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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With straight-forward socio-political imagery from folks like Banksy and Shepard Fairey, the messages of today’s crop of street artists are usually pretty easy to understand. But what are you supposed to think when you come across a life-sized monster from Space Invaders on the street? According to Invader, the artist who posts the pixelated ’80s arcade game character on walls around the world, there’s a method to his madness.
Within his mosaic tile art, Invader has started embedding secret binary code messages that can only be cracked with an iPhone app called iMatrix. After you take a picture of one of Invader’s pieces, the program decodes it and spits out messages like “This is an invasion” or “I Invade Varanas.” Watch the artist explain it for himself in the video below…
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Now that interactive, overproduced video games have become the norm, is there a future for the old fashioned simplicity of lo-fi games like Space Invaders and Asteroid? A group of students at Berlin University of Arts developed what they call Carcade!, an in-car video game that uses the scene outside the passenger window as the backdrop for a retro space combat game
Andreas Nicolas Fischer, Martin Kim Luge and Korbinian Polk rigged a web cam to their car’s window, which digitally records the landscape of the street. That landscape runs into a laptop, where it instantly becomes the game’s environment, challanging you to navigate through the streets in a tiny spaceship that moves the same speed as your car. Watch the video demo below…
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Say goodbye to chicks dancing on bars. With their touch-sensitive counter top iBar, Danish company Mindstorm has discovered a way to add entertainment value to any watering hole without relying on wasted women stomping in their stilettos.
The iBar integrates video-projectors into your everyday bar top, making it light it up when anything'drinks, hands, money'touches the surface. The company claims that the one-of-a-kind bar is compatible with any type of counter, so contact them here if you’re trying to spruce up your local dive. Watch a demo video of the flashing lights below…
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