Sweden does the London sound

Urbanista is a Swedish audio company making a range of wired and wireless headphones, earphones and Bluetooth speakers. They are named after cities (though only one for Stockholm in Sweden itself the Stockholm Plus true wireless fruity clone).

The in-ear unit reviewed is the Urbanista London, more like the fruity Pros, they have silicon tips and fit into the ear canal with short stubs that hang diagonally down and forward. The model reviewed is black (midnight), though it's available in pink (rose gold), blue (dark sapphire) and white (pearl). There's a definite hint of the brand being "fashionista" and targeting a millennial market.

There's 2 tips on the earphones and another 3 different sizes in the box.

The case supports wireless charging (Qi compatible) and USB-C (cable supplied).

The LEDs indicate the charge level when on a charging mat or plugged in.

Opening the case and the LEDs will light showing the amount of charge (a full charge will allow 25 hours of play, but the earphones only actually play 5 hours at a time, so they'll need to be placed back into the case and allowed to charge again if the batteries run out, which isn't instantaneous).

The earphones are held in magnetically which places the stems against the charging points.

There's also a button at the front of the case, between the stems which needs to be held down to put the system into Bluetooth pairing mode. Once paired opening the case and putting the earphones in your ear should just work. Long pressing the button will reset the case/earphones and loose their pairings. The earphones are Bluetooth 5, so battery life with a compatible phone should be maximised.

The earphones themselves are touch sensitive with the sensitive part under the logo and also detect when they are in the ear.

Using the smallest silicon tips, the earphones remained in the ear while moving around and were pretty comfortable. They are IPX4 water resistant so can be used in say a gym environment or playing sports, though sweat is likely to reduce the grip of the silicon and they could slip out. It's a shame Urbanista don't supply memory foam tips which when squeezed then securely fit to any shaped ear canal.

Pairing really is simple, just push the button in the case and Urbanista London will appear as a connectable device and just click on it and they are paired. Then put the earphones in your ears and sound will be heard.

There is a quirk, if the earphones are removed from the case prior to pairing and then the paring button pressed, the earphones will appear as two independent Bluetooth devices and each can be connected to individually, but not together. If that happens just forget them, and start the pairing again. Bluetooth audio codecs supported are HSP, HFP, A2DP, AVRCP. The quoted frequency response is 20Hz to 20KHz but that's pretty unrealistic as Bluetooth compresses things a lot.

Everything is controlled by tapping the logo on the earbuds (both left and right earbuds are used). A sturdy tap is required and it needs to be on the logo area and not on the side.

There are six microphones, which are used for noise cancellation and picking up speech for calls.

To play tap the left earbud twice, tapping twice again will pause.

Volume Up, tap right once.

Volume Down, tap left once.

Answer call, touch left or right twice.

End call, touch left or right twice.

Reject call, touch and hold left or right.

Siri, touch right twice.

Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) ON/OFF, touch and hold right for 2 seconds.

Ambient Voice Mode (AVM) ON/OFF, touch and hold left for 2 seconds.

Turning ANC on, turns the volume up and it does block outside noise or speech. It's not perfect but does work, the music is definitely fuller and when off, hi hat drums sounded very fizzy (or is that hissy?). There are other earphones which have better noice cancellation, but they tend to be a lot more expensive.

Turning AWM on makes (banging) music sound washed out, even just listening to a vocal podcast seemed toned down.

When moving away from the Bluetooth source (computer or phone), the audio works, until it doesn't and then starts cutting out randomly.

These probably aren't the earphones for the discerning audiophiles (or just audio snobs), but they look nice and audio quality is pretty decent for the price and with ANC on playing music is a pretty nice experience with warm tones. Also wearing for extended periods is very comfortable.

Definitely worth a look and though not quite as refined in things like ANC, they make a good (much cheaper) alternative to the fruity Pros.

They are available directly from Urbanista or from Amazon for £129.00

Techstars London opens applications for next cohort

Techstars has opened applications for their 5th London program which will run from June 20th with the demo day taking place in September.

They will be accepting 10 to 12 teams and interested companies should apply on-line through F6s.

Techstars has some great mentors (there may be some bias here) and some great companies have come out of the program. It's progressed a lot since Springboard days.

O'Reilly Strata conference comes to London

The topic on everyone's mind (well the mind of geeks) is BIG DATA. Recently Big Data Week was held and events took place all over the world including London and San Francisco. Now O'Reilly Media (known for its technology books) is bringing its Strata conference to London this fall (October 1st and 2nd). Registrations will open in June. There's still a couple of days left to submit a proposal for the conference here, though the closing date is May 17th. Strata will be chaired by Kaitlin Thaney and Edd Dumbill and the conference will cover: -

• Data: Hadoop ecosystem, real-time data processing and analytics, crowdsourcing, data acquisition and cleaning, data distribution and markets, data science best practice, predictive analytics, machine learning, and data security.
• Business: From research to product, data protection, privacy and policy, becoming a data-driven organization, training, recruitment, management for data, and the changing role of business intelligence.
• Interfaces: Visualization and design principles, mobile strategy, applications & futures, augmented reality and immersive interfaces, dashboards, sensors, mobile & wireless, physical interfaces, and robotics.

The UK has some pioneering big data companies such as Datasift and it should be a good conference.

O2 to WiFi London Olympics

O2 has announced plans to put in place 13,000 WiFi hotspots across London and out to Stratford to cover the London Olympics in 2012.

The company is making deals with local councils to use street furniture (such as lamp posts) to provide the coverage. It's hoping to offer the largest free WiFi network in London, competing with other operators such as The Cloud (bought by Sky) and BT Openzone who operate their own network and have hotspots in every Starbucks store.

The network will require users to go to a landing page which will have localised advertising which O2 hope to recover costs through.

O2 will also use the network to off-load data traffic from their mobile network. Though WiFi can be used to cover large areas, it's not really designed for that purpose and can suffer from congestion when many WiFi networks co-exist.

Droidcon takes place on the 6th and 7th of Oct

Droidcon is the London Android conference and it's taking place at the Business Design Centre in Islington over 2 days (6th and 7th Oct 2011).

There's a great selection of speakers (including myself - I'll be talking about enterprise solutions - or not) and there's a lot of actual good speakers. There'll be a mix of techie and other talks.

It's that FOWA time of year again

Oct 6th sees the Carsonified put on the The Future of Web Apps or FOWA.

As with the FOWD it's taking place in London at The Brewery which is a great venue and if they pull off the same level of professionalism it will be a great conference. They even get the networking right with high speed wireless and wired connections (almost a LAN port to every chair and WiFi for the rest).

Jason Calacanis, Mike McDerment, Cal Henderson and Brad Neuberg are amongst the speakers with the complete line-up here.

The actual conference takes place on Oct 4th and 5th and workshops on the 6th.

There's a 15% discount for anyone using the code 15DISC at the check-out when buying tickets on-line.

The carnival that's FOWD heads into town

It's that time of year again when The Future of Web Design or FOWD comes to London, specifically on the 17th through 19th of May with the first day being made up of workshops and the conference on days 2 and 3.

Like all Carsonified events it's jam packed with hot speakers talking about hot topics.

If anyone wants to go, register here and the first 20 to use promo code FOWD2010 get a 15% discount.

It shoudl be a fun event and on the Monday there's a party too.