Good news, everybody! The iCade Mobile, a Bluetooth case that slides around your iPhone, allowing you to play games using a trackpad and read buttons, is now shipping for $80. The iCade Core, an arcade joystick for the iPad, is also shipping. It costs $100.

Announced a few months ago, folks have been waiting breathlessly to play Megaworm with a trackpad. The devices should be available at ThinkGeek and you can check them out here. You can check out the Core here.

The joysticks support over 400 games, a marked improvement over the first iCade versions, and are presumably great for arcade-style shooters.

If Appsplit is any indication, either crowdfunding is the future of everything or there’s a crowdfunding gold rush. I’m going to bet it’s a little of both.

This new service allows programmers to crowdfund their projects. Why not use Kickstarter, you ask? Beats me, but here’s what’s up. Appsplit is first and foremost a place to put your app campaigns. You tell folks what you’re building (“An app that tells you what time it is in Fiji.”), how you want to be funded (an “Open” project allows you to keep the money even if the project isn’t funded), and how much you need. You then do a little marketing, tell your friends, and you’ve got an app.

You can also sell the rights to certain apps or even sell shares in a company. Finally, you can find freelancers who might be interested in working with you on your idea.

The site, founded by Hussein Yahfoufi, recently relaunched as a crowdsourcing play and it’s running a handful of campaigns. Originally Yahfoufi planned the site to be a marketplace for app ownership and source code.

“Appsplit is a new platform meant to help those working and developing apps to move their app business forward. Whether they need to raise some cash, find someone to help them or just sell a piece of their app, appsplit can help. We are a new, small and very dedicated to helping each campaign owner succeed,” he said.

The service supports international creators and takes Paypal and Amazon payments.

Now look: I think this is a good idea but is it really necessary? We have plenty of strong crowdfunding platforms already and one more – even one dedicated just to apps – might be overkill. However, you can presumably set up shop at multiple spots and keep raising money ad infinitum. I’ll give Yahfoufi credit for maintaining razor sharp focus on his niche and sometimes niches are the best places to be. I worry, however, if too many things become the Kickstarter of X we’re going to exit the golden age of crowdfunding and enter the bubble age.

Cleveland, known to many as the “Land From Whence The Cleves Came,” is rarely mentioned when you think of hotbeds of entrepreneurial energy. But yet it was the long time home to Harvey Pekar and does still have many local colleges, including Case Western Reserve, John Carroll, and Cleveland State. It is also home to Sherwin-Williams, Progressive Insurance, and now LaunchHouse.

In other words, it’s a city that’s ready to make a few sweeping changes.

LaunchHouse is a small accelerator in the LaunchHouse office park. It is accepting 10 teams out of 30 finalists set to present at their July Unconference and the winning teams will receive $25,000. LaunchHouse will retain 8% of the company on launch.

“Cleveland has a low-cost of living and operating while it is host to a highly educated and technical workforce,” said David Greenberg, LaunchHouse’s representative. They’ve seen 50 applications so far and the deadline is July 1 for submissions.

But why Cleveland?

“Because we believe in the Ohio community. We believe that Northeast Ohio can become an international center for entrepreneurship and innovation with the help and support of the local community. Cleveland is home to many fortune 500 companies, as well as many venture capital and private equity funds that will provide follow on funding to our entrepreneurs,” said Greenberg.

“We are most excited about putting Cleveland Ohio on the map as an innovative center for technology where entrepreneurs come from all over the world to build and grow their businesses.”

You can submit your proposal here and here’s hoping you don’t get hit by a rocket from the tombs.

Robots are hard to talk to. They’re not friendly, they’re mostly made of plastic, and, as anyone who has tried to chat with a Roomba can attest, they are often dedicated to a single task. Luckily, there’s ApriPetit.

Toshiba’s R&D department built ApriPetit as a successor to their larger ApriPoco. This little guy is about six inches tall and follows along to conversations by moving its slug-like body and eyes in ways that resemble proper conversation.

