First, the good news: AMD pulled in $1.65 billion in revenue — a record for the second quarter! Now, the bad news: the company still lost money. Just a (relatively) little bit, though, with a net loss of $43 million or $.06 per share. That’s five percent more revenue than the first quarter of 2010, and a massive 40 percent boost over the second quarter of 2009, in which it lost $330 million net. What changed? Sales of graphics hardware in particular, up eight percent over last quarter and a huge 87 percent from last year, driven by success of the Radeon HD 5000 series graphics cards. Likewise, sales of mobile processors were up 18 percent over last quarter. Net profitability? Keep this up, AMD, and it’s not far off.
What’s the first application you think of when I say the phrase “vibration-powered self-generating battery”? Me too, but let’s keep this clean.
The faux-batteries are from Brother Industries, and inside the AA and AAA-sized shells you’ll find a capacitor and an electromagnetic induction generator. Shaking them will charge the capacitor enough to juice low-power gadgets. The example given is remote control, which needs around 40 to 100mW of power. The battery can put out up to 180mW, so while you won’t be using these to power a camera-flash, a quick shake to get the TV remote going again would work just great. In fact, you could just build this in to a remote and forget the batteries altogether.
Ok, so I couldn’t stay clean for the entire post. As one commenter on the Gizmodo post about these batteries points out, pop a few of these inside a vibrator and boom! You have perpetual motion.
We’d obviously take this one with a grain (or two) of salt, but Nikon Rumors has it that Nikon’s fixing to give entry level DSLR buyers yet another option in the not-too-distant future. Of course, with the planet’s largest photo show coming up in just a few months (Photokina, if you’re curious), it’s about time that some of these rumors start to pick up traction. Truth be told, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard of the D3100 — a few months ago it was being bandied about as the D4000. Word on the street has it that the shooter will boast a 10 megapixel CMOS sensor, a dozen autofocus points and a fixed LCD on the rear (read: no swivel). But that’s just the beginning; the D3100 will purportedly boast 1080p and 720p movie modes, and each will support continuous autofocus while filming. Yeah, you read that right — continuous autofocus in video mode. That’s a killer feature that we’ve been begging for ever since the D90 became a reality, and while we’ll probably want to swap out the stock 18-55mm lens for something with a bit more flexibility, we couldn’t be happier to hear of these features hitting Nikon’s range. Look forward to a price and release “in a few weeks.” We are.
HP’s Photosmart B110a printer shows the direction printers will take as the Internet pervades everything electronic. Too bad about the driver software. pOriginally posted at a href=”http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20010444-264.html” class=”origPostedBlog”Deep Tech/a/p
Does your Twitter/Facebook/IM avatar suck? The answer is likely to be a resounding “probably”. You need a custom caricature, and being a proper geek, you should get it not from the dodgy street-artist with the portfolio of sample “work” downloaded from the internet, but over the actual internet.
That’s just what Dave Lanham, artist extraordinaire and designer at the Icon Factory (the people behind Twitterific and a lot more besides) is doing. Dave is holding FaceTime calls with his iPhone 4 and drawing the portrait of the person at the other end. The hi-resolution Retina display no doubt helps him to see deep into your soul.
The fun started when Dave broke his foot and was left lounging around the house. His friend Gio Gutierrez (right) volunteered for a portrait and then things just got bigger and bigger. Dave is charging $50 per portrait, which you can then use as your online personality (or print on a T-Shirt, we guess, if you are really narcissistic). The demand is likely to be huge, so even if you can’t get on his list, you should check out Dave’s website, which has time-lapse videos of his work being made.
It may or may not actually be the most compact Nintendo 64 we’ve ever seen, but even if it’s holding down the second spot, you can’t knock the ingenuity here. Crafted by one Evil Nod, the self-proclaimed N Gear 64 is little more than an N64 console tucked, shoved and crammed inside a Sega Game Gear enclosure. Best of all, the modder somehow stuffed an N64 controller in there too, yet still left all of the original markings for nostalgia’s sake. Head on past the jump for a video of it in action, or tap that source link to learn more about the build process. Riveting stuff, we tell ya.
Seriously, what the hell did HP acquire when it bought Palm? A bunch of pretty patents and a rapidlydwindling talent pool, it would seem. Mike Bell, a celebrated capture for Palm back in 2007 after 16 years at Apple, was most recently occupying the role of Senior VP for Product Development on Jon Rubinstein’s team, but he has now switched allegiances to the blue team. Interestingly, though his address might change, his job spec will not — Mike will act as Director of Smartphone Product Development in Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group, where he’ll “help build and lead a team to build breakthrough smartphone reference designs to accelerate Intel Architecture into the market.” It’s hard to imagine how Intel could signal its intent to be a big player in the smartphone realm any more forcefully. Click past the break for the full text of the internal email announcing Mike’s arrival.
Yesterday we brought you a host of videos and photos straight from Tokyo Big Sight, reporting on the best new toys at this year’s Toy Show. More generally now we’re going to give you a round-up of the trends and highlights.
We’ve had our eyes on green innovation in Japan for a long time, as witnessed by our major eco report earlier this year. Even the Toy Show had its share of eco, with Takara Tomy particularly devoting a whole booth to concept products that celebrated being energy efficient.
For example, their ene POCKET box generators allow you to connect with and power a range of other toys. Just turn the arm a few times and then join it up with another toy to supply it with charge.
Jolly moving toys that sit on your desk were first made popular by the likes of the Pekoppa. Now Takara Tomy has produced the Kinopuyo dancing mushroom and the solar-powered Flip Flap plant, which gently bobs up and down (presumably to make you feel relaxed).
Japan is certainly in Ryo Ishikawa fever at the moment; the golfer seemingly can do no wrong and his face was all over the convention center. On top of the Digital Grade Master 1/6 scale figure — complete with his trademark lookalike mascot driver cover — there was also the Excite Golf video game, endorsed by the young sportsman.
We’ve seen a lot of robotic creature toys over the last couple of years, especially dog and cat-themed money boxes. This year this trend continued, with the Peeing Dog being a slightly impractical version, while the Choenbako monkey bank being clearly the standout here.
As the Sky Tree continues to soar, Sega Toys have even produced one of their home planetarium products, the Homestar Aqua, themed around Tokyo’s new tower attraction.
Takara Tomy did some funky things with a Disney character: they re-imagined Mickey Mouse as a robot!
They also created the Mickey Mouse Projector lamp in the familiar shape of Mickey’s face and showing animations of the character. Sadly these products are still in development and there are no details on release dates yet.
Fans of famous characters would have like the Mario Kart Wii ChoroQ Hybridcars and funky racing track, along with the pinball Mario Kart Wii Grand Prix Race game!
Micro musicians will enjoy playing the drums on the Taiko no Tensai from Epoch, a mini instrument that likely won’t disturb your neighbors…
From the sublime (the very realistic ChouChou butterfly) to the ridiculous (the Popcorn no Te grabber), there’s always plenty for everyone at the Toy Show.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
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Does your Twitter/Facebook/IM avatar suck? The answer is likely to be a resounding “probably”. You need a custom caricature, and being a proper geek, you should get it not from the dodgy street-artist with the portfolio of sample “work” downloaded from the internet, but over the actual internet.
