Groupon Deal of the Day: Find Great Deals on Fun Things to Do. Crowdtap - Where Consumers and Brands Collaborate. Energy Savings through peer pressure. The Arlington, Va. clean tech startup, OPower, closed a $50 million series C investment led by Accel Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers (KPCB) and joined by the company’s earlier investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA) the firms announced Monday. OPower’s software-as-a-service helps electric and gas utilities understand who their residential energy consumers are, and how they are using power. Home owners get access to OPower programs through their utilities. OPower’s applications let them see if they’re more or less energy-hogging than their neighbors, allow them to set personal goals to reduce their own energy consumption at home, and receive alerts if they’re headed for a large bill at the end of the month among other things that are meant to inspire a behavior change.
OPower’s chief executive Dan Yates jokes, “We get paid to tell people to turn out the lights and turn down the thermostat.” Currently, OPower’s 45 clients are all U.S. The Freecycle Network. What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. Trade Books, Book Swap, Trade Video Games, CD Exchange, Movie Swap ... ThredUP. Did you know? We donate proceeds from the items we do not accept to charities like Teach for America.
Learn more » We’ve built apps for iOS and Android so that you can shop whenever (and wherever) you want. Get the App » Our merchandise experts hand -inspect every item we receive to ensure the finest quality. Orders over $50 ship for free. Clean Out bags are always free to order and free to return Order one » thredUP is your favorite online thrift shop to buy quality used clothing at great prices and sell your clothes for cash. Whether you're looking for cute dresses from J. Mesh - the living network of sharing. Home | InnoCentive. The Secret Lives Of Objects: StickyBits Turn Barcodes Into Personal Message Boards.
Every place and object in the world has a secret past: who lived there, who passed by, who touched it. The secret lives of objects are filled with such details. If only you could make them talk. But what if you could give any physical object a story simply by sticking a barcode on it and appending a message to that barcode? The message could be a photo, a text message, a video, or a voice note. All anyone would need to unlock the message is a phone with a special barcode scanning app. Stickybits is that app. The barcode in a greeting card , for instance, could trigger a video message from the sender.
The app is free, but stickybits sells packs of 20 vinyl barcode stickers for $10. Each barcode is programmable by the first person who scans it and and leaves a photo, video, audio, or text message. The app lets you follow people and see their object stream, or get notified whenever one of your objects is scanned, moved, or new bits are attached to them. Coming soon: the disruptive molecular age of information. Now we’ve seen what Google has had up its sleeve with Google Buzz. I expect this is the last tool of the atomic age. No, not the energy field, the real-time content field. “Huh?” Before I start, tomorrow I’m giving a talk to Stanford University MBA students with MC Hammer and Loic Le Meur, founder/CEO of Seesmic (he wrote about his part of the presentation on his blog tonight) about what social media is doing to our marketing, and I’ve been working with a few companies on products that will come out over the next year that will move us from an atomic age of information streams to a molecular one, so wanted to talk about it, both here, and tomorrow at Stanford to see what bubbles up.
Look at Google Buzz. Each status message there is an information atom. You can’t easily grab two of these status messages and join them together. Or look at Twitter. Same with YouTube videos. How about photos? Go to Facebook or Google Buzz. Joining information atoms takes a LOT of work and a LOT of energy. 1. Emo Labs, Inc. Layar. Square. VueZone | Personal Video Network. Autonomous Warehouse Robots. Industrial robots are nothing new, but they are getting more and more sophisticated. Watch the video above of the swarming robot warehouse pickers made by Kiva Systems. They are like orange industrial Roombas that go out and find inventory in a warehouse and bring it back to human workers to pack for shipping. Don’t fear them. Really, they are just here to help. Zappos and Staples use the systems, which are dispatched and controlled by a central computer, and can also detect each other to avoid collisions.
Speaking of Roombas, Kiva Systems might soon have competition from MIT Robotics professor and iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks. Heartland Robotics is combining the power of computers – embodied in robots – and the extraordinary intelligence of the American workforce, to increase productivity and revitalize manufacturing. They sound so friendly! When are they going to create a blogging robot so I can take day off? (Hat tip to Hizook. Life Recorders. Imagine a small device that you wear on a necklace that takes photos every few seconds of whatever is around you, and records sound all day long. It has GPS and the ability to wirelessly upload the data to the cloud, where everything is date/time and geo stamped and the sound files are automatically transcribed and indexed.
