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- Sunday CrunchWord Puzzle!
- Digital Contents Expo Tokyo: Sony’s flashy stereoscopic 3D display (video)
- 69adget’s OhMiBod Freestyle Review
- A look at how the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory (VAIL) is changing the world
- Review: Fonera 2.0n
- Why the little guy can’t get a break in consumer electronics and 5 ways to find a leg up
| Posted: 25 Oct 2009 05:00 AM PDT
It’s back! Here’s the latest CrunchGear-themed crossword puzzle. You can find the answers to the clues spread throughout this week’s posts. Enjoy! CrunchWord Puzzle for Sunday, October 25th
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| Digital Contents Expo Tokyo: Sony’s flashy stereoscopic 3D display (video) Posted: 25 Oct 2009 03:44 AM PDT
Sony is demoing a 3D display at the Digital Contents Expo that takes place in Tokyo right now, and today I went there and made a few pictures and shot a video of the device, too. Two of the 360 stereoscopic displays were displayed to the general public, and the tech is pretty impressive. The specs aren’t that great (96×128 resolution, 24-bit color palette), but this is just a first prototype. Here’s how Sony thinks we one day could use the display:
I took the following video at the expo today:
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| 69adget’s OhMiBod Freestyle Review Posted: 24 Oct 2009 06:00 PM PDT
The OhMiBod Freestyle Vibrator lets you DJ your own orgasm – literally. The vibrator wirelessly connects with your iPod or iPhone and vibrates along with the beat. Perfect for those of you who get turned on by the hot new Jay-Z song (or Ricky Martin, it's cool, he's on my playlist too), whatever your music of choice may be, this vibrator will redefine the way you look at your iPod.
In the Box: I've seen my fair share of sex toys, but this one is completely different from the second you lay your eyes on it. The kind folks at OhMiBod sent me the OhMiBod Freestyle as a sample to review and thought of everything – from packaging to concept. The vibrator comes in a hard plastic case with padding on the inside for maximum portability to school, work, business trips, the supermarket, or the gym… What makes it even better is the fact that it comes with three different electrical adapters so you can use your vibrator whether you find yourself in Europe, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, or the U.K. You will never be left high or dry next time you find yourself away from home – thank you OhMiBod! High Tech Hotness: The Freestyle comes with a charger and a 2.4GHz wireless transmitter with adjustable intensity for syncing with your music player. The vibrator has two functions: manual and music sync mode. A pretty intense vibration, it's not for the faint of heart. In manual mode, there are seven programmed patterns and in music sync mode, the pulse patterns depend on your playlist of choice. What's really cool is that you can sync the vibrator with pretty much anything that has a 3.5mm port, which includes iPhones, iPods, CD Players, a Stereo System or other MP3 music players. Completely wireless, the vibrator runs for 5 hours on a full charge and is a whopping 8 inches long and 1.5 inches thick. The only downside is that it's a little large and made of hard plastic, which may turn off someone looking for a more realistic look or feel. The $130 vibrator is simple to set-up: plug the transmitter into your iPod and then plug in headphones or let it blast out loud from your iPod dock. The hardest part about setting the thing up is choosing the right playlist. My first thought was that my techno playlist might be interesting because that is probably the most beat driven music you can get. Surprisingly, songs with strong melodies felt the best. Think Kanye, Beyonce, and Britney. The awesome build up had me craving the chorus. And if "All the Single Ladies" doesn't have the melody to make you get there, you can always twist the vibrator to manual mode mid session for a constant vibration and a strong finish. It's also great for couples, although that's clearly not necessary! My Playlist: Bret Michaels "Nothing but a Good Time" Beyonce "Single Ladies" Justin Timberlake "Rock Your Body" The Verdict: Dump Your Boyfriend: The main reason why a self love session cannot usually stand up to a real love session is because you are completely in control when alone. You know exactly what's coming next. The Freestyle solves this problem because it incorporates so many different levels of intensity, leaving you feeling surprised and wondering what's coming next. If Madonna sings an especially loud note or if the bass kicks in, you'll feel it. This element of surprise totally rules and mimics the type of orgasm you would have with a partner thanks to the varied pulses, unexpected vibes, and changing intensity. But way better. You'll be begging for the next song on your playlist to begin. For more about the latest sex toys and technology, check out 69adget.com
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| A look at how the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory (VAIL) is changing the world Posted: 24 Oct 2009 11:15 AM PDT
Volkswagen is taking great strides in making the roads safer and remove the dangerous fun from driving by developing fully autonomous vehicles. I had a chance to talk to Dr. Burkhard Huhnke, director of the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL) about the future of the Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory (VAIL) at Stanford University and how the technology developed there is being integrated into Volkswagen Group vehicles. You may be able to buy a real-life K.I.T.T before you know it. It probably won’t be a Pontiac though. You may recall that Volkswagen was the first team to complete the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005 by having a fully autonomous Volkswagen Touareg SUV (his name was Stanley, btw) drive 132 miles through the Mojave Desert. Then for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, a VW Passat Wagon took second place behind Tartan Racing team from Carnegie Mellon University in a 60 mile urban course. But those two challenges are nothing compared to what’s on tap for next year: Pikes Peak in an autonomous Audi TT-S. CrunchGear: How about we start with an overview of the project. The VAIL is an initiative that we started here from our electronics research lab in Palo Alto to initialize automotive center at Stanford. We got the smartest people from all over the world in one place. We already had experience with the DARPA Grand Challenge race success. We won the desert race with the autonomous driving cars together with the Stanford racing team. Then we repeated the success in the Urban Challenge in 2007. So we thought how can we bring each competence together, create a platform for a convenient