What updates should Android developers focus on from Google I/O?
In this video, Android Engineer Kris Pena picks out the most important pieces of information that came out of this year's Google I/Oconference.
She dissects all the changes to Android app permissions, like prompting users just to allow ccess to location services or cameras in real time, versus presenting them with a long list of permissions before an install.
She also discusses some of the exciting new APIs released with the Android M preview, as well as Google's new Design Support Library, which makes it easier for designers to implement many of the features of material design without a lot of extra work.
Enjoy, and don't forget to subscribe to our Ask a Dev YouTube channel to catch more videos like this.
The $129 Polaroid Zip Instant Photoprinter is a pocket digital printer that prints up sticker pics from your smartphone or tablet. It's possibly Polaroid's most exciting product in years.
Mashable Choice highlights the products and services we've tested and would recommend to others. Consider it Liked, Favorited, +1'ed and Pinned.
I love being able to hold pictures in my hands, but I love being able to stick my pictures on things even more.
Sticker pictures are back, and they're more fun to print out than they were before thanks toPolaroid's $130 pocket-sized Zip Instant Photoprinter.
Before digital cameras, before cellphone cameras and before Facebook and Instagram, there was the photo booth. And then for a short period of time in the mid to late 1990s, photo booths from Asia that printed "sticker pics" became really popular worldwide.
SEE ALSO: Can Fujifilm Bring Instant Film Cameras Into the Selfie Era?
It was a much simpler time. Sticker pics let you express yourself and show off your goofy side. They were a precursor to selfies, if you will.
You and a few friends would cram into a tiny photo booth and select frames and borders and make faces into the camera. Afterwards, you'd divvy the stickers up and slap them onto your notebook, CD player, pager (if you were so lucky to own one) or other personal items.
In recent years, instant film cameras have seen somewhat of a resurgence in popularity. Despite the unlimited number of digital photos we can now snap and share immediately with our phones,
people are falling in love with pictures that they can hold in their hands again
people are falling in love with pictures that they can hold in their hands again.
I'm as guilty as everyone else. Since I bought my Fujifilm Instax Mini 90 last year, I've taken hundreds of instant pictures. I bring it with me whenever there's a party, wedding or social event. There's still something delightful about watching instant pics develop and then giving them out to people as gifts. Look in my wallet and you'll find around six instant pics tucked inside that are rotated with new ones every couple of months.
But as great as instant film cameras are, they're still analog gadgets. Polaroid's Zip Instant Photoprinter takes your most used camera — your phone — and lets you print your pics out on the fly.
Ink-less prints
The digital printer is no larger than a small portable hard drive or battery pack and weighs only 0.41 pounds. I tested the white model (it also comes in black, magenta and cyan), and it's sleek with rounded corners and edges. Polaroid's iconic rainbow stripe runs down the front and back. There's a single power button and Micro USB port for charging and that's it. If not for the rainbow stripe, it could pass for an Apple product.
Slide the top cover off and you'll gain access to the paper tray. The Photoprinter prints pics using Polaroid's ZINK Zero Ink paper (2- x 3-inch stickers). ZINK paper comes in packs of 50 for $25, which works out to 50 cents per shot. It sounds like a lot, but compare that to Fujifilm Instax mini film, which is anywhere from $1 to $1.50 a shot, and it's peanuts.
What's ZINK paper, you ask? It's special paper with colored crystals embedded inside. When heat from the printer is applied onto it, the crystals activate and the photos develop. ZINK paper is the digital equivalent of instant film, without the downsides of having to keep it stored in the dark for fear of accidental exposure. And since the technology is not like an inkjet printer that applies ink on top of paper, you'll never have to buy ink cartridges or deal with smudges.
The Photoprinter isn't Polaroid's first stab at digital printing. A few years ago, I tried Polaroid's Z2300 instant digital camera, which has a built-in ZINK printer, but I thought the quality of the prints was crummy.
This time around, instead of a camera with a built-in printer, the company's simply selling a printer that connects to your smartphone or tablet and prints out pictures from there.
So easy to use
IMAGE: MASHABLE, MILES GOSCHA
The Photoprinter connects to iOS devices with Bluetooth and to Android devices with either Bluetooth or NFC. I tested the Photoprinter with an iPhone 6, HTC One M9 and Galaxy S6, and I had no real troubles pairing them to the printer.
Printing pictures is very easy to do. Everything is handled through the free Polaroid Zip app. The app itself isn't the best-designed one, though. It looks a little dated with its brushed metal aesthetic, kind of like something circa 1999 when the brushed metal look was all the rage.
