Announcing Mashable's 2013 Social Good Summit

We're extremely excited to announce the 2013 Social Good Summit, which will take place in New York from Sept. 22 to Sept. 24. We're thrilled to share several updates that will make the 2013 conversations more global than ever.

The year 2013 is all about now. You can connect with friends around the world instantly with social media, donate to charity with a text message and get updates as news breaks on your smartphone or tablet, rather than waiting for print to be delivered.

But with the challenges we face, we know the quickest or most simple solution isn’t always the best fix for deep-rooted problems. We need to think beyond the limits of one term, four quarters or 140 characters, and focus on decades into the future.

That’s why the theme for Social Good Summit 2013 will be #2030NOW.

Brought to you by Mashable, the 92nd Street Y, the United Nations Foundation, Ericsson, theU.N. Development Programme and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the fourth annual Social Good Summit promises to unite change-makers for a unique conversation about today's digital landscape. As a global community, we want to address one big question: Where are we trying to go by 2030, and how can digital tools help us get there?

We're also hosting a Google+ hangout on our Mashable account at 2 P.M. ET on Monday, July 1, during which representatives from each partner organization will discuss updates for this year's Social Good Summit and start the discussion around #2030NOW with our community.

Like in years past, we're inviting you to create and join Mashable Meetups in order to connect with people around the world around the biggest challenges facing our planet. Meetups across the world will be discussing what #2030NOW means to our specific communities and to the world.

You can learn how to take action by visiting the Social Good Summit site, which provides tools on how to create your very own Mashable Meetup: Take Action.

Social Good Summit Confirmed Speakers:

• Pete Cashmore, CEO, Mashable
• Michael Roth, President, Wesleyan University
• The Climate Reality Project
• Zeenat Rahman, Special Advisor, State Department
• Astronaut Ron Garan, NASA
• Ian Somerhalder, RYOT & actor
• Jack Andraka, Youth cancer researcher
• Sarah Kramer, Editor, The New York Times
• Jessica Matthews, CEO, Uncharted Play
• Steve Howard, Chief Sustainability Officer, Ikea

Further details and speakers will be announced soon on Mashable.

Purchase your tickets now

Date: Sunday, Sept. 22 through Tuesday, Sept. 24
Time: 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. each day
Location: 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Ave., New York, N.Y.
Tickets: $50 per day, or $130 for three-day pass

Press: Press credentials will be given to press and bloggers from around the world for all Social Good Summit sessions and the Digital Media Lounge (DML). The DML is a fully-wired workspace at the 92Y where you can report, network with fellow members of the media and organize interviews and exclusive content from Social Good Summit sessions. The DML will be open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sept. 22 through Sept. 24. To apply, please fill out this form.

About Ericsson

Ericsson is a world-leading provider of communications technology and services. We are enabling the Networked Society with efficient real-time solutions that allow us all to study, work and live our lives more freely, in sustainable societies around the world. Ericsson is the leading advocate of Technology for Good. By using broadband, cloud and mobility to address climate change, poverty, education, health, human rights, and humanitarian issues such as refugees, peace and disaster response, we work to ensure that our technology is a force for good and lasting change.

Mozilla Announces First Firefox OS Phones

Mozilla announced the first two smartphones based on its operating system, Firefox OS on Monday: the ZTE Open and Alcatel One Touch Fire.

The two devices will soon be available through Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom. Telefonicaannounced that the ZTE Open will be offered in Spain starting on July 2 for 69 euros ($90).

Individual partners will release the dates of availability for each market. Mozilla said that the first Firefox OS will launch in Central and Eastern Europe under the wing of Norway-based Telenor "this year."

Mozilla's Firefox OS, which was one of the main topics during this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, is a HTML-based, open source mobile OS that should provide a user-friendly alternative to Android, especially on entry-level handsets. Mozilla hopes to conquer much of Central and Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America with Firefox OS — most of which are currently dominated by cheap Android devices.

ZTE Open is a 3.5-inch smartphone with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 256MB of RAM, a 3.2-megapixel camera, Bluetooth, A-GPS and Wi-Fi.

