Dubbed TV+, the company’s first smart TV will be produced by TCL Multimedia Technology Holdings Ltd, with a 48-inch screen costing 4,567 yuan ($746). Sales launched with the company’s announcement. A more competitively priced model will launch in November at a price of 2,999 yuan. The TVs will offer over 200,000 selected high-definition videos, movies and drama series for free.

“With the cooperation with iQIYI and Baidu, we have become the first Chinese TV maker to have incorporated the Internet business model into the conventional TV business,” said Hao Yi, Chief Executive Officer of TCL Multimedia, in a press release. “The launch of TV+ has not just reinforced our leading product strengths, but has strengthened the application of information technologies in our operations. This has established a firm footing in consolidating the Group’s presence in the league of world-class TV brands and has significantly accelerated its incorporation of information technologies in the conventional TV business.”

The smart TVs will offer content from Baidu’s IQiyi.com, which it acquired last year. The sale, which was combined with Baidu’s June acquisition of PPStream Inc, the Internet video company, gave Baidu the largest online video platform in China.

With this latest release, Baidu will compete against Alibaba, the Chinese ecommerce engine that released a set-top box TV last July. The device uses Alibaba’s ecommerce and online payment systems such as Tmall, Taobao and Alipay, which allow users to shop and pay bills from a television. Alibaba’s TV also features an app store for video game purchases and music streaming services. Both Baidu and Alibaba will also compete against Samsung’s and Apple’s smart TVs.

IResearch, the consultancy company, has estimated that the Chinese online video market will be worth 16.2 billion yuan next year, Bloomberg noted.

The third generation in Skyera’s solid state platform, skyEagle offers flash storage at a price for $1 per gigabyte less than its previous release, while improving performance to an industry leading 5M IOPS, according to the company’s own claims. It adds over 2.5 petabytes after compression and deduplication. It leverages the high density of the Most Advanced 1y/1z NAND (MAN) flash chips together with its own high performing flash controller technology. The new platform features 16 interchangeable 16Gb Fibre Channel and 10Gb Ethernet ports and supports a mix of Fibre Channel and iSCSI block-based SAN protocols, plus 96 lanes of optional PCIe connectivity. It also supports NFS and CIFS.

The company claims installation can be done in as little as 10 minutes.

“Last year’s release of skyHawk offered higher performance at a price point much better than anyone close to us” Skyera’s CEO Radoslav Danilak told Red Herring. “This year, we’ve gone beyond that by an order of magnitude. We are changing how flash is working as well as how people work with Flash. We are offering customized commodity Flash at the same price as consumer storage with enterprise endurance and reliability.”

In addition to a consumer grade discount, Skyera’s customers also gain greater control over the system, Danilak contends. The data is routinely backed up at multiple ends, so that if any components fail, the system continues operating. “You can replace components while the system is still running,” Danilak said.

“Skyera is enabling smaller companies to have Facebook or Google type storage systems in the cloud by shrinking the density more than 100 times,” Danilak claimed. “It’s similar to the transition of bringing the mainframe to the personal computer. One rack of our systems gives you a very powerful data system. We can deliver big data to just about every customer.”

The company recently raised $51.6 million from Dell Ventures, WD Ventures, and several Tier 1 NAND Flash vendors. Though Danilak declined to state what last year’s generation did for the company’s base, he allowed that the company had delivered on its investors’ plan within 5 percent of accuracy. He anticipates similar results with the latest release.

Danilak expects future generations of Skyera’s platform to be “even crazier disruptions than generation three,” he said. “Interestingly, it was our customers who pushed us to this capacity. The market demanded, and our engineers worked around the clock to deliver it.”

While the company competes against data storage entities such as Pure Storage or Nimbus, it outdoes these players by an order of magnitude, explained Frankie Roohparvar, COO of Skyera.

“skyHawk’s introduction last year put us in a class by ourselves in regards to capacity and performance,” Roohparvar stated. “We felt that our only competition was us, and now we have disrupted ourselves not by a factor of 2 over 18 months in accordance with Moore’s law, but by over 10 times the performance and capacity in just 12 months.”

