Kyoto University said it will prohibit students from wearing or using any type of watch during its entrance exams beginning next year in order to prevent cheating. The university said the proliferation of smartwatches has made it difficult to determine whether someone is using a watch to communicate with a friend or calculate figures. The ban “is required in order to conduct a fair test,” a university official said. Other universities in the world have taken similar measures, but Kyoto University is likely the first national university in Japan to ban use of all watches at entrance exams, the official said. Exam takers …

Nuance, the company responsible for the speech recognition software Dragon, is announcing Nuance Mix, a developer platform that will allow anyone to add natural language detection to an app. The aim of Nuance Mix is the Internet of Things. It has the same technology that powers other Nuance products, and comes with voice recognition and text-to-speech tools. Developers can even create custom voice models that can be dedicated for defined tasks.

The University of Oklahoma (OU) has install a network of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons to help students navigate their way around the campus library, as well as exhibits of its Galileo books and manuscripts, located at seven locations within four buildings around the campus. The solution, which employs beacon-based technology provided by Aruba Networks (aHewlett Packard Enterprise company), is designed to solve a problem that the large public university had been experiencing: helping new students from small towns learn their way around a large complex building, such as the seven-story Bizzell Memorial Library.

Road cycling is an exhilarating sport - for the riders who compete in races, but not so much for spectators and fans who see the cyclists for a few seconds, and then lose sight of them for hours on end. Overseas, cycling race organisers get around that crucial problem by using helicopters and motorbikes with camera people who relay imagery of the riders to big screens situated where the audience is.

UBM’s recent Designers of Things (DoT) Conference in San Jose highlighted the work, not only of materials and components suppliers, but of the makers of innovative products from around the world. Dedicated to the potential of wearable technology, 3D printing, and the Internet of Things, the show featured some of the brightest ideas in the arena of Internet-enabled products. A booth sponsored by the Internet Protocol for Smart Objects (IPSO) Alliance, for example, provided a glimpse of clever new ideas ranging from smart hospital trays and ski boots to intelligent heating systems and touch displays.

There will be no more Firefox OS smartphones, as Mozilla has confirmed it will stop developing the smartphone operating system. But it plans to continue supporting it for other connected devices and Internet of Things (IoT) networks. "Everything is connected around us. This revolution has already started and it will be bigger than previous technology revolutions, including the mobile smartphone revolution. Internet of Things, as many call it today, will fundamentally affect all of us," said Ari Jaaksi, Mozilla's senior vice president of connected devices, in the organisation's official blog, after an announcement was made at company's developer event in …

As Tag Heuer faces a rising demand for its wearable technology from retailers, the designer brand has chosen to boost the production of its Carrera Connected smartwatch device by a considerable amount. This wearable technology is designed to be a highly attractive and very chic version of an Android Wear smartwatch. According to the CEO of the company, Jean Claude Biver, Tag Heuer will also be stopping all its online sales of this device until around May or June 2016 in order to give the company the opportunity to catch up with the tremendous demand from retailers selling in-store.

Stranded without food and water, TV survival specialist Bear Grylls sometimes demonstrates drinking urine as a last resort to stay alive. But it could have other emergency uses – such as powering a device to send a distress signal. That’s the idea behind a pair of socks developed by Ioannis Ieropoulos’s team at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK. Walking in the socks forces a bladder’s worth (roughly 648 millilitres) of urine to circulate through integrated tubes towards microbial fuels cells (MFCs), which contain bacteria that guzzle nutrients and create electricity. In lab experiments, the system produced enough electricity to …

Since the first instalment of the Star Wars saga hit theatres back in 1977, many fans have had difficulty reconciling the tremendous technological advancements in the films with the opening scroll’s insistence that the story took place “a long time ago.” With the latest movie in the series franchise, The Force Awakens, hitting theatres the holiday season in 2015, the issue is being raised again. Only this time, we’re more aware of automation, thanks to all of the consumer smart devices on the market today. It’s not a huge stretch to state that the Star Wars universe has its own Internet …