Engineer yogi releases breath device

Media Release | May 25, 2016

For Cindy Gu, a mechanical engineer and certified yoga teacher who graduates from UBC at the end of this month, mindfulness was key to coping with campus life.

Cindy Gu

“Studying mechanical engineering was one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done, but it was also very demanding,” said Gu, who moved to Vancouver from Beijing eight years ago. “Yoga helped me stay centred and calm.”

Now she’s hoping to share her insights with other people through a wearable device that promotes a meditative state of mind.

The device—a smart belt with a complementary meditation app for smartphones—is worn around the waist. It learns the wearer’s breathing pattern, compares it to other biometrics such as heart rate, and provides vibration feedback if the wearer is not breathing calmly and steadily.

To bring the device to market, Gu founded Ohm GearLab, currently part of a venture accelerator program at e@UBC. The venture has won the top prize at the Pacific Venture Capital Competition in Vancouver and third prize, along with a $10,000 cheque, at Canada’s Business Model Competition in Halifax.

“Research now shows that breathing is the key to both physical and psychological well-being, but not everyone knows how to benefit from that,” added Gu. “This product helps you become more aware of your breath and use it as a tool in stressful situations.”

Cindy Gu is one of 975 students graduating from UBC’s Faculty of Applied Science on May 31. Learn more about UBC’s engineering women at women.engineering.ubc.ca

Find other stories about: Cindy Gu, e@UBC, Faculty of Applied Science, mechanical engineering, Mindfulness, Ohm GearLab, yoga

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These 9 SEO Tips Are All You’ll Ever Need to Rank in Google

Why don’t planes crash more often from mechanical failure? With all the moving parts inside a plane, it seems that something would break fairly easily. So, why doesn’t that happen? One primary reason: checklists.

Related: 7 Advanced Ways to Improve Your Site’s SEO

Before pilots push the button for taxiing and take-off, they perform an extensive pre-flight checklist to make sure everything is functioning exactly as it should be.

Entrepreneurs hoping for strong SEO (search engine optimization) rankings might take a lesson here. They can create a checklist of their own to make sure everything is perfect for their next website article. No, an SEO checklist won’t protect you from crashing and burning. But it will help ensure that your post has the best chance it needs to rank high in Google.

So, before you publish your next piece of web content, run it through the following 10-point checklist for the best SEO tips.

1. Pick a good keyword to focus on.
The first step is to simply pick the search term or phrase you want the post to show up for. If I am writing about the best dog toys for small dogs, I’ll want to find out what people are actually searching for.

The easiest way to do this is use Google Keyword Planner, a free tool that will show you an estimate for any search phrase. (Although Keyword Planner is free, you may need to set up an AdWords account to gain access.)

For example, I noticed that “small dog toys” receives 590 monthly searches — higher than any other related combination of words. However, I’m still not totally ready to start writing about this topic. First, I need to do some research.

2. Research the competition.
Now that I have a term I want to try to rank for, I’m going to go undercover and do some recon!

Jump over to your “private browsing” mode on your web browser (“Incognito” in Chrome, “Private” in Safari and Firefox, “InPrivate” on Internet Explorer) and head to Google.com. (At my company, we do “private mode” because we don’t want Google to use our past search history to influence what we see on the search results page.)

Take a look at all the content on page one of Google, ignoring any ad results at the top. The 10 (or so) results are your competition! What are they missing? Can you do better?

3. Write the best content.
Now that you know what your competition looks like, it’s time to create the content that is going to blow those folks out of the water. This is perhaps the most difficult part, but it’s the most important. It needs to be amazing.

I don’t care if you are creating a blog post, ecommerce store page or sales-landing page. It needs to be better than the rest, or else neither Google nor your audience will ever take note.

For an example of an article I recently wrote — with just this goal in mind — check out “How to Become a Millionaire: The Ultimate Guide.”. My goal with that post was to write superb content about that topic. How did I do?

Related: 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Compete With Giants in SEO

4. Put the keyword in your page title.
This should be a no-brainer, but I’ll say it anyway: Your page title should contain your keyword, but that doesn’t mean it has to be exact (though it can be).

Additionally, the title must also be interesting enough that people will actually want to click on it! A good example of this would be PT from PTMoney.com, who wrote a great post about “making extra money.” However, rather than a boring title, like “Make Extra Money,” he titled it “52 Ways to Make Extra Money.” Now that is something I would want to read.

5. Put the keyword in your header.
You can organize most webpages by having a large title at the top, followed by several sub-headers throughout the page (like the sub-headers in this post).

This organization is helpful not only for people in skimming blog-post articles, it’s helpful in showing Google exactly what your blog post is about. Therefore, be sure to use your exact keyword phrase at least once in your sub-headers.

6. Put the keyword in the name and alt-tag of your image.
Next, if your blog post contains images, you can use those images to cement the idea to Google about your post’s topic. There are two ways to do this:

The image name
The image alt tag
To change the image name, simply change the name of the image on your computer before uploading. Instead of a file called “2831274.jpg,” you can re-name it something like “small dog toys 1.jpg.”

The “alt tag” is something you designate after you upload the photo to your website. Without getting too technical, the alt tag is simply the text that the web browser will show if the photo can’t load for some reason.

7. Use the keyword in the URL and in the post.
Another way Google is able to determine what your blog post is about is the URL. In other words, we’re talking about what comes after the “.com” in your url (or .net, .org, or whatever you use). For example, which of the following URLs do you think Google will like better when deciding whether or not to show a certain page?

http://www.ExampleDogToyWebsite.com/9124824834-1
http://www.ExampleDogToyWebsite.com/small-dog-toys
You’re right if you guessed the second one. While the former might not completely kill your SEO efforts, the latter definitely helps show Google exactly what the post is about.