The Polaroid Zip app works, but it's not the easiest to use.
IMAGE: MASHABLE, SCREENSHOT BY RAYMOND WONG
With the app, you can make a quick print either by taking a pic or selecting one from your photo gallery; make collages; create a quick business card; and edit pictures by adding filters, text, fun frames/borders and other icons and emoji.
The editing process can be tricky; it's not fully thought out. For instance, you can't use a pinch gesture to shrink and enlarge text or emoji, and you can't turn them to rotate. Several Mashableeditors kept trying to use gestures until I explained to them the correct way to make edits. You have to press and hold on these tool icons that pop in the corner like so:
Imperfect prints full of charm
ZINK paper prints aren't going to blow you away with crispness or clarity — actually, the color is pretty off and is darker than what you see in the app before printing — but it's really good for a pocket printer.
It's tough to notice, but there are some subtle differences in print quality depending on what smartphone/tablet you use. Here's a case where
having more megapixels and a better camera that takes pictures with less image noise is desirable
having more megapixels and a better camera that takes pictures with less image noise is desirable.
Print quality is especially noticeable when you print out selfies; prints from the iPhone 6's 2-megapixel front-facing camera look worse than selfies from the 5-megapixel front camera on the GS6.
It's not a deal-breaker at all, to tell you the truth. In fact, I quite like the somewhat lower resolution for some prints; it feels like you're getting something as imperfect as a picture developed from film. The grain in some pics actually gives them more charm and character.
It takes a little over a minute for pictures to print out — 30 seconds or so to send the data to the printer and another 30 seconds or so for the printer to warm up and print. Yes, I know, a whole minute, but it's not like instant film doesn't take a minute or two to develop; there's that same sort of excitement in waiting for the unknown.
More fun than Instagram
If my headline didn't clue you in from the start, the Photoprinter is just so much fun to use. It's a little pricey at $130, the battery lasts only about an hour for around 25 prints, and the app can make me grind my teeth a few times, but the overall product is delightful.
We all take hundreds (or like me, thousands) of pictures with our smartphones, but how many of those do we actually look at again? The value of a smartphone pic posted to Instagram is quickly lost to the sands of time. That selfie you posted 15 minutes ago is only memorable until you post your next one.
ZINK paper includes sticker adhesives on the back — perfect for personalizing your stuff like how I did to this MacBook.
IMAGE: MASHABLE, RAYMOND WONG
Not only does the Photoprinter give your smartphone pics tangibility, but it also increases the value of each pic printed. Stick them on the back of your phone or on your laptop lid or on your fridge and you'll remember those moments and cherish them more. They're daily reminders of the good times.
In today's ephemeral digital lifestyle, a physical photo is worth more than a million digital ones.
Polaroid Zip Instant Photoprinter
The Good
Sleek, lightweight design • Cheap ZINK sticker paper • Works with iOS and Android •Lots of funky frames, emoji and images to overlay on pics
The Bad
Occasional connectivity issues • Weak battery
The Bottom Line
The Polaroid Zip Instant Photoprinter is a little pricey at $130, but damn it if it's not a whole lot of fun to print your smartphone pics.
For China's blue-collar workers, this startup offers loans for iPhones
IMAGE: XIXINXING/CORBIS
STEVEN MILLWARD for Tech in Asia
China is still a country where people prefer to pay up-front — often with wads of cash. Taking out a loan to buy a car is still uncommon and some people avoid a mortgage and pay for a housein cases full of cash.
But not everyone has so much cash at hand.
One Shanghai-based startup is hoping to bring China's blue-collar and service industry workers — people like construction workers, security guards, and store staff — around to the idea of taking out loans for some smaller purchases. Although the people who use the service are strapped for cash, this isn't the kind of US subprime mortgage lending that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis or that's causing the new bubble that's emerging in America in subprime car loans.
"I wouldn't describe my customers as subprime — they just have no [credit] data," says Paymaxfounder and CEO Hu Dan, who's a Stanford alumnus. The startup's users, mostly across rural areas of China, have not defaulted before — and usually this is their first loan.
Paymax focuses on people buying mobile phones and tablets, and it recently expanded to cover buyers of the Apple Watch as well. It might add in laptops. That's all it covers. Hu stresses that
someone who receives a loan is "not a borrower — they're a buyer of a mobile phone."
someone who receives a loan is "not a borrower — they're a buyer of a mobile phone."That allows the service to avoid people who are desperate for cash, as well as people in trouble with loan sharks.
And that's one of several ways that Hu's startup stands out from other online loan offerings in the country.
