Hasta La Gadget!

A new Kickstarter project takes a useful thing and makes it even more useful, by offering a strap that not only carries your DSLR but also protects it when not in use. It’s the perfect way to minimize your equipment when you’re out shooting on a trip and don’t need your full camera bag and gear, and it’s so deceptively simple, it’s a wonder it doesn’t already exist.

The Miggo strap is designed by Israel-based industrial designer Ohad Cohen, who was a founder of professional camera bag maker Kata, which remains one of the leading makers of bags for pros and hobbyists. Cohen was the first product designer at Kata, then later was in charge of R&D, so he knows a thing or two about creating camera gear.

Miggo is designed around the philosophy that while there’s plenty of interest in photography since the advent of smartphones, people avoid high-quality cameras and gear because of the convenience factor of using their mobile devices. To alleviate that, the Miggo combines a sling strap to secure your camera with a wrap that protects it when not in use. It also comes in a grip variety for those who prefer tying their camera to their wrist to prevent drops. Both versions quickly tie around both camera lens and body to provide a secure protective layer, which then allows you to chuck the camera into a shoulder bag or backpack along with all your other stuff, instead of having to use a segmented, padded camera bag designed specifically for protecting gear.

It has a tripod mount adapter built-in so you don’t have to remove it to take time-lapse or other stabilized shots, and there are versions for both standard DSLRs and smaller-bodies compact mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras, like Sony’s NEX series. Early backers can pre-order for $30 while supplies last, at which time it goes up to $35 for the Grip + Wrap or $40 for the Strap + Wrap.

I’m so tired of lugging my 70-lb. bag of camera gear around airports that this seems like a very appealing option when I don’t feel like I’ll need my entire kit. The company anticipates shipping the Miggo by June of this year, and development has progressed to the point where prototypes are essentially ready to ship (once a proper production line is established). Miggo hits the sweet spot between affordability, convenience and smart design, so it’s very likely they’ll reach their modest $20,000 goal quickly.

As you whiz down the highway from LA to Las Vegas in your Tesla Model S, your Bluetooth humming, your Google Glass flashing messages from VCs trying to get into your next round, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to reach down and grab a refreshing cup of ice-cold Kombucha? Well now you can 3D print your very own custom center console designed to hold your fermented teas, fair trade lip balms, or any number of other tchotchkes, bootstrap-style!

Sure Tesla is about to release a premium center console with fancy Corinthian leather cup Snugglerz™ and his and hers matching USB 3.0 ports, but what about now? What can you do now that will improve your ability to hold a fresh-squeezed Vegan Blackberry Juice and Farm-Raised Civet Coffee Coolata from the Creamery? A 3D-printed center console cup holder, ya big lug!

You can have your assistant download and print this sexy little Model S center console rig for you right now so he can assemble it and place it into your car, allowing for an amazing range of potential pluses for you and your friends as you scoot across town in your futuristic transport. You can keep all sorts of drinks in there, but don’t go crazy with the phablets. iPhones only, please.

So there you have it: improving the human condition one center console at a time. It’s almost enough to make you want to Selfie a smile.

via 3Ders

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An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the Tesla Model S did not come equipped with front drinkholders. This has been corrected.

Apple has filed a new patent (via AppleInsider) for supplementary tech that adds pressure sensitivity to its iOS devices, via special pressure sensors located around the corners of the device or otherwise hidden beneath the display. The tech described in the patent would allow for detection of gestures coming from beyond the touch-sensitive regions of the display, so you could have swipes recognized as coming from the bezel for instance.

Other benefits would include the ability to better detect and discount thinks like a palm resting on the display, or a thumb that’s on-screen and yet just being used to support or hold a device, rather than as part of a touch input gesture. Already, Apple’s iOS displays are among the best when it comes to accidental touch detection, but this system would make that even better, which could potentially allow for further reduction of bezel size, for instance, or even making it possible to determine different kinds of input based not only on how many fingers are used, but on the force of the press.

