Depending on how you look at it, this is either the first floating four-wheeler, or the first jet ski with wheels. Either way, it’s awesome from just about any perspective.
The Quadski, as they say, comes from the same guy who created an amphibious car, called Aquada. His name is Alan Gibbs, and he was able to build himself a working prototype of the vehicle, but silly automotive laws in the U.S. (like, you know, required airbags) kept him from manufacturing the wheelie-boat on a large scale.
But the Quadski is different from the Aquada, as it functions more as a single-person vehicle — a hybrid between an ATV and a jet ski.
It can go 45mph on both land and water, which isn’t quite what you can see on some ATVs, but still respectable, and takes four seconds to switch between the sea and the earth. Oh, and pre-orders will open soon at the price of $40,000.
According to Gibbs, the company will move 1,000 units in the first year, high price point and all.
If you’re looking for an honest deal with a man who makes it his mission to connect to the consumers of the media he produces – and you love blood-filled effects-driven films, of course – RZA’s “The Man with the Iron Fists” release package will be right up your alley. This movie is going to be out on November 2nd, and according to RZA, the simple blacksmith that takes on evil with his own metalworking skills creating a weapon not only inside the film, but out here in the real press-driven film industry. If you head to the IronFists.com release site for the film, for example, you’ll find complete Release Notes with more details than you could possibly need to explore the upcoming epic.
This film promises to take the theater with film quality not unlike that of Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” series with RZA and Eli Roth at the helm. As RZA makes clear, “Hollywood don’t put out these kind of movies, kid. If you want a karate movie, you gotta go get a subtitle joint. This is English speaking with Oscar-winning actors in it.” A mix-up of the quality that comes with the top-brass from Hollywood, that is, with an energy only otherwise found in the best of the best in international kung-fu productions.
You can see RZA speak on the movie briefly in the interview series shown above, hosted by hip-hop legend Funkmaster Flex and working with the director / rapper / producer to reveal not just the ingredients that make the Iron Fists movie possible, but what made the Wu-Tang Clan what it is in the music industry as well. RZA was one of the founding members of that hip-hop / kung-fu fusion group, if you did not know, and it’s from that media staple that the artist has been able to blossom in the film universe.
The Iron Fists movie will be rolling out with superstars such as Rick Yune, Jamie Chung, Cung Le, David Bautista, Byron Mann, and Gordon Liu. With Liu you’ll start to recognize stars from Quentin Tarantino films, Pam Grier, Joe D’Augustine (film editor), Lucy Liu, and Yuen Woo-Ping. This last entry in the star-studded crew was also the fight choreographer for such beastly films as Kill Bill (1 and 2), The Matrix, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Russell Crowe is in the film as well – certainly an audience grabber.
This film will work with characters such as Bronze Lion, Brass Body, and the Blacksmith, so you know it’s going to be a heavy metal sort of party, but the base here is hip-hop. Expect the visual effects that make Brass Body (David Bautista) into a real metal-skinned warrior to be complimented by the musical talents of RZA, the Wu-Tang Clan, Wiz Khalifa, The Black Keys, and and Kanye West. Expect eyes to be flying out of the faces of fighters and blood to cover the walls, also.
This is kind of cool: there is a full size stormtrooper—and a small R2-D2—guarding one of the Don’t Do Evil Galactic Empire’s data centers. Oh the irony. More »
Like hiding a comic book inside the textbook you’re supposed to be studying, this handy bookmark ensures you’ve always got something interesting to read when your book takes a boring turn. It features Shakespeare’s complete Hamlet, so reading it can’t be considered slacking off since you’re still getting a dose of culture. More »
What prevents most people from getting an e-reader? Seriously, if you read, there are few reasons not to get one – aside from the price perhaps. With most competitive devices going for over $100 a person may rethink before going electronic. Yet a German company took a different approach and looks to shake up the e-reader industry in doing so.
txtr previously launched an online book download service in many countries like the UK and Germany. Via a smartphone app users buy and read a competitive selection at competitive prices. txtr is now embarking on the hardware business, keeping it simple and giving the veterans competition. The txtr beagle will launch at an estimated $13. Yes, you read that correctly. Why so inexpensive? That’s what happens when you go back to basics. Based on information on their beta website, txtr appears to have removed intricate electronics and functions and focus on – to use their slogan – read only. Really their approach seems fairly logical. The device holds just 5 books at a time. Books are acquired via Bluetooth on smartphones or via their existing Android app. It claims to be the smallest (about 6 cu in) and lightest (about 4.5 oz) 5” or 6” e-reader. Design is meant for easy resting in the hand and easy stashing in the bag. No chargers required for this gadget either as two AAA batteries reportedly give “a year of reading” or 12-15 books depending on your appetite. A smart move in my mind. The beagle will come in 5 colors too. No launch date exists now, but if you want to learn more sign up on their site for information as soon as the download service and the beagle launch in the US. Watch out e-reading industry, this dog looks to make waves. [ New Approach to eReading copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]
Star Wars is popular — that’s about as simple as you could put it. So it’s no wonder that companies and brands are licensing the movie franchise in order to boost sales. Microsoft did it with their Xbox 360 and Motorola with their DROID 2. Rovio has now joined in on the fun and released another teaser trailer for Angry Birds Star Wars that will surely whet your appetite.
