Face it, fam: Japan can’t make everything. As globalization continues to level the playing field, nations that have historically depended on foreign imports for luxury items are creating their own lines of affordable homegrown goods. As featured in our 2009 Style & Design package, we’re taking a closer look at the pros and cons of three notable new products made in developing countries. Read on to see how the whole world is getting involved…
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Illustration by Japanese legend Hajime Soroyama
The best part of a recession is you can “project” just about anything, an idea that comes in handy when you’re trying to pitch your part of the world to tourists and magazine editors. At a recent press conference to promote Australian tourism, futurologist (yeah we know) Ian Yeoman stated, “Robotics will become important, because you’re going to have labor shortages in the future…Even robot “prostitutes” that would not pass on diseases such as HIV could make an appearance.”
Sounds good to us. Hey Ian: below is our list of top ten robot women we’d like to have sex with. If you can work on getting these made real, we’ll book our tickets. Just let us know when the ladies are ready and we’ll be there with a 10-page cover story, thanks…
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WHAT: Klipsch Image S4 Headphones
COMPARE TO: Shure SE110, Sony MDR-EX300
PRICE: $80
FUN FACT: Company founder Paul Klipsch (1904-2002) started the company in 1946 out of a tin shed in Hope, Arkansas.
WHY COMPLEX IS CO-SIGNING IT: We’re accustomed to seeing demand outpace supply when it comes to limited-edition toys, or Air Yeezys, or even Palm Pres—but mass-produced headphones? That’s a first. But ever since we tested the Klipsch Image S4 Headphones a couple of months ago, we’ve been waiting to tout these excellent earbuds to the masses—waiting, that is, for the product to go back in stock at online retailers. Well, the S4s are still completely sold out at most stores, but our friends at Klipsch assure us that they will become available in the next week or two. In the meantime, here are four reasons why you need to get your back-order on…
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The New York International Auto Show starts this Friday (April 10th), and GM and Segway are expected to unveil a collaborative project that is essentially a two-person sit-down version of the Segway, everyone’s favorite love-to-hate invention of the early 2000s. This new project, named P.U.M.A. (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility), is poised to take what’s left of the 45 year-old and paid software development set by storm.
Let us not forget the storied history of the Segway, though! These things are awesome, from Cops running down gunmen to Arrested Development’s Gob showing how an executive can make the lamest device in the world classy. Hit the jump for a brief history the Segway…
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Today, T-Mobile and Blackberry team up to launch the Blackberry Curve 8900. By launch, we mean, you can go and buy this thing right now (unless you live in NYC, where it sold out in 30 mins this morning. Look into ordering it online). The O.G. Curve was great, but who doesn’t want an upgrade, right? The 8900 is slicker, faster, and cooler. If you sign on for a 2-year contract, you can cop it for $150, which is sweet.
Read on for our in-depth review and some closeup photos of the 8900…
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Remember the Walkman? That magical little device made the Sony brand so untouchable that signing Micheal Jackson, buying up the Beatles catalog, and repeatedly caking off of everything that had a plug on it was no problem? If you owned Sony stock in the '80s, your grandkid’s grandkids were gonna be eating steak. And then everything went horribly wrong.
Today, the New York Times is reporting that the Japanese mega electro-brand is set to post $1.1 Billion in losses, and some analysts are guessing that it might even be as high as $2 Billion. If you’re a current stockholder, and you bought based on the projections that the brand was anticipating $2.2 Billion in profit come March, you are bumming. This marks the first year in the past 14 that Sony will post a loss. But if you ask us, the cards have been stacked against the brand for years. Read on to see the company’s 5 biggest mistakes that got them to where they are today…
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Ah, technology. Is there anything you can’t make less lame? Even your basic park bench just got interesting thanks to German Designer Michael Schoner of NL Arcitechts, who recently unveiled the “Boombench” at Amsterdam’s annual ExperimentaDesign show.
The music-for-your-ass bench is packed with a 500-watt speaker, eight 60 watt co-axial speakers, and two subwoofers. It’s compatible with any wireless Bluetooth device, including cell phones, so be careful next time you’re secretly bumping the Miley Cyrus album while walking through the park. There’s no production plans for the bench yet, so watch the video below to see some corny kids testing it out…
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It's rare that we get psyched about commercials, but when we saw Toshiba's latest marketing video for the “upscaling technology” in their new LCD TVs, DVD players and laptops, we actually found ourselves giving a shit.
The ad builds on the special effects used in The Matrix to create a new technology called Time Sculpture, which consists of altering moving snapshots instead of just doing a 3D rotation of a still. The shoot was executed by setting up a camera rig that held 200 Toshiba Gigashot HD camcorders, which captured 20,000 Gigabytes of video data and took a staggering 336 hours to sift through. Watch the innovative ad below…
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Yahoo! hasn’t had any positive news in a long time. And today didn’t help. Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, during an interview at the Web 2.0 Summit conference admitted that his company would love for Microsoft to buy them, even though they straight up said, “Hell to the nah!” to their offers months earlier. Tough break. But despite all the negative press, everyone’s former favorite search engine is still chugging along in 2nd place. Google may have American pon lock, but Yahoo! is still the most visited website in the world.
That got us thinking, Yahoo! isn’t all that bad. There are a few things we still like about the company. Yes, they’ve made some colossal screw ups like not buying Google when they had the chance, or not buying Facebook when they had the chance, or not letting Microsoft scoop ‘em up. But there are a few things within Yahoo! that we think are worth fighting for…
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Take it from us: touch screens on mobile phones are just the foreplay for technology’s next big jumpoff. Yeah, fingering your smart phone is cool, but the full interactivity of holograms is already on deck. At Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Israel, Ivan Tihienko’s holographic PDA concept seems likely to one day eclipse today’s pocket-sized devices.
Through the use of a digital shadow, Tihenko’s design, called the Ringo, creates a radius of multi-colored arcs on the ground around you. At the wave of a hand, the user is equipped with a standard menu of date/time, GPS, and games like air hockey and chess. Unfortunately, we’re probably gonna have to wait a few years for the technology to catch up to the concept. See the demo video below…
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