X-arm's Robotic Display Mounting Solution

Today's society has turned down a decidedly pro-couch potato road. Everything is remote controlled, designed so consumers exert the least efforts possible. The X-arm is another bid to help us on our way - a robotic arm which allows you to mount a flat panel LCD or plasma tv and adjust the viewing angle with (you guessed it) a remote control. The X-arm can hold a 150-pound 60 inch flat screen and can swivel a maximum of 70º and tilt 50º. Flat screen enthusiasts and couch potatoes may rejoice!

Bamboo Keyboards by Links International

While wood is good, some might say bamboo is even better. Links International are claiming a first with their Takechiyo - a 104-key USB bamboo-encased keyboard. The good shoot peripheral will cost approximately $83 and goes on sale in Japan on February 11. Will we be seeing Rosewood speakers anytime soon?

Web readers read books less frequently

Internet users are more likely to cut back on reading books than
to curtail their magazine consumption, according to a recently
released survey by Jupiter Research.

The finding contradicts the long-held assumption that periodicals
are more vulnerable than books to competition from the Internet.

David Card, a senior analyst for Jupiter Research, said that
books and magazines suffered differently from online competition.
Internet users, he said, may read magazine content online, but
were less likely to give up buying hard copies entirely.

Not so for books: "The kind of information you can get online is a
lot like magazines," he said. "But the way people read books does
not migrate easily to the Web. With books, there's not channel shift;
there's substitution."

High-speed wireless technology to replace bulky cables

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 5 A team of I.B.M. researchers plans to report
this week that they have used standard chip-making materials to develop
a high-speed wireless technology that could do away with the bulky cables
that now connect electronic devices in the living room.
In the past, high-frequency wireless technology has generally required
exotic semiconductor materials like gallium arsenide that are costly to work
with and difficult to miniaturize.
On Tuesday, at an annual semiconductor industry design meeting here,
the researchers are expected to describe a design that is capable of
transmitting more than 10 times the data of today's Wi-Fi using lower-cost
silicon germanium material.
The researchers said the new technology would be ideal for moving HDTV
video signals around the home wirelessly in the unlicensed 60-gigahertz
portion of the radio frequency spectrum.

This is referred to as the "millimeter wave band," and it has long held out
the promise of carrying far more data than other portions of the spectrum.
Moreover, because the high-frequency portion of the radio spectrum generally
does not penetrate walls, it may be more palatable to Hollywood and the cable
and D.S.L. telecommunications firms, which have been concerned about the risks
of piracy posed by some wireless technologies, said Richard Doherty, a computer i
ndustry consultant at Envisioneering Inc., based in Seaford, N.Y.
"It might appease Hollywood, but Monster Cable would lose out," he said.
The use of silicon germanium is significant because it exploits standard equipment
that is readily available in I.B.M. chip-making plants, according to Modest Oprysko,
a manager in communication technology at I.B.M.'s Yorktown Heights research
laboratories.
That means that there is potentially a relatively quick path from research to
commercialization.
"This is Bluetooth on steroids," he said, referring to the current industry
standard that has been used as a wireless cable replacement.
The I.B.M. researchers said that despite the fact that the millimeter wave
technology would have a short range in the home, it might have significant
applications as a low-cost alternative in point-to-point communications
systems that are popular as data links on corporate campuses.
One of the advantages of the shorter wavelength systems is that the
antenna can be assembled as part of the chipset, further lowering the cost of the technology.

Woize beta now available for smartphone users

Woize is another VoIP program that offers features similar to Skype and works on the Windows Mobile platform. This beta program can be downloaded here and runs on Smartphones with a minimum speed of 200MHz. Now you can save more by making cheap calls to other cellphones or landlines, while calls made to other Woize users are free

Nokia E61 slated for mid ferbury launch?

The Nokia E61 has drawn much attention since its announcement, and the best designed Nokia yet will most probably be launched sometime in February. Targeting the business and corporate circles, the E61 comes with a QWERTY keyboard that functions flawlessly even under intensive e-mail correspondence. You can even carry a conversation via the hands-free speaker and typing an e-mail simultaneously. A 16.7 million color screen displays mails in a crystal clear format. Will the $500 pricetag justify its capabilities? Stay tuned to find out

Hp website confirms Hw6900 existence

Looks like the hw6900 series is reality as we have stumbled upon its listing on the HP website. Virtually identical to the hw6515 Mobile Messenger, it runs on the excellent Windows Mobile 5.0 platform, offers WiFi and a miniSD slot in place of the original SD slot. We know its coming, but the million dollar question would be when?

Treo 700p sneak peak

A user from the treocentral forum has uploaded a photo of the Treo 700p with rather strong claims that the new smartphone will run on the Garnet v5.4.9 OS with EVDO support as well. Pre-installed programmes include pTunes, SprintTV, Documents to Go 8, and the Blazer 4.5 browser. The Treo 700p comes with a rather generous 62.8MB of free space compared to the miserly 32MB on the Treo 650. The 320 x 320 screen will display pictures taken with its 1.3 megapixel camera in crisp and clear colors

PC inside a wine bottle

We've seen computers put in damn near everything, but now there is something new. Bottles are generally reserved for miniature pirate ships, but a Japanese case modder managed to cram a mediocre PC into a small 1.75-liter Ballentine's whisky bottle. It has a P3 733EB processor, 256MB of memory, 40GB hard drive and even a 60W mini-ITX power supply. Unfortunately the glass had to be cut to place all of the components inside so it isn’t that cool of a trick.

Amazon starting their own associate program like Adsense

Amazon is apparently looking into the feasibility of starting their own ad network like Adsense. They’ve been contacting select members of their associates programs, asking if they would like to be beta testers. The way they want the beta test to work is to give you a special code for Amazon’s Keywords Recommends banners (the banners that you feed a keyword to and they show related products) and have this special code then show these new ads 50% of the time.

When I first heard about this I thought it’d be Amazon product listings displayed in an Adsense-like way and I figured it’d analyze your content for for products to serve, but they’d be Amazon products. Turns out I was wrong, they want their own contextual advertising network.

This seems to be more or less an Adsense clone, meaning third party sponsored links, not Amazon links. It is known that Amazon currently get’s sponsored links for their own sites from Google, but apparently they wish to take out the middleman and break out on their own. The fact is that while Amazon has a high gross revenue, they have really thin profit margins, whereas Google and even eBay have much better profit margins. So I think there is probably a little bit of business jealousy at work here, and rightly so. Amazon realizes that if they want to compete as a major Internet destination, not just an ecommerce site, they need to capture a larger chunk of the online advertising revenue. It’s kinda funny, 5 years ago people were speaking about the death of online advertising, and now its huge.

So anyways, if they go through with this, then once MSN’s AdCenter program is launched, and Yahoo’s Publisher Network goes out of beta, that’ll give us publishers 4 choices in this area and choice is never a bad thing.

They also previously offering a $50 bonus for everyone who signs up, and that bonus is now $100.