:Tech Searcher

Motorola has recently received a patent for a completely silent way of alerting users to incoming calls and messages. No, this isn’t the usual vibrating system - the Motorola patent involves alerting the owner using mild electric shock.

The system, not unlike the massage and weight loss systems currently available on the market today, uses a small pad containing electrodes that are wirelessly linked to a handset. When an event occurs on the hndset, an electric potential is placed across the electrodes, stimulating the skin and underling muscles, thus alerting the wearer.

Motorola claim that the device is designed to address the problem that a vibrating alert is not truly silent - especially if the handset is placed on or next to a hard surface, such as a table or keys in a pocket. The new system solves this by having no moving parts, thus creating no noise.

Power levels and frequencies can be adjusted, allowing the owner to give a sort of ‘personal ring’ to an individual caller.

While the system is not expected to be included with handsets for some time, the innovation is interesting, to say the least. You can view the full patent application by clicking here.

Source: MobileBurn

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GyroBike wants to eliminate the wipeout.

The company, a spin-off out of Dartmouth College, is coming out later this year or early next year with a gyroscope/flywheel that fits into the front wheel of a kid’s bike. When a child begins to go off-balance and fall over, the gyroscope corrects the path of the bike and props it back up. As a result, kids don’t need training wheels to learn how to ride.

“It actually makes it easier to learn to ride a bike because this is actually how people ride and recover from falling,” said Errik Anderson, a venture capital consultant who is helping the company.

The product will sell for around $39. GyroBike says it is also talking to the six largest manufacturers of kids’ bikes.

Training wheels, according to Anderson, are unnatural. They prevent a bike from falling over, but don’t teach kids about balance.

By contrast, the GyroBike wheel relies on natural physical forces. When a child leans to one side, the rotating flywheel causes the front wheel of the bike to turn into the direction of the fall. Ultimately, this corrects the imbalance by pushing the bike under the mass of the rider and causes the bike to recover.

The same thing occurs when someone who knows how to ride a bike tries to recover, and the faster the bike is traveling, the easier it is to recover. The difference with the GyroBike wheel is that it moves the handlebars for the rider; a person who knows how to ride a bike will move the handlebars on their own, Anderson said.

One of the main problems with learning how to ride a bike is that turning into the impending wipe out is counterintuitive. The gut reaction instead is to turn the handlebars into the opposite direction of the fall, ensuring a biff.

The idea for the GyroBike–invented by Hannah Murnen, Augusta Niles, Nathan Sigworth and Deborah Sperling–came out of a classroom engineering project. How a gyroscope can correct a fall was well-understood; the challenge was to design a gyroscope that would still compensate for sudden shifts in weight at slow speeds, Anderson said.

Anderson was touting the GyroBike Wednesday at the Cool Products Expo, a showcase of novel products put on by students in the graduate school of business at Stanford University. Other exhibitors included the Dyson vacuum cleaner people, who plan to branch out into other areas; Captain Avalanche, which makes a sled for consumers that can go 50 mph; Oliso, maker of an iron that props itself up on little legs to prevent clothes from getting burned; and Cirrus Aircraft, a plane that can deploy its own parachute in the event of an accident.

By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

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TDK has gone ahead and produced the 200GB Blu-ray Disc it announced a few weeks ago that it was working on. And while it appears to have failed to compress four standard dual-layer 50GB discs together into a single unit, it has nonetheless come up with a novel alternative.

According to a subscription-only report on Japanese-language site Techon, the 200GB BD contains six data-storage layers. Now, with a standard dual-layer BD offering 50GB of storage capacity, you might well assume that the 200GB model contains not six but eight data layers.

Providing the same capacity but with fewer layers means each layer must hold more data that a single-layer BD can. Indeed, TDK said it upped the capacity to 33GB - 32 per cent more than a standard BD data-carrying layer can. According to the report, it uses bismuth peroxide as the recording medium - heat it sufficiently with laser light and it forms bubbles of air. These reflect light differently than the surrounding material does, so can be used to record digital information in the way a CD or DVD’s pits do.

That said, since the density of the bubbles is clearly different from that of a standard BD - hence the higher capacity - it’s unclear whether a BD-compatible drive could actually read one of these things. And since the 200GB disc is not more part of the current Blu-ray Disc specification than this reporter is, you can argue that the 200GB disc, while technologically impressive, isn’t about to allow anyone to cram the whole of the extended edition Lord of the Rings movies, extras and all, on a single, HD disc. ®

Story from RegHardware

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Eastman Kodak Co. on Tuesday took off the wraps of its new Bluetooth-equipped $449 Easyshare V610 digital camera and $299 Easyshare-One Wi-Fi camera. It also announced the forthcoming release of an updated version of its Easyshare photo management software.

Easyshare V610

The Easyshare V610 is a pocket-sized six megapixel point-and-shoot camera features a 10x optical zoom. It uses Kodak Retina Dual Lens technology, which provides it with 38 - 114 and 130 - 380 mm (35mm equivalent) capabilities.

