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Connected Objects Health and Wellness Sleep

Nora helps snorers to snooze and not lose

Anti-snoring devices can cut back on not only snoring, but the sleeplessness and annoyance suffered by people who sleep with those who snore.

patent-claimedUnlike Snor and SnoreNoMore, two recent devices whose inventors have sought crowdfunding for, Nora is an anti-snoring device that’s non-evasive, not requiring users to stick any tubes or other items inside their mouths. Nora is instead made up of a small white device resembling a mouse that gets placed on the user’s night table and is tapped before sleeping, and a flat, padded insert containing a mini pump that inflates and deflates when somebody starts snoring, slightly moving any pillow that it is placed in. That gentle movement stimulates the upper throat muscles and lets snorers’ breathing return to normal, without waking them or their companions up, according to the campaign.

Categories
Lighting Television

Pyxis makers want you to pick this for ambient TV backlighting

Ambient TV backlighting technology has been around for several years now, but no consumer product using it has made significant headway in the U.S. yet. Philips came closest with Ambilight, but the company is no longer marketing that (or any other TV products in North American anymore).

Project-Pyxis is a standalone HDMI ambient backlighting device for TVs that illuminates the wall behind a TV with the same colors displayed on the TV screen in real time. The small set-top device interacts with the image being displayed on the screen by using the HDMI signal to sample the edges of the screen to compute LED color values. It works in conjunction with an LED strip that the Pyxis makers say is packed with lighting and all the necessary cabling. It is shipping in May at $200. The Kickstarter goal is to raise $86,000 by Nov. 16.

While Ambilight was marketed as enhancing any video, it was mostly appreciated by gamers. Game accessory maker Mad Catz Interactive has already been fielding such a product as part of a licensing pact with U.K. company amBX, whose technology was originally developed within Philips Research Laboratories. The main selling point of Pyxis is that it doesn’t require any additional devices, such as a PC. Pyxis works straight out of the box in less than five minutes, according to its campaign.

 

Categories
Automotive Connected Objects

SafFone was designed to keep drivers safe while making phone calls

Distracted driving remains one of the largest causes of car accidents in the U.S. The makers of SafFone are out to provide a solution to that problem.

SafFone (pronounced Safe Phone) is a small black device that easily clips onto a vehicle’s driver-side sun visor and allows the user to select any preset phone number at the touch of a button. The device uses Bluetooth low energy technology for RF communication using 2.4 GHz radio frequencies.

Categories
Imaging Networking

U+ flash drive forms a triple threat for storage, charging and selfies

USB flash drives are extremely handy. But there are many of them on the market and the makers of several more of them have recently sought funding via crowdsourcing, including the Reversible USB Adapter.

patent-claimedWhat separates U+ is that the hybrid device serves not only as a wireless USB flash drive, but also a multimedia hub, external charger and a selfie shutter. For the latter functionality, it integrates with Android and iOS smartphone and tablet cameras to create a selfie shutter that activates at the click of a button on the U+. The campaign touts that it’s built with a Qualcomm CPU and Samsung RAM, and supports 1080p video.

Categories
Automotive Connected Objects Imaging

Waylens is the GoPro designed for how cars go

Some car enthusiasts would probably love to capture video footage of what’s happening around them on the road while driving –- especially while racing their vehicles.

Waylens is an action camera that, unlike the popular GoPro and other traditional action cams, was specifically designed to enable drivers to easily capture, edit and share video taken while they’re driving. The camera works in conjunction with a vehicle’s OBD-II on-board diagnostic system port and automatically turns on while driving. By plugging in to the information provided by the port, Waylens can display useful information to the driver while the camera end is capturing video, video that the campaign claims beats those of other action cameras. There’s also the option to overlay these measurements atop the video as we’ve seen from GPS-equipped action cams from Garmin.

Categories
Personal Transportation

Smart Ped kick bike assists riders to travel farther, faster

While there are a variety of ways to get around city streets, all of the effective ones — bicycles and motorized scooters for starters — require all-or-nothing decisions due to their lack of portability. As such, the opportunity to combine them with multiple forms of public and private transportation to cover longer distances isn’t really there.

FlyKly is attempting to cover that middle ground with the only legal kick bike on the market: the Smart Ped. The minimally designed scooter’s standout feature is its all-in-one kick assist system that propels riders farther with every kick. In combination with its 16-inch wheels, Smart Ped aims to provide a smooth, less intensive, more comfortable ride, reaching speeds of up to 16 mph while doing so.

Categories
Tablet Accessories

Quarter keeps the Apple Pencil right by the side of the iPad Pro

The first six or seven iPads from Apple really didn’t change very much. Yes, they got faster, thinner, lighter and sported higher resolution as the software steadily improved. But after the launch of the iPad mini, the product didn’t really break into a lot of new territory.

That changed this fall, when Apple took the iPad to new new heights (and widths) with the iPad Pro. Boasting a 12.9″ display, its screen is larger than that of some MacBooks. Indeed, Apple has made its capabilities a bit closer to the MacBooks’ as well by announcing a keyboard cover that attaches magnetically. It also announced the Apple Pencil, a stylus designed primarily for creative work. There’s no issue keeping the cover on the iPad Pro (because it’s, well, a cover). However, the Apple Pencil — unlike the digital pen for the Surface Pro — lacks any way to connect to the device for which it provides input.

Categories
Smart Home

Nucleus intercom system avoids the horror of walking to another room

The intercom of yesteryear is a patently outdated fixture in most homes. So much so, in fact, that most homeowners probably don’t even use it. Considering the increasingly connected direction homes are going in, intercoms are wildly limited in scope and unpleasant to look at to boot.

Taking a product name page out of Gavin Belson’s playbook, Nucleus hopes to become the modern intercom system for the connected home. The Wi-Fi enabled, slimly-shaped slab can either be mounted on a wall or propped up on a table to facilitate instant communication with any other Nucleus device around the world with a tap or voice command. The company boasts connection speeds of less than 200 milliseconds, or about the time it takes someone to blink, through tight integration of all components and software.

Categories
Connected Objects Imaging News

Smartphone cameras rise up to conquer the DSLR with the Light L16

editors-choiceThe power of high-quality photography has never been in the hands of so many. But for all the incredible progress that smartphone cameras have made, there’s still a wide gulf between the tools pros use and those in most people’s pockets. Indeed, even if DSLRs were cheap and simple, their size would make carrying around most places prohibitive.

Light is seeking to take on some of those issues with its first camera dubbed the L16. It is so-named for the 16 smartphone-class imaging  modules in its Swiss cheese-like frame. When the Android device’s shutter is pressed, the camera uses 10 of those lenses to capture images up to an amazing 52 megapixels at a range of zoom levels. By taking photos at different exposures, The L16 takes exceptional low light photos according to the company. It can also perform some of the same tricks at the Lytro cameras, notably adjusting the focus after the photo is taken.

Categories
News

Generosity.com may make Indiegogo easier to navigate

Indiegogo’s launch of Generosity.com, a personal fundraising site in the spirit of GoFundMe, continues the work that the company started with Indiegogo Life. Much of the focus of the site has been around the lower fee structures that Generosity campaigns will have to pay. That’s a big plus for some of the truly needy cases that would take advantage of the site.

However, in true karmic fashion. Generosity could wind up giving back to its parent site. As an open platform, Indiegogo has never banned personal charity campaigns from its flagship site. And while that has resulted in some relatively good exposure for those campaigns, they often are not necessarily the kinds of projects that Indiegogo backers are interested in funding when they seek out categories such as Tech and Design. By guiding those campaigns over to Generosity, it clears the field for projects that are more of interest to early adopters than philanthropists.