For our friends and neighbor living in the Great White North, here is news for you that should be able to put a skip in your step – with the introduction of Amazon Cloud Drive in Canada, now enabling customers to be able to stash all of their files safe and sound in the Cloud, with the promise of accessing them anytime, anywhere via Amazon Cloud Drive. In fact, all customers would be able to kick off this bit of news with 5GB of free storage, and I guess once you are hooked, 5GB is going to get filled up pretty quickly.

With this announcement made by Amazon.ca, those in Canada will be able to access their digital files via Cloud Drive for Windows and Mac, or you can even opt to do so from any web browser, too. How’s that for options? Not only that, Cloud Drive Photos for Android or iOS devices can also help you store, share and access photos from your Android smartphones or tablets and iPhones or iPod touch devices. If you want to top up on 5GB of free storage, plans start from CAD$10 annually. [Press Release]

Having the right kind of equipment in modern day warfare is definitely one of the keys to implementing a successful strategy, so it is rather interesting to read about how insects, in particular honeybees, could be part of the explosives squad. Of course, this would be a defensive movement instead of being an offensive one, where honeybees will help us humans out in removing nasty and dangerous landmines that are left over. For instance, mines in Croatia happen to be a hangover from the Balkan Wars during the 1990s, where approximately 750 square kilometers (466 square miles) of dangerous terrain are still part of the country, resulting in it being a potentially fatal issue for campers and outdoor enthusiasts alike. Bees could come to the rescue thanks to their perfect sense of smell. Should one be able to condition these pollen loving insects the right way, they could eventually associate the smell of TNT with their food.

Not only that, since bees are more or less lightweight in nature, they won’t set off mines unlike rats and dogs who do this life threatening job. Nikola Kezic happens to lead this particular research, and he oozes with optimism with the current results. We too, hope that Kezic and his team succeeds eventually for the betterment of humanity.

I clearly remember how my parents always asked me to steer clear of breakable and fragile items in a particular supermarket, especially near the dinnerware area where fine bone china plates are on display. Not only that, there were also signboards plastered all over the place saying, “Nice to see, lovely to hold. Once broken, considered sold.” I guess museums pretty much follow the same philosophy as well, although you can say that the artifacts there are generally priceless. In fact, most objects in museums tend to be behind a thick case of glass, so all you can do is admire it from the outside.

The Manchester Museum in England hopes to change the way things are run by allowing visitors to “touch” digital models of their existing exhibits, thanks to a haptic device that they call Probos. “Haptic” so happens to mean “having to do with touch” where it will simulate the contours of a virtual object. All you need to do is sit down in front of a device that has a display and a connected stylus via a mechanical arm, where the display will then show off a 3D model of an object – it can be anything like a pot, bone or statue, and the stylus allows one to interact with that model just like how a computer mouse does with a normal computer screen. An Iron Man future, perhaps? This would surely make museum visits more interesting and exciting.

How many of you keep track of your old receipts, and are able to pull it out from an organized and filed box somewhere in your home at a moment’s notice, breaking down the receipt according to the specific time and date? Well, not everyone is an accountant, and some of us prefer to just keep receipts of up to a single month or so, while throwing the rest out with the garbage when we’re done. Thing is, if other companies were to follow Gold’s Gym in issuing receipts, existing systems will need a rethink. Why, you ask? Well, Gold’s Gym intends to introduce a paradigm shift to shoppers so that they will perform their purchases based on health value instead of dollar value.

This brainchild hails from a bunch of students at the Miami Ad School in Brazil, resulting in a unique receipt that depicts the number of calories in your purchases rather than dollars and cents. Obviously, this will work only in supermarkets and if you were to purchase foodstuff, no? It would definitely help folks eat better without having to go through the trouble of keeping track of the calories in each item, right? After all, the hard work has already been done for you.

Ah, scanning. I still remember the early days of scanners for the PC, where they came in this particularly huge and unwieldy form factor, being large in nature and of course, was noisy like all get out. Fast forward to today, and scanners have taken on a totally different look without sacrificing on its ability, although you can be sure that advances in the right direction have been made. IRIS has long been a fan of optical character recognition, and this time around, their next-generation IRIScan Book 3 and the IRIScan Book 3 Executive portable scanners will run on battery power, allowing mobile users to capture paper documents, receipts, and photos among others in a jiffy without the need for a computer.

You can use both the cordless IRIScan Book 3 and IRIScan Book 3 Executive to scan straight to an included microSD memory card in either black/white or color with 300, 600 and 900 dpi scanning resolutions. Not only that, there is no need to install any drivers, and files are easily transferred by hooking up the scanner with the included USB cable, or you can simply insert the microSD memory card into the computer instead. The IRIScan Book 3 will run off a trio of AAA batteries, while the IRIScan Book 3 Executive has Wi-Fi connectivity. Interested parties can pick up the IRIScan Book 3 and IRIScan Book 3 Executive for $99 and $129 respectively.

