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Star wars gadgets available

Since it was released in 1977, Star Wars became an American epic, possessing a longevity only a handful of movies manage to achieve and crafting the very essence of the term a ‘classic’. Naturally such a blockbuster has been followed with a steady string of memorabilia, intensifying in sophistication and innovation with each passing decade. So recognisable is the Star Wars franchise, that when Darth Vader himself marched in to this year’s CES, nobody blinked an eyelid. With such an immense amount of toys, gadgets and memorabilia dedicated to the timeless classic, we thought the Star Wars fans amongst our readers may want to learn of some of the best gadgets available dedicated to their unhealthy obsession.

Picture courtesy of @lilstormys

Star Wars Anakin Replica FX Lightsaber

This official reproduction of Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber from Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith, ignites, glows and produces sound effects digitally recorded from the movie, with such realism that you think you have been beamed out of your living room and straight into Star Wars itself. The FX Lightsaber features a robust polycarbonate bright blue blade and will naturally prove to be a sensation in a home which includes any Star Wars fans. Although it will perhaps be only the most die-hard of Star Wars fans – or the parent’s of the most persuasive of children – who will part with the 360.00 euros to own one.

Star Wars: R2-D2 USB Micro Fridge

If having a cold beer easily within your reach whilst you are at your desk takes your fancy, then simply plug R2-D2 into a USB port and pop a can down his throat and by the time you’ve surfed the net for some more crazy Star Wars toys, he’ll have regurgitated the can a whole lot colder than when it went in!

Darth Vader Nintendo Wii Sensor Bar Holder

With this Wii Darth Vader Sensor Bar Holder, you can channel the force of all your games. This high-quality sculpture would make a great addition to any Star Wars-themed bedroom. Specifically made to Nintendo standards, this uniquely crafted Lightsaber has been engineered to safely support the sensor bar whilst maintaining full range and performance.

Star Wars: The Complete Saga Blu-Ray Disc

Ahh so that’s why Darth Vader made an appearance in Las Vegas this year, he was there to promote Star War’s announcement of Star Wars: The Complete Saga Blu Ray Disc. These highly anticipated blu-ray titles will be available to own from this September. What still a whole nine months away?!

Flex those muscles with Radiopaq’s new Flex headsets

If you are looking to buy sports earphones that won’t fall out of your ears when you raise the tempo of your workout, then look no further than the new Flex headset, high-tech sports earphones, designed to deliver outstanding audio performance no matter how vigorous your activity.

In boasting a unique over-the-ear design, users will be oblivious that they have these super lightweight, semi-flexible ear phones in their ears, although the high-quality music blasting into the ear drums may give it away. These ultra-comfortable ear phones are equipped with a gold-plated 3.5mm stereo jack plug, ensuring the optimum sound quality when connected to any Apple iPod or any MP3 player with a 3.5mm stereo Jacket Socket. The Flex headset is also compatible with MP4 players, portable DVD players and all netbooks, laptops, notebooks and computers, although taking the latter five on a run with you is not advisable.

Radiopaq’s mantra is to provide innovative, high quality portable audio products, and by incorporating a convenient touch-button remote control on the cable, which can control the volume, track selections and the on/off function, means that Flex can be operating easily whether you are out jogging, hurtling down a mountain on a snowboard, or pounding the treadmill at the gym.

Getting into a bit of a knot with your cable whilst you are exercising is an affliction many headset users are often subjected to. By featuring a soft rubber silicone cable finish, Flex’s cable is tangle-resistant, giving you the freedom to move unreservedly without the worry of knotting cables.
Greater freedom to make the most of your workout whilst listening to sound quality that rivals the more expensive headsets are not the only great qualities of Flex. Automatic call cut-in makes answering phone calls on an iPhone seamlessly hands-free using the built-in microphone on the remote control.

Music is immediately restored after the call is finished; bringing an end to desperately fumbling around to find the track you were on, whilst cursing the person who interrupted you!

This stylish, lightweight and ultra-robust headset is a fantastic sporting companion, and for just £24.99 is a preferable alternative to the more expensive action earphones, which offer little more in their design, comfort and functions.

Gestures that Your TV Will Understand The company behind Microsoft's Kinect controller wants to kill the remote. By Tom Simonite

Thanks to Microsoft's Kinect, millions are casting aside their controllers and using their bodies to play games. Now the company that created the motion-tracking hardware for the Kinect wants to make waving your arms an accepted way to control everything from your TV to your desktop computer.

