Author: Gizmag Emerging Technology Magazine

Business travellers have voted online check-in as the ‘innovation of the decade’; followed closely by Wi-Fi, flat beds, notebooks and the Eurostar. The top five innovations, hailed for immeasurably improving business travel over the last ten years, were revealed in a survey of 2,400 business travellers in London…

Tags: Show,
Travel,
Travel and Tourism

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Mayo researchers collaborating with investigators at the University of Iowa, University of Connecticut and New York University (NYU) have discovered a molecular mechanism that controls energy expenditure in muscles and helps determine body weight. Researchers say this could lead to a new medical approach in treating obesity. The findings appear in the journal Cell Metabolism…

Tags: Energy-saving,
Mayo Clinic,
Medical,
Research

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It may be nearly half a century old, but this rare Ferrari 400 Superamerica Cabriolet Pininfarina is appreciating quite nicely with age. So well that when it goes under the hammer in Monaco in May, keen judges are expecting the 1962 supercar could fetch in excess of US$5 million. With CES top of mind right now, one wonders how many products on the showroom floor this year will appreciate in value over the next 50 years…

Tags: Auction,
Ferrari,
Pininfarina,
Superamerica,
Supercar

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If you’ve ever lost your phone without having a backup of your contacts, you’ll know what a painful experience it is. Enter IDrive Lite, a free service that allows you to backup the contacts on your phone into the cloud. Previously available for iPhone and BlackBerry, it’s finally made its way to Android…

Tags: Android,
Backup,
BlackBerry,
iPhone

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New from electronics maker Parrot comes the AR.Drone, a Wi-Fi helicopter with dual cameras and augmented-reality video streaming, that you control using your iPhone or iPod Touch. Although the RC flyer is still in the prototype stage, Parrot has been demonstrating it at the 2010 CES show in Las Vegas. The AR.Drone features four rotors and interchangeable hulls for flying both indoors and outside. Built-in flight stabilization technology keeps the drone steady while you use your iPhone’s motion sensors to steer it remotely over the craft’s Wi-Fi network…

Tags: AR.Drone,
Augmented Reality,
CES 2010,
CyberQuad,
Helicopter,
iPhone,
iPod touch,
MEMS,
Remote Control

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• Bluetooth Wireless speakers can redefine the living space

Sony and Panasonic have announced a new technology that would increase the capacity of a single-layer Blu-ray disc from 25GB to 33.4GB. The new technology, dubbed i-MLSE (Maximum Likelihood Sequence Estimation) evaluation index, is achievable using existing Blu-ray laser diodes, and can subsequently be added to existing Blu-ray players with a firmware upgrade…

Tags: Blu-ray,
Panasonic,
Sony

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If I had to make a list of the most boring and thankless household jobs – then ironing would definitely be in number one spot. So anything that can make that tiresome task a little easier is worth a look. Panasonic’s new 360° Quick Multidirectional iron promises to not only reduce ironing time but it also makes side-to-side movements easier and can be used in any direction. ..

Tags: Consumer Electronics,
Ironing,
Panasonic

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Motorola today unveiled the Backflip, follow up to the Android-powered Cliq released last year. Like the Cliq, the Backflip includes Motorola’s Motoblur service, which aggregates data from sites like Facebook, Twitter and Gmail and presents it coherently on your home screen – but it’s the hardware that really stands out. Read on for the details…

Tags: 3G,
Android,
Motoblur,
Motorola,
Smartphone

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3-D printing technology is maturing to the point where rapid prototyping machines are becoming affordable to small business owners – and even for high-end home use. Dimension’s uPrint 3D printer has just been released at a retail price of US$14,900, giving anyone with CAD skills the ability to prototype and even manufacture pretty much any small shape they want in hard ABSplus plastic – including pre-assembled objects with moving parts. What would you create if you could have any plastic shape you wanted?..

Tags: 3-D printing,
3D,
3D Printer,
Construction,
Design,
Desktop,
Engineering,
Prototype

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One of the world’s most accomplished automotive designers, Lee Noble, is to once more start his own company, and plans to produce an ultra light weight mid-engined V8 Grand Tourer supercar. Two images were released today and that’s one of them at right. Noble’s track record is good as it gets, having penned a string of the world’s best-handling and fastest accelerating supercars including the Ultima GTR, Ascari Ecosse and Noble M12, but in announcing his new company, to be known as Fenix, Noble has promised a 1200 kg 638 bhp car with a 0-100mph time of under seven seconds and a price tag under USD125,000. The car will target serious track day drivers, while also being completely usable on the public road.
..