China's credit rating problem
The biggest challenge for the startup is that it's battling the issue of China's inadequate credit rating system. Hu reckons that the People's Bank of China (PBOC) only covers about 30% of the populace with its credit ratings — but the coverage is even more sparse when it comes to blue-collar and service workers, who are the demographic that Paymax is focusing on.
So Paymax effectively built its own ratings system. Hu explains that it uses "non-traditional data" like a person's mobile phone number and QQ account number in order to root out "credit card junkies" who are just looking for a new system to scam or who have applied for loans on the growing number of Chinese peer-to-peer loan sites.
One other method of checking on potential loan recipients is much more unorthodox — the company monitors the keystrokes of potential customers while using the Paymax website. That allows the startup to weed out people, he explains, who immediately jump to the largest loan amount, or who copy-paste in their address, which might suggest someone who's applying at multiple loan sites. While that sounds creepy, the startup team reckons that Chinese consumers (who are informed about how the site works) in search of this kind of small loan won't mind such an intrusion.
A typical loan for a Paymax customer is about US$300 for a specific mobile phone or tablet. The loan usually lasts about 12 months, but 24 months is also an option.
No to e-commerce
Another unusual thing about this loans startup is that it mostly works offline, eschewing e-commerce. Offline gadget retailers are "lagging behind in technology," Hu says. "They want to compete with online, so they need credit payment options."
To do this, Paymax teams up with small and medium-sized gadget retailers so that the staff will suggest Paymax as a payment option to shoppers in the store. This covers 3,000 individual stores in China at present. The sales person, once he or she has persuaded a buyer to pay in this way, uses the app to generate a QR code that the shopper scans. This starts the loan application process — and triggers a cash reward for the shop assistant in the form of a WeChat "red envelope" that contains a random amount of cash; it could be anywhere from US$1.60 to US$32 for a single sign-up.
At this point, Hu explains to Tech in Asia, it takes about five to seven minutes for the startup's cloud-based credit rating engine to whirr into life and crunch through all that unusual data it has just been fed. A staffer might even make a call to one or two of the applicant's contacts in order to confirm a few details. Factoring in some extra checks, a decision is made within 15 minutes and the loan amount is instantly wired to the shopper's bank card so it can be used to buy that gadget.
The startup makes money from a service fee as well as the flat-rate interest on the loan. "There's not enough data yet for variable rates," Hu says, but it's something they're working on so as to offer lower rates to safer loan applicants — and higher ones to riskier bets.
Paymax doesn't cooperate with China's top electronics retailers, such as Gome or Suning, partly because the startup doesn't cover purchases of home appliances, and partly, Hu concedes, because those major companies will probably get into loans in the future.
Another reason Paymax works mostly offline rather than doing e-commerce, Hu says, is because
there's no room for startups in China's e-commerce industry
there's no room for startups in China's e-commerce industry, dominated as it is by sites like JD and Alibaba's Taobao and Tmall. Plus, those tech titans might soon get into the loans space, which would be no surprise as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent are already getting into finance and online banking. "They have lots of data already," Hu says — and he believes they'll first target white-collar workers with loans and then a few years later open up to blue-collar workers as well.
Until then, he sees China's 200 million young blue-collar and service industry workers with no credit cards as a potential user base that will stay the same size despite China's growing middle class.
Cashing in
China is seeing an explosion of online loan and micro-loan startups, but they're all very different to Paymax. P2P loan startups are now flooding the market, keen to give ordinary people a way to lend money to individuals and small businesses. Notable startups in the P2P space include Dianrong, Renrendai, and Xiaomi-backed Jimubox.
Closer rivals to Paymax are self-contained estores like 99fenqi and Qufenqi ("fen qi" means "installment" in Chinese), which are mixing online commerce with loans.
All those have secured significant VC funding — as has Paymax, which secured US$15 million series A led by Sequoia Capital last year, and which will soon announce series B from Sequoia along with some new investors.
Hu is a former VP of Sequoia Capital China. After four years in the role, he left last July to pursue an idea he had back at Stanford years before — one that morphed into Paymax and parent company Omni Prime. That idea was inspired by a class taught by Richard Fairbank, the co-founder of Capital One bank. "It was all about subprime and prime loans — and I thought it was very brilliant," says Hu.
He also felt the time was right — in terms of both consumer demand and the infrastructure being in place for a big data startup.
Aside from getting more stores to offer Paymax as an option, the team is looking at expanding into small cash loans. Based on a survey of current customers, the startup found that many were interested in microloans like US$200 for just a few weeks. "Like bridge loans to the monthly pay check," Hu says.