TV tracker: This device, developed by PrimeSense and Asus, can be used to control a TV or a PC. Credit: PrimeSense

PrimeSense, based in Tel Aviv, Israel, makes a package that combines one or two conventional cameras, an infrared depth sensor, and specialized computer chips. Together they collect and interpret a person's movements in 3-D. The movements are calculated by projecting a grid of infrared light spots into a room, tracking how light bounces back, and correlating this with information from the stereo cameras. Certain motions can be translated into computer commands or, in the case of Kinect, used to control an on-screen avatar.

While Microsoft focuses on gaming, PrimeSense is trying to establish other uses, for example TV control. In collaboration with PC manufacturer Asus, PrimeSense has developed a device called the WAVI Xtion. It looks a lot like the Kinect controller, but connects via a PC to the TV and lets the viewer use gestures to control what appears on the screen.

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The WAVI Xtion camera is positioned next to the TV, while the control box connects to the computer. A user waves a palm in front of the TV to call up a simple menu that would let him choose between watching shows, playing games, or looking at photos. The user points to one of these options with his palm, which is tracked by the cameras and infrared sensor. To choose an option, the user holds a palm over a particular video, or he can flip through options by waving to the right or left. When the clip is playing, he can wave a palm at the screen to call up the controls to rewind the video or turn up the volume.

Adi Berenson, PrimeSense's vice president of business development, says the hands-free approach eliminates a major sticking point with efforts to bring the Internet to televisions. "We believe that the industry is trying to force-fit the PC into the living room, and it won't work," he says. "It's a more relaxed environment that needs a more natural way to interact." Google TV—the search giant's Internet TV effort—relies on a full QWERTY keyboard, a feature that many think is too unwieldy to be practical.

Every move: Technology created by PrimeSense tracks body movement in 3D. Credit: PrimeSense Asus and PrimeSense are also interested in adding gesture control to conventional PCs. Within weeks of the release of the Kinect controller, hobbyists had figured out a way toaccess it, leading to an explosion of new ideas about how gesture control could be used—everything from robots to air guitar. "We didn't expect that to happen so fast," says Berenson. "It is a validation of how many good ideas developers have, and we want to help them bring them to users." PrimeSense has accelerated the rollout of a software tool kit to aid experimentation with the controller and plans to offer a $200 hardware kit for developers. "Not having to bring a controller is great for situations with multiple changing participants," says Doug Fritz, part of a team of Kinect hackers at the MIT Media Lab that developed software for controlling the Chrome Web browser. Stepping in front of the camera and taking control with gestures could make group work easier than having to take turns at a keyboard or mouse, Fritz says. However, he adds, much more would be possible if the device could track hand shapes. "The current technology is good for body gestures, not fine-grain control," he explains. That makes things like text input a particular challenge. Doug Bowman, a professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University who has developed 3-D gestural interfaces based on more expensive tracking technology, agrees. One of his students, Tao Ni, has developed a system that allows a user to navigate menus on a TV using simple movements such as pinching fingers together (see a video of a prototype). "These freehand gestures could replace a remote or keyboard altogether in, say, an entertainment scenario," says Bowman. However, Ni's prototype requires a special glove to capture the precise orientation of a person's hand and their finger movements. "The Kinect is not capable of that yet," says Bowman. "But perhaps in the future it will be." Berenson says that improving the resolution of PrimeSense's tracking is one area of active research. "We are thinking about tracking resolution and trying to follow fingers," he says. Another future direction would have the system interpret subtle body language. "We want to make it less explicit and more implicit," he says. "For example, it should be possible to have the volume go down on your TV when you pick up a newspaper and start reading it."

Brickify: Turn Any Image Into A Lego Statue!

Everyone loves Legos. There is no debate. In fact, there may only be one thing better than Legos: customized Legos. And a new web service aims to provide those to all.

Brickify is a website that allows you to put in the URL to any image on the web and it will output a “brickified” image. Yes, it’s an image just like the one you just put in — but made of bricks. “Bricks” are the generic and non-trademarked term for Legos, but make no mistake, we’re talking Legos here.

Once you get the brickified image, you can alter it on the site by changing around colors. And once you have what you want, you can download inventory you need to build an actual version of the images with Legos. And they’ll even give you the schematics to build it. Yep, awesome.

“Turning a picture into a brick pattern isn’t the kind of problem we solve every day, but HTML5 technologies made it relatively easy. We use the canvas to load the user’s image and process the pixels in the image into bricks,” Carsonified founder Ryan Carson says. Carsonified’s Think Vitamin team built the site.

