CrunchGear |  |
- The iRig PRE: A New Microphone Interface For iOS Devices
- Wireless Sensor Posts Temperature, Humidity, And Radiation Levels To Twitter (Video)
- OrcaM “Reconstruction Sphere” Digitally Recreates Any Object Placed Within
- Playstation Vita Sales In Nosedive After Strong Japan Debut
- Boxee Brings The SOPA Protests To Living Rooms
- iPad Is The Least Problematic Tablet Says FixYa, The Tech Q&A Site
- Improvement On Age-Old Mathematical Principle Could Yield Improved Images, Video
- ION Audio’s iPad Guitar Concept In Legal Trouble
- Pro Tip: Do Not Buy An iPad Made Of Clay
- Essay Due? Here’s How To Access Wikipedia During The SOPA Blackout
- Motorola Is Now Serving Up Ice Cream Sandwichs To The Xoom
- NetLED: Japan Gets Cloud-Based, Smartphone-Compatible LED Lighting System
| The iRig PRE: A New Microphone Interface For iOS Devices Posted: 19 Jan 2012 04:39 AM PST  Jeez, CES is barely over and already NAMM is upon us. Unfortunately, this blogger is not in Anaheim for that event, but to be honest, I am still reeling from the few days I spent at CES with Team TechCrunch. Instead, I’ll happily watch the music industry event from a safe distance this year. I did however spy the iRig PRE while I was at CES but it was not yet ready for prime time. Tonight it has been officially announced. IK Multimedia, the makers of this microphone interface, describe the device as: The first high-quality microphone preamp designed specifically for iOS devices that allows musicians to use their favorite high-quality stage or studio mics with their iOS device. Its adjustable thumbwheel gain control allows the user to easily make precise level settings. The onboard 9V battery provides the necessary voltage for phantom-powered studio condenser microphones for at least for 15 hours of continuous use. The small form factor and decent battery life will, no doubt, make this a fine addition to any musician looking to use their iOS device to affect their vocals at a gig or recording session. As for the technical features:
Pricing and availability
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| Wireless Sensor Posts Temperature, Humidity, And Radiation Levels To Twitter (Video) Posted: 19 Jan 2012 04:31 AM PST  Japan-based UC Technology Corp. [JP] has developed a wireless sensor that can automatically post data like temperature, humidity, illuminance, or radiation levels to Twitter. The so-called “Tsubuyaku Sensor” [JP, PDF] is mainly designed for use in food warehouses, plants, or wine cellars. The data can be checked remotely on Twitter (the account can be set to private or public). UC Technology says that the sensor has a battery life of a year when it posts data once per minute. The company explains:
This video, shot by Diginfo TV in Tokyo, provides more insight (in English): UC Technology plans to start selling the sensor in Japan this month (prices: US560 for the base unit, US$286 for each sensor).
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| OrcaM “Reconstruction Sphere” Digitally Recreates Any Object Placed Within Posted: 18 Jan 2012 07:30 PM PST  Occasionally, in this line of work, I need to have a slight freak-out moment where I rave about the fact that things like this OrcaM “reconstruction sphere” actually exist. Not only does this thing look like a prop out of a sci-fi movie (or Transmetropolitan), but it acts like one as well. Inside that enormous ball are seven high-definition cameras that rotate around the object you put inside, looking at it from every angle and with many kinds of special lighting applied to help determine texture, reflectance, and other factors. What you get is, within a few minutes, a 3D model accurate to under than a millimeter, in full color and with color and texture included. Perfect for, say, submitting to Shapeways or the like and getting yourself a copy. I can think of many uses for this thing. It’s not the only 3D scanner in the world of course, just the most sci-fi-looking we’ve seen in a while. And big dedicated rigs like this probably won’t be the future of 3D scanning anyway; the Kinect seems to be filling that role just fine. Either way, it’s cool as hell to watch. [via Dvice]
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| Playstation Vita Sales In Nosedive After Strong Japan Debut Posted: 18 Jan 2012 01:23 PM PST  The Playstation Vita handheld system, unveiled at E3 last year, went on sale just before the holidays in Japan. It saw serious sales: around 325,000 units (500,000 by Sony’s reckoning) were sold in its opening week. Naturally numbers tend to drop after the initial rush, and the next week saw healthy sales of around 72,000. But The numbers kept decreasing, and it is now reported that for the week ending January 15, the new device sold only 18,361 units, not including online sales. That’s less than the PSP. Other games systems like the 3DS and Wii also saw big drops in the post-holiday season, but for a brand new system like the Vita to drop to sub-20,000 numbers so quickly isn’t a good sign. Could it be a lack of quality games, something that hamstrung the 3DS’s early days? Or perhaps people are waiting on the inevitable bundles when the device makes its debut in the US with high-profile titles like Uncharted? Whatever the case is, it’s still too early to be calling the Vita a loser. The fact is it has a lot going for it, and it’s a long play by Sony, not a cash-in. The PS3 was slow to take off, and is now intermittently leading console sales. In two years, will the Vita be topping the 3DS? Or will it have the same fate as the PSP, simply not recognized as a mainstream gaming machine? I hope that’s not the case, because the Vita has more potential than the 3DS to be a mainstream gaming device. February 22nd is the date to look forward to. It may be that the US launch will reinvigorate the flagging handheld, but really it won’t be until later in the year when buying habits have returned to normal that we can draw any conclusions.