automotive industry and Silicon Valley partners to look into the future and find some solutions for the mobility, safety and environmentally-friendly problems, which we have to face together. The Volkswagen Automotive Innovation Laboratory funded a building, which will be dedicated and opened tomorrow (10/24/2009). We'll fund the research projects with $750,000 per year for the next five years. CrunchGear: How is Stanford involved in the project? We expect first that we collaborate with the Stanford genius together on the solutions that we create for the future. We divided the VAIL topics into three major themes One is how do we want to drive autonomously in the urban environment. We have so many problems that we have to solve like direction recognition, lane warning, lane detection, but all these obstacles have to be observed by camera systems in the urban environment, which is one of the biggest challenges. What we would like to create for all of these three topics, and I’ll come back to the 2nd and 3rd, is initiatives. The vision for urban driving is to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles autonomously and that involves traffic jams and obstacles. What can we do to provide to our drivers with? They want to text while driving and we have to make that safe. We already established systems in our current models like blind spot detections, adaptive cruse control but what’s the future for that? Can we already allow them to press the auto button to start texting? So that’s the vision. Drive along the highway and allow the driver to do something other than driving. The second vision is up to the limits together with the driving dynamics department at Stanford. If you come to a critical situation, you generally have to take the control over from the driver. Let me explain it to you this way: If you brake your car without control, you will definitely hit the obstetrical in front of you. Can you imagine that we can try to find the emergency parts for the driver and turn the car into a different path to avoid any impact any with the obstacle? It would be a smart system that acts within the limit's range of the car that would find an emergency solution. The driver would never be able to do this because there is too much information within the milliseconds. The idea for up to the limits is to look at the best drivers to give us super examples how to react in critical situations. So we looked at a German rally driver that drives up Pike’s Peak. It’s a really critic race, but it’s a challenge for us to try to understand what makes this rally driver so special and get this knowledge into the car. We built a next generation autonomous car that’s able to drive like a rally drive and drift into the curves. It drives even in extreme situations. We think we can actually drive up hill to Pike’s Peak next year. That’s the second project. The third one is with multitasking. We actually sponsored a project seen in the NYT on what people are really able to multitask or are they not really able to focus on one task and fulfill that. It’s really an interesting study. But for us it’s really interesting because we would like understand what the perfect interface between humans and machines. Do you believe in your car? Do you believe that if you press the autopilot button that the car would actually do what you would expect. Or do you have blue screens like we experience everyday – I don’t want to blame Windows – but with our operating systems. We have to prepare the highest reliability for systems. But what do you expect in these relationships between the car and the driver in the future. These three founding purposes are the main intentions at VAIL. CrunchGear: What type of testing has the Pike’s Peak vehicle seen so far? We actually tested that at Salt Flats to have the open area available to be able drive up to the limits without any risks. It sounds crazy but we needed the smartest people actually at Stanford to prepare to the algorithms because you have to control systems again in the in-stable mode and the few years ago we thought it was impossible. But we did test already and we created a movie to show that’s possible and we think we can go one step farther and do this crazy race. Again I told you that it’s rally style driving. It’s really incredible; up to the limits. CrunchGear: One of the reason they use Pikes’s Peak is because of the environmental conditions. How does the altitude affect the vehicle? We have the best system actually to use for that in the Audi TT-S and it's working perfect. We tried it already at Pike’s Peak in slow mode to figure out what type of problems we might have in that environment. CrunchGear: What else has changed in the Audi TT-S If you saw our Junior VW Passat Wagon urban environment, we had many roadblocks to avoid and accidents with any person in that car. We don’t need the rack on the roof anymore. We don’t need big sizes for that at all. It looks almost like a stock car. You would only see three antennas on top of the roof. That’s all. We fit the computer in the trunk. We really want to show off that we’re coming closer to an actual product. It’s not too far away.
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| Posted: 24 Oct 2009 09:00 AM PDT
Review For those not sufficiently well-versed in FON, it’s kind of like Boingo for Communards. You buy a router and you automatically gain access to FON routers around the world – up to 700,000 in all. You can see a map of access points on the Fon website. The device itself costs $99 and is a small four-port router with one Internet input. It runs at 801.11n speeds and can act as a 3G-to-WiFi converter with the right hardware. You can also connect a hard drive to create a NAS server. When you’ve connected your router you log in type in a WPA key printed on the side of the device. You then can add all of your information including your YouTube, Facebook, and Picasa logins. Why? Because the router can take over your image and video uploads after you’ve completed them, offloading some of the upload time to the router itself. Want to download torrents? The Fonera box will do it for you while you sleep and it will save the downloads to the attached hard drive. The coolest thing, however, is how it shares your WiFi. You have complete control over how much bandwidth you want to share and you even even share in the revenue generated by the share. When you turn on the router it starts two access points, a public one and a locked private one. The public one displays a pay wall for users, the same pay wall that you will use to gain free access when you’re travelling. Bottom Line Regardless, it’s not expensive, there are plenty of great built-in features, and even if the FON dream fails you can still say that you’re supplying WiFi in the mode of “From each according to his DSL connection, to each according to his needs.”