“We also use the canvas to tile brick images together to form an isometric view of the final production. JQuery helps out with basic manipulation in the UI, and we use Sammy.js and Underscore.js to glue everything together,” he continues.

That’s all well and good. But let’s be honest, the key is Legos.

Why You Shouldn't Check Your Email First Thing in the Morning

We already know we check our email way too often and that the web is crucial to our morning routine, but blogger Sid Savara explains that answering email first thing in the morning does nothing but kill productivity.

It boils down to this: if you start going through your inbox first thing in the morning (as many of us are wont to do), you lose any chance you had of going full steam ahead on your important project of the morning. You immediately wake up and start distracting yourself with everyone else's needs:

As soon as you get up, work on something important for 30-45 minutes, and only then check it. If you can stand it, wait even longer. Some days I don't check email at all until after lunch.

And you know what? As long as you're ignorant of everything else that's going on outside, you can concentrate on what you want to work on.

You don't know what fires need to be put out, you don't know about that special sale that's going on today and you don't know about that funny video your buddy sent you.

In general, Savara says, you should already know what you need to work on when you start your day. If you start checking email, you will move to one of a million other things that supposedly need your attention instead, when they're probably less important.

What do you think? Do you find email just distracts and confuses you in the morning, or do you think you're able to separate the distractions from the things that actually take precedence over your first task of the day? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.Photo by Roland Tanglao.

7 Reasons You Should Never Check Email in the Morning [Sid Savara via Hacker News]

Amazon acquires lovefilm-the netflix of Europe

Amazon acquires LoveFilm, the Netflix of Europe

• 9 Comments

by Mike Butcher on January 20, 2011

BREAKING: Amazon will acquire the remaining shares in the pan-European movie rental and streaming service LoveFilm. Terms have not been disclosed but we believe the valuation was around $312 million. Amazon already owned 42 percent of LoveFilm which acquired Amazon’s DVD rental business in 2008.

Amazon has had a large minority shareholding in LoveFilm for some time and this deal has been in the offing for what seems like forever. The talks have been going on since at least September last year, and Lovefilm investors has been looking for an exit since, oh, 2009?

Assuming regulatory approvals are all fine the deal should close in the first quarter of 2011.

In the US, Amazon has a video-on-demand service but now it gets Lovefilm’s presences in the European online video streaming and rental markets of the UK, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. LoveFilm recently expanded to stream into Sony Playstation 3 and Sony and Samsung TVs, Blu-Ray players and other home theatre devices.

Will it be rebranded? Hard to say but not right now we hazard.

LoveFilm has had a long history of M&A – over 10 mergers and the acquisition of several other on-line DVD rental companies along the way.

In May 2002, Paul Gardner and Graham Bosher launched DVDsOnTap (Online Rentals Limited) operating out of Harlow, Essex. A year later William Reeve and Alex Chesterman launched Screenselect in London, and in the same month Saul Klein launched Video Island, also in London.

In 2003 DVDsOnTap was invested in by Arts Alliance Ventures, a family-owned private equity firm, rebranded to LoveFilm. Mark Livingstone came in as CEO and then merged the business in 2004 with Video Island.ScreenSelect and LoveFilm were big rivals, acquiring smaller outfits along the way until April 2006 when the two merged under Simon Calver.

In February 2008, LoveFilm acquired Amazon’s DVD rental business in the UK and German markets, and in return Amazon became the largest shareholder of LoveFilm.

Here’s the official release:

Amazon to Acquire LOVEFiLM International Limited

LUXEMBOURG CITY and LONDON, January 20, 2011 — Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire the remaining shares in LOVEFiLM International Limited (http://www.LOVEFiLM.com). LOVEFiLM is a leading European subscription entertainment service which combines the benefits of online DVD and games rental-by-post as well as streaming films and TV shows instantly over the internet to PCs, internet enabled TVs and Playstation(R)3. LOVEFiLM operates today in the UK, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. Amazon already has a significant minority shareholding in LOVEFiLM and does not itself operate any similar business in Europe.

“LOVEFiLM has been innovating on behalf of movie rental customers across Europe for many years and with the advent of the LOVEFiLM player, they are further delighting customers by streaming digital movies for their immediate enjoyment,” said Greg Greeley, Amazon’s Vice President of European Retail. “LOVEFiLM and Amazon have enjoyed a strong working relationship since LOVEFiLM acquired Amazon Europe’s DVD rental business in 2008, and we look forward to a productive and innovative future.”
“The deal is a winner for the members who love LOVEFiLM because of its value, choice, convenience and innovation in home entertainment,” said Simon Calver, Chief Executive of LOVEFiLM International. “With Amazon’s unequivocal support we can significantly enhance our members’ experience across Europe.”
The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2011.

