Hasta La Gadget!

Why can’t our refrigerator fire off an urgent email when the milk has gone lumpy? And the toilet paper dispenser warn us it’s empty – before we sit down? And when will our microwaves run BitTorrent? EUREKA, the European R&D network, knows how badly you crave networked objects, and rather than mock you, it’s moving to help. To that end, it has developed small, inexpensive, battery-powered sensors able to link everything from consumer electronics to environmental monitors to factory robots – creating the much-anticipated “Internet of Things.” But unlike the over-hyped RFID, it’s technology you’d actually use. Instead of knowing whether your keys are indeed on the RFID reader, the network could gently remind you that you left them in your car, which is now 100 miles away with someone else at the wheel, but, luckily for you, low on gas. Gaze into the so-called future of things with EUREKA’s press release, conveniently embedded after the jump.

Continue reading European R&D advances ‘internet of things,’ hastens our Phildickian future

European R&D advances ‘internet of things,’ hastens our Phildickian future originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Technical complexity and financial naiveté have meant that London’s ambitious plans to cover its underground train network with cellular signal by the 2012 Olympics are hitting the scrapheap. In spite of Huawei’s most generous offer to provide £50 million ($81m) of equipment for the project for free, the London Mayor’s wish that UK mobile operators be the ones to foot the installation bill — without a penny coming out of public coffers — has unsurprisingly found little favor. Compounded with the logistical hellride of trying to get everything up and running by next summer, that’s now led to a mutual agreement among all parties concerned to abandon the project. Mind you, the plans to get WiFi up at 120 stations in time for the Olympics are still on track, so at least we’ll be able to pull down some data before diving into those dark, damp tunnels.

London scraps plans for cellular coverage on the tube, bums Huawei out originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Apr 2011 15:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The stat guardians at IDC are among the most reliable sources for keeping track of the latest developments in the smartphone market, but we’ve got to say their forecasts haven’t always benefited from the same accuracy. It’s with this disclaimer that we present you the world of 2015 as seen through the IDC prism. In just four years’ time, says the data, Windows Phone 7 (or whatever version it reaches by then) will have ascended to occupy a fifth of the market and second spot overall behind Android, whose leading position is expected to stabilize somewhere around the 45 percent mark. Apple and RIM are projected to hold steady with shares close to where they are today. It has to be humbling for the IDC, which predicted Symbian would continue to dominate all the way into 2013, to now have to foretell of its almost complete extinction (a mere 0.2 percent) and total irrelevance in the smartphone market. Alas, while the new prediction sounds very reasonable today, four years of unknown unknowns is a mighty long time to try and forecast through, and we have a feeling we’ll be looking back and chuckling at this within a few short months — probably (hopefully!) in the midst of a massive webOS revival.

Continue reading IDC fails to learn from previous mistakes, issues 2015 smartphone predictions

IDC fails to learn from previous mistakes, issues 2015 smartphone predictions originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Mar 2011 09:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you want better cities, goes the theory herein, you’ll have to start at their very foundations. Steve Lewis, ex-Microsoftie and current CEO of Living PlanIT, has a vision for how to make our cities smarter and more sustainable, and it starts literally at ground level, with the installation of smart sensors into buildings as they’re being built. The appeal of his company’s ideas has already attracted some tech luminaries as partners, Cisco being among them, and now Microsoft has also been signed up — to provide the cloud framework required to keep all those sensors talking with its Azure platform. Paredes, a Portuguese municipality, will play host to one of the first such projects, eventually providing homes for nearly a quarter of a million people and costing a staggering €10 billion ($14.1b) to complete. To understand the synergistic benefits of having your life monitored by an omniscient Urban Operating System sentinel, skip past the break for a press release and explanatory video.

Continue reading Microsoft unites with former exec in building a ‘smart city’ in Portugal

Microsoft unites with former exec in building a ‘smart city’ in Portugal originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Mar 2011 04:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Latest in our series of “when video games turn real,” here’s the US Army’s newest addition to the wargadget arsenal. The Individual Gunshot Detector, produced by QinetiQ, is an acoustic monitor attuned to tracking down the source of gunshots just by their sound. It has four sensors to pick up the noise of incoming fire, and its analysis of those sound waves produces a readout on a small display that lets the soldier know where the deadly projectiles originated from. The entire system weighs just under two pounds, and while it may not be much help in an actual firefight — there’s no way to distinguish between friendly and hostile fire — we imagine it’ll be a pretty handy tool to have if assaulted by well hidden enemies. 13,000 IGD units are being shipped out to Afghanistan later this month, with a view to deploying 1,500 each month going forward and an ultimate ambition of networking their data so that when one soldier’s detector picks up a gunfire source, his nearby colleagues can be informed as well.

Continue reading US Army to deploy Individual Gunshot Detector, essentially a radar for bullets

US Army to deploy Individual Gunshot Detector, essentially a radar for bullets originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 17 Mar 2011 05:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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