San Antonio, Texas based Incuby is aiming to build a community where inventors can display their inventions to the general public, entrepreneurs and investors. In developing the site, the team behind Incuby have toured the United States meeting with different inventor groups. They found that inventors are tired of the high costs associated with travelling and presenting at trade shows and are ready for “a place of their own on the web”. The site is still in development and will move to a closed beta test in the coming weeks with a broad number of inventors already signed up to test the site. The focus is creating an environment where inventors can coexist and communicate online with each other, while presenting their innovations. Through ecommerce enabled profiles, each inventor will be able to manage their product’s sales while adhering to a customer feedback system that is similar to eBay. Shopping inventions does share similarities with the financing and development path of Web 2.0 startups. In truth the only real differences are tangible vs intangible IP and that tangible invention patents and trademarks prevent the same ideas being copied over and over again like they are in Web 2.0, for example with social bookmarking sites and Digg clones. Sometimes it’s the simplest ideas that work best. Incuby is a simple yet solid idea that has the potential of going far. If I was an inventor myself, I’d be signing up as soon as it launched. → Read More
Hot on the heels of its soon-to-be-revolutionary table, Microsoft is aiming squarely at the rest of your kitchen, and is set to roll out enough cooking gizmos to make your proverbial ass swim. The idea is called “Kitchen Client.” No, really. The devices in your kitchen will be aware and will interact with Windows Live. You’ll also have a terminal for recipes, calendars, and familial bulletins. With luck, and a little Windex, this tech will make making dinner a little less troublesome. Of course, the PC in the Kitchen of the Future will be different, just as desktops have morphed to attain other functions, like Media Centers, and Microsoft has hardware partners already. In time, it hopes to have clients in every room in your house. Cue Big Brother music and a cackling Ballmer. Microsoft preps Windows-based kitchen client [ZDNet] → Read More
Some of our regular readers may recall a stupid and irresponsible rumor we started right here on this blog, that being the idea, based on a slip by an Apple PR type, that future Macs might shortly ship with Vista pre-installed as a dual-boot option for Leopard. The idea isn’t just to run Windows, but to run Windows apps in the Mac OS. Many of you scoffed at the idea, and we even thought it bogus ourselves. Then a coworker showed me the Unity in VMware Fusion video above, and you can see just such things happening. We’re not saying Leopard’s going to ship with this type of scenario, but it certainly does stoke the fire and add food for thought, and other metaphors. → Read More
Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet has the scoop on Microsoft’s next best thing since sliced bread: Microsoft Kitchen. According to Foley, Microsoft Kitchen will extend Windows to the kitchen with a tailored product that will include family calendar, recipe center, entertainment features and a shared bulletin board. No, it’s not April 1 and as far as Foley is concerned this is actually being developed. Given Microsoft’s move into Surface Computing it’s not improbable that the kitchen may follow the coffee table as Microsoft’s next target. There is some history of kitchen based internet appliances. The LG Internet fridge was launched several years ago and although wildly derided at the time, others saw it as a sign of things to come. The cost of computers in general is far more affordable today; a kitchen focused Tablet PC or similar device running Microsoft Vista Kitchen Edition may sound indulgent, but the economics make the path to success far easier than it was for the LG Internet Fridge. Where do you want to go today with Microsoft Kitchen? Will it mix drinks? Share your thoughts in the comments. More at CrunchGear. Update: Microsoft has just announced a new patent licensing agreement with LG. Could it be a case of Life’s Good with Microsoft Kitchen in the future? → Read More
