CrunchGear |  |
- Daily Crunch: Mainframe
- Skimming Jonathan’s Card For Fun And Philanthrophy
- Video: Lockheed’s “Samarai” Drone Spins Like A Maple Seed
- Microsoft Patents Flat-Slider Phone Form Factor, Multi-Touch Gaming Mice
- Review: Audyssey Lower East Side Speakers
- Canon Lens Shot Glasses, For Drinkin’ And Shootin’
- Sprint: Yeah, About That 4G BlackBerry Playbook We Announced? It’s not happening.
- Samsung To Finally Debut The Galaxy S II In The U.S On August 29th
- The Battle Continues: Samsung To Appeal Apple’s European Injunction
- Today Is Cheap Nintendo 3DS Day
- 1DollarScan Scans And Digitizes Your Books For You “For A Dollar”
- Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Coming In 2012 To Revive The Aging, But Still Awesome, Franchise
- Japan To Invest $1.3 Billion In New Supercomputer
- Daily Crunch: Mouse And Rat
| Posted: 13 Aug 2011 01:00 AM PDT  Here are a selection of yesterday’s Gadgets stories:
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| Skimming Jonathan’s Card For Fun And Philanthrophy Posted: 12 Aug 2011 06:55 PM PDT  If you’ve been reading the internet regularly this week, you’re probably familiar with Jonathan’s card, a “social payment experiment” amounting to a public Starbucks gift card. You might have bought a coffee with it. You might have contributed to it. You might have suspected it of being a Starbucks viral (it isn’t). What you probably haven’t done is set up a script to skim money off the card in order to use it for your own nefarious purposes. And by “nefarious purposes,” I mean feeding starving children in Africa. Here comes the ethics! Sam Odio, who sold Divvyshot to Facebook last year and is currently working on launching Freshplum, whatever that is, has detailed a hack he put together that rather subverts the Jonathan’s card philosophy. Uninspired by the admittedly uninspiring premise of “yuppies buying yuppies coffees,” he set up a script that checks the card’s balance and alerts him whenever it hits a given amount. He then transfers the money to his own card. Just today he’s “earned” $625. At first I thought this was just an unbelievable jack move by Odio. Odious, if you will. But I too am less than amused with the results of the card (bloggers and entrepreneurs buying bad coffee) than with the idea, which is of course compelling. And of course we run a conference (now coming to Beijing!) called Disrupt, and a Hackathon where this exact behavior is encouraged. It’s just not always quite so — impertinent. But is impertinence reason to condemn? It’s a social media experiment, after all. Pass a plate around with a dollar on it and you might get the plate back with a hundred — or some else might save you the trouble of counting your money. The idea of a public, unsecured money-transfer device usable all over the country is its own end, and this subversion of the model is just part of the process. Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I think Odio’s response (turn it on its head) is exactly correct, and I’m glad to see the money going to a good cause (the card is actually $10 above its face value on eBay). Furthermore, the original experiment is ongoing — it wouldn’t be much of an experiment if it didn’t survive its results. But how will the people who donated feel? Likely cheated — but that’s not really rational, is it? They put their money on the plate. They didn’t buy the plate. Will they continue to donate? Will people clone the script and race to the bottom, transferring pennies to their own balances? I’d say this experiment just got a lot more interesting. Update: Oops, Starbucks shut the card down almost the moment I posted this. So this experiment just got a lot more over. Well, it would have been interesting.
