Month: February 2016

Categories
Automotive Connected Objects Imaging

RecSmart social dash cam streams the good times as they roll

Dashboard cameras provide a pretty good way to capture what happens while driving a car –- especially if there is an accident and evidence is needed to provide proof of what happened.

RecSmart is a connected, social dash cam with built-in Wi-Fi and GPS that connects to the user’s smartphone and continuously records whatever happens during a drive and saves it onto the included 8-GB microSD card. It collects data including the vehicle’s position, speed and time –- all while shooting HD video and making it easy to share video and photos from the road with the user’s social networks.

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Categories
Winter Sports

Hillstrike Snowtrike shreds mountainsides, snow sport perceptions

The winter sports niche is brimming with clever hybrid equipment designed to embody the fun of classic activities like snowboarding and skiing while making it more accessible to a wider range of people. Crowdfunding campaigns have seen a few vie for backer’s support, but the recently launched campaign for the Hillstrike Snowtrike claims to have perfected the mountain bike/sled combination.

The Hillstrike Snowtrike retains the characteristics of carving untouched slopes by implementing two things: a parallelogram system that lets riders shift left and right, and a proprietary pedal system that offers better grip during more demanding riding or tricking.

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Categories
Connected Objects Furniture Video Games Virtual Reality

Immersit VR accessory rocks your world, starting with your couch

Virtual reality (VR) is one of the hottest new technologies, creating opportunities to make videogames and movies more immersive to consumers. But VR stops short of providing a full immersive experience because it focuses only on the head.

Immersit is a device that slips under any sofa, chair or bed with four legs and creates motion and vibrations in response to whatever is happening in a compatible movie or videogame. It supports up to 1,100 pounds and works in conjunction with an app for Android and iOS mobile devices. Its software initially supports the PlayStation 3 and 4, the Xbox 360, Xbox One, Windows and Linux. Immersit is also compatible with the Oculus VR headset and is expected to be compatible with the HTC Vive and new Oculus VR headsets.

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Categories
Food and Beverage

Koffee Cap brings morning roast and plastic to the woods

Ahh, the great outdoors. For most, it’s a rarely visited oasis of natural beauty that creates a special connection harkening back to simpler times. But parting ways with the concrete jungle doesn’t mean that the daily dosage of caffeine isn’t coming along for the ride. What to do when one can’t order their molto-venti-frappe-grande-mocha-latte?

The Koffee Cap is a portable K-Cup brewer for those unable to swap out their black gold with the invigorating fresh air of the outdoors. The top of the Koffee Cap holds a pin that breaks a K-Cup’s seal when the body of the product is squeezed, forcing hot water through it to concoct a cup ‘o joe.

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Categories
Connected Objects Winter Sports

CARV’s a digital ski coach that lives in your ear

For those who haven’t done so before, the prospect of careening down a mountain while wearing skis isn’t exactly the most inviting idea. Eventually, given enough training, it can be less of a careening and more of a controlled, effortless glide. It just takes a lot of time to get to that point. What’s more, most of that time is spent in the dark about how effectively recommended techniques are being performed, prolonging meaningful improvement.

It’s obvious to see how much room there is to better both the process of learning to ski and, later, excelling at it. As the first wearable of its kind, the CARV is a connected ski device that acts as a digital coach. It’s made up of a less than one-millimeter thick smart insert and a clip-on tracker that work in any ski boot. Together they measure motion and pressure distribution to relay meaningful feedback through a user’s headphones in real-time.

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Categories
Automotive Connected Objects

Radiomize helps drivers keep their eyes on the road

editors-choiceDistracted driving remains a major problem that causes many needless accidents. Dashboard mounts for smartphones don’t really resolve the issue because they still require drivers to take their eyes off the road to look at their devices. Heads-up displays, meanwhile, tend to be costly, typically focus only on driving-specific information, and have raised their own set of safety concerns.

patent-claimedRadiomize is a steering wheel touchpad cover that sends commands to smartphones via patented gesture control technology. In addition to taking control of smartphone functions, it reads aloud text and social messages, as well as news that would be of interest to the driver.

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Categories
Television

Drive offers the warm glow of achievement by removing the warm glow of TV

Whether it’s being used for playing videogames or the binge watching of TV shows, the television continues to help adults and kids procrastinate.

patent-claimedDrive is an outlet adapter that connects to a home Wi-Fi network and receives instructions from its owner on when to enable or disable the use of a TV. It works in conjunction with an Android, iOS and Windows app. If parents don’t want their kids to watch TV or play games until they are done with their homework or household chores, Drive can be used to bar those children from using the TV for a set period of time. If adults make a New Year’s resolution to exercise and lose weight, but can’t manage to bring themselves to turn off the TV, Drive can be set to automatically block the TV from being used until they burn some calories.

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Aquatics Wearables

Swimmerix wearable swim coach pools your aquatic performance metrics

The myriad of health benefits from swimming are well-documented, with pools all around the world packed with both young and old stroking their way to fitter bodies. The wearable revolution so commonly found above water has lagged when it comes to swimming, though, due to data accuracy and connectivity issues. The team behind Swimmerix believe it has created the answer to these issues.

Swimmerix is a system that tracks swimming performance and helps facilitate improvement. Made up of a smartband, base station, a companion app and cloud technology connecting it all together, it tracks everything from heart rate and calories burned to number of strokes, speed and distance. Training doesn’t achieve much without previously set goals, though, so the Swimmerix app lets users set their own so they can improve in real-time.

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Categories
Imaging

ProView S3 steadies your video when shooting on smartphones

One of the major obstacles to shooting quality video is keeping the camera steady so that viewers don’t end up becoming dizzy and unable to watch the finished product. That’s especially the case with inexperienced videographers using smartphones or other cameras without good stabilization functionality.

ProView S3 is a 3-axis gimbal for smartphones designed to record video stable enough to look like it was shot by a professional. Its makers are positioning ProView S3 as an especially good stabilization option for large 4K smartphones including the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus and the Samsung Galaxy S6. ProView S3’s adjustable mount can handle any smartphone with a screen 4.7-5.7 inches. The device ships in July. Future pricing isn’t available, but early bird Indiegogo backers can get one for pledges starting at $125. ProView S3’s makers hope to raise $300,000 by March 3.

ProView S3 seems to be a good option for smartphone users to shoot better video -– at least for those whose devices will fit its mount. One standout feature is that it’s designed so that the user can easily release the phone grip with one hand, while using the other hand to insert or remove the phone.

 

Categories
Networking

Up in the air, all your data is secure with the SMiD Pro

Storing the troves of data generated up in the cloud is an easy, flexible and pretty affordable way to avoid losing important or sentimental files when a smartphone is lost or a hard drive goes belly up. But while it’s easy, privacy has never been the cloud’s strong suit because, for the most part, anyone determined enough can see everything uploaded.

SMid Cloud Security believes everyone — not just large companies — should be able to enjoy completely secure cloud privacy. To do that, it’s created the SMiD Pro, a device that completely encrypts all data destined to the cloud with a plug-and-play, thin USB device that serves as a personal authentication key — all without storing any of the files locally to ensure they stay safe. SMiD Pro works with all major cloud services like DropBox, Google Drive and Amazon Web Services. without needing any software to be instlalled. Each SMiD system goes for about $400 and is expected by September 2016. Its campaign is aiming to raise about $22,700 by March 12th, 2016.

The SMiD Pro and REDS.box have similar aims, but the latter is completely proprietary while the former works with already popular services, making it a clear standout in the cloud security space. Even if it is a tad pricey, the SMiD is simple to use, an invaluable trait in what could’ve been a far more confusing product.