Google buys Flexycore, creator of a “10x speed boost” app for Android
French site L'Expansion is
reporting that Google has completed a year-long acquisition of the
company Flexycore. Flexycore's most prominent product is "droidbooster,"
an app that claimed to make an Android device run "ten times faster."
While that claim might strain the bounds of belief, the company was
reputable enough to have a profile on the ARM partner site, and its
founder is the former head of R&D for Texas Instruments.
The supposed 10x speed boost came from generating heavily optimized
ARM binaries from Android's normal Dalvik code. Droidbooster also
claimed to increase battery life, presumably because a sped-up device
would spend less time processing and more time in a low-power state.
While Flexycore's website is down, its YouTube account still works,
which means we can watch a demo!
One thing you'll notice from the video is that it is extremely old. It shows the droidbooster tech running on a Froyo-equipped Nexus One. Indeed, FlexyCore doesn't seem to have done anything
on the Internet for the last two years. The company actively promoted
its product, releasing 11 videos in a one-year span, and then just
stopped. The lack of recent activity makes it unclear if Flexycore has
continued development outside the public eye.
The most pressing question is this: does a speed boost that worked in
2010 on Android 2.2 still function today? FlexyCore was obviously
working on something significant—Google felt the company was worth
purchasing for $23.1 million.
Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...
Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...
Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...