Hasta La Gadget!

Hard drives gone bad don’t always have to end up in the trash. Miguel Rivera, a systems administrator, took a pile of used drives, gutted some and turned them into beautiful sculptures.

“The overall concept was to make something out of just hard drive parts and pieces,” says Rivera. “I wanted it to look solid and heavy so I leaned towards just using metal — no plastic or gluing things together.”

The results are creations that almost take your breath away in their complexity and beauty.

Rivera’s first sculpture was made out of a standard 3.5-inch hard drive, and designed to evoke a car. “It wasn’t really difficult putting this one together since I didn’t have to modify anything other than the cover — everything else just screwed on,” he says. It took 33 hard drives — each wheel made of eight discs from gutted drives, and one intact drive for the body — and a whole weekend to make.

From there, he created his second project, a mini car that took 29 hard drives. The third project, the “fat boy motorcycle,” was even more complex. “This one was a bit tricky for me because I just couldn’t get parts to mix well at first to reflect the look I wanted,” he says.

Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he’ll explore where our industry is and where it’s going — on both micro and macro levels — with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.

Last weekend, Nilay Patel did a great overview of the murky legal issues surrounding the mysterious CrunchPad — now coming to market direct from developer Fusion Garage as the $499 Joojoo. While I won’t get into the swirling controversy, I think there’s a few important lessons to be learned from this great gadget debacle.

First, smart vendors under-promise and over-deliver. The hype and buzz around the CrunchPad were off the charts from day one. Everything from the delivery schedule to the initial price points were unrealistic, made moreso by continued promises to publicly show the prototype and targeted price points that kept rising with each announcement. Keep it low-key and simple — then surprise and delight your customers with early ship dates and lower than expected prices. Too much promise with no delivery is the classic recipe for having a product get tagged vaporware. Always good to remember, “Whom gods destroy, they first make humble.”

Continue reading Entelligence: Lessons from the CrunchPad

Entelligence: Lessons from the CrunchPad originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The CrunchPad is dead. Long live the JooJoo. We met with Fusion Garage founder and CEO, Chandra Rathakrishnan, in downtown Manhattan today, to get some hands-on time with the JooJoo–the Web-based tablet that was known to the public as the CrunchPad until Fusion Garage and TechCrunch editor, Michael Arrington, had a very public falling out. Well, mostly public: Arrington has largely stopped talking about the device since he unleashed the threat of severe litigation.

Fusion Garage, for its part, has been having a field day. The company has been traveling across the country, holding video conferences, and showing off the device to anyone in the press who will listen. In fact, we’ve met with Rathakrishnan one two different coasts now–our news editor, Mark Hachman, got some hands-on time with the tablet earlier in the week in San Francisco.

There are laptops and then there are laptops. The Envy 15 has fallen into that second category ever since we got our hands-on: it’s the first PC we’ve seen that really equals the MacBook Pro’s unibody design and it packs a scorching-fast Intel Core i7 processor, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4850 graphics and Beats speakers. On paper, this is easily the hottest laptop we’ve seen in some time, but has HP really managed to deliver on that promise? We spent a few days with this $1,800 monster, so read on to see if it lives up to the hype.

Continue reading HP Envy 15 review

HP Envy 15 review originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Dec 2009 17:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Look out, e-reader industry. Here comes Taiwan.

According to a statement released by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, the Taiwan Cabinet has approved $66 million (NT $2 billion) over the next five years to promote development of the e-publishing industry. The target: secure $3 billion (NT $100 billion) of e-reader revenues for Taiwan by 2013.

According to the Council, Taiwan Premier Wu Den-yih directed the Ministry of Economic Affairs to “assist enterprises involved in the production of
e-readers, including ultrathin ‘e-paper’ displays, to develop and
commercialize critical technologies, integrate resources and secure
patents.”

 The government, Wu Den-yih added, should help those e-readers “conform with
international and cross-strait standards so as to fully realize their
potential in the global marketplace.”

The government will put forward a four-fold strategy, according to the statement: enhance the global competitiveness of Taiwan’s e-publishing industry;
promote technological innovation to strengthen the industry’s
“ecology;” encourage the expansion of Chinese-language digital content;
and foster a superior “digital reading society” among Taiwan’s citizens.