Bezel-based input gestures are another big possibility here. BlackBerry already used swipes in from the bezel to activate different actions in both the BlackBerry Playbook and its BB10 line of smartphone devices. Apple could implement similar actions based on this patent, or it could go even further and use the bezel itself as an input surface, to be used in tandem with on-screen cues in software while keeping the screen completely unobscured at the same time, the patent says.

This isn’t he first we’ve heard of pressure sensitive screens from Apple: It filed a patent in November last year that described a similar system but with sensors that were placed beneath the screen and reacted to being actually pressed, rather than located in key areas and using triangulation and relative force detection to triangulate input. A Bloomberg report from November also suggested that Apple was working on improving touchscreen sensors by adding fine pressure sensitivity for introduction in devices beyond this year, so hopefully this new patent means Apple’s making progress on how to bring that to market without adding a lot of complexity to its existing internal device designs.

Google today sold Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. While many speculated that Google would release phones after it bought Motorola in 2011, it didn’t happen — Motorola remained a partner like other Android OEMs. Recently, Google acquired Nest, and TechCrunch has learned that Google has big plans for the team behind the connected device company.

Google will keep the Nest group intact inside the company. The new division will still work on hardware devices, but not necessarily thermostats or smoke detectors. In fact, Google would like Fadell to work on gadgets that make more sense for the company. Will it be a phone or a tablet? It’s unclear for now.

While Nest first became popular with its thermostats, Google didn’t buy the company for these devices. First and foremost, the company wanted to snatch the great product team.

Nest founder and CEO Tony Fadell used to work for Apple on the iPod and was a founding member of the iPhone development team. Many people working in hardware consider him one of the best executives that understand both hardware and software — he is comfortable working at the intersection of the two.

Moreover, Fadell managed to attract great Apple engineers when he started working on Nest. They wanted to follow Fadell’s plans and were good engineers. And that’s exactly what Google was looking for when it acquired Nest.

When it comes to budget, Google is willing to let the Nest team use as many resources as it needs. In other words, the company is getting serious about consumer hardware, and Motorola was just a false start.

Google will keep Motorola’s patents, and it seems pretty clear now that Google only wanted that from the get-go.

Acquiring Nest and selling Motorola now make more sense when you put these two things side by side. Something was missing with Motorola. With Nest, Google finally has the right team and mindset to create and produce gadgets.

Google has just let us in on another tidbit about the deal it has built with Lenovo over the sale of its Motorola Mobility assets: It keeps the high-tech Q division-type stuff being developed at Motorola’s Advanced Technology Group. That means the Ara modular smartphone concept, as well as sensors you swallow and passwords you tattoo on your skin.

The Advanced Tech team is headed by one-time Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency director Regina Dugan, and has been behind some of the more sci-fi things that Google has demonstrated since acquiring Moto’s mobile biz.

Project Ara was one of those projects that garnered a lot of attention back in October. It essentially features a single base unit design that pairs with components that can swap out including keyboards, bigger batteries, memory, sensors and more. Users can easily customize the device to taste using these parts, building the perfect phone for business, or for travel, or for media consumption etc. And this isn’t something that’s still so far away as to be purely contemplative: Google said back then it would be launching a pilot beta test of the Ara soon.

Motorola’s crack research team was also working on truly wearable (and ingestible) tech, including passwords that are embedded tattoo-like beneath your epidermis and can be activated on command, and authenticators that can be swallowed in pill form. Another ingestible product discussed on stage at D11 last June was a sensor that could be swallowed to relay medical information to a user and their doctors.

One more recent Motorola Advanced Tech project revealed in a patent filing in November details a lie-detecting neck tattoo that uses embedded electronics to take in auditory information via microphones and relay that back to an attached smartphone for analysis. Lie detection is just one possible use (imagine audio recording or other types of environment sensing, too) but it’s definitely an intriguing one.

All of this stuff fits pretty nicely under the Google X division at Google, where its other kooky experiments are currently housed. Luckily this part of the deal should mean we’ll see the Advanced Tech team continue its work under that department, or anywhere at all really, since it’s too interest-grabbing to just mothball away.