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#TechTuesday: AI assistants, Adobe updates, Roli Blocks and the new MacBook

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WeLikeIt announce first AI social media assistant

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November 1 saw the launch of welikeit, the first Artificial Intelligent based social media management and employee engagement platform, which is powered by Isla; a machine learning assistant that's set to transform the future of social media management. Signing up takes only a few minutes and costs start at just £99 per month. Isla monitors the web and social media in near real time by looking at billions of interactions from millions of authors optimising the way companies engage with their audience, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. welikeit has been working with a number of well known brands in closed beta for the last 12 months and currently supports Twitter, LinkedIn profiles and company pages Facebook profiles and pages, with plans to support Instagram and other networks in the next few months. welikeit is more than just the perfect tool for social marketing, its also addressing the challenges faced through the adoption of Employee Advocacy (EA), where businesses who are looking to increase exposure of their brand or product with the help of their employees. According to the National Business Research Institute, EA can have a major impact for business revenue, a 12% increase in brand advocacy generates x2 increase in revenue growth, with social engaged companies are 57% more likely to generate sales leads.

 

Adobe reveals Creative Cloud 2016 updates

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Adobe has released a series of new design programs and a raft of updates, which hope to “Democratise design” by being simpler to use and more intelligent. Revealed at this year’s Adobe Max conference in San Diego, California, Project Felix is a new program for graphic designers, which will let them create product shot compositions and scenes using both 2D images and 3D objects. The new program links up with an update to Adobe’s stock image library, Adobe Stock, which now features 3D models, lighting and materials alongside images, which can be applied directly to designs created in Project Felix. Project Felix also allows users to rotate the angle of the objects in their composition, or to change the perspective of it, and includes many “Auto” features, such as auto-light and auto-align to create the “Perfect” natural lighting or camera angle for a product shot. With its auto intelligence, Project Felix cuts out many of the cumbersome and time-consuming tasks that designers would normally need to perform themselves to create photo-realistic graphic images, such as angle, lighting and composition. Project Felix has a render preview window, which updates automatically and provides real-time feedback on what the final design will look like. It also enables users to go back to any previous design they want through a new timeline feature; something Adobe is calling non-destructive workflow.

Alongside addition of materials, lighting and 3D objects to the library, Adobe Stock has a new feature allowing users to search for images based on another image, in addition to the word search feature. This will allow people to search for royalty-free images, based on a copyrighted image they’re not able to use. Users can also combine two images together and search for a visual combination of both; for instance, a photo of a field with a dull sky and a photo of a blue sky could be used to search for an image of a field with a blue sky. This image matching capability has been enabled through the launch of new artificial intelligence platform Adobe Sensei, which will be incorporated across all Adobe software for features such as face aware editing. Adobe Stock has also partnered with news agency Reuters, and will now have 12 million more images covering news, sport and entertainment, alongside historical news video footage.

Other updates to Creative Cloud include a new version of website and mobile app design program Adobe XD, which now allows co-editing and commenting on prototype designs between different users. This means there can be feedback between developers and clients without the need to export the design to a PDF file, send and annotate it with corrections. It also has new Layers and Symbols features, allowing designers to create layers of designs and apply custom shapes. XD is now also available as an iOS and Android app for smartphone users, with a preview mode. Finally, Adobe’s video and audio editing software, Premiere Pro CC, has new co-editing capabilities, and also a feature letting users publish directly from the program to multiple social media sites. It resizes frames to suit the platform, such as square for Instagram. All of the updates aim to streamline design processes, to allow creative people to design faster but also enable clients to provide feedback faster. The beta version of Project Felix, and the updates to other programs, will be available by the end of 2016.

 

Complicated Uber app gets a major redesign

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Uber has significantly overhauled its app for the first time in four years, with the aim of making the user experience more intuitive. The new design (which has been carried out in-house) makes the user’s destination the most prominent element of the interface, with the question; “Where to?” Instead of displaying individual travel options, it now groups them together under categories such as “Economy” (UberPool and UberX) and “Premium” (Exec and Lux), as well as providing fare estimates for each option. The app also displays “Shortcut” options based on your most visited destinations, meaning the user won’t have to type in their destination manually.

To recapture the clean and simple aesthetic of the original Uber experience, we rebuilt a faster, smarter rider app completely from the ground up” Uber Senior Product Manager, Yuhki Yamashita

In the coming weeks app users will also be able to connect their phone calendar with Uber, so that meetings and appointments will automatically appear as shortcuts. Users can set their destination to a person’s location instead of a specific place, by syncing their phone contacts with the app and searching the name of whoever they are meeting with. This individual can then opt to share their location. Another key feature is the addition of the “Trip feed”, which will allow users to access other services and only comes into play once the journey starts. Currently, riders can quickly access the information on their licensed driver, send a live map of their trip to family and friends or split the uber fare with other users. But this feature is set to develop further over the coming months, with extra in-app features including UberEats, restaurant reviews via Yelp, music service Pandora, and Snapchat all in the pipeline.