See MobileCrunch’s coverage of mobile dating startup MeetMoi, which just closed a $1.5 million round of financing from Acadia Woods partners. We’ve covered web dating services before, but MeetMoi takes dating to the streets. The service works a lot like Dodgeball. When you’re available for a date, you broadcast your location by texting the service. Other available daters that fit your search criteria (sex, location) receive an SMS of your profile, consisting of a picture and short description of yourself. If they’re interested they can text you back with their profile by replying to the message and set up a date. It costs 99 cents for 10 reply messages and your phone number is never revealed. The service is available on Cingular, Nextel, Boost, Sprint, T-Mobile, ALLTEL, and CellularOne. MeetMoi is not GPS enabled. I can easily see mobile friend-finding services like Loopt and Helio integrating a similar GPS version of the system into their applications. Check out MeetMoi’s full profile. → Read More
Justin Timberlak and Beyonce are getting in the mobile zone… the VidZone actually. VidZone Digital Media, the leading music provider to mobile networks in the UK, has signed a deal that will grant it full access to Sony BMG Music Entertainment UK’s digital catalog for mobile and PC use. The provider will make this music available for streaming and downloading in audio and video formats, while also offering the music as ringtones. VidZone Digital Media distributes music content to 3, O2, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile and Vodafone within the UK as well as a further 35 mobile networks and mobile online websites internationally. VidZone Digital Media inks deal with Sony BMG [MediaWeek] → Read More
AOL’s feed reader, which competes with Bloglines, Google Reader and other browser-based feed readers, was launched in 2005 but is little known in tech savvy crowds. It’s serviceable and has a fast load time, but it hasn’t differentiated itself from the crowd enough to get a buzz going about the product. We mentioned it in passing in November 2006, but otherwise haven’t covered it. The site has about 1.5 million active users. They are now preparing to release a new version, however, that has some excellent features. Google took a similar approach with their product. It was nothing to write home about when it first launched in October 2005, but the company released a new version in 2006 that was widely applauded. Today they have significant market share and the product accounts for 34% of our RSS readers – 150,000 people get TechCrunch through Google Reader. I saw a demo of the new AOL product at their offices here in Silicon Valley. They product will be called myAOL Favorites. It’s still fast. They’ve added support for rich media and useful Ajax tricks to make organizing feeds easier. They’ve fixed problems like lack of OPML support as well. But what I like best about it is that they’ve integrated a new bookmarks product in with the feed reader. The folders are integrated into a single view. Feeds in one folder area in the left sidebar, bookmarks in another. I’m looking forward to testing it myself when they’re ready to go into beta sometime in the next couple of months. I’ve posted a couple of pictures that I took during the demo below. They didn’t say I couldn’t post them, so here they are. → Read More
This, friends, is the Behind the Green Door of watch videos. It’s essentially an amazing close-up of a Panerai mechanical movement running at full tilt taken with a video microscope. Clearly this is about as exciting as watching paint dry for many of you, but for watch obsessives this is full on gear-on-gear action. → Read More
Venture Beat and the Wall Street Journal are reporting mobile dating startup MeetMoi has closed $1.5 million in financing from Acadia Woods Partners. MeetMoi works like Dodgeball for dating. After verifying your phone, you fill out a basic profile consisting of a picture, the kind of relationship you want, and personal description. When you’re in the mood for a meetup, you text your location to 94810, which broadcasts you as available to other singles that meet your search criteria. Each potential date gets your profile over SMS. If they like what they see and read, they can simply text back by replying to the profile SMS and schedule a date. The service is free to register, costs 99 cents for 10 anonymous text messages, and is currently available on Cingular, Nextel, Boost, Sprint, T-Mobile, ALLTEL and CellularOne. GigaOm has a good roundup of some other mobile dating services: Jumbuck, Webdate mobile, and Match.com mobile. Check out MeetMoi’s full profile. → Read More
Nielsen, the media monitoring company famous for letting Alf stay on the air as long as it did, is now measuring mobile media eyeballs and boy is it getting some juicy info. For starters: Eight million persons 12 and older viewed video on their mobile phone (this excludes videos created with a phone’s camcorder function) → Read More
