The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘electronics’

What is it with the last three letters of the alphabet?

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LG announces availability of the X300, their fancy ultrathin laptop

Ready to get your pico-projector on? The Microvision ShowWX goes on sale today at 12:00 EST. Get excited.

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Microvision’s ShowWX pico-projector goes on sale today

Get ready, the 3D revolution will be televised. Sears has started offering pre-order pricing on Samsung’s 3D televisions, with some models expected to be available in stores later this month. Sears is also starting to advertise a Blu-ray player with 3D glasses as well

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Sears starting to take pre-orders on 3D TVs

Welcome to the Touch revolution. Ahead of the impending news about the iTablet/iPad from Apple today, comes news that a French maker of touch input technology has been acquired by Tyco Electronics for $62 million upfront. Motorola’s venture arm also has an interest in the technology. Will we see the mobile maker create new touch devices? Could be.

The news wraps up a good day for key European venture capital firm Sofinnova Partners, which has exited its stake in its portfolio company Sensitive Object. At the same the VC has announced the closure its sixth fund, Sofinnova Capital VI, raising €260 million.

Sensitive Object has created a touch input technology based on acoustic waves processing (more here). Oh yes, you read that right. Instead of making the screen itself touch sensitive, it analyzes the sound waves that pass through object when somone touches it. Star Trek huh.

Work at home? Live in a shoebox? You don’t need a big computer desk! Just get one of these folding ones.

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You eat dinner on a folding table, why not use one for your computer?

Looks like there won’t be a “Google phone” in China, not for a while at least. Well, an official phone; I’m pretty sure the gray market will take care of that.

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Google postpones phone launch in China amid recent quarrel

We told you about the AR.Drone that we saw at CES , but here’s an alternative that you can build today. Sure, it’s not iPhone/iPod controlled, but it does everything else

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The Quadcopter, or build your own Drone

Before I begin, let me just state that TSA has yet to confirm any of this on its website, so the details aren’t entirely clear at the moment. That said, there are several indications that orders have been issued to cease the use of electronics during international flights. Yes, that means no laptops, no iPods, no Kindles, no CD players, no portable DVD players, no Nintendo DSes — nothing that requires any sort of power on these flights. If this is true, it’s absolutely awful news.

Obviously, this is all in reaction to the Nigerian man who attempted to bring down a plane coming into the U.S. And the TSA is going to do whatever it thinks is necessary to prevent further attacks of a similar nature. But the simple fact is that if the TSA was really this seriously worried about electronic devices, they could have banned them anytime since the attacks on September 11, 2001. Instead, they’re doing it more than 8 years later after a man apparently lit some sort of mixture of powder and liquid in his lap. How that relates to electronics, I’m not sure. This just reeks of a “well, we have to do something” move.

Again, all the details aren’t known yet, and it’s entirely possible that this is just a temporary measure that will be in place during a heightened security time following the attempted attack. Other reports suggest this will only affect planes coming into the U.S. Of course, if you leave the U.S. to go on an international trip, you’re very likely going to have to come back, so this will affect you.

So far, all the TSA is official saying is this:

Passengers flying from international locations to U.S. destinations may notice additional security measures in place. These measures are designed to be unpredictable, so passengers should not expect to see the same thing everywhere. Due to the busy holiday travel season, both domestic and international travelers should allot extra time for check-in.”

Those other security measures apparently include not being allowed to get up in the final hour of a flight (so, no bathroom), being limited to one carry-on bag, and not being allowed to have anything on your lap in this final hour.

We’ll update this post when the official policy becomes more clear, but given the previous policies of no liquids, taking off your shoes, etc, it wouldn’t be entirely shocking for a no electronics rule of some sort to be commonplace. And it comes at a time when air travel was becoming almost becoming bearable thanks to WiFi on a growing number of flights. Instead, it looks like we’ll have to revert back to the old standards: Books, magazines, and newspapers for these flights. If I were the print media companies, I’d jack up the prices in airports immediately. They may have just found a business model that will save them: Fear.

I stand by my statement earlier: If they take electronics away from us on plane, I’d much prefer to be put into a state of hibernation on the flights like in Avatar. That’s about the only thing that will make those cattle cars tolerable at that point.

[photo: flickr/sundaykofax]

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Mobile advertising is poised to become a huge growth area, with research firm Kelsey Group seeing the market grow from just $160 million in 2008 to $3.1 billion in 2013. eMarketer projects mobile advertising spending in the US will balloon from $648 million in 2008 to over $3.3 billion in 2013.

While some believe search will account for the biggest chunk of the market, others expect geo-aware advertising, another way of bringing “relevant” ads to users, to have a bright future, too. This is where AdLocal, a location-based, self-service mobile ad platform that (re-)launched yesterday, comes in.

Offered by Sunnyvale-based Cirius Technologies USA, the platform has been around in Japan since 2006, currently commanding the largest share of location-based advertising in Japan’s $1 billion [PDF] mobile ad space. And now Cirius is ready to utilize the years of experience the company gained in the world’s most competitive mobile market in the US (AdLocal isn’t available outside America and Japan at this point).

AdLocal allows advertisers to manage their campaigns and publishers to add their mobile sites or applications by themselves through a Web-based dashboard. By locating a mobile user’s physical location via GPS, cell identification and other methods, the mobile ad network can tell when a consumer is close to a specific business address and then serves up tailor-made ads for that business in real-time.

Screenshot: AdLocal ad radius view in San Francisco

Publishers can put advertisements into their iPhone and Android apps through the so-called AdLocal Delivery API and the AdLocal SDK (which is currently Beta for Android). SDKs for other platforms are currently in the works. Advertisers can create ads themselves by using a wizard and then specifying the desired locations, budgets and dates to display their ads (deals, promotions, coupons etc.).

And boosting relevance this way seems to work, at least in Japan. Cirius Technologies claims mobile advertisers using AdLocal saw CTRs growing by 395% after switching from non-local to local ads on a year-on-year basis. Publishers apparently saw their average CPMs jumping 826%. The company is expecting similar results for advertisers in the US. (If you’re one of those, you might want to give AdLocal a spin before their special $50 trial campaign is over.)

There are quite a few companies ready for the location-based advertising gold rush. Startups operating in this space include Acuity Mobile (recently acquired by geo giant NAVTEQ), AppLoop for the iPhone (deadpooled earlier this year), Placecast (which raised $5 million last month for its opt-in solution), AdInfuse (with adInMotion) and Yowza (which is a popular geo-aware iPhone app for coupons).

The following screenshots show a typical AdLocal campaign view and a summary (click to enlarge):

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Taiwan-headquartered Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, will launch up to 10,000 consumer electronics retail stores in China, says China Daily. Until now they have not had a significant retail brand or presence.

What will they sell? Probably some of the many products that they build for well known brands, including the iPhone, iPod, iMac, Sony Playstation, Sony Vaio notebooks, Amazon Kindle, Nokia phones and Nintendo Wii.

But part of the plan, we’ve heard from an independent source, will be to use the retail presence in China to win manufacturing business as well. HP, Dell and others can move more of their business to Foxconn, along with a promise to get retail presence for their electronics in the Foxconn stores in China.

Foxconn exports $55.6 billion of electronics from their factories in China, says the article, or about 3.9% of China’s total exports. And that number may be lowballed. Our sources say no one outside of Foxconn even knows the real size of their exports, and that $100 billion/year or more is the street rumor in Asia.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.