The Teeny, Tiny Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter Is Available For Pre-Order

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A few weeks ago the Crazyflie Nano captured our collective imaginations by winging its way around an open plan office and looking like a cross between a hummingbird and the robotic butterfly that steals things in Dora the Explorer . The tiny quadrotor robot is now available for pre-order for $173 for the multi-sensor version and $143 for a basic version with position sensors. The product should ship in April. The project is completely open source and requires a soldering iron and some smarts to complete. The $173 version includes an altimeter and magnetometer so you can tell your height and direction. You can control it with a standard gaming joystick connected to a PC Read more »

Ret.io, A Crowdsourced Answer To Corruption In Mexico

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Three years ago Mario Romero Zavala and José Antonio Bolio decided to create a Twitter account in Mexico City to alert people to cumbersome police checkpoints that too often resulted in various forms of harassment to locals. This was the beginning of Ret.io , which has since changed tremendously. Ret.io’s Twitter presence has grown across multiple accounts in every Mexican state to 27,000 followers. Its website has more than 100,000 monthly visitors, and its iPhone app has been in the top 10 in the App Store within the navigation category. For the first year Ret.io was just one Twitter account that tracked and tweeted mentions and tips. The iPhone app was released in February of this year, albeit Romero Zavala admits that the core functionality still lies with Twitter. Although the app originally was created so people could report the checkpoints, users eventually began using the service in different ways. Zavala points out that the site isn’t set up to fight narcos in Mexico per se, but there are tangental intersections Read more »

Jirafe Grabs $7M From Foundry, FirstMark To Bring Better Analytics To eCommerce

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Founded in 2010, New York City-based startup Jirafe set out with a simple mission: Help eCommerce store managers turn their digital storefronts into viable, thriving businesses. To do so, in the long term, Jirafe hopes to be able to someday automate the many boring administrative and analytical tasks that are part of daily grind of running (and monetizing) an eCommerce operation — so that merchants can get back to focusing on product and customer service Read more »

Linus Torvalds: Locked Down Technologies Lose in the End

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Linux creator Linus Torvalds shared his opinions on Microsoft, Apple, open vs. locked down technologies and the future of Linux , at the LinuxCon Brazil conference this week. “Technologies that lock things down tend to lose in the end,” said Torvalds when asked about Microsoft’s secure boot feature, which he likened to Apple’s use of DRM technology Read more »