What is it about Twitter that you love (assuming you do make use of Twitter’s service in your everyday life, of course)? Well, some folks would list down real time search as the biggest boon that Twitter has brought to your life, which is rather surprising as some might think of Google where search – any kind of search, is concerned. In fact, some folks do use Twitter in order to check out results for illegal television streams. A TV network decided to leverage on this particular phenomenon by harnessing the power of Twitter in order to assist viewers use the service in a legal and convenient manner.

Thanks to AgenciaClick Isobar, which so happens to be Sky TV’s Brazilian digital agency, this particular project would enable subscribers to record programs using Twitter, now how about that? You will first need to register your Twitter handle on Sky TV’s website, before being prompted to follow the @skybrasil account. Whenever that account posts a tweet about a program that you want to watch, you are able to retweet said tweet with the hashtag #skyrec, and Sky TV will get down to work, recording that program on your set top box automatically and without any hassle. Pretty neat, no?

The long awakened sleeping dragon that we all know as China (when China sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold) is certainly on a warpath to be number 1, and it won’t be long before the world’s most populous nation would also end up as the world’s largest economy. Having said that, here we are with another potential first from China, where the Sky City, being a pre-fab skyscraper, is tipped to also pick up the gong of being the world’s tallest structure. Not only that, it is also said to be completed in record time, too.

We are talking about a total scheduled build time of just seven months for the Sky City, and if you were to break it down, it would approximately be 13 feet per day, which is an incredibly ambitious goal by any means. Of course, this is a whole lot safer and more sane compared to the initial plan of completing the structure in 90 days. Just how safe do you think you would be if you were to be in Sky City? Very safe actually, as it boasts of the ability to resist a 9.0 magnitude earthquake, which we do hope that the $928 million building will never have to be put to the test.

Do any of you remember the Yotaphone? This is a dual display smartphone that runs on the Android operating system, and at CTIA Wireless in Las Vegas, Yota devices, the company behind the Yotaphone (Captain Obvious is calling in this time around, informing you that one can tell by the name of the device) has announced a spanking new peripheral for road warriors, calling it the Yota Ruby. The Yota Ruby is a sleek LTE hotspot that comes with a tiny e-ink screen to keep up with the times, where it does seem to have taken a design page out of Apple’s playbook, while ditching aluminum in place of white plastic.

The e-ink display and a two-way power switch are located at the top, where sliding the latter to the left will enable the Ruby to behave like a secure hotspot, while sliding it to the right, and it ends up as a public access point. The e-ink display itself shows off the battery and signal status, in addition to the number of connected devices and a smiley icon that confirms public mode. At the bottom edge would be a trick flap which doubles up as both a micro-USB socket and a USB Type A plug, depending on how one positions it. Pretty neat idea, no? As for the micro-SIM slot, it remains hidden right behind, The Yota Ruby supports quad-band EDGE, plus HSPA+ and LTE for the European market at this point in time, with a battery life of approximately 16 hours of non-stop use.

It seems that Samsung is definitely not going to rest on its laurels, which is why someone with an eagle eye has spotted the trappings of a spanking new Galaxy Note device. Of course, nothing is official just yet, but we have already seen its footprints, so to speak, in AnTuTu benchmarks. The upcoming Samsung Galaxy Note 3 (unless the South Korean conglomerate is going to call it totally something else, of course), has been listed as the N7200 (considering how the Galaxy Note 2 used to be listed as the N7100, this pretty much keeps in touch with reality and history) and has appeared in several different results, too.

Chances are, the model which is most likely to be the up and coming Galaxy Note 3 would be the one listed right at the top (GT-N7200), where it ran on a version of Android which was never released yet, that is, Android 4.3, on a CPU that has been clocked at 1.6GHz. Not only that, this so happens to be the same clockspeed as the Exynos 5 Octa which is found in the I9500 Galaxy S4 handset. While the Galaxy Note 3 picked up a lower score compared to the Galaxy S4 in AnTuTu, you ought to take note that the software is probably not polished and finished just yet, so chances are the final deal is going to be a whole lot smoother and faster.

The explosion of Internet connectivity across a range of mobile devices have definitely led to more and more user input in online sites as well as apps. Take TripAdvisor for example – most of us these days, before going for a holiday would check out wherever we are going to stay using TripAdvisor as word of mouth works wonders. Hence, traffic updates on your mobile device might come from the navigational company itself, but is it really that accurate? For those of you who have given crowd-sourced traffic and navigation app Waze a go before, you will be pleased to hear that Waze has finally arrived at the Windows Phone Store.

The thing is, Waze for the Windows Phone platform is right now undergoing a private beta test, so even if you happen to have the platform on your smartphone, you are unable to download it at the moment. Israeli based Waze actually kicked off on Windows Mobile, but did not follow Microsoft to Windows Phone 7. It has been quite popular on iOS and Android where 40 million users assist other Waze members to locate the best route in order to avoid traffic jams, know where all the speed traps are, as well as the cheapest gas stations.