One of the big obstacles in alternative energy is that some of its primary gathering mechanisms — solar, wind, reclaimed heat — aren’t continuously available, so no matter how much of a science lab you have bolted to your roof, you still might run out of TV electricity during a calm night’s Curb Your Enthusiasm marathon. Well, Panasonic’s recent buy of Sanyo brought with it some choice battery tech, and the newly joined companies think they can be the first to build and ship a storage battery for home use. The plan is to release the lithium-ion cell in 2011, with enough juice in it to power a home for a week (a Japanese home, we presume), and the battery will be paired with a system to allow the user to monitor electricity usage on their TV. Of course, fuel cells have traditionally been looked to as the great home energy storage hope, but we doubt any will be able to compete with the tried-and-true lithium-ion by the time 2011 rolls around.
In our continuing quest to bring you the latest Apple info and let you be part of the fun, the TUAW mad scientists are going to perform an experiment this afternoon.
TUAW TV Live is a live broadcast that will be starting at 5 PM ET today. Your host, Steve Sande, is going to bring you the day’s Apple news, maybe show you some cool apps, and take your input and feedback via live chat. The show is scheduled for about an hour, and we’ll post a embedded viewer here on TUAW about 15 minutes before the start of the show.
Vienna, Austria-based tunesBag is opening up the public beta version of its social music service today, after allowing access by invitation only for the past year or so.
The launch has been a long time coming, considering the fact that the startup has already produced a fully functional web client, and Adobe-AIR powered desktop client and applications for iPhone, Facebook and Boxee since its founding in late 2008.
Our friends over at Adafruit Industries made their way over to NYU’s ITP winter show 2009 recently, and they’ve blessed us with some highlights. ITP shows are always interesting and worth a walk through, and this is one show we regret missing this time around. The fridgebuzz MK1 protoype alone is enough to snag our hearts — a MIDI controller with 32 LED button switches and six copper switches, all in a super attractive package. The Super Duper cubes go beyond their ridiculous name, and operate as an interface to control video and music, with each cube boasting a gyroscope, accelerometor, battery, and wireless communication, so that the cubes can be turned (no wires!). There is plenty more to see, so hit the source link to check out photos and a video of the full highlights.
Canadian telecom company Mitel Networks Corporation yesterday filed for an IPO of up to $230 million. The company, which provides integrated communication services primarily to SMBs, said it plans to use proceeds from the offering to reduce debts by repaying its revolving credit and loans, and for working capital and general corporate purposes, including potential acquisitions.
Mitel’s IPO would be the largest ever initial public offering by an Ottawa-based company, according to Ottawa Citizen. No pricing terms were disclosed.
Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, has rolled out an iPhone app to help declutter your email on your mobile device. Cc:Betty’s app is a group based email application that breaks email conversations into collated, threaded discussions.
An account can be created right from the app, and new group discussions can be created, using the iPhone address book to access your contacts. Photos can be easily attached as well and new contacts can be added to discussions via your address book. Any discussions, or other content such as attachments a person has in their Cc:Betty.com account are automatically synced to their iPhone. When one of your discussions is updated, you’ll get a push-notification to your iPhone so you can access important information on the go.
Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, has rolled out an iPhone app to help declutter your email on your mobile device. Cc:Betty’s app is a group based email application that breaks email conversations into collated, threaded discussions.
An account can be created right from the app, and new group discussions can be created, using the iPhone address book to access your contacts. Photos can be easily attached as well and new contacts can be added to discussions via your address book. Any discussions, or other content such as attachments a person has in their Cc:Betty.com account are automatically synced to their iPhone. When one of your discussions is updated, you’ll get a push-notification to your iPhone so you can access important information on the go.
While this isn’t quite bad enough to merit a “dude, your Dell is on fire” part deux, it’s a pretty frightful example of the hazard modern batteries (of any kind) represent. A Consumerist reader reports that her year-old Dell Mini 9 recently popped, “hissed and sizzled” as it filled her room with smoke and tarnished her fine wooden flooring. Judging from the fallout pictures (available after the break), we’d say the culprit for this Mini fire (oh!) was the battery pack, which again reminds us how badly we need to improve our energy storage technologies. Dell has been quick to remedy the situation with an upgraded laptop being sent over to the young lady and the melted machine packed off to the labs for inspection, though there’s no mention of compensation for the owner’s scarred floor and mind.
Continue reading Dell Mini 9 suffers meltdown, scorches owner’s floor
Here’s the premise: you take a good old fashioned augmented reality setup, the likes of which we’ve seen all over the land, and attach a three-dimensional, rotatable iPhone to it. Not impressed yet, are you? Neither were we, but there’s some secret sauce to this one: you can actually launch apps on the simulated iPhone. That extra layer of interactivity makes the video after the break a lot more fascinating than it has any right to be, though it’s worth pointing out that we don’t think the apps are actually usable — they just give the illusion of launching. Anyhow, don’t wait around while all the cool kids are watching it, go have a gander yourself.
Continue reading iPhone in iPhone app is useless, but mesmerizing
I don’t have kids (yet), but I’d be all over this if I did … and if I were a native English speaker: TC50 finalist Story Something is cautiously opening up to the masses during the holidays – intentionally.
While the service is still ‘most definitely in beta’ according to co-founder and CEO Jim Rose, it gives you a pretty good idea of what the startup’s building.