The Gadgets Page

At the recent Outdoor Retailer show in Salt lake City, Utah, I picked up a GorillaPod Go-Go to review. I was excited to get my hands on one of these babies.

If you don’t know what a GorillaPod is, check them out here:

• GorillaPod

What you’ll find is a unique tripod with dozens of ball joins, giving you the ability to mount the tripod just about anywhere without making it permanent. Each ball has a rubber ring, and the feet have rubber boots so you’re not going to scratch an surfaces.

The Go-Go version, which is basically the smallest of all the GorillaPods, and is marketed towards the iPhone and point and shoot camera market.

The packaging include the tripod and several pieces that allow you too mount your iPhone or camera.

My first use was to affix the adapter to the back of my iPhone. It has a lever and suction that sticks to you device, but is easily removed and leaves no marks.

What I found useful was getting my iPhone up off the flat desk so I could see my application easier. I like to see the album art on Pandora, my calendar, and even the digital clock.

My next use was screwing on the clip to the bottom of my point and shoot camera. I was able to attach the tripod to all sorts of surfaces and object, like poles, handles, and or course just simply three legs on a flat surface. But as you can see from the photos below, I was able to attach the Go-Go to my iMac so I can shoot simple video and take picture.

This is a must have gadget for anyone who has an MP3 device or small point and shoot camera. You could spend hours trying to find the weirdest places to wrap the Go-Go.

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Thom Allen is also the writer of Digital Thom.

The companies in the International Hall at CES are looking for distribution in the United States. Their products are unavailable in the U.S. and they looking for their lucky break. I sure hope someone gives Windix Industries a chance.

What attracted me to their site are these robo-bird clocks:

When the alarm goes off, they chirp to wake you up. You can also choose to wake up to the radio, but I loved the idea of waking up to a happy chirping bird. Even if the robo-bird wants to kill me…

They had a wide variety of digital clocks to choose from. I liked the ones shaped like lamps, but the clocks with the built-in LED lamp looked much more practical. See how the LED lamp folds up and out of the way when you don’t need it?

Windix seems to have specialized in making digital clocks and they have some colorful and interesting ideas. I just hope their products see the light of day in the U.S.

The winner of the most pervy display at CES this year goes to Ultmost.

Instead of half dressed booth babes, they decided to go with nearly full frontal nudity. Who thought it was a good idea to insert their video projector over a naked woman?

The best part is that it DIDN’T WORK. The convention going crowd is so desensitized to this sort of thing that the Ultmost booth was ALWAYS empty. I would see a couple people roaming around the projector, but I think they were Ultmost’s exhibitors. We went to The Sands three times over the five days of CES and never once did I see someone with a Buyer badge at their booth.

In the end, the booths that get crowds at CES are the booths with interesting TECHNOLOGY. Give them something fun to do at your booth and you have a chance of catching them, but trying to attract them with booth babes and nearly naked posters is a mistake every time.

The CEA sent me a survey. They asked me this question:

Do you have any additional comments or suggestions to improve the International CES for press attendees?

Unfortunately, they didn’t give me enough room to give a full answer, so I’m posting it here and linking to it.

There was very little that I saw at CES this year that I didn’t already know about. CES doesn’t get the word out about products anymore because companies do it themselves on the Internet.

The good thing about CES is that you can actually TOUCH and play with the new products. Companies are having more problems with having products available to try out in stores than distribution.

We all could buy anything we want online, but being able to play with it first is getting increasingly more difficult. Electronics manufacturers need to find a way to get past that and the Internet isn’t going to help them there.

We don’t want to buy things and return them if they don’t work out. We just want to have five minutes with a product in a store to see if it will work for us or not.

CES is the ONLY place where we can do that, and that’s only with the exhibitors that don’t put their stuff under glass. Getting more exhibitors to set up areas where customers can play with their products is the smartest thing that the CEA could do right now.

There are people out there who think that the era of the trade show is dead. I’m not one of them. There are many reasons to converge on one place:

• Camaraderie: Seeing other people in your industry. Never discount the power of networking.
• The Touch Factor: Being able to play with new products in person.
• Pulse Taking: A trade show gives you a visual indication of what people think are interesting. Just by following the crowds, you can track the trends.

For all of you out there who saw the lack of crowds and exhibitors, that’s more an indication of health of the industry than an indication of the health of trade shows in general.

iTouchless is a electronics distributor that carries a wide variety of products for your home. Here is a video of a couple of the products: Towel-Matic and iMu.

The Towel-Matic is an automatic towel dispenser. It will spit out the exact right amount of paper towel when you wave your hand in front of it. You can set it to work with half sheets or whole sheets. If it has dispensed some towel, it won’t dispense any more until you pull off the sheet.