If they offer that service, it will only be to existing customers by creating a whitelist of good loan recipients.
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Sydney is a city where an entirely un-special parking spot can sell for A$120,000, so there's clearly a lot of room for a clever startup to come and shake things up.
Divvy is hoping it's that startup. While it began with a similar peer-to-peer model to Airbnb — connecting people who have a spare car space and would like to earn some extra cash, with those in desperate need of somewhere to park — it's now planning to expand the service and help corporate buildings manage their parking assets.
SEE ALSO: This Sydney startup wants to reinvent your boring old Word docs
Nick Austin, founder and CEO of Divvy.
IMAGE: DIVVY
Launched in 2011, Divvy announced Tuesday it had closed a A$2.5 million funding round and formalised relationships with corporate property owners DEXUS Property Group, GPT Group and Knight Frank, among others, who will use the platform to manage the parking available in their Australian buildings.
Besides investment funding, Divvy makes money by collecting a commission on transactions.
Currently, once users have signed up to Divvy online, they can enter their destination and adjust the maximum distance they're willing to walk from that spot. If a monthly space is available, they can book right away. Otherwise, Divvy will SMS or email them an alert when one opens up.
However, the startup will be releasing a mobile app in the next few weeks to book hourly and daily spaces around Australia, before pushing out to Asia and Europe, Nick Austin, CEO and founder of Divvy Parking, told Mashable Australia. "We want to move into the short term parking market across cities globally to improve access to spaces that are sitting empty," he said. "Not just on a monthly basis, but hourly or daily."
While it operates in greater Sydney, the company is starting to expand in Melbourne and Brisbane, and plans to ramp up in those cities over the next couple of months thanks to the cash injection.
The partnerships with some of Australia's largest property owners suit the way workplaces are changing globally, Austin said. As more employees are teleworking from home or coming to the office only three or four days a week, more dynamic work arrangements are necessary. At the moment, city parking is generally booked on a monthly basis in commercial spaces, he said, so it doesn't suit these emerging trends.
Screenshot of the Divvy platform.
IMAGE: DIVVY
As an average citizen, it can also be hard to figure out where to park at all. "If you look at the Sydney CBD, there are around 1,200 buildings and about 65 public parking lots," Austin said. "They have completely different access systems, so we're creating a common system across the market, much like Uber."
By offering a standard platform, people can access parking at a broader footprint for 30-50% cheaper than a traditional parking lot, he claims.
Austin is positive city trends will work out well for Divvy. "There's very little all-day street parking left in Sydney and little parking being built into new premises," he said. "There are a lot of macro elements working in our favour."
You might not think fashion and the hoodie-dominated world of technology would mix. Technology is often focused on efficiency, while fashion is about self-expression and exuberance.
A number of Australian entrepreneurs are working on bringing fashion, beauty and technology together, from helping women customise shoes online they actually want to wear, to streamlining the process of booking salon appointments with a mobile app.
SEE ALSO: A new algorithm for Instagram helps you make your friends jealous of your fashion sense
Three Aussie women using their business and style savvy to unite fashion and technology include: Jodie Fox, cofounder of shoe design platform Shoes of Prey, Jessica Wilson, cofounder of fashion discovery app Stashd, and Lauren Silvers, founder of salon appointment booking app Glamazon.
Jodie Fox, Shoes of Prey
Since it was founded in Sydney in 2009, Shoes of Prey has gone global.
The multi-platform app, which lets women design shoes online down to the shade of leather and have them mailed to their door, just opened a global headquarters in Los Angeles and announced a partnership with the U.S. department store, Nordstrom.
Founded by Jodie Fox, 33, along with Michael Fox and Mike Knapp, the business broke even in about two months, Fox said. That's when the founders knew they were onto something. "We were giving women the opportunity to be stylish, and to have something they were comfortable in," Fox told Mashable Australia.
With a background in law and advertising, Fox said she had always wanted her own business. Mixing fashion and technology, however, was left of field. "We used to go head to head about whether [Shoes of Prey was] a technology company or a fashion company," she said. "We didn't realise we were both."
Jodie Fox, cofounder of Shoes of Prey.
IMAGE: SHOES OF PREY
The company believes the fashion model is broken. "We see all these extraordinary designers put in the position of having to manufacture thousands of collections that people may or may not want to buy," she said. "It ends up causing this huge challenge in terms of waste, and ... people regard things in this disposable manner."
Technology fits perfectly into this equation — with its digital platform, Shoes of Prey is able to give people access to the exact product they want, without bulk manufacturing.
