The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Taiwan has been developing low cost speakers that would work very well with LCD TVs or could even be used as talking movie posters as an advertisement. The researchers at the Industrial Technology Research Institute have made several rolls of the paper-thin speakers and said that they will be used in cars starting next year.
“A lot of companies are interested in this product,” stated ITRI research director Chen Ming-daw. “We don’t have enough people to handle all the attention right now.”
The paper-thin speakers are known as Flexpeaker. The goal for the inventors of the Flexpeaker is to make it mainstream enough to product standard post-size speakers that sell for $20 each. This way movie makers could use the poster speakers to place tracks from a movie soundtrack or play audio clips from the movie as people walk by.
The Flexpeaker researchers are also working on making the speakers wireless and Bluetooth compatible. The only problem with the speakers is that they don’t handle low frequencies very well. This can be offset by adding a subwoofer with the paper speakers.
Roger Ridley, a street musician in Santa Monica, California sang the vocals and guitar for the above cover of Stand By Me by Ben E. King. The track was then taken to Grandpa Elliot, a blind singer in Louisiana that added the vocals and the harmonica. Washboard Chaz then added metal percussion to the track.
The producers then sent the video and track to singers around Europe, South America, and Africa to add other instruments. The whole video and song was done with a laptop and a couple of microphones.
Taylor Merrill has taken a Samsung a867 Eternity phone and has ripped apart an NES controller to merge them both together into one unit. The phone is still functional and the ringtone that Merrill decided to use for the demo video was Sanford & Son which makes it even more fun to watch.
From the same website that brought us the USB moody hub and the USB teddy hub comes a vegetable peeler in the form of an octopus. The vegetable and potato peeler costs roughly $5.99. Gadgets like these are guaranteed to get your little kids to do some work for you while having fun in the process.
NEC and Renesas are planning to merge companies in order to form a bigger and stronger semiconductor company. Combined they would bring in roughly $13 billion in annual sales of semiconductor machinery. Renesas itself is the product of a merger between Hitachi and Mitsubishi Electric.
In terms of overall market share, the combined company would still be the #2 behind a merged business between Intel and Samsung. The two companies are aiming to conclude talks by July and become one company by next April.
WowWee’s Rovio mobile web-cam product sells for over $200. I can’t give an exact price right now because Rovio’s website is down. Colt45, a user on the RoboCommunity website revealed that he has hacked a remote fire extinguisher into his Rovio. Even the nozzle for the fire extinguisher is remote-controlled.
By itself, Rovio is unable to differentiate between objects that are and are not on fire. But using te Rovio API loaded on a home computer, Rovio is able to learn what is on fire and shoot it with the extinguisher. While the Rovio fire extinguisher hack will work only with small fires, it could prevent a serious issue from taking place.
Tammy Savage, a general manager at Microsoft came up with an idea about four and a half years ago when Hurricane Katrina took place. During times of emergencies, it is difficult for phone calls to go through. Phone lines start to jam.
Vine can be used through a Windows desktop client, text messages, or e-mail. Vine also gathers local news around where you are from 20,000 difference sources along with public safety announcements from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Vine also gathers status updates from Facebook and recent tweets from Twitter.
Currently the service is in private beta so the company can receive feedback.
Fresh from spinning off independently from eBay, StumbleUpon has updated their web toolbar to match some of the features that are on the web browser software add-on version of the toolbar. Now the web toolbar allows you to select certain categories to stumble through and it displays the number of comments on the website. Stories can be voted up or down, favorited, and e-mailed to friends.
As a matter of fact, when click on the share it button, another iFrame will open on the right hand side of the browser that will allow you to send the website to all of your StumbleUpon friends. Even if you click Stumble!, the Share iFrame will remain intact. This is useful because you don’t have to keep clicking on Share It every time you stumble to a new website.
Personally I’m still a bigger fan of the browser toolbar because it is easier than having to go to the StumbleUpon website to get started, but this makes it convenient for those that don’t use browsers supported by the software toolbar such as Google Chrome and Apple Safari.
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