Locked Out? KeyMe App Stores Your Keys in the Cloud

The Launchpad is a series that introduces Mashable readers to compelling startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion.

Name: KeyMe

One-Liner Pitch: KeyMe stores your keys in the cloud to make them accessible all the time.

Why It's Taking Off: KeyMe's cloud-based key management platform means you no longer need a physical key in order to make a copy. Once you store your "digital key," you don't have to worry about lockouts and paying hundreds of dollars for an emergency locksmith visit.

Locked Out? KeyMe App Stores Your Keys in the Cloud

It’s the end of a long day. You trudge back to your apartment, up the four flights of stairs, fish around in your bag and — dammit.

This scenario happened frequently enough to Greg Marsh and his fiancée that he turned it into a business. He was tired of waiting an hour for the locksmith and forking over $150.

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Chrome's Password Security Hole and Other News You Need to Know

Welcome to this morning's edition of "First To Know," a series in which we keep you in the know on what's happening in the digital world.

Today, we're looking at three particularly interesting stories. Two YouTube cofounders launched a new video iPhone app, Mixbit, which lets you edit and remix video on your mobile device. T-Mobile's Q2 results indicate that it gained 1.1 million new customers and sold 4.3 million smartphones. The mobile carrier's quarter revenue figures were up $4.4 billion from this time last year. And finally, Chrome passwords may be vulnerable, according to web designer Elliott Kember. However, Justin Schuh, head of Chrome security, said that Kember is wrong.

Chrome's Password Security Hole and Other News You Need to Know\

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A Tribute to Beyonce's Hair in 25 GIFs

A Tribute to Beyonce's Hair in 25 GIFs

Queen Bey's fans — both human and electronic — were devastated to discover that the pop star chopped off her long locks this week.

Beyonce (Photo credit: Ana Kelston)

Several photos of Beyonce sporting a pixie cut were uploaded to her Instagram account early Thursday morning. Although she didn't add comments in the photo captions, her fans had plenty to say.

The star is known for keeping an insane brigade of fans on the stage to blow her interchangeably long hairstyles in a diva-like windstorm. She recently got into a hair-raising situation with an electric fan mid-performance — perhaps inspiring her new 'do.

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16 Ways the Internet Supercharged Viral Philanthropy

16 Ways the Internet Supercharged Viral Philanthropy

The Internet has undoubtedly transformed the way we support great causes. For years, non-profits and individuals alike have flocked to social media to spread awareness, bolstering viral philanthropy through crowdfunding sites such as Indiegogo, Fundly, GoFundMe and others.

A handful of campaigns stand out in recent memory: Funding a vacation that turned into retirement for bullied bus monitor Karen Huff Klein; the collaboration between Humans of New York and Tumblr for Hurricane Sandy relief; and, most recently, support for the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing across various platforms.

The positive effects of these individual campaigns were readily apparent at the conclusion of their funding periods, but by juxtaposing the numbers now, we can see the real impact of viral philanthropy as a movement.

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New Box Partnerships Bring Classrooms to the Cloud

New Box Partnerships Bring Classrooms to the Cloud

Box is going back to school. The cloud content management developer today revealed a new education initiative to help facilitate better sharing to create more modern classrooms.

Partnering with more than 100 universities, hundreds of K-12 institutions, and a number of industry leaders across the Web, Box plans to expand its reach to help build cutting-edge educational experiences.

According to a survey conducted by Box, 86 percent of U.S. college faculty members using the file-sharing system think online and mobile tools ease students' learning, but only 34 percent are actually using education-focused, cloud-based applications.

In an effort to get more educators the tools they desire, Box and its newly acquired HTML 5 document collaborator Crocodoc are joining forces with those companies working to redefine teacher and student workflows. Among them are Blackboard Learn, Deltak, Edmodo, Haiku Learning, MediaCore, and ShowMyHomework.

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Intel's Bay Trail chip could find its way into robots, set-top boxes

Intel's Bay Trail chip could find its way into robots, set-top boxes

IDG News Service - Intel is developing a version of its energy-efficient "Bay Trail" Atom chip for embedded devices, which can include products like car computers, robots and set-top boxes.

Bay Trail chips for tablets, laptops and desktops were already expected, but there will also be a product called Bay Trail-I targeted at "embedded intelligent systems," according to a session description for the upcoming Intel Developer Forum.

Details about Bay Trail-I's performance, power consumption and customization options are expected to be revealed at the event, which takes place Sept. 10 - 12 in San Francisco.

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LG announces the G2 -- life's good for Android users

LG announces the G2 -- life's good for Android users

While LG has slowly made a name for itself in the USA with such devices as televisions and washing machines, the company has also released smartphones to much lesser fanfare. The South Korean company has a small and quiet following in the Android community, but it is far outmatched by the likes of Samsung, Motorola and HTC. Today, the company hopes to change this by announcing the LG G2 -- an interesting new smartphone with an unfortunate ho-hum name.

