Amazon has the Polk Audio M10 for only $69.99 shipped, originally priced at $249.99. The “wide dispersion drivers and tweeters project sound over a wide area so every listener in a room hears open, ‘box-less,’ three-dimensional sound, and front mounted bass ports ensure deep, punchy bass.” Product page.

[via Amazon]

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Deal of the Day: $249.99 Polk Audio M10 Cherry Bookshelf Speaker for $69.99 Shipped

Honda’s slightly bizarre attitude toward personal mobility has given us an hybrid car, an exoskeleton to strap your granny into and a gyroscope-packed Segway-alternative; however if you’d rather stay indoors, then their latest simulator might do the trick.  The Honda Bicycle Simulator is intended to allow would-be cyclists to “safely experiencing the possible risks bicycle riders may face” in the hope that they then don’t end up under a juggernaut.

To do that, there’s a mounted bike and large display, along with speakers that extend out to surround the rider’s head.  The simulator shows various road conditions, while the bike controller itself is clever enough to recognize when the rider dismounts and walks it along, as per the road situation.  Secondary displays mean you can check over your shoulder and to the sides.

The content itself varies according to the user’s age, and Honda has pre-programmed simulations of “going to school,” “going to the grocery store,” “going to cram school” and “going to a local shopping street”.  As you might expect, they aren’t planning on selling very many of their Bicycle Simulators; in fact just 500 of the 732,900 yen ($8,253) systems are tipped to find buyers each year.

[via Autoblog]

Press Release:

Honda to Begin Sales of Honda Bicycle Simulator Developed for Traffic Safety Education

TOKYO, Japan, October 15, 2009 – Honda Motor Co., Ltd. today announced plans to begin Japan-wide sales starting February 2010, of the Honda Bicycle Simulator developed for the purpose of traffic safety education. By safely experiencing the possible risks bicycle riders may face, users will improve their ability to predict risks and increase safety awareness. In addition, rider evaluation session which will follow the riding simulation will help users learn traffic rules and manners in an enjoyable way. Honda will aim for widespread use of this simulator by a range of customers including public offices, law-enforcement organizations, driving schools and educational institutions which conduct bicycle safety education programs primarily for school children and senior citizens. Honda will begin accepting pre-sale orders in November of this year.

In recent years, the total number of fatalities from traffic accidents has declined in Japan. However, the ratio of fatalities in accidents involving bicycles has increased. Bicycle riders aged 10 – 19 in and above the age of 50 have the highest chance to get involved in an accident, and approximately 70 percent of bicycle accidents are caused by violation of traffic rules.

Leveraging the know-how accumulated through its activities to promote traffic safety since 1964, Honda has been developing and selling motorcycle and automobile simulators since 1996 and 2001, respectively, as traffic safety educational devices which enable users to safely experience the risks based on real-world traffic situations. By offering these simulators, Honda’s goal is to improve people’s ability to predict risks and increase safety awareness. Striving to realize a richer mobility society in the future, Honda developed the Honda Bicycle Simulator as an educational tool for a wider range of people.

Key features of the Honda Bicycle Simulator

・ Compact design (length 2,270mm × height 1,400mm × width 990mm, weight 88kg)
・ Equipped with monitors to check right/left and behind.
・ Equipped with a “walking sensor” which recognizes the user’s action of walking the bicycle.

・ Contains different courses such as “going to school,” “going to the grocery store,” “going to cram school” and “going to a local shopping street” to offer realistic experiences for user groups of different ages.
・ Contains a course for the user to learn traffic laws and manners to ride a bicycle in mixed traffic.
・ After the simulation, the rider’s path can be reviewed from multiple vantage points -above/below and right/left- and the riding situation and evaluation will be displayed on the monitor.

Sales Plan (in Japan): 500 units per year

Suggested Retail Price (in Japan, including delivery fee): 732,900 yen (698,000 yen before tax)

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Honda Bicycle Simulator injects road-safety fun into gaming

Hey Windows users: what would you risk for a mouse of such mystical persuasions that it has the word “magic” right in the product name? How about $69 for the mouse followed by a few sleepless nights after installing a .exe found in the murky shallows of the internet? That’s what it’ll take to install some hacked drivers, said to enable Apple’s Magic Mouse gestures, on your Windows rig. The drivers were extracted from the latest Bluetooth update targeting Mac owners running Windows under Boot Camp, but now there’s nothing stopping you from trying them too. Let us know how this dark elixir works out in the comments below.

Windows drivers for Apple’s Magic Mouse conjured from the ether originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Magic Mouse owners lusting for multi-finger gestures on a PC can stop wishing. Some good ol’ fashioned hackery pulled Windows drivers from the latest Bootcamp update. You can grab them here, report back with results. [Uneasy Silence, thanks Dan!]