Photos of people, of course, would be automatically identified and tagged as well. Imagine an entire lifetime recorded and searchable. Imagine if you could scroll and search through the lives of your ancestors. Would you wear that device? Privacy disaster? But ten years ago we would have been horrified by what we nonchalantly share on Facebook and Twitter every day. A Business Week article talks about a ten year old Microsoft project called SenseCam (more here) that is just such a device. It’s clunky today and doesn’t do most of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph above. The hardware is actually not the biggest challenge.
But these devices are coming. Recharge Your Gadgets With Your Bike. If you have a dynamo generator-equipped bike, $100, and a USB-powered gadget that needs charged, Dahon has a doodad called the BioLogic FreeCharge coming out in March that just might interest you. It basically grabs the power you generate while pedaling and outputs it via USB cable, allowing you to keep your phone juiced up along that 100-mile bike ride you’re always talking about doing someday. The little weatherproof box attaches to your bike frame and provides enough power to recharge an iPhone in about three hours, so it might not be that advantageous to casual commuters. Long-haul bikers, though, may just add this to their equipment arsenal with little resistance. [Bike Hugger via Wired] Digi-Key - Pico Kit. The DLP® Pico™ Projector Development Kit Version 2.0: A way to incorporate embedded video, portable projection and structured light into your products. The development kit uses the DLP 0.17 HVGA Chipset available from TI.
This Chipset is a miniaturized version of the popular DLP technology found in today’s best projectors on the market. Using microscopic mirrors, TI’s DLP1700 is a digitally controlled spatial light modulator (SLM) able to create binary light patterns with speed, precision, and efficiency for a multitude of light processing applications. Utilizing an efficient design with ultra-low power consumption, coupled with the robust DLP1700, you can expedite development and add projection or spatial light modulation into a vast array of products.
Buy Now! The Development Kit for the DLP Pico Projector includes: DLP Pico projection device Power supply cable (operates from 110V – 220V) Video cable with I2C capability HDMI to DVI adapter Reliability is the key to success. Rovio™ Water-Powered Clock - Bedol What's Next. Zoombak Personal GPS Locators, Portable GPS Tracker, GPS Vehicle Tracking, Family Car GPS Tracking, Pet GPS Tracking, Personal GPS Tracking Systems. iLANE. New – Experience DriveSync Infotainment App for Android FREE- View Infotainment Features iLane In-Car Infotainment Helps You Stay Safe and Productive While on the Go IMS iLane in-car infotainment provides safe, distraction-free voice-powered access to business critical apps and information while on the go. When paired with a BlackBerry® device, iLane’s Bluetooth® hands-free technology lets drivers hear email and text messages and respond via VoiceNote™, a natural recording of the user’s voice.
Perhaps the most important feature of iLane in-car infotainment is security. It not only keeps private information confidential, it meets strict corporate security encryption requirements and will not compromise your organization’s privacy. Stay Connected on the Road. Today’s business environment puts increasing pressure on mobile workers to stay connected to the office while on the go. iLane in-car infotainment is the answer to this safety and productivity dilemma.
Specifications. Current InvenTeam Grant High School Recipients. Students Use Spare Parts to Make Wheelchairs for Foreign Countries - Top News Videos. December 12, 2003 Educator-astronaut Barbara Morgan will visit the International Space Station in 2003. Science@NASA — NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe today announced that Barbara Morgan, the agency’s first Educator Astronaut, has been assigned as a crewmember on a November 2003 Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station. Today’s announcement was highlighted with a ceremony at the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore and fulfills the Administrator’s commitment earlier this year to send an educator into space in a renewed mission to inspire a new generation of explorers. Morgan’s flight represents the first of what is expected to be many flights as part of a new Educator Astronaut program, which will be unveiled in early 2003. “NASA has a responsibility to cultivate a new generation of scientists and engineers,” said Administrator O’Keefe.
