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“Start the new year off strong” is a phrase we’re all familiar with and Apple seems to be taking those words to heart after the reveal of their earnings for Q1 2011. With Q4 2010 being the best revenue quarter ever for Apple ($20.34 billion) it was projected that the company would come in around $23 billion for this quarter but as it turns out, Apple only SURPASSED those projections by $3 billion dollars when they reported $26.74 billion for Q1 2011.
Breaking down the earnings for Apple, we see that iOS and in particular the iPhone to be leading the way for Apple’s record-breaking quarter. iPhone sales reached 16 million sold which made [...]
Continue reading: Reports Indicating Record-Breaking Start To 2011 For Apple
At CES 2o11 we saw every kind of gadget imaginable designed for the business world, but what about the fun side of technology? Sifteo is one of the few new tech toys trying to bring the focus of fun back to technology. The company has created a game system in which small cubes have displays and wireless connectivity. The cubes are sensitive to touch, movement and they interact with each other when you put them near each other.
“Traditional game consoles have lost the tangible and interactive nature of classic tabletop games like MCo-founders David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi first came up with the prototype for the cubes when studying human-computer interaction at the [...]
Continue reading: Cube Linked Gaming System Sifteo Brings Some Fun To CES
As we reported previously, Norway-based Elliptic Labs was showing off its touchless gesture technology called “Mimesign” at CES 2011. At the demo we saw how the ultrasound based worked with a small speaker kicks out frequencies higher than the ear can hear, and a set of microphones listens in on the reflections, using an algorithm to calculate where your hand is at as you wave it through the air. What this accomplishes is turning touchscreen devices into touchless ones.
The rep from the company told us how the system is already in use in a Norwegian hospital, where surgeons control touchscreen tablets without having to start the sterilization process all over again. [...]
Continue reading: Elliptic Labs Demonstrates Touchless Gestures On iPad At CES 2011
Turtle Beach is looking to blow us away at CES 2011 tomorrow with their new Ear Force PX5 Programmable Wireless Surround Sound Headset. The headset includes an impressive list of features. Turtle Beach is so confident in the headset the company is calling it “the most technologically-advanced headset ever designed for PS3 and Xbox 360 gaming,” and we’re hoping it lives up to the claim. One impressive feature that stands out is the fully programmable digital signal processor that will allow the user to customize the experience all the way down to which sounds they want emphasized. This doesn’t mean turning up sound effects over background music, this means you can increase the levels of footsteps, [...]
Continue reading: PX5 Headset From Turtle Beach Announced For CES
A new hack for the Kinect allows players to become even closer to their avatar in World of Warcraft. With an open source framework tool called OpenUI and a Kinect, University of Southern California researcher Evan Suma and his team have hacked together a middleware program called Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton, or FAAST. This program allows users to plug their Kinect directly into their computer and use it in the place of a keyboard and mouse for the game World of Warcraft. The software takes real-world gestures and translates them to commands for moving, casting spells, and other simple in-game commands. In a phone interview with Wired.com, Suma said “Our software communicates with the Kinect [...]
Continue reading: Kinect Hacked With FAAST Allows Player More Immersed Gameplay
Because of the cost, finding equipment to use for their studies, daily tests and everything else can be quite the hassle. But fortunately for science, its seems that consumer electronics functionality has caught up with the needs of scientists. The only real difference from consumer devices and those that scientists use is the drastically cheaper cost of the consumer electronics. This is one of the main reasons behind scientist beginning to use Nintendo’s Wiimote to measure water evaporation.
In the process outlined by the Water Resource Research, the Wiimote obtains the same result but at a cheaper cost. In the past the cost of pressure transducers forced scientists to spend hundreds of research dollars [...]
Continue reading: Nintendo’s Wiimote Used In Water Resource Research
In the ever changing world of technology and gadgets there are my challenges that developers face, one of the bigger challenges is how to make products more streamlined. One product that hasn’t been updated in a while but also probably doesn’t come to mind right away is the average everyday street light. Designer Kisung Lee looks to change the old design with one of his latest concepts. It’s called the Mobius Strip Lamp, and it is meant to make better use of space and consolidate all aspects of traffic signals.
Lee’s design is centered around the idea of an all-in-one lamp. In the design, the traffic signal would sit at [...]
Continue reading: Mobius Strip Lamp From Kisung Lee Wins Red Dot Concept Design Award
With the expectations that HTC will launch at least one tablet in 2011, everyone is excited to see what HTC will bring to the table. And even though HTC has not confirmed that it is working on a tablet product, suspicions were raised even further this week with the company filing two trademarks, “HTC Scribe” and “Scribe”. In the description found in both filings, the HTC Scribe will be a “handheld wireless device, namely, a tablet computer.” This, along with the rumored specs which include the NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor, 2GB of internal memory, microSDHC support and a 1280 x 720 pixel touchscreen display, all of this is to be run on an [...]
Continue reading: HTC Trademarks “Scribe” For Possible Tablet PC
Even with the economy at one of its lowest points in history, spending for the holiday season was expected to increase from last year but the final numbers greatly surpassed all predictions. According to SpendingPulse, a MasterCard Advisors service that monitors retail and services sales on a national level, holiday spending hit $36.4 billion in the U.S. The number indicate a 15.4% increase in spending over the 2009 season. “Today eCommerce accounts for a much larger share of overall retail sales compared to a few years ago. And during this holiday season, it registered double digit growth for 6 out 7 weeks,” said Michael McNamara, VP for MasterCard for MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse, in [...]
Continue reading: [Report] 2010 Online Holiday Sales Up 15.4%
With the successful release of the Kinect it would be fair to say that there’s been an increase of activity and odd movement or gestures going on in living rooms around the world. You wouldn’t think that the odd movements used to control the Kinects’ games wouldn’t have much meaning to anyone not playing the game other than a source hilariousness, but that’s not the case for usability expert Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen has been looking at how much the required movements vary from game to game even though they accomplish the same result. Nielsen has come to the conclusion that while there’s no doubt the Kinect is “fun to play” it’s very inconsistent, full of awkward dialogs [...]
Continue reading: Several Issues Found In Kinect UI During Usability Breakdown
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