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| Boxee Brings The SOPA Protests To Living Rooms Posted: 18 Jan 2012 12:47 PM PST  SOPA protests are everywhere today. The Internet is collectively up in arms about the proposed legislation. Major sites are shut down, banners are everywhere, but that’s online. Boxee is taking the fight to living rooms. Turn on a Boxee Box today and you’ll be greeted with three large black boxes that clearly state STOP SOPA. There’s no way to miss them. Featured videos generally occupy the prime real estate on the home screen. But not today. Today they direct viewers to a Vimeo video (embedded below) explaining the downfalls of Protect-IP. Boxee would be uniquely affected by the proposed legislation. The company is built around the idea of open video sharing. SOPA and PIPA could utterly disrupt this practice. Most of Boxee’s video sources are legitimate but many of the service’s apps would no doubt fall victim the purposed legislation’s murky wording. Boxee’s message is mostly preaching to the choir at this point. Chances are owners of Boxee Boxes are well aware of the horrors of SOPA. But it shows the sheer depth of today’s movement. The message is everywhere: Stop SOPA.
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| iPad Is The Least Problematic Tablet Says FixYa, The Tech Q&A Site Posted: 18 Jan 2012 12:33 PM PST  FixYa, a product Q&A site, took a look at its own holiday stats to collect some facts about many major cell phones and tablets including iOS and Android devices. The conclusion? iPhone owners tend to be most interested in fixing battery and call quality problems on Android users found a number of screen issues including freezing and problematic interfaces. They also found that the iPad had far fewer support questions than the aggregate number of Android tablets. Obviously the cohort they surveyed isn’t very statistically useful, but they were able to grab quite a few percentages based on page views of various support questions. On the gaming front, users overwhelmingly had the most questions about the Xbox 360 and PS3. Coming in third was the Wii and the DS Lite saw the least activity. Out of all devices, the Xbox 360 saw the most “visits per device” at 188,342 while the iPhone saw 99,000. Oddly, Nokia and Blackberry devices also so a bit of traction as well. Windows itself came in at #4 behind the Wii. The Coby Kryos was the most problematic tablet followed by the Galaxy Tab. These sorts of stats are interesting because they offer a window onto what users are thinking about after unboxing their holiday gadgets and finding them lacking or problematic in some respect.
