea of biking around, but in places like San Francisco, that can be a drag. Electronic bicycles have emerged to help people get where they’re going, even in incredibly hilly environments. But many e-bikes are ugly, due to huge motors and battery packs that end up being placed in odd places around the frame.

Faraday Bicycles hopes to change that, with a bike that was built to be stylish, functional, and a lot of fun to ride. We got a preview of the company’s first bike, which will be shipping soon to customers who pre-ordered it. With a motor on its front wheel and batteries actually stored inside the frame, the Faraday bicycle is built to look just like a regular city commuter bike.

The first iteration of the Faraday bike was designed while founder Adam Vollmer was at IDEO to compete in a contest to create the ultimate city bike. But what started out as just a side project was spun out into its own company.

Faraday has come a long way since then. About a year-and-a-half ago, the company ran a successful campaign on Kickstarter, and has sold several more pre-ordered bikes in the meantime. Behind the scenes, the company has been working to put the final touches on its prototypes and preparing to put them into production soon.

What you see in the video is pretty close to what will end up being shipped to the community. It has a 350-watt motor, which works out to about three times your power.

The company pre-sold about 200 of the bikes at a price of around $ 3,500. Starting in March, Faraday expects to be shipping out to those who pre-ordered, and then hopes to ship a second production run in the mid-to-late summer. Check out the video above for more details!

The good old Polaroid brand isn’t dead yet — with the Polaroid Socialmatic, the concept has now become a product. It has a camera with a 14-megapixel camera, a 4.5” touchscreen LCD display that runs Android, a Zero Ink printer, and wi-fi and Bluetooth capabilities. At $ 299, it will be a tough sell for those who already have a smartphone in their pockets.

The two main features that differentiate the camera from a smartphone are the printing and sharing aspects. After taking a picture with the back camera or the 2-megapixel front camera, you can share it on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest using the built-in software on a Wi-Fi network. At the same time, you can print a 2×3 little photo.

In a corner of your printed photo, there is a QR code so that other Socialmatic users can scan it, get the digital version from Polaroid’s servers, and reprint it. While it’s a good idea, a QR code doesn’t look good on your photo.

As the camera runs Android, many users will install Instagram right away. The Socialmatic will become a dedicated Instagram camera. That’s why the QR code integration feels weird.

On this camera, you will also find 4GB of internal storage and a Micro SD slot. If you want to share photos on the go, you will have two options: you can either send your photos to your phone, or tether your phone.

PLR IP Holdings, C&A Licensing, Socialmatic and ZINK Imaging are the four companies behind the Instagram Socialmatic. This is what remains from Polaroid Corporation. The companies count on the popular Polaroid name and the iconic look to sell this new camera — but will it be enough?