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Displays Tech Accessories

NoonWear One lets you see your screens in the bright sun

The screens on today’s smartphones, tablets and laptops produce vibrant, saturated colors — that is, as long as they’re not directly in the path of the sun. Trying to fight the greatest light source for millions of miles is a tough battle to win and so screens become washed out and hard to read.

While most sunglasses only make the problem worse by blocking half of a laptop’s emitted light, Noonwear One provides a new approach to this problem with a line of sunglasses that create a dramatic improvement in screen visibility. The specs use diagonal polarization to allow light from electronic screens to come through better while still blocking sunlight.

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Cell Phone Accessories Imaging

ScopeCam uses your phone’s better camera for selfies

Today’s smartphones put incredible photo taking capabilities in a device that’s always at home in a pocket. Their front-facing cameras have spawned millions of selfies. But the sad secret about these narcissistic snapshots is that the front cameras of almost all smartphones lag significantly behind their rear cameras in terms of resolution even as smartphone companies are steadily improving selfie features.

ScopeCam is a simple phone device that clips on to a smartphone, allowing you to use its rear camera to take forward-facing shots. This gives you the best of both selfie worlds, being able to use the big screen of the phone to frame the photo and the full power of the camera to take the photo — well, almost the full power as there’s no way to turn the flash to the front of the phone.

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Smart Home

Smitch smart light switch brings simplicity to smart home category

Smart home devices can make life easier for consumers, but too many such products are overly complicated to set up.

The same can’t be said for Smitch, a smart light switch that its makers say can be installed in a matter of seconds, and fits 90 percent of existing switches. It features an intuitive interface, and can control all of a room’s lights by just tapping on the corresponding picture that is shown on the companion Android or iOS app. Smitch begins shipping in November and will cost $69 each at retail, although it can be purchased via Kickstarter at reduced early bird pricing that starts at $32. Its makers set a Kickstarter goal of raising $21,949 by Sept. 8.

Smitch certainly seems easy to install and other features that should make it appealing to some consumers is its advertised long battery life of about 500 days. But Smitch may face an uphill battle because it just seems too much like many other smart light switches already available, including Switchmate.

 

Categories
Sleep Travel

JetComfy props up your head through the long flight

Airplanes may be the places people spend the most time trying to sleep in a seated position. To make matters worse, passengers are usually jostled due to turbulence. This poses the double challenge of trying to achieve comfort while keeping the head steady when it tends to droop.

The JetComfy is the latest in a line of flight sleep aids — many of them fairly awkward–looking — that seek to provide head comfort to the weary traveler. While many of these pillows steady the head by surrounding the neck, the JetComfy takes a unique approach by including a telescoping arm that attaches to the airline seat. This props up the memory foam pillow part of the device up to head level.

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Input

Sensel Morph force-sensitive input pad pushes past keyboards and trackpads

The keyboard and trackpad are cornerstones of mobile productivity, but they take up a lot of room. We’ve already seen one crowdfunding approach to combining them but the combination isn’t necessarily greater than the sum of their parts.

The Sensel Morph is a Bluetooth touch input device that’s sensitive to pressure — so sensitive, in fact, that it can pick up the bristles of a paintbrush with its 20,000 embedded sensors. The company is taking advantage of its versatile surface by making available a series of magnetic overlays that have raised surfaces. Some of the first are a DJ control pad, a typing keyboard, a music keyboard, a drum pad and game controller.

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Cell Phone Accessories

DreamMe has your smartphone display dancing on the ceiling

For many smartphone owners, the alarm clock has become yet another device that the versatile device has replaced alongside the camera, camcorder, music player, navigation device and even flashlight. After all, one generally has to charge it at night. Why not keep it at bedside? But there’s at least one alarm clock feature used by some that smartphones couldn’t answer — the ability to project the time on the ceiling.

DreamMe is a lens that’s designed to sit atop your smartphone’s screen at bedtime. When used with its companion app, it can outdo projection alarm clocks by projecting a range of things on the ceiling, including the time in different cities, weather, social media or other messages. DreamMe requires no batteries or other power to do its thing. The device can be manually focused by twisting its halves. DreamMe’s creator seeks $10, 872 by September 23rd. DreamMe can be topping your smartphone for €18 (about $20) with the devices slated to be shipped in December.

The DreamMe is a clever little accessory that will fill a gap for what has proven to be a resilient alarm clock feature Its versatility could be a bit of a drawback as a social media stream, for instance, might do more to keep one awake than keep one asleep. But of course that’s up to the owner.

 

Categories
Connected Objects Cycling

SmartHalo keeps your bike on track and your eyes on the road

There’s no shortage of bike computers and mounts to have your smartphone take on a wide range of tasks while affixed to a bike’s handlebars. But both can be a bit overwhelming, or at least distracting, when trying to glean information at a glance.

Consisting of a ring of LEDs surrounding a central light, SmartHalo takes on a more symbol-driven approach to a range of bike-related tasks. By lighting up the different parts of its circular display’s edge, it can cue the rider to turn left, right or make a u-turn while a center dot turns on for a call notification. As soon as one starts pedaling, its companion app starts tracking a range of metrics, including time, distance, average speed and calories burned.

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Uncategorized

Bikiros bike safety device watches over kids in three ways

Learning to ride a bike is often a childhood rite of passage. And once kids get it, they’re usually good to go. But sometimes little ones lack the best judgement — or the tallest height — to avoid accidents.

Inspired by an accident that left the inventor temporarily paralyzed, Bikiros (“bye-KEY-ros) is a two-part bicycle add-on that can help young cyclists in a number of ways similar to how various smart car products can report on driver safety.

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News

Hasbro, Indiegogo team for game design contest

Companies such as Quirky and Edison Nation have shown that big-name brands are happy to tap into great ideas that come from the crowd. Now Indiegogo, which has run a number of partnership programs, has teamed up with toy giant Hasbro for a game design contest.

Participants fill out a form on the Hasbro site that provides information about the team and the game. Ideas will be judged on several criteria, including gameplay, story/theme, viability and “potential for fun-ness.” The winning individual or team will get $10,000 and a trip out to Hasbro HQ to meet with game designers. Once five finalists are selected, they’ll have the option to crowdfund their products on Indiegogo with Hasbro providing publicity support. However, the game designers are responsible for fulfilling their own rewards.

Game designers who think they’ve got a Clue in putting in the hard-Scrabble effort of creating the next game Monopoly will have to enter their submissions by September 30th with the winner announced on December 3rd, two days after the Indiegogo campaigns close.

Categories
Personal Transportation

URBY Board motion board takes on irregular terrain, uphill battles

The Segway got a lot of things wrong, but it also got a few things right. These included the development of more rugged models for navigating more challenging grounds. In the past few years, we’ve seen a whole host of two-wheeled gliding platform scooters or balance boards that cost a tenth of what Segways do but many of them can’t veer far from paved level surfaces.

The URBY Board seeks to up the ante on the kind of environments for these two-wheeled self-balancing wonders with a balance board that has a bit more horsepower and bigger wheels (10″ vs. the standard 6.5″) as well as LED-based turn signals. The campaign video shows it taking on grass, ramps, the rain, pushing shopping cards and pulling luggage.

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