eBay Virtual Reality Department Store Shows Futureworld Shopping.

For some time, small business owners have been pondering how virtual reality might change the way they serve customers. Now one of the world’s largest online retailers may be pointing the way. Sure, shopping from a mobile gadget is already convenient enough, but eBay thinks the shopping experience can be improved further with the use of virtual reality. Say hello to what the Internet-based retailer is calling the world’s first Virtual Reality Department Store. The store allows customers to browse through collections like home goods, clothes and electronics as though they were actually in the store. The new store is the product of a partnership with Australian retailer Myer and you can now catch a glimpse of the store by downloading the app. eBay Virtual Reality Department Store The Android and iOS eBay Virtual Reality Department Store app works with headsets like Google Cardboard or Samsung’s Gear.To celebrate the launch of the eBay Virtual Reality Department Store, eBay and Myer are giving away 20,000 “shopticals” to shoppers, but if you don’t get to snag these for free, don’t worry as the headset only costs around $5.95. The brand new VR store boasts more than 12,500 products from Myer, which shoppers can checkout using eBay’s Sight Search technology. Instead of getting inundated by all of the store’s goods all at once, you can create your own unique shopping experience by choosing only categories of products that you are interested in. The shopping experience also gets better as you continue using the service. Sight Search also learns consumers’ shopping preferences and this might in the near future make it possible for business owners to know their customers’ spending habits. “It’s been important to us that we don’t just replicate the ecommerce experience in a virtual environment,” Managing Director of eBay Australia and New Zealand Jooman Park said in a post. “We are taking the best elements of traditional retail and expanding on them to improve browsing, selection, personalization and efficiency.” The eBay Virtual Reality Department Store allows customers to place items that they like in a virtual shopping basket, but in order to make a payment, users have to step out of the virtual reality world and head back to their eBay app. The online retailing giant might be the first eCommerce company to open a VR store, but this technology might soon take off as more shopping tools become available. culled from Small Business Trends.

How To Create a QR Code For Your Small Business.

Originally designed for the automotive industry in Japan, a QR code uses numeric, alphanumeric and byte/binary encoding modes to store data that can be easily accessed with your smartphone, tablet or PC. Unlike a traditional barcode which stores limited data, a QR code has a lot more information. This odd looking image has now evolved to provide a wide range of services, and many countries in Asia it is the go to technology for quickly connecting users to information and services. In China QR codes are used to make payments offline, sharing a password protected Wi-Fi network, transferring money, sharing contact information, logging in to a website and much more. One of the greatest selling points of QR codes is the ease in which it quickly engages users. How to generate your code; the process is so easy, you will be wondering why you didn’t use it sooner. After you create your first code, you will be looking for new and innovative ways to deploy the QR codes so you can connect with your customers in the physical and digital world. The first step is to find a QR code Generator. Here are five you can use right away. You can use the traditional links, as well as the QR codes. The common generators include 1)QR Code Generator 2)Goqr 3) Webqr 4)Visualead and 5) QRstuff . The next step is Create, design and link the code. It can be linked to any URL, including Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and other social media outlets for immediate access to the content you want your customers to see. There are two types of QR codes, static and dynamic. A static code is fixed, meaning the data that is stored in it cannot be changed, while a dynamic QR code can be edited any time. You can get really creative when you create a QR code and add color, your company logo and even animation. Test the QR code. You want to make sure the code is working, and it sends you to the right destination. This is especially important if you use a static code, because you cannot edit it. Track how your QR code is performing. You can now analyze the performance of the codes you create by monitoring how much traffic is coming from them, as well as what actions users are taking once they arrive at your website or other destination. Make your QR code accessible to everyone. If you require a special scanner or app, you will greatly limit the number of people that will follow through. Make it app-agnostic so anyone can scan your QR code with their mobile device. After all access is the ultimate goal, and you don’t want to drive people away by making it unnecessarily complicated. Once you create a QR code, you can get very creative with them. A South Korean grocery store placed a stand in a subway station with QR codes of the items it sells. All customers had to do is scan the code and purchase their groceries, which according to the company makes the deliveries the same day. This is just one example, here are some additional ways you can use it: 1)Direct customers to your digital presence 2) A discount code 3)Link to Google Maps 4) Link it to your app 5) Place in a takeout menu so customers can place an order right away. 6) Act like a URL on a direct response advertisement 7)Add it to business cards so the contact information can be downloaded instantly The ubiquity of mobile devices has made product information one of the most important factors for consumers looking to purchase an item. QR codes, can offer information on any product or service you provide and make it accessible right away. It is easy, cheap and worth trying if you are a small business. read more at small business trends.