This wee fellow is designed to help older folks with their daily chores. Its eyes are expressive and will follow the user across a room and it can ask and answer simple questions relating to health and mood.

The robot is part of Toshiba’s “Advanced Personal Robots with Intelligence” project and is not yet for sale.

via PlasticPals

In an excellent piece by David Sanger, the NY Times has confirmed what we all suspected: that the US deployed the Stuxnet worm, a powerful worm that targets very specific machines within Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

Some inkling to the source of the worm came in 2011 when Gary Samore, White House Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction, said “we’re glad they [the Iranians] are having trouble with their centrifuge machine and that we – the US and its allies – are doing everything we can to make sure that we complicate matters for them.” However, until now the worm, which jumped out of the Natanz facility and into the wild, was considered a rare and effective cyber attack by an unknown party.

There are two interesting points in this mission, one that could be rightly termed a fiasco. First: cyberwar is real and it is happening now. If this worm can shut down a secure nuclear facility, even through the “air gap” between the Internet and the facility’s internal network, then we are all in danger. I’m not suggesting that we will see reactors explode and planes fall out of the sky. I could, however, see the day when it becomes harder to perform research unpopular to a certain regime. Politics aside, we are living in a world where one nation can perform no end of trickery on another in the name of national security.

Second, this attack shows us that cyberwarfare can cause collateral damage. Because this worm jumped out of the facility and into the wild, it’s clear that even the best laid schemes aft gang agley. Anyone – be it in government, security, or development – who thinks this is a magic bullet akin to the neutron bomb. As we become dependent on the networks that support our lives – visibly or invisibly – a worm that has jumped the rails can (and dare I say will) come to affect all of us at some point. It’s just a matter of time.

Cyberwar has grown up. I hope we learn to use it more wisely than we’ve used other technologies of destruction.

[Image: Ludvig/Shutterstock]

Waxing for two at Take-It-Offs in Scranton? $100 worth of Polka lessons for 40 cents? An avant garde grilled cheese sandwich meal with metal shavings in it at Chez Naif for $60? You don’t want any of those daily deals, right? But they’re still coming.

Two people (lovers, really), Edwin Hermawan and Lea Pische, wanted to fight back. And they did. With UnsubscribeDeals.com.

“We stopped buying daily deals a long time ago, but the emails kept coming. We had to find a way to stop them,” said Hermawan.

This site is a tactical nuke aimed straight at LivingSocial City, Gilt Groupville, and Amazon Localstan. You fire it up by connecting to your Gmail account and then you get a list of daily deals sites. One by one, like a sniper taking down stoats at a great distance, you turn off each daily deal. Bang. Dead. The deals, not the stoats.

The site is completely bootstrapped and has seen about 2,000 users so far. Even the backstory is stirring: “I am a recovering attorney. She is a West Village waitress,” said Hermawan.

“We started at a hackathon. At Pivotal Labs if you must know. We were trying to hijack one of their engineers and find our mythical technical co-founder. Unfortunately, all we got were awkward interactions and a random conversation about statistical-regression-mumbo-jumbo-database structure.”

Hermawan is also co-founder of SignaturePages.com. But that’s not important right now.

Pische is a “West Village waitress”. She “ordered too many things from Lifebooker that she never used.” She also has a startup, Runorder.com, that helps restaurants find distributors. But that, also, isn’t important.

What’s important is that they’ve finally solved the daily deals inundation problem. Finally. And for good.

Sure, Hermawan’s a little deluded. “We focus strictly on daily deals. We believe that’s where the bulk of the junk emails come from,” he said. “We knew it was time to go to sleep when Groupon emails start to come in.” Have you read junk email, dude? Have you? No matter.

All I can say is thank you Edwin and Lea. Thank you. I’ve just unsubscribed from Gilt City (did I sign up for that? Is that for girls?) and whatever kgb deals is and I’m a happier man for it. Keep killing those stoats, friends, and stay gold.