Continued here:
Magic Mouse Drivers for Windows Now Available [Apple]

Amazon is selling the Altec Lansing FX3022 Expressionist BASS speakers for just $54.99 shipped, originally priced at $129.99. This “system has a downward firing orientation, causing the bass to reflect off the desktop and create a radiating 360-degree sound field for convincing slam in the lower registers.” Product page.

Specially engineered 40mm drivers provide the mids and highs with great clarity. The two drivers are compartmentalized in a sealed chamber, ensuring that the pressure of the subwoofer doesn’t mix and muddle the sound.

[via Amazon]

See the original post here:
Deal of the Day: $129.99 Altec Lansing FX3022 Expressionist BASS 2-Way Speaker for $54.99 Shipped

Perhaps it’s a 2009 thing and, come the new year, packaging will won’t enthral us so, but for now there’s a great deal of geeky appeal in how manufacturers choose to present their tech.  Cowon have generally been associated more with audio performance than they have with style, but it looks like some of the “shape up” message is getting through: DAP Review have just taken delivery of the iAudio 9 PMP, and as their unboxing photoset shows there’s obviously been a lot of thought put into how it’s packaged.

The plastic shell does look a little like a big-gulp drinks container up-ended, but inside there’s a reasonably slim PMP with touch-sensitive controls, some headphones with an anti-tangle cord, and – quite a surprise these days – a mini CD with drivers and software.  Considering most companies point you in the direction of their website for apps to go with your new media player, we’re giving Cowon a little credit here.

As to whether this is all a case of style over substance, ask yourself whether you’d have reached for a Cowon player in their previous, ugly bare-box or vacuum-packed containers, or if you’d have gone for the glistening iPods next to them in-store.  Unboxing a well-designed device not only sets the scene for a clean usage experience, it also helps banish a little of that “new gadget guilt” where you wonder whether you really were justified in splashing out on the plastic.  Anything that minimizes that, we’re happy with!

Relevant Entries on SlashGear

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• Cowon O2 PMP with T-DMB & touchscreen: pricing announced
• Cowon iAudio 9 PMP gets priced & dated

View original post here: 
Cowon iAudio 9 PMP gets unboxed

While much of the Verizon DROID by Motorola impressed us, one less than satisfying aspect of the Android 2.0 smartphone is its camera.  Despite boasting 5.0-megapixel optics, the DROID’s autofocus was sluggish and the final shots mediocre.  Now, an ostensibly simple fix is promising to address the issue, and you don’t even need to whip out the screwdrivers: in fact, all that’s required is a soft cloth to give the DROID’s lens a proper clean.

Updated: There’s now talk that the camera issues were addressed with a “silent” over-the-air (OTA) firmware update.  That’s not been confirmed by Verizon or Motorola as yet.

“This works and sounds crazy. I just read that if you clean the camera lens really good with a soft cloth you will get the green focus. I’ll give anything a try so I did it. My camera now focus’s all the time. Green focus on all my shots. Supposedly there is a little bit of oily film over the lens and when wiped clean it fixes the issue. give it a shot and report here. I can tell you it worked lol…4 shots, all green….” cereal killer, Droid Forum

According to some users’ experiments, the DROID is being shipped with an oily film over the lens; that film is what’s causing the autofocus to have trouble locking on, and producing less than perfect shots.  After giving it a good polish, users are claiming to have perfect shot after perfect shot.  We’ll be trying the fix with our own DROID review unit, and feed back with the results.

[via TechCrunch]

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• Best Buy taking pre-orders on Motorola DROID now
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• Verizon DROID Eris by HTC to be $99; Hero specs confirmed

View original here: 
Motorola DROID camera woes fixed by a good lens clean? [Updated]

DELHI, INDIA–“I’ll take you! I live there!” a small boy with a blue shirt and a perfect toothy grin said as he ran ahead of me. His quiet friend in yellow jogged beside him smiling shyly, his jet-black Elvis curl bobbing on his forehead. The boy in blue stopped a few yards in front of me turned around, beaming and added in Hindi, “I know computers quite well.”

These weren’t middle class kids on the well-trod, parent-driven Indian path to seats at IIT. These were Delhi slum kids, whose families likely live on less than $2 a day. And yet, for the last five years, they’ve spent several hours of their free time every day playing games and learning English, Math and Science on computers.

So how have they bridged the much-agonized-about digital divide without a hand out from a chip company, computer company or wealthy philanthropist? A for-profit Indian company called NIIT.

It started back in 1999 when Sugata Mitra, NIIT’s chief scientist, noticed his kid could learn how to use gadgets like a mobile phone far faster than tech-savvy adults could. At this time, most computer “labs” in Indian schools were one or two computers that were only to be used under the strict supervision of a teacher. The reasoning was computers were expensive and required training and supervision. As a result many kids only got to look at them from afar in the classroom.