Heriot-Watt University Researchers Win $3.3 Million Grant to 3D Print Smart Rocks to Capture Data on Underground Oil and CO2.

In order to secure our water, food and energy supplies while being able to maintain the safe extraction of oil and gas from underground oilfields, we need to have a better understanding of the layer of porous rocks in the subsurface. Specifically, the way that liquids and gases manage to travel through them, and how captured carbon dioxide (CO2) could be stored underground. Unfortunately the conditions of this subsurface material vary widely depending on the type of rock, the temperatures and the pressures that occur deep under the ground. Beyond the complexity of replicating specific environmental conditions, direct dynamic observations at the pore level are virtually impossible in a lab setting. According to Professor Mercedes Maroto-Valer, holder of the Robert M Buchan Chair in Sustainable Energy Engineering at Heriot-Watt University , the problem is that the rocks are unable to tell us what’s happening to them. However Maroto-Valer and her team of researchers think that they have come up with a way to communicate with these subsurface rocks, the team wants to make their own rocks that are capable of communicating with us. Their research was promising enough that the team received a prestigious European Research Council Advanced Award so they can continue to pursue their research into developing 3D printed “smart rocks” capable of giving the team an inside look of what’s happening deep underground. Maroto-Valer and her team will use a 3D printing process to produce their own porous rocks that will include multiple micro sensors embedded inside of them. The sensors will be able to transmit data directly to the research team, including detailed information about what actually happens to liquids and gases deep underground. The 3D printed smart rocks will be capable of providing information on the subsurface conditions and environment at a microscopic level, which is simply not possible to reproduce using traditional laboratory methods. This fundamental knowledge at such a tiny scale will feed hugely into our understanding of such processes at the large scale and enable us to maximize the success of industries from oil extraction to water safety and the storage of captured CO2. The grant that Maroto-Valer and her team won was awarded by the “Excellent Science” pillar of Horizon 2020, the European Union’s research and innovation program focusing on enabling senior researchers to pursue their most promising ideas. read more at 3dprint.com

AfDB Earmarks N34.5billion for Nigeria’s Agricultural Sector Development.

The African Development Bank, AfDB, has disclosed that it marked down $175 million, about N34.5 billion to improve Nigeria’s agricultural sector. AfDB Country Director, Ousmane Dore, who made this known when he visited some Northern governors in Kaduna, said the initiative was part of the Bank’s intervention strategy to boost the all-important sector in the country. Dore said, the Agricultural Transformation Agenda Support Programme, ATASP-I, of $175 million would consolidate the AfDB’s investments in the country’s agricultural sector Under this scheme, the bank will establish four Staple Crops Processing Zones, SCPZs, to cover four, out of the seven northwest states of Kebbi, Sokoto, Kano and Jigawa. He listed two upcoming projects in the country, totaling $500 million to include a youth programme, otherwise known as ENABLE, meaning Empowering Novel Agri-Business-Led Employment, which would gulp $300 million as well as the Phase II of the ATASP-$200 million. The Country Director said these projects are in addition to the Bank’s financial supports to SMEs through lines of credit to several commercial banks as well as the Bank of Industry, BOI and NEXIM. Culled from BizWatchNigeria.

Step inside a rat's brain with this VR reconstruction.

This virtual-reality reconstruction allows you to step inside the brain of a rat. The 3D brain is projected by 12 eight-megapixel streams across the six walls of a three-metre-sided cubic room known as the CAVE (cave automatic virtual environment). It was developed by the visualisation lab at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia. "Through our application of electron microscopy, we are able to develop new ways of analysing microscopic cellular structures of the brain," explains Corrado Calì, a lead researcher on the project. The above image is of the hippocampus, an area involved in memory formation. KAUST scientists process extracted brain tissue through ilastik, a program created by Fred Hamprecht and his team at the Heidelberg Collaboratory for Image Processing in Germany, which is mainly directed toward interactive image classification, segmentation and analysis. Once the hippocampus has been digitally logged, its data is fed into 3D-modelling program Blender, with NeuroMorph plug-ins. This converts it into something a bit more compelling - a visualization which grants the ability to dive deep into the brain. for example," says Cali. "The use of CAVE was key to the observation of a non-random distribution of glycogen. This led us to develop tools for measuring glycogen clustering and proximity to other subcellular features." And if you don't have access to a CAVE? KAUST has created an Oculus Rift version, so other scientists can have rats on the brain. read more at wired.co.uk

How thousands of gamers are helping to decode the human body.

