B-Squares

Hey guys,

This ones going to be a quick post because Jake has already hit you with some love on here tonight. Anyways, these little guys IMO are really ingenious and super intuitive. Those two qualities are ones that really make a product stand out in the crowd of electronics that stud our world like the stars do the sky. Lets dive right in shall we.

First off since starting design and gracing the kick starter page back in January of this year, the two designers Jordan and Shawn have managed to collect over $114,000 USD and 864 backers for their project. This is almost five times the amount the Seattle duo hope to obtain back in January.  Now to the tech part of the spiel. With the use of rapid prototyping and countless brainstorms via Skype; the two managed to create six unique and powerful “squares” with the basis that these would all be powered by a  .325 watt solar cell with a sticky/suction cup backside used alone or in tandem with a three AA rechargeable battery square. The squares themselves all contain 4 magnetic corners, two negative and two positive to complete different circuits or “recipes” as they aptly dubbed them.They can be stacked, formed into cubes, triangles, whatever your heart desires. However, this is where the similarities of the squares end.

The first two squares I have already explained, the next four are where the ingenuity really starts to pick up. The square that is showcased the most in their short video (after the break) is the LED-Square, which contains three multi-color LED’s. Depending on how you place the square onto either of the power squares will determine the color that is emitted.

The iPhone-Square is everything you need for on the go and outdoor iPhone/iPod/iTouch awesomeness. It includes built in stereo outs, dock connector, and a handy USB connection to boot.

The Proto-Square is just as it sounds, a dream come true for hackers. A one inch pitch perfboard on the PCB serves up availability for your creative hackery (made up adjective, yes I know) talents.

Ahh and the pièce de résistance. The Arduino-Square in all its glory. They have added a 3.3V Arduino Pro complete with the ability to easly accommodate any and all the shields you can purchase on the WWW.

So, now you are asking yourself where could I get my hands on those wonderful little squares. Well look no further check the B-Squares Kickstarter and place your order/pledge to them one of their four required payments to get these little guys to your door ASAP.

Apple Upgrades: iCloud, OS Lion,

As of today Apple has stated that it will announce its iCloud, iOS5 and OS Lion soon. These will serve to upgrade your phones operating system (iOS5), computers operating system (OS Lion) and your music on-the-go capabilities with iCloud.

iCloud is essentially the same as Amazons Cloud Drive and Google’s Music Beta. Its a service that lets you upload and snyc all of your music to a cloud network (rather than storing it directly on your computer) so you can access it at any point through any device. iCloud will be the first media cloud service that will work on the iPhone. Apple has been building a massive data storage center in North Carolina to prepare for the iCloud’s release.





OS Lion is Apples next operating system for Mac laptops. Aside from the speed and computing power, there are some notable user interface upgrades that the average user will truly appreciate. 1) Airdrop: This feature creates for extremely easy data/file transfer to and from other mac’s with Lion OS. You simply connect to the other persons computer and “drop” your files onto their computer. Similar to dropbox in a way. 2) Launchpad: This is a new way to check out all of your desktop applications. Simply enough – its basically the same interface as the Apple iPad, but on your computer. 3) Resume: Ever turn your computer off and open it back up to see everything you had worked on gone? Resume fixes that problem. If you randomly turn off your computer, you need not worry about losing your files/work. Everything will open right back up when you turn it back on.

Funny coffee heater

Just stumbled upon this today – thought you guys may enjoy it. Funny portable drink heater to keep all your beverages at the right temperature!

Video Trading Cards

Panini is a well known company and producer of trading cards and stickers. Since the business has gone downhill, they needed a cool way to spice things ups. Paninis HRX – Highlight Reel Xperience  cards do just that. With every HRX card you collect, you’ll be able to watch awesome highlights of your favorite player. The cards come with 2GB of memory (enough to store about 200 songs), fully loaded with top quality video highlights. Just plug it into your card player and watch the excitement.

What does this mean to you?

It means that if you have kids/nephews/cousins etc.  who love to collect cards, you are going to be the coolest fucking relative when their birthday comes around!

Video below, skip a ways in to see the good stuff.

Google Wallet!