With Locket, co-founder and CEO Yunha Kim had brands in mind she thought users might like to interact with, but customers quickly took ad selection upon themselves. “We were getting thousands of emails from users that are saying, hey, I want to see ads from this company or that company,” she says. Soon, those emails prompted a platform allowing customers to request and rank which brands advertised on their phones.

According to the company’s press release, submissions flooded in following the “My Ads” platform’s appearance on lock screens. Within 20 minutes, users had sent in 1,000 entries. The campaign saw a click-through rate of 36.2 percent, meaning almost 4 of 10 people engaged with Locket instead of swiping messaging to the side.

The platform’s a triple-win for Locket, consumers and advertisers. Locket gets users increasingly engaged in their product; customers get say in what they’re pitched; and advertisers get crucial data on ready-made markets. “Advertisers are spending a lot of time and money and resources on trying to find out who their demographics are,” Kim says. Locket can measure reach. “I think that’s more efficient than trying to beat around the bush and guessing what ads users would like to see.”

Following the success of the campaign, the company’s launching a financial outreach program called Locket Cares. Currently, Locket’s partnering with Los Angeles non-prof Free Arts for Abused Children, which brings art programming to more than 500,000 underprivileged kids. “Locket is backing the organization by driving donations and featuring children’s beautiful and inspiring artwork on Locket users’ lock screens,” the release states. Kim says Locket Cares eliminates confusion around where to donate and when and makes charitable giving one-swipe simple. “We were thinking, how cool would it be for users to be like, I’m a Locket Caregiver, or Locket Giver,” Kim says. “Then all you have to do is click on that button, and that allows you to give back to the community every single time you unlock your phone.”

Kim foresees Locket letting users choose where their donations go, but right now they’ve paired with Free Arts for a trial run.

As for Locket’s future, they’re connecting with investors and looking to raise additional capital. “We are actually in the fundraising process for the next, a bigger round,” Kim says. “We have our previous investors that would like to join but we are also looking for the best partners that already have experience in what we’re doing, and [who would] be able to add new perspective and add value to our business.”

More money means expansion from the Android platform. “With the fundraising, as soon as we close that, we will be hiring aggressively,” Kim says. Additional staff will help develop an iPhone and tablet app for Locket.

The product’s designed to give users privacy and peace of mind, as well as a chance to disconnect. “The pocket functions effectively to protect your security, if your data is being tracked or monitored or if your location is being tracked or monitored,” says Adam Harvey, who designed the OFF Pocket in collaboration with Johanna Bloomfield. “But the other part of it, which I think is more interesting, is the psychological aspect; which, you’re placing your phone inside a bag that eliminates your connection with the phone.”

Inside the case, phones can’t send or receive signals across a range of frequencies used for communication. No signals, no data––meaning location’s untraceable and texts and calls don’t land.

Harvey’s OFF Pocket prototype debuted last year at January’s “Stealth Wear” exhibition (hosted by TANK Magazine and presented by Primitive London) along with his anti-drone garments. “The timing worked out well for the show because that was right around when drones became a daily news item,” he says. “And now it happens that I’m launching this product when cell phone tracking’s a daily news item.”

Lately, current events portray U.S. agencies less like Uncle Sam and more like Big Brother. “The recent news with the NSA, Edward Snowden, Verizon, XKeystroke and so on is only supporting––it’s providing a good argument for what people should have already been thinking about…in the last 12 years since the introduction of the Patriot Act, when we’ve been engaged in the dilemma of trading our privacy for security,” Harvey says. “Security is more important, but there is a limit. You can’t take that logic and scale it infinitely.”

“At some point people will want their privacy back and that’s what’s happening now,” he continues. “The problem is that you can’t simply ask for your privacy back.”

Harvey sees the OFF Pocket appealing to a wide audience, from middle-to-high school tweens and teens evading parents’ tracking to journalists, politicians and security industry employees. Its democratic applicability suits the Kickstarter platform well.

“This is what I see as a highly functional security or privacy product, and putting it on Kickstarter is offering it to anyone,” Harvey says. “And I think that’s important; that is, providing security, but anybody could buy it–– whether you’re a whistleblower at the NSA or you work at home and you need a break from your phone or you’re just concerned about security.”