EVE Online isn't just a game about internet spaceships and sci-fi politics. Since March, developer CCP Games has been running Project Discovery – an initiative to help improve scientific understanding of the human body at the tiniest levels. Run in conjunction with the Human Protein Atlas and Massively Multiplayer Online Science, the project taps into EVE Online's greatest resource – its player base – to help categorize millions of proteins. "We show them an image, and they can change the color of it, putting green or red dyes on it to help them analyse it a little bit better," Linzi Campbell, game designer on Project Discovery, tells WIRED. "Then we also show them examples – cytoplasm is their favourite one! We show them what each of the different images should look like, and just get them to pick a few that they identify within the image. The identifications are scrambled each time, so it's not as simple as going 'ok, every time I just pick the one on the right' – they have to really think about it." The analysis project is worked into EVE Online as a minigame, and works within the context of the game's lore. "We have this NPC organisation called the Drifters – they're like a mysterious entity in New Eden [EVE's interplanetary setting]," Campbell explains. "The players don't know an awful lot about the Drifters at the minute, so we disguised it within the universe as Drifter DNA that they were analysing. I think it just fit perfectly. We branded this as [research being done by] the Sisters of Eve, and they're analyzing this Drifter DNA." The response has been tremendous. "We've had an amazing number of classifications, way over our greatest expectations," says Emma Lundberg, associate professor at the Human Protein Atlas. "Right now, after six weeks, we've had almost eight million classifications, and the players spent 16.2 million minutes playing the minigame. When we did the math, that translated – in Swedish measures – to 163 working years. It's crazy." "We had a little guess, internally. We said if we get 40,000+ classifications a day, we're happy. If we get 100,000 per day, then we're amazed," Lundberg adds. "But when it peaked in the beginning, we had 900,000 classifications in one day. Now it's stabilised, but we're still getting around 200,000 a day, so everyone is mind-blown. We never expected it." Currently, EVE players are going through images from Lundberg's domain, who serves as director for the sub-cellular chapter of the atlas. It took players just three weeks to get through the entire workload, and are now engaging in a second pass for veracity, with no signs of interest dropping. "Part of the problem with the gamification of science is that participation rapidly drops and that's what we hoped we could prevent by doing it in an existing game, with rewards," says Lundberg. "I think that's the biggest difference, that it's integrated into the game." The Human Protein Atlas itself is expanding on the mapping of the human genome, but at a much smaller level. "We have about 20,000 genes and right now we haven't even proven that more than 70 per cent even exist. So there's a big gap between protein research and DNA research, and there are several reasons for that," says Lundberg. "DNA you can amplify so it's easy to study, but you can't amplify proteins. Also, as all cells have the same DNA, you can [just] take a blood sample [to look at]. But proteins, that's the genes that are expressed, vary through the body. You have to cover the whole body and so it's a lot more difficult, from a technological point of view, to study proteins," she continues. "From my point of view, that's the interesting part – proteins are the molecules that perform the function, and drugs act by targeting proteins. So if you want to develop better drugs, understand how humans work, or understand biology, you have to know what the proteins are doing." Players' efforts will soon be felt in the wider scientific field too. After verifying their categorisations and analyses – a process involving control images that researchers know are correct, used to measure performance of the EVE hivemind – their findings are incorporated into the HPA's database. All data is publicly available, and the atlas has around 100,000 monthly users. Already, an average of two peer-reviewed scientific papers are published every day, and when the next version of the atlas is published in December, future papers will incorporate the EVE players' data. culled from wired.co.uk

Agric Firm Plans to Build N7billion Poultry Farm in Nigeria.

An agricultural company, Multi-Net Group Nigeria, has disclosed plans to build a large poultry farm at a cost of N7 billion in the country. The company’s Chairman, Uzoma Obiyo, who revealed this, said the company would also invest in the full value chain of animal husbandry including breeding of animals and processing, up to abattoir development, declaring that the project was currently on board. According to Obiyo, the company had an interest in developing world class poultry in Nigeria, which was assumed to be very expensive to build. He added that after their visibility reports, Abuja, Niger and Imo States have been chosen as pilot states and about N7 billion would be needed to establish the poultry farms in those states. Obiyo, who pointed out that 14 Federal Government’-owned breeding centres had been abandoned due largely to lack of maintenance and government’s insensitivity to the company’s needs, urged the government to privatize the centres for optimal performance. He maintained that without giving those centres to the private entrepreneurs, their potentials to generate revenues for the government would be jeopardized, which would be a big loss to the economic development of the country. Culled from BizwatchNigeria.