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Sprint’s EVO 4G LTE Has Cleared U.S. Customs, Pre-Orders To Be Filled As Early As May 24

blogger — Tue, 22 May 2012 03:19:05 +0000

Sprint’s launch plans for the HTC EVO 4G LTE were ruined last week when shipments of their shiny new Android handset were held up by United States Customs, but we’re hearing that they may been hitting doorsteps and store shelves sooner than expected. According to Sprint , the devices are now currently sitting safely in Sprint’s warehouses and are expected to start trickling out into the world “on or around May 24.” And rest easy, you faithful pre-orderers — the world from on high is that you’ll still be getting your devices first. In case you’re new to this little shipping snafu, shipments of Sprint’s new EVO (along with those of their AT&T-based cousin, the One X) were prevented form entering the country thanks to an exclusion order handed down by the International Trade Commission. The entire convoluted story started last year, but here’s the tl;dr: Back in July, HTC was found by ITC judge Carl Charneski to have infringed on one of Apple’s patents — specifically, it involved recognizing a particular structure within a set of data and binding it to a particular action. Sounds pretty dry, I know, but if your phone lets you directly a call a phone number by touching it in an email, you’ve seen the patent in action. At the time, HTC stated that they were working on fixing the offending UI flourish, and part of the holdup for customers was apparently because the phones were being spot-checked for compliance. With Sprint’s EVO shipments said to be on the move once more, now the question becomes whether or not shipments of AT&T’s One X are as well. I’ve reached out to AT&T for confirmation one way or the other, and I’ll be updating the post as I hear more.

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Sprint’s EVO 4G LTE Has Cleared U.S. Customs, Pre-Orders To Be Filled As Early As May 24

The Power Of Disrupt: gTar Raises $30,000 On Kickstarter In Two Hours

admin — Tue, 22 May 2012 02:20:48 +0000

Incident took the stage this afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC and debuted the gTar. It’s safe to say that they are already a major contender for the Disrupt Cup. The startup wowed the crowd with their iPhone-powered teaching guitar . The judges loved it. The crowd loved it. And most importantly, fans turned to the startup’s Kickstarter campaign where funding took off like a rocket. Prior to hitting the stage, the gTar had raised just a touch above $10,000. Now, almost exactly two hours after their Disrupt debut, their Kickstarter funding (a.k.a. pre-orders) is north of $42,000 and rising fast. The gTar seems to hit home with most people who see the demo. It promises to take away the massive learning curve associated with playing guitar. With a progressive learning mode, the gTar essentially reinvents guitar lessons. Besides that, experienced players can rock out to the gTar’s synthesized instruments or simply play around with its LED fretboard. There is a real chance that a hardware startup will win Disrupt NYC this year and that’s very exciting.

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The Power Of Disrupt: gTar Raises $30,000 On Kickstarter In Two Hours

Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, And Others Will Share Wi-Fi Hot Spots

kram412 — Tue, 22 May 2012 01:19:51 +0000

Imagine for a moment that you are sitting in your front yard in a lawn chair, sipping lemonade while attempting to read the latest news on your WiFi-only iPad. You’re just out of range of your WiFi signal. Your neighbor’s signal is super strong, but that selfish hooligan didn’t leave it wide open for you to leach onto. Relax. Depending on where you live and who your service provider is, you may be able to use your neighbor’s hotspot regardless of his futile attempts to lock it down someday soon. A consortium of cable companies (Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp., Bright House Networks LLC and Cox Communications Inc) have agreed to enable the sharing of WiFi hotspots at a grand scale, creating a large region of available signal, in select markets in the U.S. According to the Wall Street Journal, a single hotspot name and sign on scenario will be used to make it easier for consumers to log in and use available spectrum to surf. It will be a perk for paying broadband account holders in the consortium, but certain providers like Time Warner will let you pay as you go if you like. I assume there will be measures in place to prevent people from consuming all of the available bandwidth of someone else’s node, but they haven’t explicitly laid out how or when throttling will occur. [via WSJ ]

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Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision, And Others Will Share Wi-Fi Hot Spots

Incident Launches The gTar at Disrupt, An iPhone-Powered Electronic Teaching Guitar