With 11 days left, OFF Pocket’s already cleared its funding goal of $35,000 by $10,000. Its success might drive others to follow Harvey’s lead into privatized privacy.

“It’s also proving to people that there’s a market for privacy-type items,” Harvey says. “I think people are gonna see this and realize that hey, I’m onto something, and that’ll probably motivate other people to explore the business side to privacy.”

“Our biggest challenge is getting over this first hurdle, where we get enough people together, enough money together; this can’t be done on the cheap,” says Randolph Hencken of The Seasteading Institute. “So while there’s lots of people who wish they could just go tomorrow, it’s going to take a critical mass of people and capital to actualize the place.”

The Institute’s “Floating City Project” is a pipe dream made practical. Its mission may appeal to those fed up feeling voiceless in today’s political process, as seasteading gives people a fresh start.

“What holds seasteaders together is a penchant for new opportunities,” Hencken says. “A lot of that has to do with freedom from [overreaching] governments, [and] a lot of that has to do with just the excitement of trying something new.”

Floating-city settlers may choose to migrate offshore for the chance to shape their political futures. The Institute’s seastead will strive for de facto autonomy.

“The major goal behind seasteading is to give humans more opportunity in governance,” Hencken says. “We have 7 billion people and only 190 countries, so there’s not a lot of choice. And there’s so many great ideas for how we could live together or run a government that are unavailable to be tested because there’s no space to test them.”

Retaining autonomy can prove tricky, even on the ocean. It makes more sense economically to locate a seastead close to shore rather than in international waters; but coastal proximity means dealing with local territorial jurisdiction.

“We’ve spent a good process evaluating coastal nations for ones that we think would be most susceptible to reaching a bilateral investment treaty with us,” Hencken says. “We also plan to build a city that is of symbiotic relationship to the neighbor.”

Some potential boons for coastal countries considering a seastead: new jobs and an influx of people and product at their ports. Plus, Hencken says, seasteading could provide solutions to oceanic pollution exacerbated by agricultural runoff.

“There’s a lot of great opportunities in aquaculture that would be associated with a floating city that could remediate the waters,” Hencken says. “So it would be commercial benefits, environmental benefits, and social benefits of allowing a seastead to be in their waters.”

To build a maritime metropolis, the Institute must navigate diplomatic waters and get plans in hand. Their current Indiegogo campaign aims to raise $20,000 to pay Dutch firm DeltaSync to transform vision into design; the Thiel foundation will match whatever the public puts in.

“Eventually our goal for the floating city project in the next year is to conclude this feasibility study where we say, this is what the design could be, this is what the design would cost, here’s a location that we’ve already begun negotiations with the government, and here’s hundreds of people that want to live there,” Hencken says. “And then we take that project and we go to investors and developers and we say this is a worthwhile investment.”

“The total cost of [the feasibility study for] our floating city project is going to be probably closer to a quarter million dollars,” he says.

Besides actual capital, The Institute looks to Indiegogo for another kind of validation.

“It’s one thing to say on a survey, ‘Yeah, I would pay $800 a square foot.’ It’s another thing to actually put down as little as $10 or up to thousands of dollars to show that you’re really committed,” Hencken says. “And that’s what we’re asking of the community right now, is to prove their interest in seasteading by putting a little skin in the game.”

From its Indiegogo campaign to online survey, the Institute’s seasteading movement has welcomed crowdsourced input. Importantly, what the masses donate to, there’s a chance they can participate in. Many a Trekkie will tell you space is the final frontier; but with seasteading becoming a viable alternative to land living in the not-so-distant future, pioneers could settle new frontiers a bit closer to home.

“There’s so much energy put towards trying to take humanity to space and it’s a great idea, and I hope it will be that we will get there. But I don’t think we’re going to get there in my lifetime, not to a point where the common person could afford to go there.” “Yet it’s something that’s very feasible to make it so the common people could go live on the ocean, and there’s a frontier right there waiting for us that’s unexplored, uninhabited.”

Unexplored and uninhabited for now.