The RIM PlayBook by just received a developers update that adds some interesting new Android functionality to RIM’s tablet. This new version now supports Android apps running in their own windows, improving compatibility with the general Android app universe.

From Crackberry:

This version is butting up against the incoming BB10 OS that will soon appear on phones and tablets, but, as the Verge notes, the BB10 PlayBook should be able to run apps written for previous OS versions.

Oddly, this version seems like a bit of a dead end but it’s nice to see Android functionality getting fleshed out more concretely.

via RIM

Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Kickstarter, dropped us a line about the systems in place to “hide” failed projects. He told us that Kickstarter does indeed hide many projects from search robots, but it’s for a good cause.

“The original poster was correct in noting that we don’t have a browse area for projects whose funding was unsuccessful,” he wrote. “This isn’t to ‘hide failure,’ as the original post said, it’s because it would be a poor user experience (there’s no action that anyone could take) and it would expose the creators of unsuccessfully funded projects to unnecessary criticism from the web (those projects would be prime for trolling).”

“Most unsuccessfully funded projects come up short because of a lack of interest in the project or because their creators didn’t promote it enough, not because of the Kickstarter page itself. Success on Kickstarter comes down to making a video, pricing things reasonably, and telling people about the project.”

In fact, project creators asked that Kickstarter projects be de-indexed for a reason: they ranked high in search results and, if Google crawled them, the resulting failures would percolate towards the top. “Because Kickstarter projects index very highly in search, creators were seeing their unsuccessfully funded projects ranking extremely high — in some cases as the #1 result — for their name. That obviously sucked, so we made the decision to de-index them.”

The company has added a FAQ to address the problem here.

As we said before, this isn’t a marketplace, it’s a dog show. You don’t want the ugly mutts hanging around when there are plenty of great specimens to peruse. This is crowdsourcing perfected, in a way, and if there’s one thing we know about crowds it’s that they’re easily swayed, fickle, and rarely kind.

Another day, another iPhone 5 leak. This time we’re looking at a four-inch long front panel of what appears to be a new iPhone. This panel suggests a longer, 16:9 style body and screen and lines up with previous news of a longer iPhone casing with a Micro USB port on the bottom.

I’m very skeptical in regards to these videos simply because rapid prototyping and sourcing is getting so simple these days anyone can carve out a convincing iPhone shell and take some good footage of it. Am I skeptical enough to dismiss this outright, however? No.

Japanese bloggers at Macotakara acquired the piece and compared it to the current iPhone. The clear portion is almost as big as the entire screen of the old iPhone, making this a fairly radical redesign. It’s not as slab-like as other phones out there but it gives you a bit more screen for media consumption.

Will we really see this at WWDC this year? Who knows. It’s always nice to dream.

Although I seriously doubt these things will take off into the stratosphere like the Pebble, the Cookoo watch on Kickstarter has already hit $120,000 on a $150,000 target, placing it up with the big boys in the crowdsourcing race. The Cookoo is essentially an e-ink watch with a few wireless tricks up its sleeve – namely Bluetooth connectivity that will notify you when you have messages, etc.

The watch costs $80 and is far less complex than the Pebble. The watch uses a small CR2032 battery and doesn’t need to be recharged. The best thing? It has a single button on it that can be used to trigger various functions including Facebook checkins, photo taking, and location tagging.

You can also press the Cookoo’s button to find your phone when you’ve lost it.

Now look: I don’t think any of these smart watches are any good, but this one (and the Pebble) look to be the closest to something the general consumer would enjoy using. Wearable tech is hard and getting to work well with everyone’s phone is harder. Time will tell.

Project Page

I would totally embed this video but WordPress won’t let us, so here it is. It’s essentially a quick run-through of Google Glass thanks to Sergey Brin. He even gave them to California Lieutenant Governer Gavin Newsom who got to try them on.

The verdict? They’re pretty cool and they’ll be available sometime next year. There is apparently a touch sensitive pad on the side. This is part of a longer video that will air on June 1.

