Hasta La Gadget!

Electronics maker Bang & Olufsen is releasing a 500GB digital audio player this month that uses an intelligent ‘music identity’ system similar to Pandora.com’s and Microsoft’s MixView. But sadly, its BeoSound 5 system is likely to only end up in the showcase rooms of America’s richest families. It’s expected to be priced at a massive $5,900.

Suddenly, the value of the other two smart music analysis services seems to grow. Not only are they both free, but their livelihood on the cloud allows for customized hardware and wireless applications.

But you have to give B&O it’s due on one thing: It’s an extremely sleek, beautiful-looking system. I especially like the $500 floor stand that makes the player look a prop from Star Wars. Still, I’d stop myself before calling it ‘sensual,’ which is what the company did in its statement. That’s nuts.

The BeoSound 5 system comes in two parts – the BeoMaster 5 black box that includes its storage, web, and PC connections, and the futuristic BeoSound 5 master control. The control has a smart juke box program called ‘MOTS’ (for ‘More Of The Same’) that takes WMA tracks from your digital library and creates playlists based on appropriately similar attribute matches.

According to B&O, the identity attributes are analyzed by a complicated math formula, but there’s no word on whether the system will tell you the reason for its choices. Pandora, for example, uses interesting (some would say uselessly vague) explanations like ‘we’re playing this track because of its mild rhythmic syncopation.’

The control is flashy, especially the cool aluminum wheel, and the UI seems very smooth (check out the video below) and definitely different from other visual controls. But if you’re paying almost $6000, shouldn’t it have an OLED screen and come with a butler or something? It currently has 10.4-inch LCD. It’s also wireless, with direct connection to web radio stations.

As we’re reminded every day now through layoffs and discarded product lines, the economy is really beating down electronic makers. So this high-end gadget will probably have a hard time getting traction. But someone will manage to pick it up and you know it’ll look awesome in the middle of any room.

If you’ve wanted to scan thousands of family picture prints at a time but never had the time to go through with it, a couple of services are available to do the job on your behalf. ScanDigital and ScanMyPhotos.com both take pictures that you send through snail mail and get back to you in digital versions that you can store in the cloud, safely.   

ScanDigital’s service scans your photos at 48 cents per print (at 300 dpi) or for 68 cents (at 600 dpi) to an online server where you can download or share them with others. Once they’re done, they’ll send you back DVDs of the digital pictures and all of the originals. According to the company, you receive task progress emails through the process.

But it’s not that easy to send those pictures to them in the first place, according to Yahoo’s Christopher Null. He tried the service this month and found that the instructions to send the pics were somewhat confusing and didn’t like that he couldn’t change his dpi scanning requests before the service was practically over. In theory, ScanDigital could set up a live online scanning ‘booth’ where a customer could check out how his pictures were looking while they were being scanned, and possibly request re-scanning a few for a few more bucks.

ScanMyPhotos.com also offers a similar service and scans hundreds of pictures per minute through an unnamed Kodak machine seen in this video. It’s probably similar to this one. Its rate of 5 cents per photo is likely the cheapest out of any similar service on the internet. But you just can’t send out a big box with a messy array of pics. You have to separate them all out into small packages with rubber bands and label them in sequence, and they all need the correct orientation. That’s annoying. Basically, you’re still doing a lot of the work and they’re just taking care of the basic scanning.

But are these services any better than buying a good scanner and just doing it yourself?

At the beginning of the year, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to scan thousands of photo prints on behalf of my older relatives. I thought it was important to insure their memories (which are also my own) against disasters like earthquakes, theft, and flooding. But one hour after I started scanning prints of the first box out of 15, (with a high-quality flatbed), I just quit. I realized this was going to take forever. 

I’d scanned 16 pictures, which seemed like a lot to me (maybe that’s a pathetic number for scanning pros, but I was trying to be perfect with the framing). I figured that if there were 2,000 pictures in the boxes, it would take me over 156 hours to complete the task. Rats.

Since that’s way too much, I’m probably going to use ScanDigital to get them in order. Even if takes me a full afternoon to ship them, I figure I will save a week’s worth of hours, at least. 150 big ones. It’s not going to be cheap to pay for the service, but nothing is more expensive than wasted time.

