PayPal awards first winners of Battle Hack in Toronto

The winning developer team of Maya Kenedy, Alex Christodoulou, Christopher Larsen, and Ernst Riemer from Pivotal Labs took home the coveted Viking axe trophies and a paid trip to the Battle Hack World Finals later this year.

PayPal just announced the winners of its inaugural Battle Hack competition in Toronto. Local developers were tasked to develop mobile apps that incorporate PayPal’s application programming interface or Braintree or Venmo Software Development Kits to solve community issues. Team Angry Kittens won the Toronto competition and has secured a spot at the PayPal Battle Hack World Finals in San Jose, California in November. They will compete with winners from 13 other cities including Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Istanbul, London, Miami, Mexico City, Moscow, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney, Tel Aviv, and Warsaw. The winner of that global competition will take home US$100,000 and be named the “Ultimate Hackers for Good.”

Team Angry Kittens created the Security Blanket mobile app with the use of Beacon, Bluetooth Low Energy technology, and Twilio to help parents track missing children. PayPal is used to have people donate to help locate the children or supply sensors to help find them. The team also hopes to use the app to monitor the whereabouts of Alzheimer’s patients and even pets.

Intel debuts next-gen chip in a new mobile device

Intel has brought its next-generation Broadwell chip to Computex in a new mobile device they call Llama Mountain. Intel President Renée James introduced Broadwell as the “world’s first 14 [nanometer] fanless mobile PC reference design. Broadwell is said to be a 14-nanometer “shrink,” which means its transistor geometries have been reduced. This will enable manufacturers to create more compact devices.

The Llama Mountain uses Broadwell Y series silicon, which the company intends to brand as “Core M” processor. Intel says it will be the company’s most energy efficient processor to date. The Llama Mountain is 12.5-inch device with a detachable keyboard. It is said to demo the future of devices that will run on this new processors. According to Intel, the new designs that will use Broadwell are expected to be fanless. This will help create “lightning-fast” tablets and “razor-thin” laptops.

Source: CNET

HTC expands One line with E8 in China

The HTC One E8 was announced in China and will be a more affordable entry into HTC's family of products. A dual-SIM LTE-enabled smartphone, the "E8" is expected to cost the equivalent of US $450. Sporting a 5-inch screen the E8 is powered by a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 (2.5GHz in Asia/China; 2.3GHz in other regions); Adreno 330 GPU. This model eschews the UltraPixel camera in favour of a more conventional 13 megapixel shooter. No word on whether this model will be sold anywhere else aside from China.

Source: Engadget

TomTom: Vancouver, Toronto are most congested cities in Canada

TomTom released its fourth global Traffic Index. This year’s Traffic Index showed that traffic congestion on secondary roads is worse than main roads, and commuters around the world are spending an average of eight working days a year stuck in traffic. In fact, it is revealed that traffic shortcuts drivers take to avoid congestion are actually ‘long cuts’, adding 50 per cent more travel time to journeys. 

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