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| Video: Lockheed’s “Samarai” Drone Spins Like A Maple Seed Posted: 12 Aug 2011 05:30 PM PDT  Anyone who lives near a deciduous forest knows the joy of the maple seed, or as we called them when we were kids, helicopters. Their single wing spins the seed, slowing its descent — so why shouldn’t a similarly-designed wing be able to spin faster and actually fly upwards? Lockheed Martin has demonstrated a new drone platform, not quite a nano air vehicle but still simple and light, that does just this. Looking at it, you’d never think the Samarai would fly. But fly it does, and remarkably well at that. Apparently getting it into the air wasn’t the hard part; after all, if you move a wing fast enough, it’ll lift, right? On the other hand, learning to control this single-wing design isn’t exactly intuitive. Traditional aviation ideas don’t apply when your entire craft is spinning. Check out the video: The design was developed in Lockheed’s Intelligent Robotics Laboratories in New Jersey, and the idea is to make a UAV platform that could be easily carried by soldiers and deployed just by throwing it. The video shows the Samarai doing vertical take-off and landing as well, so it sounds like throwing isn’t even necessary. The payloads and sizes are flexible, since apparently the design is easy to scale by using 3D printing methods. This isn’t the first maple-seed project: students at the University of Maryland demonstrated a small version, and Lockheed themselves were looking to it as early as 2006 as a potential nano air vehicle platform. I guess it took them longer than they expected. [via Technabob]
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| Microsoft Patents Flat-Slider Phone Form Factor, Multi-Touch Gaming Mice Posted: 12 Aug 2011 04:26 PM PDT  We’ve seen a lot of interesting patents from Apple over the last few days, but Microsoft loves to patent things too — and they’ve just been granted a nice little pack of designs for mobile phones in a special slider format, and some Kinect and mouse tech to boot. They’re not patenting a plain slider, of course. They’re patenting a few specific designs of sliding mechanism by which, once you finish the sliding action, the keyboard and the screen are “positioned in a substantially similar plane.” That is to say, mostly flush. Check it out:
The advantage is, potentially, a more comfortable typing experience. Many complained about having to type around the G1′s “chin,” and other phones with sunken keyboards have similar problems. My issue with a design like this is that the additional hinges and such might end up increasing the weight and decreasing the sturdiness of the phone. The second design does look more interesting, though, lowering the display rather than raising the keyboard. That could actually work. What I’d like to see is some patents on a slider keyboard with keys that are actually fun to type on. Or maybe a slide-out keyboard for a tablet that doesn’t increase the weight the thing by 500%. Microsoft was also granted a patent that clearly relates to the Kinect — it’s about determining the potential space for gestures and tracking user movement within a sort of cone. I wouldn’t say this is particularly exciting, but if you’re interested in the Kinect and Microsoft’s implementation thereof, it could make for some fun reading this weekend. More up my alley, Microsoft has patented a method of interacting with games via multi-touch mice. I’m pretty surprised this patent flew, since games are just a form of software, and there must be hundreds of patents in play regarding the interaction of software and multi-touch surfaces. I mainly liked looking over the patent because they use illustrations that hearken back to the days of yore, when multi-touch mice were a novel proposition. [via WMPoweruser]
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| Review: Audyssey Lower East Side Speakers Posted: 12 Aug 2011 02:51 PM PDT  Short version: A solid pair of laptop or desk speakers, unremarkable but warm and powerful, with an understated and attractive design. More attention to detail would help justify their price, though. Features:
Pros:
Cons:
Full review: When it comes to PC speakers, the go-to brands like Harman-Kardon, Klipsch, Logitech and so on provide good, predictable performance. I saw these speakers announced a little while back and felt it’d be good to take a break from the usual suspects. I’m glad I did — Audyssey’s LES speakers aren’t a knockout or anything, but they hit a nice Goldilocks zone of size, power, and fidelity. The design is meant to evoke the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I’m not sure how or why, but whether you see that neighborhood in the speakers or not, you can at least agree that the design is straightforward, handsome, and understated, perhaps to the point of being plain. The speaker enclosure itself, with its red rubberized stripe gripping the one-piece stand, is nicely done and reassuringly speaker-shaped. The stand, while sturdy and partially rubberized, doesn’t seem as considered. On the right speaker you have a red/green power indicator LED, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and the volume knob, which you press to power the speakers on or off. The indicator is tastefully dim and of an olive hue, not the traffic light green often found on devices. I was not impressed with the quality of the volume knob: there’s very little weight to it, and lots of wiggle. And the volume level notch is so shallow as to be nearly imperceptible most of the time. They have 3.5mm and optical audio input on the back, and the speakers connect