Hasta La Gadget!

With the rise of cheap and affordable manufacturing facilities, combined with new sources of financing such as crowd-funding, hardware startups are hot once again.

And there is no better evidence of this than a quick dash through the Hardware Alley at TechCrunch Disrupt last week in San Francisco.

We started with a new kind of connected coffee maker and ended with a startup that lets you look at your thoughts. Enjoy.

Blossom Coffee
Boosted Boards
BrightLot
Cerevellum
Devium
Ninjablocks / ninjablocks.com
App Tag
HEXBRIGHT
ImpossibleCamera
Interaxon

In a world where IPv6 lives and IPv4 addresses are scarce, network providers must fight for survival… or at least, claim their IP blocks quickly. The RIPE NCC, the regional internet registry for Asia, Europe and the Middle East, warns that it’s down to assigning its last set of 16.8 million IPv4 addresses as of this weekend. That sounds like a lot, but we’d do well to remember that the registry churned through about 5.2 million addresses in just the past two weeks. What’s left won’t be around for long, folks. To cut back on the number of Mad Max-style battles for dwindling resources, RIPE NCC is rationing out IPv4 for local registries in 1,024-address chunks — and only to those who both have IPv6 assignments as well as proof of a need for IPv4. With just a bit more than half of the RIPE NCC’s customers currently on IPv6, that could still trigger a shortfall among networks that haven’t prepared for the internet protocol apocalypse. We’d advise that companies stock up on IPv6 supplies before launching the raiding parties.

Continue reading RIPE NCC handing out its last block of IPv4 addresses, tries to fend off internet survivalism

Filed under: Networking, Internet, Alt

RIPE NCC handing out its last block of IPv4 addresses, tries to fend off internet survivalism originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 16 Sep 2012 18:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A weapon doesn’t have to be complex to be devastating and awesome, and this sling is a perfect example. Dubbed the “forearm hoopack” this simple frame, lets the user sling spheres with repeatable precision. There’s no doubt about it; slingshot master Joerg Sprave shows off his balls of steel with this one. [YouTube] More »

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

One sits far atop the Android smartphone heap while the other has recently stepped up its efforts to compete more aggressively by acquiring the stake of its decade-long joint venture partner. But at the recent IFA event, electronics giants Samsung and Sony both acknowledged the importance of their smartphone sub-brands by stretching them into new product categories. For Sony, its Xperia sub-brand hopped across to its tablet while Samsung brought the Galaxy brand to a connected camera. How these companies have stretched these brands reflects their relative position both in terms of where they’ve moved from and where they’ve moved to.

For Sony, the move of Xperia to another product category represents somewhat of a full circle (as does the return of the Sony brand to handsets itself). Part of the early playbook for Sony Ericsson was to bring established Sony Electronics brands — notably Cyber-Shot and Walkman — to phones focused on imaging and music in the heyday of the feature phone, which the joint venture clung to for too long. Xperia, in contrast, was the company’s first “native” sub-brand meant to evoke “experience”, of course. And while many in the line have been well-received, they never translated into a strong global market share for Sony Ericsson.

Continue reading Switched On: Rubber brands

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets

Switched On: Rubber brands originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 16 Sep 2012 17:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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For all the noise that was made around the relative lack of novelty with the iPhone 5, it’s fair to say that most people will probably agree on the fact that it is a faster phone, and not in a small way. Without running proper benchmarks, we’re not sure if it is really “2X faster” than the previous one but it is obviously faster.

One of the first theories to emerge was that Apple was using the ARM A15 core design instead of the ARM A9 design that was integrated to the Apple A4 and A5 chips. I know, the naming scheme is confusing, so to put this in context, ARM’s A9 and A15 core designs are CPU blocks, which can be integrated into Apple’s (or other) chips that also contain graphics processors, video processors etc. A full chip like the Apple A6 is called a “system-on-a-chip” or SoC (learn more about SoCs). Qualcomm’s Snapdragon , NVIDIA’s Tegra and TI’s OMAP are other well-known SoCs. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: iPhone 5 held back by… dogma, The unibody iPhone,