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| Why the little guy can’t get a break in consumer electronics and 5 ways to find a leg up Posted: 24 Oct 2009 06:00 AM PDT
Every few months we get a press release about some great device from a no-name manufacturer who promises to change the world. One example was the TXTR reader from Germany last January. Another is zzzPhone, a company selling dual-SIM Android powered smartphones from China. Neither company produced much of anything. Era of the Silicon Valley success story – two guys making something cool in a garage and selling it – is over, at least in hardware. The costs of making consumer electronics, including cellphones and computers, on a small scale have risen so much as to be prohibitive and then the marketing costs of that same hardware is even more prohibitive. Whereas, once, two nerds in a basement could build a computer company I worry that it takes more resources than any one man or woman can muster these days to even approach something like success.
The first sad truth is that most consumer electronics cannot be made in “expensive” countries like the US or the Euro zone. During a visit to the Suunto watch factory in Finland, for example, I learned that while many of the watches are made near Helsinki a large percentage of them are made overseas and drop shipped from Asia. The company just couldn’t make anything in bulk without resorting to off-shoring. This means you either invest in an expensive small run of hardware overseas, something the Asian manufacturers do not do particularly well, or invest in a massive run of inexpensive hardware in Asia that you risk having to recycle if your company goes belly-up. This doesn’t mean you can’t make it big anymore. Take TiVo, for example. It sprung out of obscurity a decade ago and filled a niche in the living room that has yet to be challenged by any manufacturer. Unfortunately, when someone – probably Samsung, LG, or Apple – figures out how to take over the DVR market, TiVo is toast. The same is true of Palm who, to all intents and purposes, is now a small company. The big guys are eating their lunch thanks to Android and it will take some fancy footwork to survive. The small guys are, sadly, always at the precipice of failure. Other companies like Neuros and Slingbox simply sell a wrapper for their software. Sometimes this works but sadly it also leads to retrenchment when companies like Slacker pull out of the hardware business due to lack of interest and cost. Then there are success stories like like FyreTV [NSFW] which will do well because they focus on porn. Not everyone can focus on porn.
The second problem facing small CE companies is marketing. Micro-companies like Zeo and FitBit get a huge initial boost thanks to online media but then disappear once the news cycle has moved on, leaving the companies with amazing technology in the dark. This is an era of constant marketing, a situation that forces companies like Apple and Sony to put their message in front of consomers almost constantly in multiple media. Anecdotally, I’ve seen companies receiving 8,000-10,000 pageviews with one good launch, more if its an interesting product. That initial boost translates into a percentage of good sales – those are good eyeballs, not just random traffic – but it rarely turns into repeat or continuing business. That said, here are some of the best practices I’ve seen from small to medium CE companies who know how to do it right. This may not apply to you and yours, but it’s something to think about when you get excited about a product (Gizmondo anyone?) only to find it has crashed and burned. 1. Tell multiple stories. When you start out you have one story: Why your product is good. Prepare multiple stories for the next few years including ideas tagged to pressing issues of the month or year. Do you have a fitness gadget? Work on a story about post-holiday stress and weight gain. Have a DVR? Put yourself in the Super Bowl frenzy with blogger outreach and giveaways. That first boost is nice but if you’re a small company it’s the next four boosts that will push you through the rest of the year. 2. Price yourself competitively if not suicidally. Even if it’s suicidal, price yourself at just above the average price in your market. Aiming at rich, cosseted professionals is nice but the sharper Image model of doing business is over. Consumers want more for their money (even if they often get considerably less) so while $999 might seem like a nice number for a NAS or a piece of audio gear the consumer is more accustomed to $499. 3. Be quiet. Hide your light under a bushel. Patent your idea and don’t launch until the product is completely ready. I’ve seen too many companies splattered with the vaporware monicker because they failed to deliver on time or at all. Once you’re done, support your product forcefully and quietly. If someone has a problem, address it quickly. Send out new hardware before putting someone through tech support hell. 4. Change your trade dress regularly. This fickle market thinks anything that looks the same as it did last year is old. Why do iPods change every few months? People want to think they’re buying the new hotness, not the old and busted. If you can’t change your trade dress, change your website. 5. Slow and steady wins the race. None of the greats made it overnight and it’s harder than ever to truly make it. If you’re a small CE manufacturer, Godspeed. It’s a tough race so don’t sprint it. For a great look at this topic, read The Song of the Powersquid, our 6-part story on the creation of a CE product.
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