Sources: CBS5 KPIX, Yahoo, NYTimes, ScanDigital

Photos: Canon, ScanDigital

2/3/08  – Note: ScanDigital contacted us with a discount offer for Gadget Lab readers — If you choose to try the service, you can add in the code  WIRED10 on an order and get 10% off the total price. — JF

Streaming video pioneer Vudu released an iPhone app this week that allows users to rent or buy a movie remotely. With a few swipes of your finger, you’ll be able to direct your video box at home to download the selected movies, so they’ll be ready to go when you come home for work. Because waiting for less than twenty minutes to start a download is just a nightmarish proposition for control freaks.

The Vudu Movie Catalog application offers the full browsing services of the at-home box, with full cover art, movie synopsis, and cast information. There’s no word if the iPhone App will also offer iPhone selections of its new "On-Demand" section, which comes with extra web content, like Discovery Channel.

Currently, Vudu offers about 13,000 movie titles in their video-boosting HDX digital video format. The company has gained notoriety through the quality of that video and its torrent-style storage system, with small pieces of movies moving from one hard drive to another to facilitate downloads. Recently, Vudu also announced a standards-based RIA (Rich Internet Application)platform for its box that allows third-party developers to build and improve web-based content apps.

The VUDU Movie Catalog application is available now at the iTunes store, for free.

A little less than two years after TiVo debuted its swivel video search engine, it is now killing it in favor of a better integrated search whose biggest improvement is visual.

Announced this week at CES 2009, the new TV search works similarly to the search bar in the Firefox address browser. You type in the first few letters of a show in the ‘discovery bar’ and relevant recommendations of shows on TV satellite and broadband networks come up. At the same time, you get a nice looking new column arrangement of information about a show, including episode description, rating, and relevant art.

The new appearance, according to TiVo reps, was created to fit to the longer length of HDTV’s. The old swivel search had no visuals and didn’t provide immediate information that could help a user choose efficiently. Still, this is a feature that is most helpful during passive browsing – if you’re the type that already knows what you want, the new search will look much nicer but it won’t make a huge difference.

Already, some are saying that the search function is not fast at all but TiVo reps promise they’re working on boosting that speed. That’s an important development that is critical if the company really wants to make this feature the "Google of TV search."

There are three other updates with search that are interesting.
Results now come up through the most popular of the day automatically,
and you can also browse shows by the season. This is especially helpful
for serial shows like The West Wing, where I’m constantly confused
about where it falls in line.

But the one I like the most is the Wish List feature, which takes a
show that is not currently available anywhere and holds a search on
your behalf so that when it’s finally offered, it will record it. It
will be even better if you end up forgetting about it and will show up
one day like a present you didn’t expect. I will be adding the “Rebels
of Oakland” HBO documentary from a few years ago because I can never
find it anywhere. C’mon HBO, you can have three docs about the Red Sox
in two years, but can’t manage to release the Rebels? Get on it,
please.

TiVo’s search update is in now in beta and available to Series 3 and HD TiVos.

LAS VEGAS — It was probably the lack of any exciting new products from the Sony stable that the keynote address by company Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer was high on the celeb quotient and low on new product news.

At CES, Stringer paraded a list of stars including Tom Hanks, Usher, Oprah’s favorite doctor Mehmet Oz (better known as Dr. Oz on TV), the Yankees baseball hall-of-famer Reggie Jackson and Hollywood power executives, John Lasseter, chief creative officer of Disney and Pixar and Jeffery Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks.

Hanks and Stringer kicked off the keynote with banter about some of the prototype products that Sony is working on. This includes new eyeglasses that would allow the wearer to watch a movie on their glass and see their surroundings at the same time.

Sony didn’t offer any details on when early products based on the prototype will be available. But if successful in bringing it to market, the company would have eliminated the biggest problem in wrap-around personal movie viewer-glasses: claustrophobia.

Glasses from companies such as Myvu and Vuzix are not popular among most consumers because they completely cut off peripheral vision and awareness of the surroundings.

With its new glasses, Sony hopes to eliminate that problem and make it more acceptable to users.

Sony also showed a prototype of a flexible display screen. The organic TFT OLED called Flex can be squeezed and manipulated even as it displays on-screen video.

On Wednesday, the company announced a new mini-notebook called the Vaio Lifestyle PC. The size of a small business envelope, it sports a eight-inch LCD screen.

At CES, Sony is also showing a prototype of its sugar-based bio battery that generates electricty based on the breakdown of carbohydrates and GreenHeart concept phone that has a recycled plastic keypad and greener packaging among other things.