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| Improvement On Age-Old Mathematical Principle Could Yield Improved Images, Video Posted: 18 Jan 2012 12:09 PM PST  It’s not often that you improve on a bit of math that has been around for 200 years. The Fourier transform was first proposed in 1811 by a Frenchman named Joseph Fourier, though it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that he was given the credit he deserved. His technique broke down a complex signal into a number of component signals, which could be transmitted or processed separately and then recombined to produce the original in a fairly nondestructive way. In 1965 the Fourier transform got a boost as James Cooley and John Tukey discovered a way to apply the transform on the fly using a computer. And now, in 2012, another major improvement has been proposed. Understanding the Fourier transform isn’t so hard: if you have a piece of music that needs to be transmitted, you can’t send each instrument or frequency separately. So instead, you stack the frequencies on top of each other, and what you get is a single signal, more complicated than any of the single frequencies, but interpretable on the other end. The process of breaking down the complex signal into its component frequencies is achieved by Fourier’s method, and recomposing the original signal from those component frequencies is an inverse Fourier. And it’s not just audio that can be encoded in this way: if you consider pixels to be simply bit values for color and so on, you can express images and video using this method as well. It ends up being rather ubiquitous, actually. But despite its age and ubiquity, the algorithm is apparently due for another boost, according to researchers at MIT. The digital, “discrete” Fourier transform established in 1965 can apparently be extremely inefficient at times, and the researchers found that for an 8×8 block of values (totaling 64), 57 can be discarded without visibly affecting image quality. Now, it’s not just a matter of throwing things out. The new technique also changes the way the signal is sliced up into smaller signals, making it easier on the algorithm that needs to choose which pieces are important and which aren’t. And they also snip existing bits of signal down until they contain only the part necessary. So why is this on TechCrunch? Because it’s research like this that makes things like FaceTime and Spotify possible. And it’s also from work like this that many startups are born. Improvements at the most basic level of signal processing, like this one, can produce repercussions years or decades down the line. The improved algorithm, which has not been named, could improve compression and transmission of compatible signals by as much as 10 times. Will it improve the speed of encoding so your phone will shoot 4K video? Or maybe reduce the bandwidth necessary for audio and video so that it can stream faster and in higher quality? Maybe improve data handling on your wi-fi? Hard to say at the moment, but generally one does not improve on the fundamentals of a field without causing real improvements there. The paper is by Dina Katabi, Piotr Indyk, and their students Eric Prince and Haitham Hassanieh at MIT’s CSAIL. It has not been published, but you can read it here.
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| ION Audio’s iPad Guitar Concept In Legal Trouble Posted: 18 Jan 2012 10:33 AM PST  Wow. Talk about not doing your homework. ION Audio has apparently infringed on the patents, trademarks and designs of three companies by debuting a new iOS peripheral at CES. The Guitar Apprentice (which is honestly a pretty cool idea) appears to use concepts that Behringer sent to the US Patent and Trademark office over a year and a half ago. But it's not just the product concept. The trademark on the name "Guitar Apprentice" is actually owned by another company called Legacy Learning Systems and if that were not enough, the headstock design on their guitar shaped controller could be in dispute by Schecter Guitars. There is a fairly comprehensive account over at FutureMusic, where they are following this little product drama. I didn't see this device while I was at CES, so I am not sure how "finished" their booth prototype was. But I have to wonder how much effort and time went into this. Surely it wasn't a "hey we just threw this thing together and didn't know any better" moment. If they created their iOS app in house, you've got to figure that the development for it alone could easily have been tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, and likely took some time. Not to mention the controller device, which looks to be molded plastic and fairly finished in appearance. If it was an honest mistake, then I kind of feel bad for these guys because this could be a very costly blunder for a company that has a couple of pretty sweet looking peripherals. On the flip side, just think of the press they are getting for their other product lines via this problem? Maybe this could even turn into a win? [via FutureMusic ]
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| Pro Tip: Do Not Buy An iPad Made Of Clay Posted: 18 Jan 2012 08:03 AM PST  The story goes that at least ten customers were sold clay iPads over the holidays from Canadian electronic stores. These customers were sold what appeared to be sealed iPad 2s, but turned out to contain slabs of clay rather than, you know, iPad 2s. Best Buy and Future Shop of Canada opened investigations, but since the stores already compensated the customers, we’re in the clear to laugh at the situation a bit. This scam is a lot less scandalous than the iPad McDonalds story. In that case a lady went against every shred of common sense and purchased what she thought was an iPad from a pair of men in a McDonald’s parking lot. It turned out to be wooden block. But this time, the buyers purchased sealed boxes from reputable retailers. They had no idea that a slab of clay was inside the box. The popular theory right now is that scammer purchased the iPads and replaced the units with a block of clay weighing the same as the iPad. The person than re-wrapped the iPad in retail-grade cellophane and returned it to the store as an unopened item, effectively circumventing any return policy. The scammer likely had to employ a bit of social engineering too as most stores log the customer’s ID on large returns. From there, the retailers simply returned the units to the shelves to be sold to unsuspecting customers. Of course once these customers started showing up at the retailers, the stores responded with suspicion and bewilderment. At first the customers were turned away with the stores claiming they were the scammers. But after a bit of persisting, the stores recanted and refunded the purchase amount, and at least in one case, also gave the customer a free tablet to compensate for the hassle. Returning a brick in a box is one of the oldest scams. If that box gets placed back on the store’s shelves, the customer will lose nearly every time. Consumers have no protection against it aside from opening the box right in front of the cashier. I mean, most will not buy an iPad from guys in a McDonald’s parking lot. That’s just straight up dumb. Buying an iPad from a major retailer shouldn’t throw up the same warning flags. So here’s what you do: Skip the iPad and buy a Playbook or Xoom 2 next time. No one is going to go the trouble of putting a brick in Playbook box.