admin2 — Tue, 22 May 2012 00:25:35 +0000

The gTar by Incident is disruption defined. It takes the guitar, an instrument with a steep learning curve, and adds a bit of digital wizardry in the form of an embedded iPhone to make learning dramatically easier. The company brags that their modern take on the guitar allows for three levels of difficulty, rather than the traditional single really difficult one. But thanks to the iPhone and a clever app, this $450 electronic guitar essentially teaches users the ins and outs of the instrument. The startup recently turned to Kickstarter to raise $100,000. However today they gave the crowd at Disrupt a musical treat — a demonstration at Startup Alley. And the device seemed to work as advertised. After docking an iPhone in the guitar’s body and loading the app, the neck comes alive with a series of interactive LEDs along the fretboard. In Easy Mode, these lights illuminate in sequence with the teaching app, showing the user which string to play. Medium takes it up a level by forcing the player to use the frets and the strings. However, the gTar’s Smart Play function only plays the correct string. Thanks to sensors rather than traditional pickups, the guitar will only play the appropriate string. But, as the user improves, the guitar does away with some of the nanny features, allowing the user to have, for better or worse, full access to the guitar’s musical capabilities. The Free Play mode allows for even more options, letting the player turn the guitar into a wide-range of instruments thanks to its iPhone core. The gTar seems to have all the right goods to disrupt a space as old as string instruments. This could be the high of Disrupt NYC talking, but it feels as if this could be, or perhaps lead to, the guitars for the Guitar Hero generation. Disrupt Q&A q: From a user perspective, will gTar players be competent at playing the guitar or is this a way for people to fulfill a guitar fantasy? Or is this an actual learning tool so they can pick up a guitar and jam solo? a: On one hand, yes this teaches people the fundamentals on how to play the guitar. These are real strings. They take the same amount of pressure. On the other hand — and I get this all the time — does this actually teach people to play the guitar? That usually comes from people who don’t know how to play. But yes, this teaches people how to play the guitar. q: How do you handle pace and rhythm? a: The app does move with the tempo of the song accurately. We were playing with some display techniques to show people. We are going with an MVP solution. The capabilities of the technology is a lot larger than we can demo. q: From a song library perspective, can you create a song from my iPhone or is it limited to your library? a: Our content platform is developed on a platform we built and we deliver songs directly from our crowd — kind of seamlessly so that the user doesn’t really see it. The platform doesn’t take the songs from iTunes; that’s definitely not a trivial problem. We have first parties to help get songs onto the platform. It takes about 30 minutes per song. q: Is there a speaker built-in? a: So you can either use the iPhone’s speaker and thanks to a cavity in the body under the pickup, it amplifies the sound a bit. we are going to be providing a headphone adapter. But you can pop it into a Marshall amp. q: Can you say how much it costs wholesale? a: We’re going to be releasing through Kickstarter. We’re going to release at $450. The way we’ve structured our cost of goods, we’re working with a manufacturing partner in China, who are a really great group of people. Out of the last six months, I’ve been there three. We’ve spent the last 3 months with them. We are building it clean and lean. What Kickstarter really helps us do is to ascertain how many people want to buy it. And for a hardware business that’s very important for us to know.

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Incident Launches The gTar at Disrupt, An iPhone-Powered Electronic Teaching Guitar

Comcast Is Finally Rolling Out The X1, Its Set-top Box In The Cloud

blogger — Mon, 21 May 2012 18:58:33 +0000

Comcast announced Monday that it will make its newest set-top box available in Boston over the coming weeks, with a rollout planned across the entire country later this year. It’s also introducing a mobile app to control the set-top box from the iPhone or iPad. The new set-top box comes after several years of development. Comcast has been working hard to develop a new set-top box that would take all of the smarts out of the box and put it in the network, essentially allowing the cable provider to launch new services and update the new features without having to totally rewrite applications or push out new firmware. With the X1, all the processing is done in the network. That will give Comcast the flexibility to quickly test and create new apps for customers, without having to worry about how outdated its set-top boxes are. It will also provide more personalized features, such as allowing customers to see which shows their Facebook friends are watching. The new X1 iOS app will improve navigation on the set-top box, allowing subscribers to use the virtual keyboard to search through all the live and on-demand channels more efficiently than using a traditional remote control. Users can also filter by genre and interact with other social media apps. Anyway, here’s how cool I think this thing is: I haven’t been a cable subscriber for at least a year and a half, but I might just have to sign up again, just to try out the X1. So bring this thing to San Francisco, Comcast, and I’ll pay for cable TV again.

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Comcast Is Finally Rolling Out The X1, Its Set-top Box In The Cloud

TC/Gadgets Webcast: Live From Disrupt NYC

A D M I N — Mon, 21 May 2012 03:14:57 +0000

This week we recorded live from the show floor at Disrupt NYC. We sat through 24 hours straight of hot-rod hacking at the Hackathon and now we’re preparing for the main show and, most important, the brand new Hardware Alley where we’ll have loads of great hardware start-ups for you guys to check out. In this episode we talk about Disrupt, the new EVO 4G LTE, and the rumors of the four-inch iPhone. We also talk about the “thumb touches anywhere on the screen” iPhone chestnut, how good the battery life is on some Android phones, the late night Nerf wars at the hackathon, and my horrible sausage fingers. Tune in today and look for another episode next week from the show floor.