Alcatel One Touch Fire boasts nearly identical specs, but is powered by a Qualcomm processor.

Image courtesy of ZTE

The iblazr Flash Will Light Up Your Mobile Phone Pics

Modern mobile phones have improved in their picture-taking abilities, but there is still one thing lacking: a good flash for dark shots.

The iblazr mobile phone flash promises to work on both iOS and Android devices to light up the night. This simple flash consists of four powerful LEDs that work with an included camera app to provide more light when shooting both photos and video.

The flash can also rotate to support the phone's front-facing camera, to brighten up portraits or very dark video calls.

iblazer's site mentions no release date for the device, but the company is heavily updating social media channels with new images of the flash. Its Facebook shows off pictures of the flash compared to the iPhone 5's on-board flash.

Would you use an external flash for your mobile phone pictures? Have you figured out any other solutions to add light? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photos courtesy iblazr

Charge Your Phone — With a Flick of the Wrist

ROSS BROOKS for PSFK 2 days ago

When it looks like your phone is about to run out of battery, you actually have plenty of juice to spare. The Voltmaker is a device that allows you to make use of that reserve energy in order to charge your phone — all with the flick of a wrist.

A hidden rod that is normally secured to the body using a magnet can be released using a spring-loaded mechanism. Once you release it, you can spin the rod by shaking the device like a rattle — a movement that allows your smartphone to harvest kinetic energy.

By keeping up your enthusiastic rattling for a few minutes, it’s possible to generate enough power to make a quick phone call, play a couple of songs or light the way using an LED torch attachment that fits into the USB port at the opposite end.

Using this method to fully charge the device would take two to three hours — more shaking than your wrists can probably handle. For this reason, the creators of the Voltmaker recommend charging the device using a USB connection for everyday activity. Kinetic energy should be harnessed when your phone's charge is low, but you can't access a power socket or USB port.

The company has set a $200,000 funding goal on Indiegogo and has promised a refund to anyone who pledges if the campaign is unsuccessful.

This article originally published at PSFK here

Wi-Fi Tech Sees Through Walls

JESSE EMSPAK for Discovery News 2 days ago

We've seen terahertz cameras that can look through walls and X-ray scanners that fit in the palm of your hand. Now, scientists at MIT have developed a way to track movement through walls using Wi-Fi signals.

The idea is pretty simple: take two transmitters and one receiver. Each transmitter sends out a signal that is precisely 180 degrees out of phase with the other, so the two cancel each other out, and the receiving antenna “hears” nothing.

But put any moving object in the area, and it reflects the signals. The signals don’t cancel out, and where once there was no radio “noise” at all, now radio energy is emanating off the moving object or person. A still object also reflects radio waves, but the time it takes for a wave to bounce back to the receiver stays the same, and the reflections will still cancel out.

The invention — which Dina Katabi, an electrical engineering professor, and her graduate student Fadel Adib are developing — is called Wi-Vi. The two will present it at the Sigcomm conference in Hong Kong this August.

There are several uses for this technology. A small handheld detector could find people buried under tons of rubble, showing rescue workers where to look, or police could use it to see if there is someone inside a room.

Wi-Vi differs from traditional X-ray or terahertz wave systems. In that case a beam of radio waves is sent to an object that reflects them back. This kind of detection is just like what your eyes do – seeing reflected light. (Radio waves just happen to be in a different part of the spectrum).

It’s also a twist on a previous attempt at using Wi-Fi routers to see through walls by taking advantage of the signals they emit. Wi-Vi doesn’t require that a router be in place.

The advantage here is that this works with radio frequencies that penetrate walls relatively easily, at least for short distances. The wavelengths are also short, so the antenna doesn’t need to be very large. It also needs just one receiving antenna, so it can be fit onto a hand-held device.

And the reason it uses Wi-Fi type signals is that they aren’t reserved for the military, and are open to use by any device with less need to get approvals from regulators.

via MIT News

Photo via iStockphoto, saffetucuncu