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DuckDuckGo Challenges Google on Privacy (With a Billboard)

DuckDuckGo, a one-man-band search engine based out of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, is aiming at Google’s privacy practices with an unusual tactic: a billboard in San Francisco that proclaims “Google Tracks You. We Don’t.”

The ad, which cost DuckDuckGo founder and coder Gabriel Weinberg $7000 for four weeks, went up Thursday in San Francisco’s tech-heavy SOMA district, along the highway dumping cars off the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. While the billboard is far from Google’s Mountain View HQ, San Francisco is a Google-town, where many residents who work at the search giant board Wi-Fi enable, black executive shuttles for the daily commute to the Valley proper.

At issue is Google’s habit of sending along a searcher’s query to the site they are visiting, according to DuckDuckGo’s founder and sole employee Gabriel Weinberg. So if you search on “athlete’s foot” on Google, then click on a link, that site gets told that you searched on “athlete’s foot.” That’s something that not many people know, Weinberg says, and something his search engine doesn’t do.

Moreover, third-party ad tracking networks can also grab that info and add it to the store of information the companies store on users, Weinberg adds. It’s not clear if any ad tracking networks actually do grab this information, since those companies are notoriously unforthcoming about what data they collect.

When talking about the idea, Weinberg built a quick website, donttrack.us, at the suggestion of friends, which took off earlier this month, and it’s privacy message seemed to resonate with users. In fact,DuckDuckGo’s traffic doubled after the site got attention on Hacker News and Stumbleupon and is now up to about 160,000 queries a day, which equates to about 5 million queries a month.

Weinberg chalks that success up to people not knowing that their search terms were available to marketers on search result pages.

“People know that Google is storing searches and they know about the employee snooping,” Wienberg said. “The part many don’t realize is that the serach term is being sent when the search is in the Google link.”

While that’s a pittance compared to the billions served daily by Google, but many of DuckDuckGo’s users are alpha geeks, much as Google was adopted by the tech set back in the late 1990s. Weinberg powers his search engine using his own web crawler, results from Bing, and APIs from a number of companies, including the mathematical answer engine WolframAlpha.

DuckDuckGo, along with the new, well-funded start-up Blekko, have also been challenging Google on relevance, focusing on removing many spam and low-quality content farms from their results. That approach is resonating, as tech observers have begun to turn on Google for the number of low-quality sites that show up in search results. That’s thanks to search optimization methods used by sites to lure searchers, even if a webpage lacks any quality content.

Weinberg’s search engine avoids the problem of referrers — the habit of web browsers telling a new webpage what page you just came from — by doing a quick redirect any time you click on a link in DuckDuckGo. Like Google, DuckDuckGo also offers an HTTPS version of its search engine, which naturally only passes the top-level domain you are coming from (e.g. https://google.com), instead of passing the entire url along (e.g. http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=what+I’m+searching+for).

Weinberg’s not the first to raise the question. Christopher Soghoian, an independent privacy activist who has worked at the FTC and been a Google Fellow, filed an FTC complaint in October last year, alleging Google is violating its privacy promises to users by passing along the queries.

Google itself briefly turned off referrers when it moved to AJAX search, and its HTTPS site, but faced a backlash from online marketers who live and breathe by where they rank in Google searches.

Matt Cutts, Google’s public face for webmasters, defended Google’s policy in a thread on Hacker News, saying the company cares about privacy and users can always try their HTTPS search. As for why the search giant won’t stop sending referrers, Cutts explained, “When Google switched to AJAX-based search, that temporarily stopped sending referrers, and lots of people screamed bloody murder.”

But Weinberg counters that there are other ways for websites to get the data they want without being able to tie it to a particular user using Google’s Webmaster tools, rather than relying on analytics tracking scripts installed on their own website.

“It will tell which terms you are getting traffic from, and how you rank for that term,” Weinberg says. “You can get that info if you need it, so you almost don’t need them to send it.”

-wired.com

US private equity to take stake in Russia's Kaspersky Lab

After the deal, US-based GA will become the second largest single shareholder, the Moscow-based company said in a statement, adding that the financial details were not being published.

Vedomosti business daily on Thursday quoted Natalya Kasperskaya, the co-founder and chairman of the board of directors, as saying that GA was acquiring up to 20 percent the company.

Kaspersky Lab is Europe's largest producer of anti-virus software, according to its website, which says that it employs more than 2,000 people.