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TC/Gadgets Webcast: Live From Disrupt NYC

New Project, Roominate, Offers A Fully-Wired Dollhouse For Kids

admin2 — Sun, 20 May 2012 22:29:20 +0000

Teaching kids – especially little girls – about electronics is a hard job. First, there’s the electricity. Then there’s the sense that soldering, wiring, and lining up LEDs is considerably less fun than watching Tangled . This project, called Roominate, aims to change the way girls think about electricity. The kit consists of a set of tiny furniture with built-in wires and switches. You can wire up your dollhouse however you like, adding lamps and switches. $49 gets you one regular room and $95 gets you a “duplex.” One Roominate Kit includes: 2 wooden walls, 1 wooden floor, interchangeable wooden building pieces to construct at least 3 pieces of furniture, 1 complete circuit, and assorted decorations to get you started. A Deluxe Decoration Pack includes: tons of additional decorations so that you can adorn your creation over and over again! They’ve hit $13,000 of a $26,000 target and it it helps little girls think more clearly about science and electronics, I’m totally backing it. The project ends on June 16 so there’s still plenty of time to slowly replace the Barbie Dream House with a decidedly more DIY dollhouse. Project Page

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New Project, Roominate, Offers A Fully-Wired Dollhouse For Kids

SpaceX To Attempt A Second Launch On Tuesday, May 22

vertical8 — Sun, 20 May 2012 21:13:49 +0000

SpaceX and Elon Musk will not be held from the history books. Last night the company announced that engineers were currently replacing a faulty valve on engine #5, and if successful pending a data review today, the company would attempt a second launch on Tuesday, May 22nd. This comes as SpaceX’s maiden voyage to the International Space Station was cut a half second short by an automated safety function built into the rocket. SpaceX is attempting to become the first privately owned entity to reach and dock a capsule with the ISS, therefore increasing its chance to win what will likely be a lucrative contract to ferry cargo and humans between Earth and Space. So far these duties have been carried out by the U.S., Russia and Japan. However, as governments are cutting space budget programs they are looking to hand over these relatively nominal duties to the private sector and redirect funds to long-range space exploration and science programs. Come next Tuesday, SpaceX will attempt to make history again .

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SpaceX To Attempt A Second Launch On Tuesday, May 22

Kickstarter: Meet CordLite, The Light-Up iPhone Cable For Night Owls

A D M I N — Sat, 19 May 2012 21:36:53 +0000

My set ritual before going to bed each night is as follows — turn out the lights, plug in my iPhone, take off my glasses and attempt vainly to nod off. Step two in that process can be a bit of a crapshoot in the dark, but the folks at Scrap Pile Labs have recently kicked off a new Kickstarter campaign for a product called the CordLite that just may come in handy. As the name sort of implies, the CordLite is a dock connector cable for iDevices that, well, lights up thanks to a pair of forward-facing LEDs. It’s a very simple concept, but the thoughtful execution is what make this project worth keeping an eye on. Perhaps the niftiest thing about the CordLite is how you actually fire up those lights — the dock connector’s aluminum body is entirely touch-sensitive, so the lights engage whenever someone goes to plug in the cable. Meanwhile, a pair of indicator lights run along the top of the dock connector so there’s never any confusion as to which side is up. Pledging $25 locks you in for one of the first CordLites to roll off of the assembly line, so you’d best shell out the dough if you’re interested — after the Kickstarter campaign ends, the price will jump up to $35. Not a bad deal for night owls, especially considering that Apple’s own dock connector cable is nearly $20 without a single frill to go with it. Though the CordLite is Apple-only for now, Android users shouldn’t feel too left out. The team also has a light-up micro-USB cable in the works, though I suspect we won’t be seeing those out in the wild for a little while yet.

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Kickstarter: Meet CordLite, The Light-Up iPhone Cable For Night Owls

SpaceX’s Historic Launch Aborted Less Than A Second Prior To Launch

admin — Sat, 19 May 2012 17:31:45 +0000

“Entering terminal count autosequence. 60 seconds to engine fire. #DragonLaunch,” Tweeted Elon Musk as his space company was less than a minute away from it’s historic flight . But the launch didn’t happen. Nothing happened as Long-time NASA commentator George Diller counted down the seconds, “3..2..1……We’ve had a cutoff. Liftoff did not occur.” Musk tweeted 11 minutes later at 5:06am EDT, “Launch aborted: slightly high combustion chamber pressure on engine 5. Will adjust limits for countdown in a few days.” The SpaceX Flacon 9 rocket was literally a half a second away from launching. NASA is still inspecting the engine but early reports, tweeted by both Musk and NASA , state that the chamber pressure on engine 5 was abnormally high, causing the rocket’s onboard computer to abort the launch. SpaceX was on the cusp of making history and becoming the first privately owned institution to dock a capsule with the International Space Station. Only governments, the US, Russia and Japan, have so far accomplished this task. Space X is hoping to take over the transport duties from NASA starting first with cargo but eventually shuttling personally between terra firma and the ISS. This isn’t SpaceX’s first rodeo. The company has been launching its Falcon rockets since 2006 although the first flight of a Falcon 1 failed a few seconds in. The rocket on the launchpad today, a Falcon 9, saw a successful first flight in 2010. Today’s launch, while cut short, will likely (hopefully) just be a footnote in SpaceX history. The company is set to try again in the coming days. The next launch attempt will come on May 22 but it could be pushed to May 23 according to some reports.