Hasta La Gadget!

Wysips popped by our trailer at the show this year to celebrate the 90% transparency of its photovoltaic display overlay achievement with us — and therefore with you. Last time we had a chance to peek through Wysips’ solar cell the transparency was sitting at 70% which was way short of today’s level and manufacturer requirements if this thing is ever to see the light of day. The current setup will not generate enough power to negate the need for a charger, not even close but what it could do is power all your music playback, for example while your phone is exposed to the sun. Wysips’ goal for 2014 is to reach a power return of 10 mWc per cm² as of today the output is closer to 3, though seeing as most of the effort has been focused on reaching this production-ready transparency, they’ve hope this will be attainable. Sampling should begin in march this year with potential for a product in the marketplace in September this year.

Honestly, the demo sets available were pretty worn out looking, though the overlay spoke for itself in that it was still visible at extreme angles but barely when viewing straight on. Part of our demo was plugging an LED into the array that had been retrofit into an iPhone and seeing the LED light come on when the solar cell is exposed and go out when covered. Here’s hoping we get a proper working demo in the coming months though for the here and now, consider us guardedly impressed. A few pics comparing overlay versus no overlay are in the gallery below.

Filed under: Cellphones, Peripherals, Science

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Not done with CES yet? Good, because the mobile crew are back on stage for more news from the show. Joining Brad and Myriam on stage this time are fellow Engadgeteers Joseph Volpe and Mat Smith, along with Sony’s Stephen Sneeden. You know the drill by now, head south for the goods.

Hosts: Myriam Joire (tnkgrl), Brad Molen

Guests: Joseph Volpe, Mat Smith, Stephen Sneeden

Producer: James Trew
Music: Tycho – Coastal Brake (Ghostly International)

Hear the podcast

Continue reading Engadget Mobile Podcast 165 – CES special – show 2

Filed under: Podcasts, Mobile

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It’s easy to hate CES. It’s a vapid, broken wunderkammer filled with booze, waste, and gadgets that no one will buy for months if not years if ever at all. The show floor is a crass place where marketers try out ways to get into our wallets and manufacturers, caught in a spiral of “design-build-trash” have to pump out new hardware just because they have to pump out new hardware – like a toothless, abscessed shark that can’t stop moving as it seeps its own blood into the the water.

But this year, I have to say, was different. It’s different because we at TechCrunch gave ourselves a mission. We wanted to spot the little guy. We wanted to meet all the hardware startups we could. We made a general call on the site and got hundreds of people clamoring to show off their coolest inventions. They brought their best efforts and held them up and said “I made this.”

It was, in short, the BEST.CES.EVER.

It’s what CES – and it’s what innovation in general – is really about: the lone genius (or geniuses) working in the dark, brining something into the light. Call it a CESPool if you want. Say it’s hopeless. Fly in with your dark glasses and your post-collegiate snark and try to go Hunter S. Thompson on the show. That’s fine. It’s been done before and it will be done again.

But when you take a step back and look at CES from an innovation standpoint, and with the expectation that the big money here makes the most noise but the small guys here make the most sense, then you’ve got a different show. There’s some really cool stuff here. We tried to celebrate that.

Because that, in a nutshell, is why everyone watches CES. They’re looking for something amazing. While we’re here on the ground, wandering around halls full of “consumer electronics,” the rest of the world sees CES as a strange, bright star that blinks out in a few days. When’s the last time anyone called what we’re seeing here “consumer electronics” outside of a Circuit City bankruptcy hearing? They call these things tablets, TVs, DVRs, TiVos, phones, and toys.

However, weeks or months from now, the iterative changes you see here will trickle out into the world and change things. That’s important stuff.

CES isn’t for us, the consumers and the pundits, anymore. It is for those lone geniuses on the run. They come here to figure out how to make it big and to meet manufacturers and distributors. They’re here to see what marketing is all about and how they can do it better.

So that’s why we came: to meet with the brave men and women who are actually building something. Technology changes every minute. CES was born in a time when it changed every year. But a lot came out of here. Color TVs, transistor radios, VCRs, early lumpen computers – all of these once thrilled the world. Now Fitbit, Indiegogo, Jamstik, Parrot and countless others are thrilling the world. We don’t need to come to CES because we hear from these guys every day, but it’s still nice to meet face to face.

So yes, I hate CES. But this year was different, and we’ll be here every year until the sun burns out or those little guys figure out a better way to get together and make the future happen.

[Image: Shutterstock]

Eureka Park played home to a whole host of interesting companies and projects (some of which were arguably more interesting than the stuff you’d find on the actual CES show floor) and our first stop was clearly a winner. Meet California-based Sensory Acumen, the creators of curious a scent-generating device called the GameSkunk.

Yes, I know, they should probably work on their branding, but the name does a decent job of explaining what the gadget does. In short, the Game Skunk is a small black box that emits different kinds of odors in an attempt to create a more immersive video gaming experience. It’s not exactly the newest concept out there — the Game Skunk first hit the scene back in 2011, and devices like the ScentScape take a very similar approach to smell-centric media enhancement, but it’s heartening to see the team still plugging away at it.

There’s a much nobler goal here as well — in addition to just enhancing the level of immersion gamers feel as they trek across a digital landscape, the Game Skunk is also meant to be something of a therapeutic tool. By exposing, say, combat veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder to smell-enhanced recreations of war zones, SensoryAcumen hopes to help them cope with the sorts of sensory triggers that make acclimating to life at home so difficult.

Speaking of war zones, that’s exactly the locale that SensoryAcumen took us on an olfactory tour of. While the Game Skunk wasn’t actually running while we were filming (ignore me crouching in front of it like a lunatic), the folks running the booth fired it up just as soon as the camera turned away. It wasn’t long until the device began pumping out a scent highly reminiscent of gasoline as the video demo placed us inside a Humvee rolling through a ruined desert town. Granted, the sketchy CGI quality of the demo made that full immersion unlikely, but Sensory Acumen has made an API and SDK available to game developers who want to bake smell support into their projects.

If you’ve heard of Fibaro already, you’ll just have to forgive us this post: although the home automation system is already available in 43 countries, it’s just arriving in the US, with the main box about to go on sale for $699. In a nutshell, the system works not over WiFi, but using the Z-wave protocol. The base station itself can connect to as many as 240 lights and switches, with support for all sorts of devices: heat and cooling systems, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, doorbells, dehumidifiers and motion sensors. For each of these, you can program any number of macros — e.g., “close the shades when the temperature reaches 68 degrees”. Like Nest (a North America-only product) it eventually learns your usage habits, and offers up tips on how to conserve energy.

In particular, though, the system uses geolocation to track members of the household, so you an also do things like set the heat to come on when you’re a mile away from home. Separately, the company is also releasing a smart power strip, which logs your energy use for various gadgets, and then sends that data to an iOS app. (An Android version is in development.) No word on how much it’ll cost in the US, though in Europe it’ll cost 64 euro, tax included.

Continue reading Fibaro home automation system comes to the US, company releases smart power strip (video)

Filed under: Household

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