The teaser features a short snippet from A New Hope where Han Solo explains to Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi that his Millennium Falcon “made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs.” Then, we see an Angry Birds version of the Millenium Falcon which looks to be having a little trouble getting up to light speed, but with the help of a familiar slingshot, the ship eventually gets there.
Obviously, George Lucas failed to realize that a parsec is actually a unit of distance and not time (equal to 3.26 light years or approximately 19.2 trillion miles). We’re not sure if Rovio noticed Lucas’ mistake, but they seemed to just run with it anyway. Sadly, the teaser trailer is all the info we have so far.
However, it could mean the Millennium Falcon will play a critical role in the gameplay, and the slingshot on the back of the ship may suggest that we could soon find ourselves launching angry birds off of the ship’s deck, but we’ll mostly just have to wait until the game’s release on November 8 to find out.
For all of Microsoft’s talk of Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8, we’ve heard precious little about the Windows 7 version beyond the certainty that it was coming. Eventually. Someday. The company is partly putting that anxiety to bed with word that IE 10 should be available for the Metrophobic in mid-November, but only in a preview version — a possible sign that Microsoft’s Windows 8 RTM deadline prevented the concurrent platform releases we’ve grown accustomed to in recent years. The team in Redmond is hinging its launch of a finished Windows 7 build on the feedback it gets, so we’d suggest that those willing to experiment with a new browser (but not a new OS) still give IE 10 a shot next month.
Apple is a hardware design company. It owns ideas not factories. And because it runs its own operating systems, an intrinsic part of the design of its products is software. But this crucial area is showing signs of weakness as competitors copy its innovations. More »
Late last night, the Kickstarter campaign for Obsidian’s Project Eternity finally came to a close. It was a very exciting ride too, with the developers at Obsidian managing to raise nearly $4 million in funding. The exact figure is $3,986,929, which is enough to make Project Eternity the most-funded game in Kickstarter‘s history.
We thought it would be a while before we saw a video game raise more than the Double Fine Adventure, which netted $3,336,371 in funding by the time its own campaign came to a close, but it appears that we were wrong. Project Eternity reached its funding goal only one day after the Kickstarter campaign launched, and since then has been raking in the cash from fans who are all too eager to open their wallets. Obsidian named a ton of stretch goals for the project after it became clear that the studio was about to make much more money than it was originally asking for, meeting most of those stretch goals but unfortunately falling just short of the goal for $4 million, which would have seen the entire game improved.
It’s easy to see why fans were so willing to hand over their money, too. Project Eternity will be a fantasy-themed computer RPG, heavily inspired by the old-school CRPGs that were made with BioWare‘s Infinity Engine. Many of the developers currently at Obsidian worked on a lot of those classic RPGs in one way or another, including games like Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment. With this Kickstarter campaign marking something of a return to the beloved RPGs of the past, it’s no wonder gamers threw their money at the campaign, especially with Obsidian at the helm.
Sadly, we’ve got a while to wait before we can get our hands on Project Eternity, as it currently has a release window of Q1 2014. Like all of these crowd-funded games, though, the end of the Kickstarter campaign is merely the beginning of everything else, and we expect to hear plenty about Project Eternity over the course of the next year. We can’t speak for you, obviously, be we sure are excited to find out more. Stay tuned.
Apple’s web traffic share among mobile devices is huge, according to new numbers from Chitika. The online ad network is seeing 43 percent of smartphone web usage coming through iPhones up to the 4S, plus another 3 percent from the iPhone 5 alone. By contrast, the Samsung Galaxy S III is driving 2 percent of mobile web traffic on its network, combined with 15 percent across all other Samsung mobile devices.
Both phones are taking up a huge percentage overall, however, with other smartphones combined adding up to just 37 percent overall. Apple and Samsung account for a total of 63 percent of the mobile traffic Chitika sees through its millions of daily ad impressions. Last week, the company told us that the iPhone 5 had quickly risen to surpass the GSIII as a traffic driver on its network, but these latest figures prove there’s no doubt which two companies are battling it out for overall smartphone market dominance.
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