innovations
Interested in the building blocks of reality, but intimidated by talk of quarks, leptons, charm, flavour and spin? A new website aimed at explaining the whole bang shoot of big bang derivatives is located at www.particle adventure.org.
Streetcar.co.za has opened an innovative new e-shopping site that allows you to send gift vouchers to deserving friends, colleagues or bribe targets without the hassle of going out shopping to get them yourself, and the range of partner stores is very impressive indeed. You can choose vouchers according to the town the recipient lives in, so they can redeem them without difficulty, right down to the likes of Kwaggafontein, Phalaborwa and Malmesbury. Partners include not only CNA, Exclusive Books and Musica, but supermarkets, unit trust companies, hotels, restaurants and designer clothes outfits.
How much does your browser know about you? Find out how much it lets slip about you as you surf, by completing a survey on privacy at http://atlas.cs.york.ac.uk/~ada101. The survey is part of a research project on the subject by a University of York computer science student. Once you e-mail your answers, you can click on a button to see the details your browser would happily cough up about you to marketers or data miners. The site also steers you to www.anonymizer.com, which lets you surf anonymously.
Clothes company Levi has teamed up with Dutch electronics giant Philips to introduce the first of four new e-jackets. Each of the designs incorporates wires into the lining to create a complete body area network for hooking up various electronic devices. These innovative jackets, the result of five year’s research in Philips’s Redhill Laboratories, allow the synchronous control of the new Philips Xenium GSM mobile phone and Rush MP3 player via an integrated remote control. Microphone and headphones are stored in the collar and can be extended while playing music or making calls. When the phone rings the MP3 player will automatically cut out. Available from September, the e-jackets will cost from R11 000 with MP3 player and Xenium phone fitted. Sounds like a real mass-market item. Wonder which bit took the five years?
Everybody says “I’ll send you a print” when they take a photo, but they almost never do. But Sony will help people keep their promises with the DCR-TRV820 camcorder, the first to feature a built-in printer. Press the shutter and the camera not only stores a VGA-resolution (640×480 pixels) image, it produces a small (6,4×4,8cm) print. The camera uses Sony’s own Digital8 format and Memory Stick storage, and has a 25x zoom lens.
In a flood of new products, Sony has also launched the DCR-TRV20, a megapixel digital video camera with built-in editing functions; the DCR-PC5, a palm-sized camcorder that weighs only 450g; the DVP-FX1 and DVP-F5 portable DVD players with 7in screens; the SCD-XB940 Super Audio CD player; two Art Couture TV sets, and a fast (8x) CD-RW writer, the CRX-160E-RP, to enhance your PC.
In September Logitech is having another go at the “feelymouse” market with two rodents that react to what is on the screen. For example, a mouse should slide smoothly as the cursor crosses a plain white background, react when it bumps into a button and vibrate on a “rough” image. Logitech launched this market a year ago with the Wingman Force Feedback Mouse, targeted at a games market where force- feedback joysticks and vibrating controllers are all the rage. The right-handed iFeel MouseMan will cost around R450 and the ambidextrous iFeel Mouse will cost around R550. Both mice are optical designs with flat bottoms and no balls.
ENDS