Google Wallet is a pretty “convenient” addition to Google’s phone app’s this year. They took advantage of the simple and now cost effective technology within NFC cards, and did it in a very consumer friendly way. NFC – or Near Field Communication chips are used typically in ID cards and tracking devices to allow for simple check-ins at just a swipe of a card. Google has integrated NFC chips into Sprints Nexus S smartphone (running Android OS), allowing Nexus S owners to swipe-pay at many retail stores. By connecting your fincancial information to your phone and to your NFC chip, you can now pay with a swipe of your phone.

Google Deals: Part of Google Wallet is Deals. The best way to explain this is with an example: A consumer is walking through NYC and finds herself extremely hungry! She doesnt want to spend too much b/c she just bought a $5 million handbag from Georgio Armani. She types “lunch” into her Google Wallet application and instantly receives two lunch deals – one for half off at Subway and one for a free Salad and Panera – both within walking distance from her. How convenient!

What does this mean to you?

If you are a Nexus S user, you will be able to sign up with stores like Starbucks, Subway, American Eagle, and many more to use this simple swipe pay service. Furthermore, Google has introduced Google Deals – a service that offers customers deals for going to certain retail stores. If successful, the service will  expand to all 300+ Android platforms. Get excited!

For retail companies, this deal is huge. Google is giving millions of customers a reason to shop at their stores.

Check the video to see reactions from the retailers.

Websites I check everyday, religiously…

Hey guys another thing to add tonight before I hit the sack for the long weekend. This is a list of websites I check everyday for music, tech, and just general time killage. These in my opinion are some quality sites that you can and should definitely check out:

• hackaday.com-one of my favorites for all things hacked, destroyed, rebuilt, and improved…great learning tool for all you beginner hackers
• engadget.com-your general tech site, love the articles and the atmosphere
• tjoonz.com– for all things music in the electronic genre, you name it they’ve got it
• reddit.com-love this site, has everything from strange stories, rage comics, and just general nonsensical awesomeness
• The drudge report-this is where I find all my news for the day in a nice neat little package, no BS, just news
• Popular Science-definitely alot of awesome stuff going on over at their site, great mag, great web content
• Wompasaurus -shout out to my friend Dave, his blog is great for more music, check out his stuff everyday for sure
• CoolHunting-just a really cool out of the box thinking website, really enjoy what they put up for all the none tech articles

After this comes the usuals: youtube, facebook, email, etc…So check out some of these sites, I’m sure Jake will have some more sites up for you to check as well.

Dueces,

Steve

Who Ya Got: iOS vs. Android vs. Windows

I know this is a hot topic in the tech world as of late, so which is it for you? A smartphone? A tablet? And if so what are your running, iOS, the brandy-new Gingerbread, or Windows?

For me my choice has been the Apple iPhone for the last three years or so. It has been an uphill battle with general abuse and replacement parts, but overall I could not find anything deep down(other than haggling with iTunes everytime I sync my phone) that is worth mentioning.  What gets me is not that I was hit early on with the Apple craze, of course you have those that oppose Apple and the trend/”scene” that seems to follow any product that Steve Jobs and his boys out in silicon valley shove out into the market. Truth is I had never owned an iPod or Mac computer before owning my iPhone, I was strictly a Windows man. However, the awe of the iPhone hit me like a ton of bricks and I can honestly tell you I, Steve Ralph Corbesero Jr, would be lost without it. It’s elegant, simple, comes with some comforting features, unbridled reliability, and adds endless entertainment to my day, not to mention it gets great battery life… People identify with it. People know it. People use it…

Now here comes the part of my article that delves into the other two areas of this “discussion”. Lets start with the Android platform, and boy what an entrance has this little guy made.  With around 36 manufacturers producing over 300 Android devices, Google is seeing activations in the numbers of hundreds of thousands a month(100 mil to date) and around 4.5 billion, yes BILLION, app DL’s alone. Its crashed this party in the largest sense of the phrase. Google has not stopped there though with the introduction of their dev kit for an Arduino-esqe platform, which for all of you not familiar is all too popular microcontroller for hackers to do pretty much whatever they please just check out hackaday.com for projects galore. They also just announced the ability to make purchases with your Android device. These guys are gunning for Jobs and his boys with the intensity unforeseen in the tech world.