8. Insert internal links.
If you aren’t talking about your best content, why should anyone else care? For this reason, it’s important that your best SEO content be linked to internally by other pages on your website.

Yes, this means you may need to go back and edit some older posts to include links to the new, incredible content.

9. The most-important SEO tip: Get external links.
Okay, finally we’re finally at the big one: external links.

External links are links from websites other than your own. Google relies heavily on external links to determine how good a post is. And this makes sense, doesn’t it? You can talk about yourself and your own skills all day long, but no one will believe you. But as soon as other people begin bragging about you, others take notice.

While producing incredible content may get you some links, the truth is, you are going to have to do some “link building.” This means reaching out to other website owners in the space to ask for links. For some great tips on getting these links, I like to read Backlinko.com.

Related: Companies Will Spend $65 Billion on SEO in 2016, Much of it Will Be Wasted

The above nine-point checklist may not include everything a person could know about SEO, but by simply following this checklist, you’ll be miles ahead of the competition and will likely see your posts get significant SEO traffic.

Elon Musk vs Warren Buffett: how two titans see carbon-free electricity

The Silver State is witnessing a fight between two energy companies promoting different visions of energy policy, led by two very public features.

On one side is electric utility NV Energy, owned by billionaire Warren Buffett.

DON’T MISS: Latest drone footage of Tesla Gigafactory shows progress

On the other is SolarCity, the solar-power company owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

The two companies and their wealthy leaders are now actively clashing over the implementation of solar power in Nevada, as a recent report by the Las Vegas Sun Newsshows.

Both Musk and Buffett believe their methods—decentralized generation through rooftop solar panels for the former, traditional grid infrastructure for the latter—are the best way to bring carbon-free electricity to consumers.

Cooling tower at power plant, by Flickr user Paul J Everett (Used under CC License)

NV Energy recently won a crucial skirmish when regulators decided to cut incentives for homeowners with rooftop solar panels.

Nevada’s utilities commission introduced a new scheme where, over 12 years, it will triple a current fee for solar customers.

It will also decrease the value of credits consumers earn for selling excess power back to NV Energy, a process called net metering.

SolarCity is now funding an effort to reverse the utility commission’s decision through an “alliance” with more than 100,000 members, reports the Sun News.

Separately, Tesla is backing a Nevada ballot initiative to end NV Energy’s monopoly in the state.

At the moment, though, Solar City isn’t installing new solar-panel arrays in Nevada.

Tesla gigafactory, March 2016, shown in drone footage posted to YouTube by Above Reno

For its part, NV Energy believes it can deliver solar power more cheaply through its grid than a decentralized network of rooftop panels can manage.

Under the previous incentive program, NV Energy paid customers 11 cents per kilowatt-hour for excess electricity—the amount it typically charges residential customers for power.

But Buffet has said NV Energy could buy power from large-scale solar plants for as little as 4.5 cents per kWh.

MORE: Tesla And Panasonic: Partners In Electric Cars, Foes In Home Energy Storage(Sep 2015)

SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive disputed that figure, claiming that because NV Energy is currently locked into long-term contractors that were negotiated when solar was more expensive, it regularly pays around 13 cents per kWh.

The lower figure also doesn’t take into account the cost of transmission, Rive said. Power from large plants must be transmitted over greater distances than home solar, he said.

At the moment, NV Energy also relies more on fossil fuels than renewable energy to generate power for Nevada.

Tesla Energy for utilities

It may have lost the regulatory battle, but SolarCity has a potential weapon even utility companies are concerned about.

It’s the line of home energy-storage battery packs made at Tesla’s “Gigafactory” just outside Reno, and marketed under the Tesla Energy brand.

The battery packs allow consumers to make more use of the power generated by their solar panels, lessening dependence on the grid.

A survey of 500 utility executives conducted by trade publication Utility Dive found that 65 percent believe their companies should invest more in energy storage.

Whether it’s used by utilities or homeowners, an energy-storage system’s ability to store solar power for later use could greatly increase the technology’s attractiveness.

Philips Hue’s new white ambiance bulbs are now available

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If your current Philips Hue white light bulbs aren’t the proper shade of white you require, well you’re in luck. The Philips Hue white ambiance bulbs are officially on sale today, and they will deliver shades of white light between a cool 6,500K to a warm 2,200K.

The current white Hue bulbs will let you change the brightness level, but not the color temperature. If you’re new to the Philips Hue ecosystem, you can pick up the new white ambience starter kit for $129 — which comes with two bulbs, the Hue base station, and a dimmer switch — while a single bulb will cost $29.95.

Google Is Preparing To Add The Raspberry Pi 3 To AOSP, It Will Apparently Become An Officially Supported Device

The Raspberry Pi 3 appears to be on track to receive official AOSP support from Google. At least,that is the most obvious conclusion based on the fact that Google has created a code repository forit within the same directory that also includes the Nexus devices and generic source code.

The Raspberry Pi 3, the latest iteration of the cheap, simple, and small computer, is marketed as adevice to promote more engagement with computer science and programming. It has also gained agreat deal of support from DIY types, who have rigged them up for all manner of uses. Given theopen source-centric nature of existing software for Raspberry Pi—nearly all operating systemsavailable for the devices are open source and Linux-based—it makes good sense that Google wouldtake the time to make Android run on them as well.

On the other hand, Google may not necessarily be working on getting Android to run on the deviceitself, but rather could be adding support for Android to interface with the Pi for other purposes.

The public repository was created 5 weeks ago, but Google hasn’t yet released any code and there’sno telling when they will. In any case, when it does come around it will make for a nice alternative forRaspberry Pi users and could, with some prodding from Google, get novice programmers usingAndroid.