Hasta La Gadget!

It’s Kickstarter time again, only instead of bringing you the strange fruits of amazing amateur inventors, this gadget comes from a pair of seasoned toy designers.

The Air Guitar Move for iPhone is a guitar pick that plugs into your phone. Inside the pick is an accelerometer, so it knows just how hard you are thrashing. A pair of companion apps work with the accessory to actually give it some functionality.

First, a “free play” app lets you finger chords on the touch-screen, whilst you strum them with the pick. You can also shake the iPhone around to vary the sound, much like bending the neck of the guitar. The second app is a Rock Band-like game, and the pick and screen become the controllers.

Air Guitar Move is just one of many app-accessory combos that turn a smartphone into a musical instrument. Several app makers in years past have created apps that replace turntables, flutes, electric guitars and other instruments. A few bold musicians, such as the Gorillaz and iPad DJ Rana Sobhany, are already experimenting with music apps on mobile devices as cheap, versatile replacements for the traditional recording studio.

The brains behind the Air Guitar Move are Colin Karpfinger, who previously came up with Thumbies, an iPhone controller sold by Best Buy, and Ronald Mannak, inventor of the V-Beat AirDrums and V-Beat AirGuitar (a toy guitar with a body you clip to your belt and a neck and headstock you hold in your left hand. Suffice it to say, Mannak likes air guitar).

To get an Air Guitar Move you’ll need to pledge $39 or more. It already looks like the guys will make it: They already have alomost $7,000 of their $25,000 goal, and there are still 20 days to go.

Air Guitar Move for iPhone [Kickstarter]

See Also:

• Playing Air Guitar With Your Phone is the Perfect Excuse For Your …
• Guitar Hero Air Rocker Transforms Us Into Arena Gods
• Pic Band Is a Safety Rope for Guitar Picks
• Pick Punch Cuts Plectrums from Credit Cards
• Trubador Case Holds iPad Like a Guitar

Micro Four Thirds cameras continue to shrink, with the leaked Olympus EPM1 PEN

This looks like a pretty solid leak from Olympus, showing a new slimline Micro Four Thirds camera to be launched on June 30th. The camera is called the EPM1, and it looks to be an answer to Panasonic shrinking GF series of Micro Four Thirds cameras.

Like the GF3, the EPM1 is tiny, more in line with compacts like the XZ1 (also pictured above) than Olympus’ previous PEN cameras. It has a touch screen for control (losing some mechanical buttons in the process), stero mics for video recording and apparently has super-fast AF.

According to 43 Rumors’ source, there will be two more PEN cameras launched along with the EPM1, as well as some new lenses: a 12mm ƒ2.0 and a 45mm ƒ1.8. I can’t wait.

First E-PM1 image and hands-on report [43 Rumors via Electronista]

See Also:

• Retro-Styled Olympus Camera Photos Leaked
• Next-Gen Olympus PEN Hits the Micro Four Thirds Sweet Spot …
• Olympus Pen EP-2, Now in Retro-Tastic Silver

It’s the same entry-level digital SLR, just painted a different color.

Lulzsec and Anonymous have just declared full open war against all governments, banks and big corporations in the world. They are calling all hackers in the world to unite. Their objective is to fully expose all corruption and dark secrets: More »

Remember the K — the Fujitsu supercomputer that promised to do a whopping ten petaflops by the year 2012? Well, it hasn’t reached that threshold just yet, but according to the latest Top 500 supercomputer list, it’s still faster than any other machine on Earth. In fact, the top-ranked beast is more powerful than the next five supercomputers combined, consumes enough electricity to power about 10,000 homes for a full year, and is capable of churning out about 8.2 quadrillion calculations per second — three times as many as what runner-up (and former number-one) Tianhe-1A can process. Today’s announcement marks the first time since 2004 that a Japanese creation sits atop Top500.org’s rankings, but Fujitsu isn’t exactly resting on its laurels. Before deploying it next year, engineers at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science are aiming to add about 100,000 cores to the K’s collection of 548,352, which would provide it with even more computational muscle, and likely spell doom for all of humanity. Find out more in the PR after the break.

Continue reading Fujitsu K supercomputer now ranked fastest in the world, dethrones China’s Tianhe-1A

Fujitsu K supercomputer now ranked fastest in the world, dethrones China’s Tianhe-1A originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Jun 2011 08:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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