Blow up doll connoisseurs rejoice! A new wave of touchable tech is just around the bend. A team of Swedish scientists have created paper embedded with metallic particles that, when touched, complete a circuit which produces a recorded sound. The sound is played via small electromagnets embedded in the paper. The aim for now is to apply this technology into packaging. However, more “interesting” ideas are sure to be ahead. Combine this with the sweating robot, and staying at home on a Saturday night becomes more interesting. Interactive Paper Makes Music [InventorSpot] → Read More
Kevin Poulsen, ex-hacker extraordinaire, posted a teaser image on Threat Level, one of the Wired blogs. He writes: I’m so excited by this piece we’re running tomorrow, that I’m posting this preview pic to give THREAT LEVEL readers an exclusive chance to guess what the subject is. Here’s a clue: this will be the best thing that’s ever appeared on the internet. Ever. So what is it? Can any eagle eyes suss it out? Click the image for a blow-up. Mystery Photo From Tomorrow’s Wired News [Wired] → Read More
Sun opened its big, fat mouth today and announced that Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X Leopard will use its ZFS file system as its default. (Macs currently use HFS+ with journaling enabled as the default file system.) A full list of ZFS’ advantages can be found on Sun’s site, but this one caught my eye while quickly glancing over it: All operations are copy-on-write transactions, so the on-disk state is always valid. There is no need to fsck(1M) a ZFS filesystem, ever. Every block is checksummed to prevent silent data corruption, and the data is self-healing in replicated (mirrored or RAID) configurations. If one copy is damaged, ZFS will detect it and use another copy to repair it. Oops, now big Papa Jobs is gonna be angry. Video Announcement [Sun via Mac Rumors] → Read More
Netflix stock jumped up 5.66% today on rumors that the company may be in acquisition talks with by Amazon. The funny thing about public company rumors: when they affect stock prices, it becomes AP-reported news. Netflix has been under attack from Blockbuster and others in recent years, although membership growth has remained steady and the company is profitable. A whole new class of competitors are emerging, though, that facilitate legal movie downloads. Netflix has entered that market as well, but at a cost of $40 million per year in licensing fees. It may be time to throw in the towel. → Read More
USA Today is running a little piece about how Skype is totally Pee Oooed about how some carriers won’t let phone owners run outside applications on their handsets. They were so angry, in fact, they wrote a sternly worded letter to the FCC about it and they intend to take this all the way to … zzzzzz… what? Oh, sorry. → Read More
Goody, more robots! Today’s is a Robot B9 replica—you know, the one from “Lost in Space” that always ran around flailing his arms in the air warning about danger and hippies. She’s full-size, too, which just makes the $24,500 price all the more inviting. Right. If I had an extra $25K I probably wouldn’t be buying robots, but rather some Air Jordans and matching jersey. Product Page [Lostinspacerobot.com via Nerd Approved] → Read More
Uh, oh. Now it looks like there will not, repeat, *not* be any new iMacs at Apple’s WWDC next week. That’s what AppleInsider has learned, at any rate. But AI promises that a major overhaul of Apple consumer computers is still on track for this year, it’s just that next week is too early to launch them. (Apple might have a certain other product launch to worry about.) AI still believes that Apple will kill off the 17-inch iMac and the Mac mini and that the iMac will get a makeover in the upcoming months. Will it look all brushed metally? We shall see (and hopefully soon… all these Apple rumors are getting hard to keep track of). Poor bets placed on new iMacs at Apple’s developer conference [AppleInsider] → Read More
What’s underneath the veil, Olympus? Could it be the successor to your E-1s, which are now some four years old? I know you showed a prototype SLR back at PMA, but we want the real thing, baby. We want it so bad. Or not, whatever. It better do well to compete against the heavy hitters from Nikon and Canon. “Product Page” [Olympus via fareastgizmos.com] → Read More
It looks like Porsche is branching out from its mainstream-fancy sports car production and into the cellphone game. In this man’s hand is the Porsche Design Mobile Phone P’9521, whose interface looks a hell of a lot like the Prada’s. It’s a flip phone, my least favorite kind, and I have no idea whether or not it’ll be released or how much Porsche would want to charge for it. Don’t forget, June 29 is ever approaching and will make nearly every other cellphone on the market irrelevant. Woo~! Porsche Design Mobile Phone P’9521 presented [Fareastgizmos.com] → Read More
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