Last year, it was ranked 79 in the top 100 world software companies by revenue, which reached $480 million.

In 2009, Kaspersky Lab's share of the world information security market for private computers was around 5.8 percent, executive director Yevgeny Bukyakin told AFP.

Kommersant business daily quoted a source close to the deal as saying that around 15 percent was being sold, worth between $150 million and $225 million.

Kasperskaya told Kommersant: "The company has grown to such a level that we need to get access to capital markets and the new investor will help us to stage an IPO."

Executive director Bukyakin told AFP that the initial public offering of shares could be held within the next three years.

"In the medium term, in the next three years, perhaps a little more, we expect to remain a private company and to concentrate on developing our business. Then the next natural step for the company will be an IPO," he said.

With this in mind, "we are counting on the help of General Atlantic," he added.

The company was co-founded in is 1997 by Natalya Kasperskaya and Yevgeny Kaspersky, a couple who are now divorced but still work together.

Kaspersky studied computer science, cryptography and mathematics at a Moscow institute used by the KGB secret services to train its staff.

He later worked at a defence ministry research institute until 1991, where he first began writing anti-virus programmes.-

physorg.com

An Eyeball Camera, Now with Zoom Cameras built using flexible electronics could find many uses.

The burgeoning field of stretchable electronics promises to change the way we think about gadgets. Silicon chips, once confined to flat, rigid shapes, will break out of the planar mold. One experimental example is a camera, modeled after an eyeball, that features a curved array of light sensors.

Eye of the beholder: Inside this experimental camera, a stretchable sensor array sits below a liquid lens. Water is pumped into both components to change the magnification of the image captured by the camera. Credit: John Rogers

Now a new design gives this curved camera a boost: the shape of the lens and of its sensor can be changed in synchrony, providing a 3.5x zoom. This provides a key piece of missing functionality for the original camera concept, says John Rogers, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Rogers led the development of the device. "The result is a complete camera system, with tunable lens and tunable detector, capable of taking pictures," he says. Rogers and his coauthors published details of the work on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A camera with curved sensors—analogous to the curved retina of the eye—has certain advantages over one with a flat sensor. Its field of view is wider, and overall the device can be simpler and more compact. Possible applications include cameras for surveillance, phones, endoscopic imaging, or even tiny video cameras embedded in football helmets, says Yonggang Huang, coauthor and engineering professor at Northwestern University.

The camera is about as wide as a nickel and has two main parts, a lens and a sensor array. The lens consists of a thin membrane stretched over a transparent glass window. The shape of the lens, which corresponds to the camera's focal length, changes when the space between the glass and the membrane is filled with water.

For the camera to produce quality images, its sensor array must adjust to match the lens. Therefore, the detector consists of a 16-by-16 array of ultra-thin silicon diodes, connected by thin wires. The array, originally fabricated on a flat substrate, sits on top of a stretchable sheet and is bonded to a plate with a circular opening. When water is pumped out of a chamber below the plate creating negative pressure, the stretchable sensors are pulled down, producing a concave shape. Modulating the water pressure in the lens and below the sensors, makes it possible to produce a variety of magnifications.

Data collected by the sensor array is transferred to a computer, where it is used to create an image. The camera has a relatively small number of pixels, so the system uses computational trickery to boost the resolution. By taking multiple pictures from slightly different positions and using special imaging algorithms, the researchers were able to achieve a 100-fold increase in resolution. The same basic technique was used to compensate for damaged pixels.

After years of theoretical modeling and fine-tuning the fabrication and transfer process, Rogers and his colleagues have found effective ways to make silicon stretch into a variety of shapes for various applications. The approach involves connecting ultrathin islands of silicon using precisely patterned wires on a conformable surface. When a surface is stretched, the silicon islands are spared the strain because the wires allow them to separate, and because they themselves are so thin.

Organic and printed materials can also be used to make stretchable electronics, but they can't match silicon in terms of speed. Applications for stretchable silicon circuits range from electrical sensors that sit on top of the brain to wearable solar cells. Rogers's startup MC10recently announced a collaboration with Reebok to integrate stretchable electronics into sportswear to monitor a person's performance during training or rehabilitation.

The new camera design is "a fantastic demonstration of the technology toolbox that John Rogers and Yonggang Huang have pioneered over the years," says Heiko Jacobs, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Minnesota. Rogers and Huang are able to "integrate high-performance devices on stretchable and curved substrates while maintaining electrical activity," he says. "It will dramatically change the appearance of devices and systems which can take new forms and shapes that a few years ago would have been impossible to build."

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