 

BIG-designed Hyperloop to connect Dubai and Abu Dhabi in 12 minutes

Hyperloop One has released a new teaser video revealing that its new high-speed transportation system designed by Danish firm Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) will connect Dubai and Abu Dhabi in just 12 minutes. The video, released ahead of the official unveiling of the plans due later today (November 8), shows the Hyperloop linking Dubai with key cities across the United Arab Emirates in just a matter of minutes. The capital city Abu Dhabi (located over 150 kilometres away) is reached in 12 minutes, Riyadh in 48 minutes, Doha in 23 minutes and Muscat in 27 minutes. Air-cushioned pods transport both passengers and cargo in capsules travelling at speeds of up to 1,100 kilometres per hour. The pods are pushed through a network of semi-vacuumed tubes using both levitation and propulsion mechanisms.

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Hyperloop is the vision of entrepreneur Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors, PayPal and space exploration company SpaceX. Musk first unveiled the concept for a Hyperloop in 2013 but later open-sourced the technology and is no longer directly involved in its development. Hyperloop One is among of a handful of companies vying to be the first to build Hyperloop. The company appointed BIG alongside architecture and engineering firms AECOM and Arup to realise the concept. Hyperloop One carried out testing of its propulsion technology for Hyperloop near Las Vegas earlier this year, where it achieved speeds of 187 kilometres per hour in 1.1 seconds. The company's main competitor is Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, which is currently building a test track in California and is already in discussions to build a Hyperloop between the European cities of Budapest, Vienna and Bratislava.

 

DesignStudio create colourful launch campaign for the Roli Blocks

Since first launching the Seaboard Grand keyboard instrument, music technology start-up Roli has become an influential force in the industry. Today it launches new instrument Blocks, released only in Apple stores and Roli’s website, and DesignStudio has worked with the company to create its launch campaign. Blocks is a portable and modular instrument system that allows musicians to make music in innovative and expressive ways, and share it easily via the company’s Noise app.

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Invented by Roland Lamb and designed by the Roli in-house team, the instrument’s main component is the Lightpad Block, a small controller with an interface that involves users combining various gestures on a silicon pad, which lights up to visualise the forms created by the player’s fingers. DesignStudio used this vibrant display as a basis for its graphic design concept, which is hooked on the phrase Shape Music, and turns the gestures into painterly dots and brushes of colour. This idea went on to influence a feature of Blocks’ final interface, as these “Light trails” became part of the instrument’s display. The campaign has been rolled out across print ads, artist ads featuring Grimes, Steve Aoki and RZA, social campaigns and films.

Roli have a very creative culture which helped us push the concept further, allowing us to not only create an impactful campaign but also influence the experience of playing and learning” Tim Williams, Creative Director at DesignStudio

 

New Apple MacBook Pro ships with 'revolutionary' Touch Bar

Apple has unveiled its new Macbook Pro, featuring an intuitive Touch Bar display, high resolution retina display and Touch ID. The model has a new, all-metal enclosure design, and at 14.9mm thin, the 33.2cm (13 inch) version is 17% thinner and has 23% less volume than the previous generation and weighs 1.4 kg. A new addition to the Macbook Pro is the Touch Bar; a thin interactive display above the keyboard which replaces the function bar. The Touch Bar is designed to give the user more control when using different apps and systems, including Mail, Finder, Calendar and Final Cut Pro X. For example, it can be used to show tabs and favourites for different internet browsers, allow easy access to emojis when sending messages or to edit images and videos. Already used in other Apple products such as iPhone and iPad, Touch ID has also been incorporated into the new MacBook Pro so that users can quickly unlock the device, switch user accounts and make purchases with Apple Pay on the internet by touching their finger on the screen. The MacBook Pro also includes a new operating system, macOS Sierra, with features such as voice control programme Siri, and Apple Pay. The new MacBook Pro models retail from £1,449 and might be the design that tempts some creatives who have abandoned Apple for the flexibility of Windows 10 back to Mac!

 

Germany open the first zero emissions train

A fleet of the world's first zero-emissions passenger trains are set to go into service in Germany. The Coradia iLint, developed by French rail company Alstom, only emits excess steam and condensed water into the atmosphere; something the company claims to be a world first. The train is powered by a hydrogen fuel tank on its roof. The fuel cell is supplied with hydrogen and oxygen from the air, which it converts into electric power. The system is also backed up by lithium batteries, which store the excess power in order to later supply the train when needed. This means that the train is totally carbon-free, making it a much more sustainable alternative to the 4,000 diesel trains currently in circulation in the country. The train apparently has enough onboard hydrogen storage to power an 800 kilometre (497-mile) journey, with speeds topping out at 87 miles per hour (140 kilometres per hour).

Alstom is proud to launch a breakthrough innovation in the field of clean transportation” Alstom CEO, Henri Poupart-Lafarge

According to German news site Die Welt, testing will be carried out by the end of the year. If the results prove successful, the trains will service the Buxtehude-Bremervörde-Bremerhaven-Cuxhaven line in the German state of Lower Saxony by December 2017. The announcement comes soon after one of Germany's legislative bodies moved to ban petrol-powered cars in favour of electric vehicles by 2030. Many of the country's car brands (including BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen) are already rolling out battery-powered vehicles. BMW launched its first fully electric production car, called the BMW i3, in 2013, while Audi unveiled an all-electric version of its R8 supercar, the Audi R8 e-tron, in 2015.

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