Instead Mitra wondered what would happen if he left a computer out in the open for a group of children to discover. So he literally knocked a hole in the office wall to the slum on the other side.  He shoved a computer in the hole and set up a camera on a tree limb to record what happened. A 13-year-old, illiterate kid who’d never seen a computer wandered over tentatively, and soon realized he could move the cursor by moving a finger across the touch pad. Within four hours, a small group of kids had gathered. They had figured out how to open Internet Explorer and were playing a game on Disney’s Web site. “All of us were absolutely shocked watching that,” says Abhishek Gupta who heads the program now. Some expected the kids to break or even try to steal the computer.

A pilot project with the World Bank followed, and 22 of these “Hole in the Wall” kiosks were set up around the country from 2001 to 2005. The organization studied the results closely. The most obvious take-away was that kids left on their own will learn computers. The project also helped develop team-building and social skills—with 200 kids sometimes huddled around one screen. Whether the computers lead to more general academic improvement was less clear, but in many cases it was up measurably, Gupta says.

But interestingly when that partnership was over, NIIT didn’t take the project down the non-profit route. It’s not because the company is adverse to such things—it’s also opening a new high-end university that is run as a non-profit. But there’s a unique attitude in India that believes the way to eradicate poverty is to turn India’s scrappiest, free-market entrepreneurs on the problem, not to increase handouts.

NIIT now sells the kiosks at between $6,000 and $20,000—depending on which model and how many screens—to the government, who puts them mostly in schools in India’s poorest areas. There are 500 stations in India and a handful in 10 different African countries.

Having customers means NIIT has had to compromise on the original vision. For instance, the government requires administrators to keep an eye on the systems. They’re not open when an administrator isn’t there. But running the program as a business has assured its survival and given NIIT the cash flow to pour money into content creation so it doesn’t have to rely on the country’s spotty Internet connections for kids to stay engaged. Gupta says his job isn’t necessarily to be a profit center. Success is running a break-even program that makes a social impact. But that’s still a world away from a donor-funded program.

NIIT isn’t alone. For profit companies have made microfinance loans for years in India. One of the most known is SKS Microfinance. It was run as a non-profit in the early days, but when it was time to scale, decided to turn into a Sequoia Capital-backed startup. “It’s important to realize the poor have been paying three-to-four times more to the local money lender,” says Surendra Jain, a managing director with Sequoia in Bangalore. “There’s nothing wrong with using the same tools to scale the way other companies scale. The question is: In your heart are you doing the right thing?”

Even non-profits I’ve met over the last two weeks run themselves to rely on revenues not donors. An example is LabourNet,  a company that seeks to move India’s huge informal workforce into a formal channel. The company organizes phalanxes of construction crews, drivers, cooks and retail clerks and matches them with the best employers. How does it reach them? Word of mouth and SMS. So far 7,000 workers are in the system.

It was started by Solomon JP. His umbrella non-profit organization, MAYA, has already produced one self-sustaining company that trains poor youth in making high-value furniture. With a grant from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CHF International, an international NGO addressing urban poverty in India, is providing technical and financial support to help LabourNet become a self-sustaining enterprise. “Being poor isn’t about not having money, it’s a lack of capabilities,” JP says. So LabourNet doesn’t stop at getting poor people a job, it offers access to healthcare benefits, issues ID cards, and helps with bank accounts, literacy, and job training too. The worker pays a small fee, and the employer pays LabourNet a larger one in exchange for matching them up.

It’s hard work. JP has been working with the poor in Bangalore for some 15 years and says it’s like Hotel California. “I don’t recommend this path. I can never leave. I’m trapped!” he says with a weary half-smile. (I’m not sure what percentage of that is a joke.) But he believes he and others can solve the problem through self-sustaining means as long as organizations don’t sacrifice humanity in the name of efficiency.

It’s a dramatic difference from China, where most entrepreneurs are building businesses that are aimed squarely at the top of the pyramid or the burgeoning middle class. But since India is a democracy—and not an authoritarian one—it doesn’t have the same social safety net of other emerging worlds. It’s fitting that it’s trying to use a free-market economy to solve its social ills instead— something American do-gooders could probably learn from. After all, we’ve got our own digital divide.

One final note on NIIT’s Hole in the Wall program: It was allegedly the inspiration for the book “Slumdog Millionaire” which spawned the movie. “Where’s my Oscar?” is a favorite joke of Rajendra Pawar, the chairman and co-founder of NIIT. I asked a lot of people working to eradicate poverty how they felt about the movie, and most said it was neutral-to-positive for India. It doesn’t hurt to show rich Americans how one-third of India’s 1.2 billion-person population lives, even if it was sensationalized. The difference is none of them are banking on a one-time windfall as the answer.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

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How to Profit off the Poor… and Keep Your Soul

One idea behind a “cyborg life” is that we look to machines to take on critical, physical roles. These 10 machines illustrate how we have already begun passing the torch on tasks we are getting to lazy to do ourselves.