A native of McCall, Idaho, Morgan was selected in 1985 as the backup candidate for the Teacher in Space program. On the Net: Technology Review: TR10: Liquid Battery. Donald Sadoway conceived of a novel battery that could allow cities to run on solar power at night. Conventional battery: Ordinary batteries use at least one solid active material. In the lead-acid battery shown here, the electrodes are solid plates immersed in a liquid electrolyte. Solid materials limit the conductivity of batteries and therefore the amount of current that can flow through them.
They’re also vulnerable to cracking, disintegrating, and otherwise degrading over time, which reduces their useful lifetimes. Arthur Mount Without a good way to store electricity on a large scale, solar power is useless at night. The battery is unlike any other. The first prototype consists of a container surrounded by insulating material. Technology Review: 10 Emerging Technologies 2009. Test Drive: Project PUMA [Update] Betaworks Launches Chartbeat To Track Who Is Paying Attention To Your Website Right Now. The default mode for Google Analytics and other Website tracking software often makes you wait an entire day to find out what is happening on your site. There is a 24-hour delay (although this can often be changed in settings). Speed up the feedback loop, and Websites in theory could become even more responsive to traffic and attention peaks or to unexpected sluggishness. Betaworks, John Borthwick’s startup holding company which has stakes in Twitter and Tweetdeck, and spun off bit.ly, has just launched Chartbeat.
Keeping with Betaworks’ focus on real-time data services, Chartbeat offers a dashboard for Website owners that monitors how many people are on their site at any given second, where they are coming from, which pages visitors are looking at the most, as well as conversations and links from Twitter. Chartbeat is offering a free 30-day trial and then wants to charge $10 a month for the service. Microsoft Office Labs. Siftables. Invention turns cell phone into mobile medical lab. (CNN) -- When Debbie Gordon and her fellow health-care mission workers go to Belize, there's just so much they can do to treat people in the remote village of Gales Point.
This modified cell phone acts as a mobile medical lab by helping doctors analyze samples of bodily fluid. Her group, which includes two or three doctors, can only treat the town's 300 villagers based on the symptoms patients describe or what the doctors observe. "If we had the ability to take a device that could do field tests and get back the results in a few days, that would be very helpful," said Gordon, a health educator based in North Carolina, who teaches doctors and nurses about care for sick newborns.
How about in a few seconds? Such a device may be available in the near future, and it could turn a cell phone into a mobile medical lab -- and change the way doctors treat patients in rural areas far from hospitals. LUCAS captures the image to a chip in the cell phone. All About Cellular Phones • Medicine. Plastic Logic Home. GlowBots. Wifi Car. Revolutionary paper is stronger than steel. New machine prints sheets of light. Scientist: Holographic television to become reality. LONDON, England (CNN) -- Picture this: you're sat down for the Football World Cup final, or a long-awaited sequel to the "Sex and the City" movie and you're watching all the action unfold in 3-D on your coffee table.
The future of television? This image is an impression of what 3D holographic television may look like. It sounds a lot like a wacky dream, but don't be surprised if within our lifetime you find yourself discarding your plasma and LCD sets in exchange for a holographic 3-D television that can put Cristiano Ronaldo in your living room or bring you face-to-face with life-sized versions of your gaming heroes. The reason for renewed optimism in three-dimensional technology is a breakthrough in rewritable and erasable holographic systems made earlier this year by researchers at the University of Arizona. "This is a prerequisite for any type of moving holographic technology. The researchers produced displays that can be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes. Tung H. Lightbulbs Could Replace Wi-Fi Hotpsots.
Note -- this news article is more than a year old. Boston University's College of Engineering is launching a program under a National Science Foundation grant to develop the next generation of wireless communications technology based on visible light instead of radio waves. Researchers expect to piggyback data communications capabilities on low power light emitting diodes or LEDs to create "Smart Lighting" that would be faster and more secure than current network technology.
This initiative aims to develop an optical communication technology that would make an LED light the equivalent of a Wi-Fi access point. "Imagine if your computer, iPhone, TV, radio and thermostat could all communicate with you when you walked in a room just by flipping the wall light switch and without the usual cluster of wires," said BU Engineering Professor Thomas Little.
With widespread LED lighting, a vast network of light-based communication is possible, Little noted. Hippo Water Roller. TonchiDot: Tagging your world one iPhone at a time. EarthClassMail.