Hasta La Gadget!

Recently, Google announced the winners of their Project 10^100, which awarded multi-million start-up funds to promising, world-changing ideas. One of Google’s million-dollar idea babies was for New Zealand-based Shweeb and their innovative take on public transportation. But Shweeb–if it ever manages its way down from an ivory tower and into reality–isn’t innovative as much as it is revolutionary.

Like all truly forward thinking ideas, Shweeb seems completely nuts at first glance. As a tech blogger I’d love nothing more than to mock Google and it’s choice of Shweeb with its poor-man’s take on the Jetsons opening sequence. But the more you read about it, the more Shweeb’s innovative take urban transport makes a whole lot of sense.

The idea in a plexiglas nutshell is to combine the concept of a subway with urban bike lanes (like many cities, my own Brooklyn has been crosshatched with newly designated bike lanes over the past year). Shweeb transport consists of self-propelled “pods” that are tethered to ultra-thin (8-inch) monorail tracks that extend over and through urban landscapes. The pods are completely encased and aerodynamically-designed to cut down on wind resistance. Additionally, the user leans back within the pod with the legs forward, further cutting down on wind drag. According to the Shweeb site, riders should be able to go much faster than a conventional self-propelled bicycle with less work. Or as they boast, their tech “requires less energy to cover a given distance than any other vehicle on earth.”

The current concept is that, like a subway, the Shweeb lines would run between population and business centers. Riders would pick up a pod at a hub in their neighborhood and ride them into a hub near work. Overall, the system might work something like a self-propelled city-wide ski lift. Shweeb promises that they will “soon announce the location where we will
build the first transit Shweeb for public use.”

But the main advantage of Shweeb is that it is completely carbon-free in its everyday function. All the energy is muscle powered. As populations explode, dense urban living is an inevitable reality for our species. Sustainable technologies like Shweeb will help make the civilizations of the future keep themselves civilized.

Video of Shweeb in action after the jump.

The volunteer editors of Wikipedia take their custodial role very seriously. And we should be thankful that they do. They are what keep Wiki at a safe distance from the sexually-repressed and anonymous hordes that populate the comment sections and Urban Dictionarys of the world.

Of course, as a smart ass, I also have a soft spot in my heart for the vandals and pranksters of the Wikiverse. Their digital defilements are like crude drawings scrawled on the wall of a hallowed university library. Always good for a cheap laugh–as long as they remain rare. 

In my younger days even I would occasionally take to open source, log-in free venue of Wikipedia to add my cheeky two cents for the entertainment of myself and my friends. Usually, these jackassisms were found and removed in short order. But some edits stayed for months. For all I know, there may still be some stray forgotten “facts” of mine that remain part of the vast (and high search-engine ranking) Wiki knowledge bank.

As a fairly heavy user of Wikipedia, I never found myself getting too discouraged by the occasional deliberate misinformation on the site, because I know the keepers of Wiki
will be there to clean house sooner or later. And they do a fairly good job. But they can’t be
everywhere.

But there may soon be an end to the wild world of crude and salacious Wikipedia edits. Recently, the PAN 2010 Lab in conjunction with CLEF held a competition that invited teams to submit methods to detect different forms of wikivandalism. There was even a €500 prize supplied by Yahoo! Research. Slashdot reports that the winning approach utilized rule-based bots that are programmed to scan for suspicious changes and updates. The bots were able to detect 20% of vandalism without misclassifying any legit posts. However the system could also be adjusted to detect 95% of vandalism, but would then misclassify 30% of regular edits. Either setting is far from perfect and would still require the judgment of a human editor. But nonetheless, if implemented, they would be a valuable aid to the sentinels of Wikipedia in their ongoing war against smart asses.

There are tons of backpacks and bags that come with poorly fitting solar panels or bulky batteries that claim to keep your gadgets juiced up while you’re out and about, but most of them are heavy on gimmick and light on utility. It’s those frustrations that led the community at Quirky to develop the Trek Support, a new backpack that’s both a fully functional charging station for your laptop, phone, and other gadgets as well as a TSA compliant laptop bag that’s safe to travel with and doesn’t look out of place on the street.

The Trek Support is one of their newest products. It features a clamshell design with a large main compartment and zippered outer pockets for valuables, and is made of durable, waterproof nylon that keeps the interior dry. Inside the Trek Support is a padded nylon board with mesh pockets that can fit a 15″ laptop, and up to three other gadgets like an eReader, mp3 player, or camera. At the bottom of the boars is the rechargeable battery that connects to and charges your devices over USB.

Quirky is unique in that its user and design community is responsible for coming up with product ideas, financing them with pre-orders, and then releasing them to the public for general purchase. The Trek Support is currently in the pre-order phase, and if interest is high enough Quirky will manufacture it for broader sale. You can pre-order one now for $130 list price. 

Your next external hard drive and NAS device can be completely wireless – except for power, of course. The LaCie Wireless Space is designed to look good, back up your data, and even be the heart of your home network if you need it to be; it comes in 1TB and 2TB models and features an 802.11 b/g/n router built-in as well as three gigabit Ethernet ports for high-speed data transfer. The Wireless Space can also act as a NAS, media server, or network extender once it’s configured, and has a pair of USB 2.0 ports that can be connected to printers for wireless printing or additional external drives to create a pool of storage. The Wireless Space will be available in October if you’re interested, with the 1TB model shipping for $229 and the 2TB model for $399 retail price.