I’m really conflicted when it comes to these things. On one hand I’m really excited about usable wearable computing and, on the other hand, I’ve never, ever seen it work well. Here’s hoping Google has the chops to pull it off.

via BGR

You’re hitting deadline and you want to add that special something that will totally knock your web app out of the park. Do you add rounded corners? A Tweet This button? No, motherlover, you add Clippy JS.

Clippy JS, made by Smore, is a cute little bit of Javascript code that allows you to embed Clippy, Merlin, Rover, or Links (all of Microsoft Office fame) into any webpage. You can make these folks do all kinds of things including look around, jump up and down, and even converse with your users. Why? Because it’s funny, that’s why.

You can download the code here and it requires just a little bit of Javascript in the header and footer to get the thing rolling. You can stack actions and even programmatically control Clippy to ask questions.

This is obviously just a bit of fun, but I could see a day when Clippy is helping us fill out web forms almost everywhere. Imagine a Clippy helping you on Paypal.com (“I see you’re trying to launder money. Can I help?), phishing Clippy (“Please enter my friend your PINcode?”), and even NSFW Clippy (“I see you like… oh my god, what is that? Why are you making me see that?”) The possibilities are, as they say, endless.

An Irish women’s charity, Women’s Aid, linked to some articles on the Irish Examiner (like this, this, and this) and thought that all was right with the world. Heck, that’s how the Internet works, right?

It turns out that according to the Irish Newspaper Licensing organization, you need to pay to link to the newspapers. And there the troubles begin.

Arguably the INL is in the right in most cases. They offer a special calculator for licensing entire pages or stories and everybody likes to get paid for their work, so what’s up with this? Essentially, the organization charged the charity for simple links on its webpage, a move that suggests a certain amount of draconian fervor.

The charity’s lawyers posted a nice rebuttal to the request, noting that:

It seems, then, that the INL is overreacting in a particularly comical way. Obviously this sort of press attention will tone down the INL’s efforts and call off this attack but it’s interesting to see that this kind of stuff still happens on the Internet. It’s also interesting to see that the Irish Examiner has a great recipe for one pot lamb dinner.

via Faduda

Although one could argue that Facetime and Skype are already nearly perfect telepresence systems, there’s definitely some value in having a jolly little robot sit on your shoulder and transmit, in real time, everything you see and hear to a friend far away. Right? Please say I’m right?

This experimental robot is called the Miniature Humanoid 2 or MH2 and was built in Japan by Yuichi Tsumaki, Fumiaki Ono, and Taisuke Tsukuda of Yamagata University in Japan. The robot requires a big honking backpack so it’s a little bit cumbersome but essentially the MH2 can move around on your shoulder as you move around the world, creating a sort of Master/Blaster relationship or, more likely, a Kuato/host human situation.

Here’s a description from the IEEE:

That’s right: this thing simulates a little friend so you don’t feel so alone. Welcome to the 21st century.

via Giz via Ieee.org

Now look: these are probably fake as all get-out, but bear with me. These handsomely watermarked photos are purported to represent a brand new iPhone design with a sort of two-tone brushed and chromed casing. Whether they are real or not (they’re definitely going to get UBreakIFix plenty of SEO juice), there is still a bit more to this story than just some blurry-cam shots (and these nice shots on 9to5mac). The most important thing to note is the size of the dock connecter. That’s right: it’s a micro USB port (or, less likely, a Thunderbolt port).

Arguably most major manufacturers have settled on micro USB as the standard. This is, in short, one of the best things to happen to the industry in the past decade. That Apple still clings to their jolly 30-pin slot is quite odd, especially considering how much real estate these things take up in the casing. A lot of those pinouts may have seemed like a good idea a few years ago, things like a dedicated S-video connection are probably outmoded these days. Sure they’re great for backwards compatibility, but why not offer a teeny adapter and call it a day?