Fox thinks fashion, beauty and technology will need each other, especially as wearables develop. "Technology can make these amazing products we put on our body like Google Glass," she said. "But it needs fashion to make it something we would actually wear."
For others hoping to enter the fashion and tech space, Fox has some advice: Do everything before you're ready. "You learn a ton more by doing things than you ever do by planning," she said. And don't be afraid to admit you don't know what you don't know. "People are generous in giving you time and advice if you're confident enough to go and ask for it," she added.
Jessica Wilson, Stashd
Business and fashion both come naturally to Jessica Wilson, 23, cofounder of fashion discovery platform, Stashd. It was technology that was the steep learning curve.
A "global, virtual mall on your mobile," the Stashd iPhone app (with Android and Windows Mobile apps in the works) lets users swipe through clothes, save images and make purchases.
Wilson's entrepreneurial spirit started early. Growing up on a farm in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, she founded a company when she was 16 hosting formal after parties for different local high schools, she told Mashable Australia.
She later worked at the Australian, New York and Paris fashion weeks for different designers and PR companies, but decided to take a career U-turn in 2013 and booked a one way ticket to Silicon Valley without knowing a single person. "It was about putting myself in the right situation," Wilson said. She went to launches and networking drinks and even met one of her main business mentors in the girl's bathroom at an event.
IMAGE: STASHD
On her return to Sydney in 2014, she moved into the technology coworking space, Fishburners. That's when she got started translating the process of browsing in a brick and mortar store to a smartphone. Now working with over 3,000 brands globally, including Net-A-Porter, Asos and General Pants Co., the app aims to change the way people shop online.
Until this point, the startup has been funded through sales — depending on the store, Stashd makes between 8% and 20% a sale — but the company plans to raise investment cash in the coming months to fund further expansion.
Wilson's even shooting a pilot for a reality TV show about her journey as a female startup founder. "I want to show how real it is being an entrepreneur," she said. "It's not just all the hype people see in the media. You have extreme highs and extreme lows and you pivot almost weekly."
Jessica Wilson, cofounder of Stashd.
IMAGE: STASHD
When starting out, Wilson advises entrepreneurs to ask questions of people who know more than them. "When I entered from the fashion space, I didn't know much about tech," she said. "Meet people in the space and ask them questions you think are stupid."
"The fashion industry has problems to solve, and tech can solve those problems," she said.
Lauren Silvers, Glamazon
Lauren Silvers, 25, came up with the idea for Glamazon in early 2013, when she found it frustrating to connect with salons for last minute haircuts or manicure appointments.
While working in PR in New York, she was using apps like Seamless and Uber, and that gave her the idea for a platform that connected clients with beauticians on-demand, Silvers toldMashable Australia.
Before launching the Glamazon iPhone app in June 2014 — you can also book on the company's website, with an upcoming Android app — Silvers spent months learning about the startup scene.
While having always been business minded — she started a dog walking service at age nine — she didn't even know what the term "startup" meant when she developed the idea for Glamazon. "All I knew was I had this vision of how girls could connect with beauty salons," she said. "I'm not a tech person, but I believe in outsourcing all your weaknesses."
The Glamazon app.
IMAGE: GLAMAZON
Within six months of launch, after working with part-time developers on the app, she had more than 140 vetted salons signed up across Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. Now Glamazon has over 5,000 customers, with most located in Sydney. The company takes a 15% commission off every transaction, but salons don't pay to be on the platform and the app helps them fill empty session times.
The goal in 2015 is to launch GLAMfit, Silvers said. The company has found users of Glamazon are also interested in fitness and health, so the platform will help people book last minute yoga, pilates or personal trainer sessions.
Glamazon owes a lot to a collaborative approach, Silvers said. Her advisory board, with members who are involved in companies like Uber, Peasy.com and H2Coco, has been integral to the startup's growth. "Without my mentors and advisors, it would have taken me longer," she said. "I would have gotten there, but these are people who have seen it all before, so why not tap into their knowledge?"
Lauren Silvers, founder of Glamazon.
IMAGE: GLAMAZON
Word of mouth marketing has also paid off for Glamazon. She's found reaching out to Instagram celebrities with the offer of free appointments, such as Australian actress Charlotte Best and health blogger Jessica Sepel, really helpful. "There's so much marketing out there these days, a personal endorsement really cuts through," she added.
That's not to say startup life has been easy. "You can kiss a nine-to-five, five-day-a-week lifestyle behind," Silvers said. "You work whenever you need to work." While putting everything into Glamazon means she's living with her parents, it's still been immensely rewarding. "It's so fulfilling to see what I'm doing come to fruition," she said.