with standard speaker wire. Might have been nice to see something more substantial as a connection method. As you have no doubt figured out by now, this is a two-speaker setup, not 2.1. Normally two-speaker systems are budget items, given away with cheap laptops or plugged directly into your iPod. The LES speakers are different, more like bookcase speakers on your desk than anything. They’re powered, with decent-sized drivers; Audyssey claims “Small speakers that can't produce bass, speaker cabinets that make noise, distortion, or even poor sound quality at low volumes are all problems that are solved by Audyssey Smart Speaker technology,” and “We don't boost the bass and distort the sound, we actually enhance the performance of the driver to give you deeper sounds.” They won’t be blowing your windows out or anything, but it’s safe to say they’re well beyond the capabilities of your average two-speaker set. I actually prefer these over the Logitech Z623s I recently reviewed, which sound great, except I’m always worrying about whether I’ve got the sub at the right level — and at any rate, separating the low end into a separate channel has always kind of bothered me, though it’s really only a problem when the falloff between the satellites and the sub isn’t well thought out. The LES speakers have a nice level response throughout the spectrum, and while you won’t be getting teeth-rattling bass, that’s not really the intention of compact speakers like these. Some experimentation led me to the discovery that these speakers sound best on a flat EQ, or something close to it. Depending on what you’re listening to, you might want to bump or scoop it a little bit, but for the most part they produced an even, rather warm sound that easily reached up into the highs and descended into lows without distorting or falling off too much. If anything I felt that a certain bit of mid-low spectrum was overemphasized, taking over the rest of the sound during this or that part of a song, though I’m starting to think that’s a resonance issue with my desk. At any rate I don’t have the same issue with other speakers. They get plenty loud, though the sound is fairly directional and you’ll want to stay in the sweet spot if you can. Movies and games sounded good. One quirk I wish Audyssey had thought twice about is the auto-off feature. If you don’t use the speakers for a while, they turn off automatically. No problem, you think, saves a little power. But they don’t turn back on when you come back and hit play again. I know, it’s a small problem to have to hit the button and turn them on, but I wish they’d just implemented an auto-on feature as well. I also think that treble and bass adjustment knobs wouldn’t be out of place. I know you can EQ stuff, but it’d be nice to do that on the back of the speaker as well for when they’re in a less customizable audio environment. Conclusion For apartment living or use in, say, a studio environment, these are a great choice. Or for a dorm room, where space is at a premium and subs just irritate your neighbors. They’re tastefully if not beautifully designed, produce good sound with plenty of power, and provide a simpler and perhaps more faithful audio environment than 2.1 setup. If you’re confident enough to tweak your sound a little so it’s sending the right stuff to these, I’d say they’re a great choice for personal audio. But I hope they’ll consider paying a little more attention to the user experience details in the next version. Product page: Audyssey Lower East Side Speakers
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| Canon Lens Shot Glasses, For Drinkin’ And Shootin’ Posted: 12 Aug 2011 01:12 PM PDT  Lens-related ephemera seems to be a soft spot of mine. Canon thermoses, Canon mugs, Nikon Mugs, Nikon bracelets — the fun never stops. Or, alternatively, it never starts, if you’re a Pentax user. All you get is great cameras and an amazing lens selection. For the photographer who likes a tipple now and then, or just loves things that look like lenses, consider these twee 24-105mm zoom shot glasses. I can’t vouch for the image stabilization, but you can’t fault them for their size. Their capacity is 1.5oz (i.e. a normal shot glass), they’re made of sturdy glazed ceramic, and they cost $18 for a set of three over at Photojojo. [via OhGizmo]
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| Sprint: Yeah, About That 4G BlackBerry Playbook We Announced? It’s not happening. Posted: 12 Aug 2011 12:32 PM PDT  Waaaay back at CES in January, Sprint and RIM announced that they were cooking up a version of the BlackBerry Playbook that played friendly with Sprint’s 4G network. And then… nothing. Months went by, with nary a mention from either of the companies involved. Alas, it looks like the Sprint 4G Playbook will be buried before it’s even born. Blaming a “lack of demand from business customers” (read: everybody who wants a tablet right now probably already has an iPad or a Xoom), Sprint has killed off plans to launch the device. It’s unclear whether or not RIM will go on to sell a Sprint-friendly version of the tablet themselves, though it seems rather unlikely. Selling CDMA phones without the carrier’s support is tough enough — but an ultra niche object like a half-baked enterprise-focused tablet? Blyeck. As the Wall Street Journal points out, this.. isn’t good news for RIM. Sprint was the one major carrier who was willing to back the Playbook — neither AT&T or Verizon wanted to have anything to do with it. While Sprint still offers the WiFi only version of the tablet, it doesn’t seem like they’re planning to stick by the Playbook for much longer. Nail, meet coffin.