Remember handwriting? We have all but abandoned it, but the torch is being taken up by robots like Kuka, who has been put to work writing out copies of the Martin Luther bible. [BotJunkie]
Developed by Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge, Adam the robot was the first machine to independently discover new knowledge.

Using artificial intelligence, Adam hypothesized that certain genes in baker’s yeast code for specific enzymes which catalyse biochemical reactions in yeast. The robot then devised experiments to test these predictions, ran the experiments using laboratory robotics, interpreted the results and repeated the cycle.

The results of the experiment were later replicated and confirmed by a team of human scientists. So, it appears that computers are not only doing our calculations, but they have begun thinking for us as well. [Scientific Blogging and Link]
Are you lactose intolerant? Do you have frequent heartburn or constipation? Perhaps one day your defective digestion system could be replaced with a more advanced version of the Cloaca machine. This thing simulates actual human digestion and, in the end, produces a turd you would be proud of. [Cloaca via Link]
Dishwashers have been around for decades, but we still have to physically put the dishes into the machine. This is completely unacceptable. Panasonic’s robot takes care of the entire cleaning process from start to finish. [Link]
Seriously, what don’t smartphones do for us these days? At the most basic level, these phones are how we communicate, how we entertain ourselves and how we gather information. Thanks to apps, smartphones are taking on even greater roles—like helping us keep our girlfriends happy without actually having to do any work. Girlfriend Keeper sends automatic texts and emails to your significant other depending on the intensity of your relationship. [Girlfriend Keeper]
If you are tired of your co-workers being promoted over you, just wait until a robot becomes your new boss. JAST or the “Teamworkbot” has the ability to observe and mimic human behavior. As you will see in this video, JAST already knows how to complete the task, so it observes the human’s actions, anticipates his next move and dresses him down when he gets it wrong. [Link]
I’m pretty sure that allowing robots to take a critical role in surgery qualifies as crossing a Rubicon with respect to our level of trust in machines. The Da VInci robot enables a surgeon sitting at a console to control movements and equiptment with greater precision—resulting in a procedure that is minimally invasive. [Wikipedia]
It’s only a matter of time before technology becomes advanced enough to allow lazy parents to turn over the duties of child-rearing to robots. In fact, it’s already happening in Japan where robots like Tmsuk babysit kids in shopping malls thanks to RFID badges. They even have robot teachers like Saya that terrify elementary schoolchildren into doing their work.
The Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA) was developed by MIT to help drivers navigate, bitch about their driving when necessary, and keep them company on long trips.

“When it merges knowledge about the city with an understanding of the driver’s priorities and needs, AIDA can make important inferences,” explains Assaf Biderman, associate director of the SENSEable City Lab. “Within a week AIDA will have figured out your home and work location. Soon afterwards the system will be able to direct you to your preferred grocery store, suggesting a route that avoids a street fair-induced traffic jam. On the way AIDA might recommend a stop to fill up your tank, upon noticing that you are getting low on gas,” says Biderman. “AIDA can also give you feedback on your driving, helping you achieve more energy efficiency and safer behavior.”

[MIT via Link]
While the AIDA robot helps you navigate, there are plenty of engineers working on cars that do all of the driving for you. Chevy’s “Boss” Tahoe is one of the higher profile projects that have come out in recent years, winning the DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007 after successfully navigating a 60-mile course littered with obstacles. [Link]

Originally posted here:
10 Human Functions We’ve Already Handed Over To The Machines [Tgif]

Yamaha seems to be pushing its newly unveiled yAired technology pretty hard, with the second system to sport it unveiled just weeks after the first. The $399.95 MCR-140 is far from being the most stylish mini stereo we’ve seen — in fact, it’s probably one of the ugliest — but it is available in a rainbow’s worth of hues (or just ten), and it does talk to iPods and subwoofers sans cabling. Aside from that, you’ll also get an old fashioned CD player, a front-panel USB socket, an iPod dock on the top, FM radio tuner and mini jack inputs for other sources. The box itself packs a pair of 4-inch drivers and ships with a bundled remote, and if you’re not so interested in cutting cords, a yAired-less MCR-040 is available for $120 less.

Continue reading Yamaha’s yAired-equipped MCR-140 micro stereo wirelessly talks to iPods and subwoofers

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio

Yamaha’s yAired-equipped MCR-140 micro stereo wirelessly talks to iPods and subwoofers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 07:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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