The Sgnl wristband lets you hear phone calls through your fingers

*The Sgnl wristband lets you hear phone calls through your fingers*

Innomdle Lab is a South Korean startup that was spun out of Samsung’s incubator, and it’s just about ready to launch its first product: Sgnl, a wristband-slash-watch strap that turns your fingers into a phone receiver. When paired with a phone, you can hear callers by touching your finger to your ear; the vibrations travel down your wrist to your fingertip.

The device also has fitness tracking and notification functionality, and it can be fit to pretty much any analog or smart watch or worn by itself. The audio quality was decent in my brief testing, and Innomdle says that Sgnl should be shipping in March, so we shouldn’t have long to find out how well it works in practice.

Rooftop 🔥Fire at Trump Tower in 🌃New York📹

*Rooftop 🔥Fire at Trump Tower in 🌃New York📹:*

Firefighters from the Fire Department of New York are at the scene of a small rooftop electrical fire at Trump Tower in Manhattan. President Donald Trump's son Eric Trump said a fire broke out in a cooling tower on the roof. "The New York Fire Department was here within minutes and did an incredible job," he said in a tweet.

Two injuries were reported, one firefighter and one civilian. The fire is said to be under control. The department says it was called around 7 a.m. ET Monday for a report of a fire on the top floor. More than 70 firefighters responded to the call, which is standard for a fire on a roof of a high rise, the New York Police Department said. Aerial views initially showed firefighters on the roof, with smoke billowing from one corner of the high-rise.

President Trump and his family are not currently in residence at the midtown skyscraper

EGYPT ANNOUNCES DATE FOR PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

*Egypt announces date for presidential election *

Egypt will hold a presidential election on March 26-28, with the incumbent Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi widely expected to seek a second term in office.
Sisi, who won a landslide victory after he led the military overthrow of elected President Mohamed Mursi in 2013, has yet to announce his candidacy.
Candidates must submit their official bids to the commission between Jan 20-29. Announcing the date, the national election commission said a run-off would be held on April 24-26 if needed.
It will be Egypt's third election since the 2011 uprising which ended Hosni Mubarak's long rule.

Ronaldo ‘stole’ my Ballon d’Or, claims Ribery*

*Ronaldo ‘stole’ my Ballon d’Or, claims Ribery*

Franck Ribery has claimed that the 2013 Ballon d’Or was “stolen” from him.

The Bayern Munich star said that it is “incomprehensible” that Cristiano Ronaldo picked up the prize that season after he had enjoyed such a formidable season with the Bundesliga club.

The France winger led Bayern to domestic glory and played a leading role as they snatched the Champions League with a 2-1 win over Borussia Dortmund at Wembley.

“It was as if it was stolen from me,” Ribery told Canal Football Club. “It’s incomprehensible. I won every trophy, I couldn’t have done more. It was an injustice.”

The Frenchman grumbled that he did not have the support of his compatriots.

“I didn’t have my country behind me,” he claimed. “I saw it with my own eyes that the French said Cristiano should win. Did the Portuguese want it to be Ribery or Messi? Of course not.”

Ribery feels that he was made a scapegoat after France’s shambolic World Cup 2010 campaign, in which Raymond Domenech’s side crashed out at the group stage and even staged a strike against their coach by refusing to leave the team bus.

NNPC spent billions of dollars maintaining refineries with no result – NUPENG*

: *NNPC spent billions of dollars maintaining refineries with no result – NUPENG*

The Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers on Monday called for the rehabilitation of the nation’s refineries to end the recurring scarcity of petrol in the country. The petroleum workers described as “ridiculous that for the past 15 years now, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation had been spending billions of dollars on Turn Around Maintenance of the refineries with nothing to show for it”.

Mr Tayo Aboyeji, the South-West Chairman of the union, who made the call in an interview, said, “It is ridiculous that for the past 15 years now, Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation had been spending billions of dollars on Turn Around Maintenance of the refineries with nothing to show for it. If all our four refineries are producing at their maximum output, the country will not be spending billions of naira on the importation of refined product. This is the right time for our refineries to work, the Federal Government should as a matter of urgency fix the refineries now,” he said.

The chairman urged the NNPC to increase the supply of petrol to depots in order to reduce the scarcity nationwide.

Merge VR has made a Nerf-like gun that supports smartphone games

: *Merge VR has made a Nerf-like gun that supports smartphone games*

Merge Labs, a San Antonio-based company known for its inexpensive, toy-like AR/VR products, is making a Nerf-like toy gun that supports mixed reality games from a smartphone.

Called the “6DoF Blaster,” the plastic toy gun has a shoe for your smartphone, so you can prop a smartphone up where your gun sight would normally be. In the demo we saw at CES today, the iPhone X inside the gun was running a Merge VR first-person shooter game, one the company said was built on Apple’s ARKit platform. The gun has four buttons: a trigger, a reload button, a zoom button, and one that slows down enemy fire.

But the more interesting (and slightly confusing) partabout the product is really its name, or rather what its name signifies. “6DoF” stands for six degrees of freedom, referring to the freedom of movement of a body or object in three-dimensional space. Merge is using “6DoF” to describe what is effectively an augmented reality app; only, it’s not just AR either, because it’s not there’s any aspect of the real world visible through the app. It’s a kind of mixed reality, really, except mixed reality also applies to things like Microsoft’s HoloLens, so I don’t know, let’s just call this shruggie-reality.