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| Samsung To Finally Debut The Galaxy S II In The U.S On August 29th Posted: 12 Aug 2011 08:19 AM PDT  It’s coming! It’s finally, finally coming! After nearly four months of traveling around just about everywhere but the US, the Galaxy S II is finally set to make its stateside debut. Samsung will be holding a press event on August 29th to spill all the details. Just last month, Samsung’s President of Mobile Shin Jong-Kyun predicted that the US S II would launch sometime in August. As long as they’ve got things prepped to hit the shelves somewhat shortly after the press conference, it looks like he won’t be too far off. If the rumor mill’s whispers from waaaaay back in May are still holding true, the S II will likely launch as the Galaxy S 2 Attain (on AT&T), S 2 Function (on Verizon), and S 2 Within (on Sprint). Need a refresher on what’s inside? It may vary a bit from carrier to carrier, but here are The Galaxy S II Specs:
Samsung is one of the largest super-multinational companies in the world. It’s possibly best known for it’s subsidiary, Samsung Electronics, the largest electronics company in the world.
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| The Battle Continues: Samsung To Appeal Apple’s European Injunction Posted: 12 Aug 2011 08:11 AM PDT  As expected, Samsung has decided to fight back against Apple's preliminary injunction to ban sales of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 across the European Union (excluding the Netherlands). On August 25, the rumble continues, as Samsung will go to court in Dusseldorf, Germany to appeal the court's decision, reports the Wall Street Journal. It's been a long and bloody fight so far, with both sides losing quite a bit of ground. In Samsung's case, the European injunction is by far the greatest setback. But the GalTab has also been put on hold in Australia, with decisions pending here in the U.S. That's a pretty big hunk of the global market to lose, and if these preliminary import bans become permanent ones, it could change the tablet game considerably. The GalTab is widely regarded as the strongest competitor to the iPad, and Apple's widespread control of the tablet market is certainly threatened by this new Samsung slate. But what's worse is that Apple's reputation is also at stake. While there are innumerable complexities to consider going into these patent brawls, the majority of the general public doesn't really have access to the nitty gritty details of the court proceedings (details on the trade-dress violations, the in's and out's of this extremely complex legal process across multiple court systems, etc.). I whole-heartedly believe that Apple has every right to defend its trade dress, and I also believe that some of Samsung's new products (the GalTab 10.1 and Galaxy S II smartphone, included) very closely resemble the look and feel that Apple has spent so much time establishing. The appearance of Apple products is just as important as what they do, and Apple knows this. At the same time, Apple tends to overreach. Once the complaints start moving into the software arena, things get really blurry. Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7 all share quite a few different features, yet the patents related to software are so general and broad that it hardly seems fair. Every time Apple pushes hard against Android, whether it be with Samsung's smartphones or HTC's, Apple ends up looking entitled and desperate to premptively squash competition. In any case, we're the ones with the most to lose. Apple and Samsung will both survive this fight, albeit with a few bumps and bruises. But end-users are getting screwed out of fun new toys, and that's what hurts the most. Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years, officially changing their name from Apple Computer,...
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| Today Is Cheap Nintendo 3DS Day Posted: 12 Aug 2011 07:41 AM PDT  Just a reminder: today is cheap Nintendo 3DS day and, sadly, it is the end of availability for Nintendo’s unusual “ambassador” program. The device is now available for $169 – down from its launch price of $249 – and they will be launching the 3DS in “Flame” aka “Mario” Red this September. Why, then, is this news? Well, as is the case with many recent price reductions, Nintendo overshot. Although, in theory, the 3DS technology is wildly superior to previous portable consoles, the fact remained that those selfsame consoles were just fine for playing the vast majority of DS games. 3D was – and still is – a gimmick and although I found the console fascinating I suspect, at launch, parents were balking at paying another two and a half clams for another Nintendo console. At $169 the device is considerably cheaper and considerably more accessible. However, I worry that the dip will create a negative perception in the market. Console-makers traditionally have been very aggressive and stalwart in their pricing. Console prices don’t drop until sales are well beyond sales plateau that happens during a console launch. Forced shortages, grey market aftersales, and general chatter all combine to create a perfect revenue storm and only when that storm dies down do we see any major price reductions. In the end I’m sure Nintendo will do just fine on the 3DS. They’re aiming at an older, more nostalgic market and they understand kids are happy with a new Pokemon title every few years. However, for them to reduce prices so early is a negative sign in almost every respect except one – the price reduction means more people will be willing to try out Nintendo’s vision of the future of handheld gaming. Company: NINTENDO Website: http://nintendo.com Nintendo, a technology company widely known for its line of game consoles, was actually founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi. It began as a Card Game company and evolved...