The V610 shoots up to 8 frames in burst mode at 1.6 frames per second, and can record VGA-quality movies in QuickTime format at 30 FPS. It comes equipped with 32MB of internal memory and can write content to an SD/MMC card (not included).

The Easyshare V610 is also equipped with Bluetooth 2.0+EDR — wireless personal networking technology that’s the same as what Apple ships on newer Macintosh models. It can transfer pictures to any Bluetooth-equipped device up to 30 feet away, or receive them, according to Eastman Kodak.

The Easyshare V610 camera is equipped with a 2.8-inch LCD screen. Expect to see it on store shelves in May.

Easyshare-One

The Easyshare-One is billed as “the world’s first Wi-Fi consumer digital camera.” It’s a six-megapixel model that features a 3x optical zoom lens.

The camera sports a variety of scene modes like portrait, sports, landscape, night and more, can store up to three pictures at 1.5 FPS in burst mode, and records QuickTime MPEG-4 compressed video with audio at 640 x 480 pixels at 30 frames per second.

The Easyshare-One has 256MB internal memory and also supports SD/MMC flash media cards. It connects to a Mac or PC using USB 2.0, works with Kodak’s Easyshare camera docks and also can transfer pictures wirelessly using 802.11b Wi-Fi networking and an SDIO-based Wi-Fi card — an optional accessory that costs $99.

Easyshare Software v6.0

The new Kodak Easyshare v6.0 software is coming in May. The software provides digital image storage and cataloging features for Mac and PC users, and offers a way for users to organize, print and share their digital photos with others.

The new release features an improved user interface, photo card printing that lets your pictures get turned into invitations and anouncements, and more.

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Apple today unveiled its new 17-inch MacBook Pro notebook computer featuring the Intel Core Duo processor and an all new system architecture that delivers up to five times the performance of the PowerBook G4. The new 17-inch MacBook Pro features an aluminum enclosure, that is one inch thin, weighs only 6.8 pounds, includes a built-in iSight video camera for video conferencing on-the-go, and the breakthrough Front Row media experience with Apple Remote. The new 17-inch MacBook Pro also features a MagSafe Power Adapter, which was invented by Apple and shipped on the previous 15-inch MacBook Pro. It features a 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo, a 17-inch widescreen LCD (1680×1050) with 300 cd/m2, 1GB of RAM, 120GB SATA drive, a slot-load 8x SuperDrive with double-layer support, and a PCI Express-based ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB GDDR3 memory. It will be available next week for $2,799.

“The 17-inch MacBook Pro delivers the speed and screen area of a professional desktop system in the world’s best notebook design,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “With Intel’s state of the art dual-core processor, the new 17-inch MacBook Pro delivers unrivaled performance in an innovative, sleek, one-inch thin design.”

The new 17-inch MacBook Pro includes a 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo processor that delivers dual-core performance in a breakthrough power-efficient design, making it ideal for use in MacBook Pro’s thin and lightweight design. Apple says that new 17-inch MacBook Pro is up to five times faster than the 17-inch PowerBook G4, running industry standard benchmarks and offers an all new system architecture including a 667 MHz front-side bus that is four times as fast as the PowerBook G4 and 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM memory expandable to 2GB that is twice as fast as the PowerBook G4.

Every new 17-inch MacBook Pro includes the same great Apple innovations as the 15-inch MacBook Pro including a built-in iSight video camera for video conferencing on-the-go using Apple’s award-winning iChat AV, or recording a video Podcast or iMovie using iLife ‘06. Every MacBook Pro also includes Photo Booth, Apple’s application that lets users take quick snapshots with the built-in iSight video camera, add entertaining visual effects and share their pictures with the touch of a button.

Featuring Apple’s breakthrough Front Row media experience, MacBook Pro gives customers a simple way to enjoy their digital lifestyle content including music, photos and videos from across the room using the Apple Remote. With Front Row, MacBook Pro customers can effortlessly access shared iTunes® playlists, iPhoto libraries and video via Bonjour, Apple’s zero configuration wireless networking built into Mac OS X.

Every MacBook Pro comes with Apple’s MagSafe Power Adapter, designed especially for mobile users that makes charging the notebook’s battery easier than ever by magnetically coupling the power cord to the MacBook Pro. The MagSafe Power Adapter safely disconnects from the notebook when there is strain on the power cord, preventing the notebook from falling off its work surface. Every MacBook Pro also includes Apple’s Sudden Motion Sensor that is designed to protect the hard drive in case of a fall.

Designed for business and creative professionals, the new 17-inch MacBook Pro includes a 36 percent brighter display to make reading text and viewing images even easier and an ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 PCI Express graphics with 256MB of dedicated GDDR3 graphics memory for demanding professional applications, and a Scrolling TrackPad to easily scroll through long web pages or pan across large photographs. Providing industry-leading connectivity and high-performance I/O, every new 17-inch MacBook Pro also includes a FireWire® 800 port, a FireWire 400 port, three USB 2.0 ports, optical and digital audio input and output, built-in Bluetooth 2.0+EDR (Enhanced Data Rate), and integrated AirPort Extreme 54 Mbps 802.11g WiFi wireless networking.

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