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Houston, Texas: Innovation gets personal as the world's biggest sportswear firm Nike unveiled its first shoe that ties itself and will go on sale at the end of 2016.

Sports lovers are in for an amazing and innovative self-lacing sneakers this holiday season with the HyperAdapt 1.0, confirmed the US sportswear giant at its 'Innovation 2016' event yesterday.

The self-lacing shoes have been designed by legendary sneaker designer Tinker Hatfield and Tiffany Beers, Nike's senior innovator, who's worked on the Nike Air Mag and Nike Air Yeezy.

According to Tiffany Beers, the laces tighten when your feet hit a sensor built into the shoe. There are two buttons on the side to loosen and tighten them for the perfect fit.
"We've entered a new era of personalised performance," said Mark Parker, Nike's president and CEO. "Today, athletes want more than just a dash board. They want a relationship."

HyperAdapt 1.0 is the first performance vehicle for Nike's latest platform breakthrough - adaptive lacing. The shoe translates deep research in digital, electrical and mechanical engineering into a product designed for movement.

It challenges traditional understanding of fit, proposing an ultimate solution to individual idiosyncrasies in lacing and tension preference.

Beers was tasked with figuring out how to engineer self-lacing sneakers to meet "Back to the Future's" fictional release day last year.

Nike made one pair of the self-lacing Nike Mag kicks for Michael J Fox - the actor who played Marty McFly in the film - which they are planning to auction to support his non-profit organisation for Parkinson's.

The potential of adaptive lacing for the athlete is huge, Hatfield said, adding that it would provide tailored-to-the-
moment custom fit.

"It is amazing to consider a shoe that senses what the body needs in real-time. That eliminates a multitude of distractions, including mental attrition, and thus truly benefits performance," Hatfield said.

"Could it take you even tighter than you'd normally go if it senses you really need extra snugness in a quick maneuver? That's where we're headed. In the future, product will come alive," he added.

HyperAdapt 1.0 is the first step into the future of adaptive performance. It's currently manual (i.e athlete controlled) but it makes feasible the once-fantastic concept of an automated, nearly symbiotic relationship between the foot and shoe.

It will be available only to members of Nike+ beginning Holiday 2016 in three colours.
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The consortium responsible for the USB has announced that the next enhancement of the industry standard (USB 3.1) will operate at speeds of up to 10Gbps.
The new update will be completely backward compatible with USB 2.0 and 3.0 and will offer “more efficient data encoding and […] twice the effective data through-put performance of existing SuperSpeed USB”.
Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports were introduced in the late-1990s and were designed to standardize how peripherals connected to computers. Developed by a group of seven companies (including Microsoft, Intel and IBM) the first iteration of USB ran at a top speed of 12 Mbits.
The last upgrade to USB (USB 3.0) was introduced in 2008 and was known as SuperSpeed. Identified by blue colouring on ports and plugs, SuperSpeed has a data transfer rate of 4 Gbps. The new standard will be branded as SuperSpeed+.
“In this multi-device world, the USB 3.1 updates will enable end-users to move content across devices quickly, conveniently and without worrying about compatibility,” said Emile Ianni, Corporate Vice President of Platform Solutions Engineering, AMD.
USB dominates computers as a recognisable and ubiquitous standard, and the new SuperSpeed+ confirms its dominance. The only real competition would be from Apple’s Thunderbolt standard.
In its most recent update Thunderbolt 2 data speeds were moved up to double that of USB 3.1 at ‘blisteringly fast’ 20Gbps. However, a limited product base, a virtually Mac-only ecosystem and high prices mean that Thunderbolt will never truly compete with USB.

A fledgling tech company from the US is attempting to fix the problem of tangled earphone cables once and for all with Split: a stand-alone MP3 player that is just a pair of earphones, without buttons or cables of any sort.
In lieu of any conventional interface, Split is operated by biting, with the earphones sensing the vibrations of even a gentle bite. One bite skips a track, whilst two bites cycle the volume between four options: mute, low, medium and high.
“The teeth bite creates a vibration pulse that travels along the jawbone. The vibration has a distinctive signature which is detected by a custom-built 3-axis accelerometer,” say the Split’s makers.
To avoid accidently skipping your favourite song when you tuck into your lunch, the bite-controls can also be locked by tapping the side of the earphones.
“You are able to control your player without stopping what you’re doing. Keep your gloves on in the cold; walk, bike, jump, exercise without cables, dongles or external attachments. All you need is right there in your ears.”
The Split’s stripped-down approach to interfaces also applies to connectors: there are no USB ports, mini or otherwise, and instead a pair of magnets handle most of the necessary functions.
The magnets keep the two buds in one place, sticking them together when not in use. Pulling them apart turns the device on and the magnets are also used to charge it via a special USB cable.
 The two earphones communicate with one another using short bursts of near-field signals (these are electromagnetic transmissions that emit around 1000 times less radiation than Bluetooth) but actually operate independently, with the music kept in sync with “high precision clocks”.
The three-person team behind the Split are currently looking for funding for their project via Kickstarter (see the video below) but are promising that the production version will store up to 24 songs and offer four hours of battery life.