Hasta La Gadget!

In the years that it took for eBook readers to become objectively decent, prices haven’t really come down much. Foxit seeks to take on Sony and Amazon with a solid reader at under $250.

The eSlick, manufactured by the same company that builds the Kindle for Amazon and sold by a company more famous for their free alternative PDF reader than anything else, looks like a capable device, with a respectable 600×800 reflective screen, 128MB of RAM and a claimed 8000 page battery life. It’ll ship with 2GB of additional storage and room for expansion via SD cards or USB sticks. Where the eSlick falters, however, is in the areas of Wi-Fi and cellular connections—for the time being, it has none.

Foxit says a later version of the device may ship with Wi-Fi, but don’t indicate whether or not that’ll affect the price. As it stands, your options for loading and viewing content of the eSlick look to be fairly limited: files, mostly PDFs, are loaded through the USB port. MP3 support could also make the eSlick an attractive podcast player, assuming the media player app is serviceable.

The lack of connectivity won’t be a problem for many, as the artificially limited data capabilities of the competing Kindle won’t leave feeling like you’re missing too much. More importantly, the price—$229 in January and $259 afterwards—and sleek design have offerings from Sony and Amazon squarely beat. [PCWorld]

NEC continues on its quest to equip digital signage with with all the tools necessary to know everything about the consumers that enter its perimeter. The all-knowing ad is now a reality.

Eye Flavor uses an embedded camera to gather demographic information about visitors, but also to gauge how well particular advertisements affect those that see it. It can tell whether viewers simply glanced at the display, gave it a passing look, stopped, or ignored it entirely. From this information advertisers can know exactly which ads grab their targets in a real way, and the locations that host the displays can more specifically target advertisers with strong demographic proof.

More hands-on possibilities mean changing the ads to fit the crowd on the fly, and offering discounts/coupons in the form of QR codes for mobile phones.

To test the system, NEC had the Eye Flavor installed at the Granduo shopping center in Tachikawa for three weeks in October, and it’s now available for real utilization for about $20k.

NEC has been doing a great deal in the last couple of years, particularly for technology to gather demographic information about shop visitors and then track their movements. Other systems can track movements within a store, which items were visually attractive, time spent at displays, and other valuable data. We’ve gone into this a great deal in the Trendpool, where we highlight these among a wide range of new retail technologies.

Press Release from NEC

Polaroid may have defeated Kodak in the instant camera business, but it can’t beat a sagging economy. Polaroid (or Polaroid Corp to be precise) just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for the second time in 7 years. Of course, the new Polaroid Corporation is really just a holding company for the Polaroid name — a brand that has been thoroughly diluted by its application to sub-standard TVs, vile portable DVD players, and gimmicky PoGo digital cameras. Polaroid says, “We expect to continue our operations as normal during the reorganization and are planning for new product launches in 2009.” That a threat?

[Thanks JideOsan, image courtesy of Jerkwithacamera]

Filed under: Digital Cameras

Polaroid files for chapter 11 bankruptcy, again originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Dec 2008 04:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

We didn’t get a chance to talk about it here, but we want to say a big thanks to Aquent for inviting us to speak at their Q’s Club event at the Design Hub in Tokyo Midtown on December 5th.

We covered a lot of ground and ran out of our 90 minutes rather quickly, so I hope that we got our points across in the midst of our code-switching, culture jumping presentation. The goal was to lighten the burden that “Cool Japan” is carrying, while still showing the relevance of many of the seemingly wacky/absurd offerings of the Japanese market as seen by our foreign clients. More importantly, we wanted to show the down-to-earth segments of the Japanese market that don’t get as much press coverage.

To sum up:
– Foreigners see Japan as some strange and innovative otherworld (but we already knew that)
– In many ways, this is true (see above)
– Japanese men do NOT wear bras (why does this keep coming up?!)
– While weird products, fashions, and subcultures aren’t necessarily “trends” in their own right, they aren’t irrelevant either.
– We showed a LOT of photos we’ve taken.

Many thanks to everyone who came as well! There was great attendance, no shortage of questions, and we enjoyed meeting everyone afterwards.

Already known as the world’s strongest material and a great solution for shrinking transistors, now researchers say it can also be used to make super-tough, super-small storage.

Researchers at Rice University demonstrated a graphite data storage medium that was only 10 atoms thick. They said it could provide many times the capacity of current flash memory and withstand temperatures (up to 200 C) that would make SSD memory disintegrate.

On the minus side, the researchers have only gotten an access time of 100 nanoseconds, about 10 times slower than SRAM. But they’re confident that as they experiment more with the material, they’ll be able to get that number down. [ComputerWorld]