I digress. You may be asking yourself, Steve where does this put Windows? I put them at dead…last. The resounding reason, and I will put this as bluntly as possible, is becuase they are fat, dumb, and happy at where they were a few years ago. Leaving them at the latter end of  a losing battle of catchup. Sure they just purchased Skype, big whoop, they are currently floundering at the feet of their two competitors. If that needs more explanation please feel free to email me.

Fact of the matter is, for myself I feel like Jobs and his army of geniuses are still a few steps ahead of Android(they are slowly closing the gap might I add), but I feel that they have the ability to continue to put out great, easy to use, high quality devices that rule the masses. I for one can not wait to see what either does next, and honestly I could not tell you what I will choose next when my two year agreement is up. All I can say is that it will be a tough decision between Apple and Android. Windows I’m sorry, love your computers, always will, always have, just how I was brought up. I could go on for days and I’m sure you could as well. So let me know what you think by dropping a comment or two and lets get this party started.

Hey Bill Gates, you mad??

Safer Seating!

Heart monitor sensors on seat.

For all those worried about your elders on the road, fear no further (or a bit less further). Ford’s tech research team have taken couple highly accurate heart monitoring electrodes and embedded them in a driver seat. The cars security system can monitor the drivers heart rate and understands when the driver is calm, stressed, etc. The most important part of this application is that the car can detect a heart attack, stroke, or other serious conditions and react accordingly. According to Ford, the prototype correctly detected the heart rate patterns 98 percent of the test times.

So what does this mean to you?

Not too much at the moment, stuff like this will likely appear on the market in a few years – maybe late 2013 or 2014. Any tech that involves “taking over” control of a car will take a little time. The tech is kind hearted, but must be 99.9% effective and safe before it can be released.  Once this and techs alike come to market, they will hopefully save lives and make the roads a bit safer for everyone. Video after the break.

Hasbro @ Google IO with some Smart Phone Enabled Goodies

Just in case you missed out on any coverage of the Google IO conference last week (I know I was glued to Engadget waiting for updates/more coverage will be added soonish), here is a taste of two  items Hasbro and Google have teamed for that were quite a hit.

First being a Nexus S/Android fueled addition. These little fellas pack extra juice, two servo motors, and a bluetooth module to communicate back and forth with the Nexus. They’ll do more than wiggle around your desk causing a racket. Using Wifi services they communicate with the Google Cloud services allowing facial recognition and object recognition as well as a host of other interesting features. It doesn’t stop there though, with a full spread of additional features utilizing the forward facing camera, touch screen and accelerometer to enhance behavioral characteristics to react with it’s surroundings. By poking, prodding, or  picking up; even flashing a Transformers trading card in front of them,  they will react to their surroundings with a host of reactions ranging from getting dizzy and disoriented to being scared or excited. From what we can see the sky’s the limit and we can’t wait to see these hit the stores (fingers crossed that we can eventually get our hands on one).

Second up is a new addition to their A.M.P Music robot. These two wheeled bots are now smart phone enhanced with controls that allow you to control their every move. Below is a short clip of them in action… More info as Hasbro/Google releases these items into the wild….

Edit: added another video posted from Engadget, the Folks at Hasbro go into a little more detail about the Nexus S bots, these prototypes are for both genders male and female, enjoy…

Music Beta – Google Music

Music Beta by Google is a great feature developed for android using music lovers. The service is basically a cloud server that stores all your music in your profile and allows you to use it whenever you want, wherever you want and with whatever gadget you want (as long as its Android powered). The basic premise here is that you take what music you have on your computer, from iTunes, WMP, etc. and upload it to your Google Music account. Once you have done that, you can organize your music and make playlists just as you can in iTunes. Any changes you make from your computer will appear on your phone, tablet or whatever device you use to access it.

Since Music Beta runs off of a cloud server, accessing and playing your music takes up zero space – no matter the amount of music you have. Well that’s great, but what about when you don’t have your 3G or WiFi connection? Music Beta will automatically save your previously listened to songs (an unspecified number of songs), allowing you to listen to music without a connection. The service is in the beta version now and is only available via invitation. It is also free (for now) but will presumably be for purchase later on. Video after the break.