“I do believe that this floating city project that we’re working on, with the Indiegogo campaign is going to catalyze the first bona fide seastead,” Hencken says. “I’d like to see us begin construction on it in the next few years; hopefully by 2020 we can see hundreds or thousands of people living there.”

RH: Tell me about GCON.

TS: GCON started out late 2011 when we had the idea of having a girls’ gaming convention in Saudi. The gaming conventions here are usually male-only, and we’re not allowed access, so we’re kind of left out from that community. And there’s a huge female gamer community here, [and] us being gamers we definitely wanted to be part of these events, so we decided to host our own event…We came up with the idea and went through with it and somehow, we actually pulled off the first girls-only gamers convention here.

RH: What challenges did you encounter, planning GCON?

TS: We had around 3,000 people attend the event last year. Actually, the numbers are a bit messy because there was a storm that day, and we kind of had to shut down for the first day. [Laughs] That was one of the challenges we faced. But it was around 3,000 female gamers. We had very little marketing budget, of course…but if I have to go back probably the main challenge was convincing the companies that there actually is a female gamer community. I remember sitting in meetings with Sony, Microsoft and just saying ‘Really, we’re here, we exist, this is a good idea. We invite you to participate, please take place in this event.’ That was probably the first obstacle we faced.

RH: If companies didn’t know you’re out there, do you feel the separation of female gamers is an awareness issue, or one more embedded in social and cultural pressures around girl gaming?

TS: I would say it’s a little bit of both. It’s not exactly very ladylike to be a gamer. For a lot of people it is like that, not for the new generation, but for older generations that’s one thing. Another thing is, it’s like you said…they don’t know that these gamers exist because they don’t see them at events, because the events are male-dominant. So they assume that they don’t exist.

RH: Was GCON a way for girl gamers to announce their presence?

TS: Yes, we basically wanted to say ‘We’re here, we exist, and we would like to be paid attention to.’ That was our main point from last year’s event. Everything in the event last year was free. It was just about saying you know, there is a society, it’s right there, and we’re just putting it on the map.

RH: Right off the bat, you were sponsored by some of the biggest names in tech: Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. How did you get their attention?

TS: Access was not easy at all. I used to work in telecom, so I have some contacts in that area. But literally, we had to go knocking on doors and emailing info emails, and emailing someone who knows someone who might know someone who can connect us to that person that we need to talk to; in order to actually get their access was a bit difficult. Especially that we were females and…wasn’t really taken seriously at the beginning. And having actually achieved the fact that we’d managed to get them, all three companies, under one roof was huge for us. Even though it was varying participations––some of them went really big, like Sony, they went all in; other companies were a bit more shy––still, the fact that they were all there under one roof was a huge achievement for us.

RH: Did you feel like acquiring those sponsors validated your idea?

TS: Yes actually. Following the first event, especially Sony, they’ve been a huge supporter for us…last year, with our help actually, they created the ladies gamers day, and that was the first time ever they’ve done that. And this year they went all in with us, collaborating and making us an official event for them. Instead of just having GCON and ladies gamers day, we’re now officially partners with Sony for the event. So that was a milestone for us. Other companies…well, some of them basically don’t have females on their agenda, yes? In terms of the demographic that they want to serve. But there has been some attention. We’ve definitely gotten the media attention and at least now that they actually acknowledge the community. And it’s not just the gamers community by the way, we’re heavily focused on the developers’ community as well.

RH: So GCON’s also an opportunity to network.

TS: That’s what we’re trying to do, but our objective is mainly to get them working in the industry professionally. We don’t just want them to have this as a hobby. We don’t just want them to be gamers who occasionally do fan art. We actually want them to take those talents and put them to good use and get them in the industry.

RH: Have you seen progress?

TS: So far, we’ve noticed that there’s an abundance of talent when it comes to art, and many of those are now being requested. We get requests from companies that, if we know any artists who’d be interested to work on projects…once they’ve actually started putting their art out there, through GCON, through other channels, they have been getting offers to actually start doing this professionally. That’s on the art side. On the development side the community is still pretty new. We’ve had the competition with Verso, Verso is a local business incubator for educational projects. We approached them since our theme for the development competition this year was education. So we approached them and they were very supportive actually. And they offered incubation for the winning projects to help them get the games going and publish them and so on.

