Apparently if you work at LEGO, you get a miniaturized LEGO person of yourself with your contact info on the (your) back. When someone asks for your business card, you hand them the figure. That is, how you say, outstanding. Never mind the gigantic bulge of LEGO figures in everyone’s pockets and the incessant noise that must fill every hallway at LEGO headquarters when people walk around, it’s the principle of the idea that makes it so wonderful. → Read More
The successor to Acer’s popular and well-reviewed Aspire One netbook is appearing on the net today in the form of some hands-on photos and specs from German site NetbookNews.de. To be honest, the specs aren’t exactly inspiring, but it looks like they are simply polishing the previous Aspire One and not trying to make a whole new class here. → Read More
Motorcycle and ski enthusiasts, among others, have known about d3o’s polymer compound for years and it actually saved my brother’s limbs from a nasty motorcycle accident last year. I first saw this material in the summer of 2007 at Spyder’s SIA booth.
Well, the British Army has finally wised up and contracted d3o Labs to line their 20-year-old Mark 6A helmets with the shock-absorbing material. The contract is worth £100,000 to be exact. But the Ministry of Defense isn’t stopping at just helmets. They’re hoping that it can be applied to the rest of the infantry’s armor because we know how restrictive those body suits can be or so I’ve been told. → Read More
Tomorrow’s Cloud Computing Roundtable is sold out. But we have good news. For those of you who can’t join us in person, we will be live-streaming the event. Thank you to Sun Microsystems for sponsoring the roundtable stream (powered by ustream and camera work by FutureWorks.) Tune in on TechCrunchIT or Sun.com/cloud
TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor and I will be grilling our panel of cloud-computing heavyweights about where we are with this technology and where we need to go. As Gillmor wrote in a post on TCIT:
Short term, cloud computing will slip in as a cost-saving rationale. Near term, the social clouds will expand across workgroups, across business domains, and finally cross-cloud. Then the Golden Age of the Cloud will occur, where applications and services only possible in that environment will guide the next wave of business architecture.
On Friday, the dialogue will be about when, not if. When did cloud computing begin? How far are we into the cycle? Is cloud computing a baby or an old man in diapers, and are we going backwards or forwards so fast that we can’t tell the difference? Or are we and cloud computing meeting in middle age, each ready for the other?
I am also happy to announce the startups who will be giving the main demos prior to the roundtable and the panel of judges who will be evaluating them. Here are the companies and what they will be showing off: → Read More
The first two EA Sports MotionPlus-compatible games for the Wii will be shipping on June 16th, according to a company press release. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 and Grand Slam Tennis will both make use of the super-precise MotionPlus add-on for the Wii-mote. → Read More
Scientists in the U.S. and Sweden have created a substitutional alloy using aluminum, cerium, a little theoretical math, and a whole lot of pushing. Normally, aluminum and cerium don’t play well together, because their atomic radii and electronegativity are too far apart. But just like Oscar and Felix were able to get along in their apartment, so too can these two elements combine when forced to do so. → Read More
Going for the “peace through superior firepower” theme, custom builder group Inventgeek built the ultimate solution to keeping those pesky kids off your lawn – the paintball turret. Featuring dual barrels, and available in a wired or wireless platform, this seems like the ultimate in paintball warfare. → Read More
When can we call plasma officially dead cause the flat screen tech doesn’t have much going for it anymore? Pioneer and VIZIO just announced they are getting out of the market and now LG is contemplating the same thing. → Read More
I bet the boys and girls over at Sony breathed a huge sigh a relief when that “Kaka-to-Manchester-City” rumor finally died last month. After all, he’s the star of its latest commercial, seen here, promoting the company’s Motionflow technology. Fast-paced sports benefit from all those hertz (and a nice helping of signal processing). → Read More
Ho-lee cow, that’s a sweet rebate. Amazon’s got the “lighter than air” Samsung X360 notebook for under a grand if you’re the type of person who owns stamps and can handle mailing things before certain deadlines. → Read More
A super-secret Digg toolbar has been spotted in the wild. We tracked down a beta tester who gave us the skinny on its features. The toolbar lets you Digg or Bury the page you are on, and shows how many Diggs it has already received. There are also links to show related pages, as well as more pages from the same source voted highly by the Digg community or marked as up and coming.