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| 1DollarScan Scans And Digitizes Your Books For You “For A Dollar” Posted: 12 Aug 2011 07:18 AM PDT  Having old media digitized to get more space in the house, preserve them or simply make them portable isn’t exactly a new trend. But some startups, like Peggybank in the case of videos and photos, still find ways to stand out. And now a new company called 1DollarScan tries to do the same for books, documents, pictures and just about anything that’s printed on paper – through pricing. 1DollarScan is the US equivalent of a service in Japan called Bookscan, which is the largest of its kind in that country and hit several millions of US dollars in revenue within a year, according to the namesake company (in fact, the service is so successful that some customers in Japan currently have to wait for months to get their material digitized). 1DollarScan works in the same way as Bookscan: after receiving physical books or other printed material from customers, the company scans the papers, and converts them into PDFs or DVDs. That’s what similar services do, too, but as 1DollarScan’s company name suggests, prices start at just $1 (for ten photos or 100 pages in a book, for example). The obvious idea here is to address a bigger market than competitors by making mass-scanning and digitizing more affordable. 1DollarScan tells me they are building on their experience in Japan and “radically” apply Toyota’s kaizen method to perfect operation and keep costs down in their “factory” in the US market. Launched last week in the US, it’s too early to tell if 1DollarScan can deliver in terms of quality as well, but if it’s any indication, the Japanese parent company already filed for a patent to protect its (actually pretty impressive) device-specific resolution adjustment method (here‘s a video in Japanese that shows the scanning process). On its website, 1DollarScan says that digitized content can be viewed on all Android phones and tablets, essentially all iOS devices, the Kindle 3, Sony’s PRS-650, and the Nook.
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| Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Coming In 2012 To Revive The Aging, But Still Awesome, Franchise Posted: 12 Aug 2011 07:14 AM PDT  And for today’s news out of the left field, Valve is working on a new Counter-Strike game. Yep, the venerable shooter might soon get an update. Details aren’t exactly flowing at the moment, but it seems and feels as if this incarnation is going to be a niche game, aimed at the competitive gaming community. Still, it’s a new Counter-Strike game! Get excited! Counter-Strike was released as a Half-Life mod 12 long years ago. It has since went onto be its own game and the most played title on Valve’s Steam gaming distribution service. It is and always has been, in a word, popular. A whole generation of gamers grew up on CS. Before Internet gaming blew up, Counter-Strike was the LAN party game. (and Starcraft) I had to retake a MSCE course because my time was spent tearing up Dust2 rather than studying. This was the FPS that defined team-based shooters. It was the Modern Warfare before Modern Warfare. The game never exactly disappeared. It took Valve making Team Fortress 2 free-to-play for the game to lose its top spot. But it’s time for a refresh. Pro-gamers are the ones that spun-up the rumor mill after tweeting that they actually played the game at Valve’s HQ. The game is reportedly due out in Q1 of 2012 and like mentioned before, it’s not exactly clear if CS: Global Offensive is an update of CS: Source or if it’s a totally new game. It’s said to be built around a new Source engine, meaning the graphics should be from 2012 (or at least 2011). Dedicated servers, classic maps, and classic weapons are all said to be included within the new release. There will also be new weapons, gernades and modes. The matches are apparently 5v5 and designed for the eSport scene. Valve is said to release a statement concerning the upcoming title sometime today.
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| Japan To Invest $1.3 Billion In New Supercomputer Posted: 12 Aug 2011 06:55 AM PDT  There is a list of the world's 500 most powerful supercomputers, and the last time it was updated, back in June this year, Fujitsu’s “K” (pictured) came out on top, taking the No. 1 spot from Tianhe-1A (a supercomputer from China). It was the first time since 2004 for Japan to get to claim those bragging rights, and now the country’s largest business newspaper The Nikkei reports that the government is already thinking about what will happen in 2020: by then, the plan is to develop a computer that handles exascale computing or, in other words, one million trillion operations per second (that computer would be 100 times more powerful than K). Japan’s Science Ministry MEXT is estimating that costs could amount to $1.3 billion and has already roped in NEC, Fujitsu and government agency RIKEN to discuss details of the project. The goal is to make sure Japan stays on top in the supercomputer race as other countries are investing, too. In February, the US government, for example, set aside $126 million for the development of exascale supercomputing in the budget for fiscal 2012. Supercomputers are being used for predicting earthquakes and other natural disasters, analyzing climate change, exploring outer space etc.
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| Posted: 12 Aug 2011 01:00 AM PDT  Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets:
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