RH: What drives you, personally, to pursue this passion?

TS: I wanted to have these opportunities presented for me, and now that I found myself in a place where I had the ability to make them available for myself and for others––I’m a developer as well. I began developing last year. I used to be a CS student and really didn’t know what to do with a CS degree, at some point. It’s like, do I work as a programmer or do I just get into marketing like everyone else does? So having these opportunities available for me would have been a great help at that time. So I feel that if I can make them available for me and other people as well, then, yeah, it’s worth it.

RH: What future developments do you hope to see in your region and sector?

TS: Right now, what we’re working towards is seeing the first game developed by a woman published locally. We haven’t had that yet, so that’s our mission. Whether it’s someone from our team or ourselves personally or one of the developers that we’ve been working with––we need a success story, and that’s what we’re focusing on for the next year. Hopefully after that we would be able to expand a little bit around the Middle East. We’re focused on Saudi Arabia for now as we’re based here, but we’re hoping to expand a little bit and maybe take the Saudi experience and customize it and share it around and, different countries where we see this pattern could actually work.

RH: In a far-off future, do you see GCON going co-ed?

TS: I don’t see that happening in Arabia. I mean we see them around, you’ve seen them in Dubai, you’ve seen them in Jordan, and the fact that the community––it’s not really about having an all-female event, it’s just more about having a more specialized event that focuses on women. That’s it, really. But I don’t see it happening in Arabia any time soon.

RH: Is that something coming from GCON, or do you see that as specific to the Saudi Arabian culture around tech and gaming?

TS: No, it’s very cultural, not just gaming. It’s a matter of, it’s what the general preference here. And honestly, it’s working for our advantage.

The enthusiasts behind the campaign are fundraising to produce a wireless temperature controller, which they say will update brewing tech for the smartphone era.

DIY beer buffs themselves, the brains behind BrewBit (Misha Manulis, Brian Starnes and Nick Hebner) set out to create their dream controller. “We’re all huge nerds so we kind of dove in headfirst,” Hebner said. “We were really interested in learning the technical aspects of brewing.”

Their tool is capable of both monitoring and regulating temperature over the Internet. Users can babysit their beer from pretty much anywhere, as all that’s necessary to make remote modifications is web access. Homebrewers can also choose to pre-schedule temperature changes via beer profiles. “There’s certain processes in brewing [where] you want to hold special temperatures for certain durations and then change,” Hebner says. “[Before, there was] a timer running on your watch and when the alarm goes off you run over and turn up your burners. It’s a very manual process even if you have temperature controllers.”

With the Model-T, “you can tell it up front, ‘I want you to hold 135 for 10 minutes,’” Hebner says. “That’s one of the cool things that relieved a lot of stress on the brew day.”

The controller will also keep users posted on how their beer’s doing––even when they’re doing other things.

“Then of course there’s the connected aspect,” he says. “If you’re using it to control your fermentation, you can check on it when you’re bored at work. If you forget to change the temperature, you can command it to change temperature over the Internet.”

By nature open source, the Model-T’s possible functionalities are subject to users’ whims. Manulis says they’ve been asked about adapting it to other purposes, like barbecuing. Because of its potential, the BrewBit team considered marketing the Model-T based on its flexibility, but decided to focus on its use to brewers.

And though California’s known for its VC scene, BrewBit stresses the project’s more about passion than profits.

“It’s a huge passion for us,” Manulis says. “We’re not going after raising gobs of money. We want to share this with the rest of the brewing community.”

“We’re really focused on, from the startup perspective, this is helping us build the product that we want,” he says.

So far, its seems the product they want suits prospective customers fine.

“It’s been good, we’ve gotten a bunch of messages from people that are incredibly excited about it and can’t wait to get theirs,” Manulis says.

The Model-T Kickstarter campaign launched July 15 and will conclude August 17. Right now, it’s up over $37,000, with about $43,000 left to go. Funding came quickly in the beginning, but the stream has slowed down. Though Hebner says he thinks their daily numbers are just about where they need to be to acquire the necessary funding, he’s still worried.