Then there is the “Random” button which works like StumbleUpon. It takes you to a randomly-generated page based on your past input and overall Digg voting. By the prominence of this button, it appears that is a feature Digg will be trying to highlight. Users can also share the page via Facebook, Twitter, or email via icons at the top. A drawer slides down to expose additional functionality.
Now, here where it gets interesting. For each page, the toolbar creates a shortened URL similar to TinyURL or bit.ly that starts instead with http://digg.com/. . . followed by a six-character code such as “http://digg.com/d1gVha.” When you share a page via Twitter or Facebook, it is that shortened URL which is used. And in fact, for the beta testers, the toolbar can be wrapped around any page simply by sticking “http://digg.com/” in front of any URL, which then gets converted into a shortened version. → Read More
Alaska Airlines has announced that they’ve started testing Row 44’s satellite-based Wi-Fi service on a handful of Boeing 737-700s. The first trial flight will take place between Seattle and San Jose (leaves Seattle at 2:20 PT today and returns on Flight 329 from San Jose back to Seattle) and the service will be free for 60 days. After today that aircraft will shift routes, which includes anything going up and down the West Coast and Alaska. No exact date has been attached to the trial (but I would assume it’s today or sometime this week) and pricing hasn’t been set, but I’d imagine it’s close to what VA or AA is charging for Aircell’s Gogo service. Now watch the boring video after the jump. → Read More
Windows 7 just plain rocks, but the RC is getting some tweaks over the Beta 7000 release. According to the Engineering Windows 7 blog, a good amount of the changes will be done ‘under the hood’ but still, some updates will involve a visible difference. After perusing the list a bit, it seems most of the changes simplify the user experience and clean up the interface a bit more. Honestly though, the beta is amazing and I’m sure most users cannot wait to see what will change for the better. → Read More
Well, that didn’t last long. HP’s Upline, a backup service that offered unlimited storage for $59/year, is closing its doors. Since launching last April, Upline has faced issues with extended downtimes – a pretty major offense for a backup solution. But it’s likely the ultimate reason for the shutdown is that Upline was never really able to get much traction in a crowded space with very little in the way of differentiation. That said, there’s clearly money to be made in online storage, as evidenced by Hitachi’s recent acquisition of storage and backup solution Fabrik this week and EMC’s $76 million <a href="acquisition of Mozy in 2007.
Below is the letter sent to HP Upline users, who will have until March 31 to download their files. In a classy move, it looks like HP is going to refund any fees customers have paid for the service. → Read More
Bandai’s everlasting Tamagotchis, which recently got upgraded to color, face some serious competition from another Japanese toy maker. Takara Tomy has developed the Yuruppy, which is as least as cute but requires no care at all. → Read More
In an effort to beat this Kindle horse closer to pulp, I present an excellent essay by Ed Champion, a guy who knows publishing. He points out that the publishing industry is stuck in one or two models that just don’t work and things need to change. First, he brings up three interesting examples: Valve offering its hit Left 4 Dead for half-price over President’s Day Weekend and improving sales 3000%, sales of board games going up in recessions because humans enjoy durable entertainment (games, books, maybe DVDs) in a downturn, and Free Comic Book Day which accounts for the most comic book sales over the year. → Read More
Remember when people used to memorize phone numbers? How many of the phone numbers of the contacts in your cell phone do you know by heart? I know my wife’s and both my parents — that’s it. Assuming I’d want to get in the way-back machine and go to a simpler time, this Bluetooth-equipped rotary phone might do the trick quite nicely. → Read More
While there may still be a lot of confusion surrounding the future of AOL, that didn’t stop the folks in Northern Virginia from recently overhauling their popular AIM instant messaging app for iPhone (and iPod touch). Available in two tasty flavors, free (“AIM Free”) and paid (“AIM Paid”), AIM 2.0 for iPhone now provides SMS notifications, has location-aware services, and supports multiple accounts (among other updates). It appears as though all of the application updates have been included in both the free and paid versions, with the major (and obvious) difference being the inclusion of ads in the buddy list of the AIM Free app. → Read More
TomTom announced today that Microsoft is suing them for patent infringement, however they denied that they had violated any of Microsoft’s patent rights. Microsoft said that it it taking legal action against the GPS maker after the two failed to reach a licencing agreement after more then a year of negotiation. → Read More