The most intriguing new aspect of the G2 is something LG calls "Rear Key". Basically, the volume and power buttons have been moved from the side of the device to the rear. This is truly innovative outside-the-box product design -- my mind is officially blown!

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Fulfilling customer requirements is a weapon at IBM

Fulfilling customer requirements is a weapon at IBM

There are several new data points this week in the ongoing cratering of IBM as an IT vendor. The state of Pennsylvania cancelled an unemployment compensation system contract that was 42 months behind and $60 million over budget. Big Blue has been banned from the Australian state of Queensland after botching a $6.9 million SAP project that will now reportedly cost the people of Queensland $A1.2 billion to fix. That’s some botch.

Credit Suisse analyst Kulbinder Garcha says IBM has a cash flow problem and downgraded the stock. At IBM’s Systems & Technology Group, management announced to employees a one week mandatory furlough at the end of August or beginning of September. And finally, I’m told that there is now a filter on the IBM corporate e-mail system that flags any messages that contain the word Cringely. I’m flattered.

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Instagram 4.1 now lets you upload pre-recorded clips, opens the door to video ads

Instagram 4.1 now lets you upload pre-recorded clips, opens the door to video ads

Instagram just introduced a major change to the video-posting feature it its Android and iOS mobile apps, with the popular social network now allowing users to upload pre-recorded clips from the smartphone's gallery.

The revamped video-posting feature is part of the new Instagram apps for Android and iOS, version 4.1. "Starting today you can upload videos from your phone's media library and share those moments to Instagram regardless of when they were captured", says Instagram. "Once you select the video clip you'd like to import, you can trim it down to the exact part you like best. We've also made it so that you can choose how you square-crop your clip so you can keep the action front and center".

So what does this mean for Instagram? Well, aside from letting users post short clips from their past trips or vacations, the popular social network also opens the door to businesses that wish to promote their products through professionally-recorded video ads -- prior to this change, this was only possible with photos.

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FotoSketcher transforms your photos into works of art

FotoSketcher transforms your photos into works of art

David Thoiron has announced the release of FotoSketcher 2.50, his excellent tool for transforming digital photos into paintings, sketches, cartoons and more. And while it doesn’t exactly transform the program, the update does include one or two very welcome improvements.

Top of the list has to be the new linear halftoning effect. With its default settings this is a very effective abstraction tool, and delivers great results on both color and black and white images. But as usual with FotoSketcher, the effect has a host of configuration settings (Abstraction, Angle, Color Intensity, Texture and more), and it’s easy to produce more customized results to better suit individual images.

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Twitter rolls out improved login verification for iOS and Android apps

Twitter rolls out improved login verification for iOS and Android apps

MICROBLOGGING WEBSITE Twitter has rolled out improved login verification for its iOS and Android apps that allows users to approve login requests directly from mobile devices.

The update means that now, in addition to the SMS based login verification that Twitter released in May, you can use login verification without relying on text messages.

The update brings some other major changes. The first includes the removal of a required phone number to use login verification. This means that if you manage multiple Twitter accounts but have only one phone number, you can now opt all of them into login verification.

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Philips extends Hue range with additional lighting options

Philips extends Hue range with additional lighting options

DUTCH ELECTRONICS FIRM Philips has extended its LED digital lighting system Hue, adding additional lighting options to the smartphone controlled system and a feature dubbed "Friends of Hue".

The additions are Livingcolours Bloom lights and Livingcolours Lightstrips, which are different variations and shapes of bulbs that are controlled by the Hue app to deliver different, more dynamic lighting systems in the home.

The Livingcolours Lightstrips add-on is a flexible two metre LED light strip than can be placed anywhere in the home, such as across bookshelves or around picture frames, showing a range of 16 million colours. They can also be cut to required lengths.

The Livingcolours Bloom is a portable spotlight that can be moved around to highlight a feature, for example. As with the Livingcolours Lightstrips, Livingcolours Bloom works with the Philips Hue bridge included in the starter kit.

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Amazon launches digital download service for video games and software in UK

Amazon launches digital download service for video games and software in UK

ONLINE RETAILER Amazon has announced a digital downloads service in the UK for software and video games, allowing customers to download the latest releases straight to their PCs and Macs.

"Customers can start downloading the product as soon as their purchase is completed - no more waiting for the package to arrive," Amazon declared today.

However, the retailer said in a statement that downloads will be available "from major publishers", so it might be that not all software and games available to buy on its website will take part in the download service.