“We’re just biting our fingernails,” he says.

Adding to the pros: Locket CEO Yunha Kim promises the Android app won’t just make mobile ads less annoying––it’ll make them entertaining.

“What we’re trying to do is change how mobile advertising works,” she says. “We want to make sure that every single ad we put out there is enjoyable, that they’re aesthetically pleasing.”

Beautiful or not, monetized mobile ads on lockscreens could raise a lot of dough for consumers. Kim says people look at their lockscreens 150 times a day. Multiplied by the million Android users out there, that’s a lot of screentime-turned-dollars-and-cents.

Locket’s model could potentially change the mobile ad game, as it rewards customers for their attention like no other company does, despite past attempts to harness the power of the platform. Both angel investors and Great Oaks Venture Capital took notice. Kim says it took three business days to acquire funding from the latter, who pumped in $500,000 in April. “We went in to pitch [and] we heard back in 24 hours,” Kim says.

Though Great Oaks takes a hands-off approach, Kim notes the VC firm has provided more than just financial support.

“We are a team of six, including myself. Yesterday we launched and we were getting 10,000 users downloading within a few hours and we really needed help. I called them up at one in the morning saying, ‘We are getting too many emails, we don’t know how to respond,’” Kim says.

 “He responded saying, ‘How many interns did you need?’” she says.

A quickly-increasing user base will do nothing but boost Locket’s growth goals, which also involve fundraising and working with more advertisers. Right now, users get a penny per ad view and can only earn 3 cents an hour; but Kim says these numbers might not stick. The app’s also planning to give customers choice in redeeming their accumulated change. Currently, they can cash in anything they’ve racked up past the $10 mark via Paypal, but in the future, Kim sees people donating to charity, purchasing gift cards and paying down their phone bills.

Importantly, though, Kim says Locket’s not only about making money. Instead, her goals for the mobile ad world are more idealistic.

“The beauty of…high quality print ads has been lost in mobile advertising and we want to bring that back,” she says. “We don’t want users to be just sitting there and unlocking their phones to get the money. We want them to be able to enjoy the ads.”

When ads appear on lock screens, users can choose by swiping left or right whether to engage or not. With participation pretty much optional across the app, Locket may succeed in making advertising less annoying to some consumers. But if you find yourself bummed by overexposure to ads, remember you’ve only got yourself to thank––and with Locket, three cents more than you had a second ago.

Images provided by Yunha Kim of Locket

Though some imagine Musk’s proposal as a higher-speed high-speed train, Hyperloop’s not just a faster horse. According to Musk, it’ll be a fifth mode of transportation––and the world’s fastest, shuttling travelers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour. “It’s a cross between a Concorde, a rail gun, and an air hockey table,” Musk said at the Wall Street Journal’s D11 Conference this past May.

The PayPal and SpaceX entrepreneur is reportedly open to working with others on the project (so long as they agree with his philosophies) and plans to put Hyperloop out into the world open source, meaning he’s not currently looking to patent the tech.

If you’re wondering at the physics and practicalities behind Musk’s idea, take heart as you are not alone. While bullet trains already use magnetic levitation to achieve high speeds, Musk’s Hyperloop would be a new and different animal.

Word on the street is his Hyperloop could combine maglev tech with solar power and electromagnetic energy. Musk’s included reference to an air hockey table has some experts musing he means for Hyperloop’s carriages to travel through pressurized tubes instead of ones devoid of air.

To explain how Hyperloop might operate, many have involved a simplified, yet familiar image: that of the bank drive-through with its pneumatic tubes for deposits. Except with Hyperloop, the cylinders getting sucked up will hold people––and they’ll be moving at breakneck speeds.

With Musk’s claims that Hyperloop will save consumers time and money comes anticipation for next steps, especially as he’s been quick to point out problems with California’s high-speed rail project. Together with suggestions that the system will be crash- and weather-proof, his comments have raised eyebrows and expectations for August.

Until then, we can only speculate with the rest.