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| Essay Due? Here’s How To Access Wikipedia During The SOPA Blackout Posted: 18 Jan 2012 06:14 AM PST  As you can tell from the homepage, it’s a sad, trying day for the internet. Many of our favorite sites like Reddit and Wikipedia have gone dark, leaving only an argument against SOPA on their homepages in lieu of cat gifs and knowledge. All in all, it will shape up to be an incredibly boring day in the name of justice. Because to be honest, SOPA is unconstitutional in the way it’ll be enforced, and means rarely if ever justify the ends. I drone on because I’m about to hook you up with access to Wikipedia, and I want to make sure you still understand what it will mean to our internet if SOPA passes. However, I’m sure plenty of you have papers due tomorrow or simply want to learn more about SOPA, which you should, and so we wanted to give you a circumvention for the Wiki blackout. It’s actually quite simple, according to CK Sample II: Just tap the escape button as soon as you begin to load a link to Wikipedia. I find that if you hold the button down, the page stops loading. If you press it too late, you’ll be redirected. It’s an acquired skill but should only take a few tries tops. Otherwise, you’re doing it wrong. If you can’t seem to get the jist of it, you can always check out Wikipedia on your phone. We’re seeing reports here and there that the mobile version of the site does not redirect, and my iPhone 4S confirms. Again, we here at TechCrunch oppose SOPA and are proud of the sites willing to take a hit in order to show the world what a life without Reddit or Wikipedia is like. I think we can all agree that it sucks. Wow, and it’s only 9am.
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| Motorola Is Now Serving Up Ice Cream Sandwichs To The Xoom Posted: 18 Jan 2012 05:57 AM PST  Good news, Xoom owners. No, you’re not getting a refund but rather the official Ice Cream Sandwich update should now be available for OTA downloading. This update replaces the Xoom’s stock Honeycomb operating system with ICS, Google’s latest Android build. This comes just a week after Asus started rolling the update out to its new Transformer Prime tab. Right now it seems as if only the American Wi-Fi are receiving the update. The international and 3G/4G models are seemingly on deck. Hopefully this signals the flood gates are now open and most first-gen Honeycomb Tegra 2 tablets will soon get Android 4.x. The majority of the original Honeycomb tablets are built on very similar hardware, which should mean most will get the latest Android build. It’s up to each manufacturer to roll out the update to its devices though. Asus was the first out of the gate followed by Notion Ink and now Motorola. Hopefully Samsung, Acer, LG and all the rest are prepping their updates as well.
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| NetLED: Japan Gets Cloud-Based, Smartphone-Compatible LED Lighting System Posted: 18 Jan 2012 05:39 AM PST  First, Japan got the world’s first connected home garden device, and now it’s time for Nippon to get the world’s first cloud-based LED lighting system. Developed by Tokyo-based lighting tech startup Net LED Technology Corp., the so-called NetLED system will go on sale in Japan on February 20 (here‘s the company’s English website). The 40W lights, which have a 40,000-hour lifespan, come with built-in Wi-Fi: users can control each tube over the web after installing the NetLed app on a smartphone, tablet, or computer (the iPhone app is already out, while iPad and Android apps will be released this summer). It’s possible to dim the lights (each tube has 10 different dimming levels) and to turn them on or off. Users can control individual, multiple, or a set of lights (which can be located in separate rooms) via the app, which also offers a timer function. The system also makes it possible to track energy usage in real-time and to automatically aggregate data over an extended period of time. Net LED says that when a company, for example, uses 200 of these lights, power consumption can be pushed down by up to 50%. Using the app and Net LED’s servers is free. The system’s own costs depend on how many lights are needed: the price for the control box/router set (see above) is fixed at US$780. One Wi-Fi-enabled tube (US$260) can be connected to up to three NetLED lights without a Wi-Fi module (those lights cost US$180 each), resulting in sets of four lights (as you can see above).
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