Tags: Fenix,
Lee Noble,
Noble,
Supercars

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A Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak is one more step closer to reality thanks to the work of a research team at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (AMOLF) in the Netherlands, which has successfully harnessed the magnetic field of light to develop meta-materials that can deflect light in every possible direction…

Tags: Electromagnetic,
Invisibility,
Invisible,
Light,
Metamaterial

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Shooting in 3D has traditionally required a complex, bulky and fragile rig using two cameras and additional hardware to calibrate and adjust them. Panasonic’s straight-forwardly-named Twin-lens Full HD 3D camcorder looks to radically change the 3D game, with integrated lenses and dual memory card slots allowing you to capture 3D footage immediately, with just one device…

Tags: 3D,
HD,
Panasonic,
SDHC,
Video Camera

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• VHoldR sports action cam gets waterproof casing
• Hybrid Digital Camcorder delivers 3 megapixel stills

In conjunction with Fulton Innovation, Texas Instruments (TI) will showcase a new contactless charging evaluation kit at this year’s CES. The bqTESLA kit will enable designers to develop wireless charging capability for products such as phones, MP3 players and GPS units. In the future, this technology could be used to develop compatible wireless portable devices and conveniently-located charging stations – offering consumers compatible, convenient, wireless connectivity – just one charger for all your devices and no power cords!..

Tags: CES 2010,
Charger,
Wireless

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Picture it: You’re zipping down the road in a sleek, exotic vehicle that looks like it came straight out of Blade Runner. You pull up at a red light, and a gawking onlooker asks what sort of an engine it has. To their amazement, you open the top to reveal that it’s propelled by nothing but the superhuman power of your own body. Well, that fantasy can become a reality if you’re willing to spend several thousand dollars on a velomobile. There are a number of such vehicles being produced, but perhaps none are more lusted-after than the German Beyss Go-One3. That model may soon be upstaged, however, as Beyss is set to release their latest creation, the Go-One Evolution…

Tags: Aerodynamic,
Beyss,
Bicycle,
Evolution,
recumbent,
Transport,
Vehicle,
Velomobile

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It’s just over 50 years since the shipping container took its first trip. Though it has changed little in the subsequent half century, standardised containerisation has dramatically reduced global transportation costs and supercharged international trade. Containerisation remains a beacon of efficiency only because it exists within the obscenely inefficient, environmentally irresponsible and otherwise resistant-to-change shipping industry. Now a new collapsible composite container is being trialled which is ingeniously more efficient, lighter, cheaper, more easily trackable, more accountable in terms of its contents and more environmentally-friendly. Despite a raft of advantages, it might not go into service because …..

Tags: Cargoshell,
Environmentally-friendly,
GPS,
Shipping,
Transport

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Media streamers are rapidly gathering momentum as digital media collections grow, and it should come as no surprise to hear that the technology involved in streaming a collection of files to a TV is being built into more and more screens as standard. The Western Digital WDTV Live demonstrates how it’s possible to fit everything you need into an extremely small box, and such developments have encouraged VIZIO, the number one LCD HDTV company in America, to go one step further by adding lossless 1080p wireless HD support to its new screens.
..

Tags: CES 2010,
Digital Media,
HD,
HDTV,
LCD,
Streaming,
Wireless

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This week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, e-reading company Skiff is previewing its new electronic reader. At a quarter of an inch thick, the Skiff Reader is the thinnest device of its kind. Not everything about it is small, however; its 1200 x 1600 pixel, 11.5-inch screen is the largest and highest-resolution consumer e-reading display yet. Perhaps its biggest boast, however, is what that display is made of – Instead of rigid, fragile glass, the Skiff Reader’s display utilizes a thin, flexible sheet of stainless-steel foil. Developed by LG specifically for Skiff, the touchscreen foil-display promises an e-reader that will be much more durable than anything currently available…

Tags: 3G,
CES 2010,
Connectivity,
Consumer Electronics,
Display,
E-reader,
Electronic reader,
Flexible,
Media,
Screen,
Skiff,
Touchscreen,
Wifi,
Wireless

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Precision gaming manufacturer Razer is moving into the console peripheral business with the release a US$50 (EUR45) Onza high-end gaming controller and US$130 (EUR110) Chimaera headset for the Xbox 360®. The Onza will feature Hyperesponse™ buttons, analog sticks with customizable tension, a programmable multi-function button (MFB) and wired connectivity for “virtually lag free gameplay.” The Chimaera is equipped with a 5.1 Channel Virtual Surround sound system, a Daisy-Chain cable system and a circumaural design. ..

Tags: CES 2010,
Chimaera,
Onza,
Professional Gaming,
Razer,
Xbox 360

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There’s been a definite buzz around eBooks and eBook readers in recent times, and despite Asus challenging the price point last year we’re yet to see what we’d guess to be an affordable enough solution to break the mass-market. There are some pretty tidy devices on the shelves though, with Amazon’s Kindle proving popular enough to ‘go global’ last October, a move that has now been repeated with the spacious Kindle DX. ..

Tags: Amazon,
Book,
CES 2010,
EBook,
Electronic paper,
Kindle

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There are few technologies more hotly anticipated in the TV/display market than OLED, but sadly we’re still a way off replacing our 50” plasmas with these wafer-thin low-power alternatives. Affordability is the main issue, and so far Sony has been one of few to have an early crack at the market with its US$2500 11” XEL-1…

Tags: Display,
OLED,
Screen,
Thin,
TV

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