Whatever happens in the next few weeks before WWDC, rest assured we’ll see plenty more iPhone 5 mockups. The glut of cases we’ve seen in the past hour is pointing to something brewing in Cupertino. Here’s hoping there is a solution for the constellation of iPhone-compatible devices already set up for 30-pin connectivity.
Click to view slideshow.

If you’ve been in the baby monitor racket as long as I have, you’ve seen it all: the good, the bad, and the unusable. Well here’s a monitor that just might win my heart. It’s called the BabyPing (there’s an N in there) and it allows you to view your child’s every squiggle and giggle on your iPhone or iPad. The app and monitor costs about $230 and is currently available in Europe only, although it’s expected to hit our shores shortly.

Arguably video monitors are mostly for first-time parents who are total freakouts about watching the baby at all times. The system notifies you if the baby is stirring and an infrared system ensures you can peep in on him or her at night.

As I noted before, video systems like this one usually used special hardware and/or wonky software so it’s nice to see something that just works.

Product Page

According to a very short, very rumor-filled VG24/7 piece, Sony is looking at adding cloud-enabled gaming to the PlayStation line, presumably in the form of an Onlive or Gaikai partnership.

Given that we won’t see much new this year at E3 – aside for official Wii U availability and perhaps (just perhaps) whispers of next gen Sony and Microsoft consoles, this bit of news could carry the show. The Vita is powerful, to be sure, but it’s hardly nailing it in terms of game availability and to be able to play a game on the handheld and then pop over to the console is pretty compelling. Presumably the console can also act as a conduit for a definitively more interesting gaming experience.

Whatever Sony chooses to do, I’m actually not expecting anything in the way of blockbuster news this year, which is, in the end, just fine. The next generation consoles have to make a huge splash next year and the more fully baked the concepts the better.

If you’re in the City of Brotherly Love, you’re in a for a treat. Thanks to constant entreaties by one of your own, Anthony Coombs, we’re going to hold a mini-meet up in Philly on June 19 at the Field House, 1150 Filbert St.

Please RSVP here.

As is our wont, we like to hold these on neutral ground and we’d love to sit down with you to chat about what you’re working on during the day. We’ll have very limited time, so if you’d like to sit with us, please submit a request through ohours.org. We’re holding office hours at Caribou Cafe near the venue, also on June 19, at a yet-to-be-determined time.

We’ll have more information on sponsors and hours shortly, but please mark your calendars and we’ll see you soon.

[Image: David W. Leindecker/Shutterstock]

If you’re an older gamer, you will remember the holy trinity of Sierra RPGs – King’s Quest, Space Quest, and Police Quest. All three of these games used something called “imagination” and “storytelling” to immerse early gamers in an Ad Lib sound card-induced gaming coma.

Now you can re-live those heady days with a new game by the makers of Space Quest, Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe (aka “The Two Guys from Andromeda”). Their new game, called SpaceVenture, is a refresh of the old Sierra series and promises spills, chills, and horrible jokes. It’s getting funded on Kickstarter as we speak.

The best part? They hired the original voice actors to spice up the game including Gary Owens, the voice of Space Ghost, and Ellen McLain who plays GlaDOS in Portal 1 and 2. Talk about your crossovers.

The game will cost $15 for early pledgers and runs on Macs, PCs, iOS, and Android. The $30 tier gets you beta access to the game and a soundtrack download.

The game is halfway to its goal with 15 days to go, so get pledging, space cadet.

Project Page

The auction house Sotheby’s is selling an official memo from Steve Jobs to Atari about improving the World Cup Football game. The pages – stamped and signed by Jobs himself – describe circuit diagrams and paddle layouts. Delightfully, the stamp says “All-One Farm Design” and features a Buddhist mantra, “gate gate paragate parasangate bodhi svahdl.” As you do.

If you’re thinking of picking this up you’d best have about $10,000 to $15,000 handy – although bidding could get fierce. Quoth MacWorld:

If you’re really feeling spendy, you can plop down $180,000 on an original Apple I circuit board, presumably in mint condition. Get cracking and don’t forget: Sabbe satta sukhi hontu.