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Vodafone vs EE: 4G pricing, locations, speeds and smartphones

Vodafone vs EE: 4G pricing, locations, speeds and smartphones

MOBILE OPERATOR Vodafone was quick to follow in O2's footsteps, having announced that it will switch on its 4G network on 29 August

, the same day as its rival operator O2.

This means that by the end of August, Vodafone will also be battling EE for the UK's LTE mobile services crown. While Vodafone has yet to reveal all the details about its 4G network, we've taken a look at how its incoming 4G services stack up against EE's existing offering.

Vodafone

Pricing
EE's 4G tariffs, as have been well publicised and criticised, aren't cheap. At the time of publication, EE's cheapest £21 SIM-only deal comes with 500MB of data, with EE's £26, £31, £36, £41 and £61 plans coming with 1GB, 3GB, 5GB, 8GB and 20GB of data, respectively. In terms of pay monthly pricing, EE's contracts start at £26.

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SSD drive shipments have tripled over the last year

SSD drive shipments have tripled over the last year

GLOBAL SHIPMENTS of solid state disk (SSD) drives have more than tripled over the past year, a market tracker report from analytics firm IHS has revealed, thanks to their growing adoption within ultrathin PCs, ultrabooks and tablet devices.

Although a Gartner report released today said that desktop and laptop PC shipments have declined by almost 20 percent across Europe, IHS' report claimed that the mounting deployment of SSDs in PCs has meant the drives reached shipments of 5.9 million units in the first quarter of 2013.

IHS said that this is up more than threefold from the 1.9 million units shipped worldwide to ultrathin and ultrabook PCs during the same three month period in 2012, amounting to four million more shipments.

SSDs also made an impact in the tablet sector IHS said, with shipments hitting 1.6 million units, also tripling the figures from the same period last year where sales were recorded at just 542,000 units.

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Startup's 'RRAM' Tech Promises 1TB Memory for Mobile Devices

A California startup called Crossbar is working on an alternative to current NAND Flash memory chips like those used in mobile devices and other consumer electronics products which could serve up a terabyte of storage and playback capacity on "an IC smaller than a postage stamp."

Crossbar, which came out of stealth mode on Monday, calls its "new category of very high capacity and high-performance non-volatile memory" technology "Crossbar Resistive RAM," or RRAM, though several tech sites are dubbing it "ReRAM."

"This new generation of non-volatile memory will be capable of storing up to 1TB of data on a single 200mm2 chip, enabling massive amounts of information, such as 250 hours of HD movies, to be stored and played back from an IC smaller than a postage stamp," Crossbar said in a statement announcing its presence.

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MSI Introduces 'World's Thinnest' 17-Inch Gaming Laptop

It's like Christmas in August for gamers: MSI on Monday revealed the GS70—touted as the world's thinnest and lightest 17-inch portable gaming machine, designed specifically to fuse power with portability.

MSI boasts a "lethal arsenal of cutting-edge components," including the latest fourth-generation Intel Core i7 processor, Nvidia's GeForece GTX 765M, Killer DoubleShot, and a SteelSeries full color backlit keyboard with Anti-Ghosting keys.

Additionally, the computer highlights MSI's ultra-thin aluminum chassis, measuring in at 0.85 inches thin and weighing only 5.7 pounds.

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Sony's PlayStation 4 Comeback

Microsoft became the leader in the game console business but did not obliterate Sony entirely. Now Sony is making a comeback with the Sony's PlayStation 4 while the newest Xbox One  will have to fight for market share.

There are plenty of reasons for this but in the end most people simply prefer the PS4 because it's $100 less. I've written about this in previous columns but the outrageous pricing decisions at Microsoft stem from Steve Ballmer's insistence that price be a reflection of development costs, regardless of the size of the market and the competition.

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Should You Build a Responsive Site or a Native Mobile App

You know your business needs a mobile presence, but how to best offer that experience — without breaking the bank — is something tons of companies, both big and small, continue to struggle with.

Carl asks: Is it worth it for me to have a mobile app (or should I just have a responsive site)? How do I know whether I'm getting bang for my buck?

If Carl had asked this question back in 2009 or 2010, it would have been phrased, "Do I need a native app or is a mobile-optimized website enough?" In 2011 and 2012, the question again would have shifted to "native app or mobile web app?" Today, "responsive" is the buzzword du jour.

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First 3D-Printed Rifle Successfully Fires 14 Shots

A riflemaker in Canada has made and tested what he says is the world's first 3D-printed rifle. He follows gunsmith Cody Wilson who fired the first 3D-printed handgun earlier this year.

When the riflemaker, known as "Matthew," first fired the .22-caliber rifle, the gun cracked after the first shot. Now, the rifle, known as the "Grizzly," is back and better than ever, according to Matthew, who furnished the rifle with a thicker barrel.

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