This looked like a great product until I remembered WHEN I use paper towels. I use them when I’ve spilled a bottle of grape juice on the floor and I need something to clean it up. I don’t want just ONE towel in those situations. I want to pull off at least three or four. The Towel-Matic would be great for those times when I wash my hands and I want a towel to dry them off, but for the emergency situations, I really just need to grab the whole roll.

They also exhibited this fingerprint door lock. Using your fingerprint as a key, this lock makes it so you don’t have to carry around keys anymore.

They also exhibited the iMu. It’s a small gadget that turns any surface into a speaker. It works best with glass, but it also made a pretty good noise with the wood display.

We saw the iMu in the International hall as well. We recognized the iMu speaker from the iTouchless booth, so we were showing it off to Matt Strebe. We picked up the speaker and the music almost went away. We placed it back on the glass and the music was loud and clear.

It wasn’t until after we walked away from the booth that Strebe said to us what he noticed. Every time we lifted the speaker, the woman had turned the volume down. When we put it back down, she turned it back up.

No one did that at the iTouchless booth, but it made me feel like I was in a carnival. The pins are bolted to the table so I can’t knock them down and the darts are dulled so they bounce off the balloons.

With a name like Innovative Technology, I expected something a little more futuristic, but when I saw these old school flip clocks, I squealed with delight.

When I was a child, my parents had a flip clock next to their bed. I remember lying on the bed, trying to fall asleep for my nap and hearing the click, click, click of each minute flip by. It makes me happy just to see a clock like this.

They also make these retro turntables. You can create a CD from an old cassette tape or record with this turntable. It’s not perfect and the record arm won’t automatically return when the record is finished playing, but it will do a fairly good job of getting your rare vinyl into the digital world.

Innovative Technology seems to have more style than innovation, but sometimes style is what we need. When you can choose from twenty identical turntables or clocks, it’s nice to be able to find something that actually works AND looks good.

Nicotine isn’t the only addicting quality of cigarettes. There is also the ACT of smoking that people miss. There were several companies at CES this year who showcased their electronic cigarettes and cigars. Here is a great demonstration from E-Cig.

Here is a closer glimpse of the E-Cig:

I haven’t smoked since I was nineteen years old, but back then, something like this would have made me feel ALOT better when I was smoking to look cool. The only problem with it is it stays the same size. It never gets smaller like a real cigarette does. The end lights up and a harmless steam smoke comes out of your mouth (not your nose, though).

I could see these products being useful for props in the movie industry for actors who don’t smoke who want to play characters that do. Even HD would be completely unable to tell the difference between an E-Cig and a real cigarette.

E-Cig wasn’t the only company exhibiting electronic cigarettes. Desonic also had a WIDE collection of electronic smoking paraphernalia.

To me, the cigars weren’t quite as believable as the cigarettes. I can smell a cigar a block away, so if I saw someone smoking an electronic cigar, I’d KNOW it wasn’t a real one. The electronic cigarettes are MUCH more realistic.

Whether these gadgets could help you quit smoking is another question. A nicotine patch can take care of the cravings, but the electronic cigarette only handles the habit. If you want to stop going out to the smoker’s patio several times a day, an electronic cigarette won’t help you.

Additionally, I haven’t smoked for YEARS, but seeing these electronic smoking gadgets made me want to start again. How crazy is that?!

I suspect that in five years, every late night commercial slot will be filled with electronic cigarettes. Until then, you’ll have to buy them on Amazon.com. Here are a few companies selling them:

• NJOY NPRO ELECTRONIC CIGARETTE WHITE STARTER KIT
• Smoking Everywhere Electronic Cigarette – 2.0 Kit
• The E-Smoke Stop Electronic Cigarette Kit
• Electronic Cigarette, Ecig, E Cigarettes, Ecigarette – Starter Kit
• Electronic Cigarette by Smoking Everywhere E Cigarette
• Electronic E-cigarette Premium Combo Pack
• The Ok Super Mini Electronic Cigarette

Update 10-27-14

Here we are a little more than five years later and you can buy ecigarettes in every gas station in the nation. There are vaping stores even in the smallest towns in America, with flavored nicotine juices and high-tech vamping machines that look like Dr. Who’s sonic screwdrivers instead of trying to look like cigarettes. I am continually shocked at how quickly things change!

Buglabs creates little electronic boxes that click into a computer/power module and can be used to create gadgets.

The tagline needs a little work though:

Buglabs is a collection of easy-to-use electronic modules that snap together to build any gadget you can imagine.

Rather than soldering LEDs, transistors and resistors onto a circuit board, you can choose a completed circuit, like a motion sensor or a digital camera and mix it with other complete gadgets to create your own.

I first saw Buglabs last year at CES, but they have been steadily growing their community, so now if you buy a Bugbase, there are tons of people out there who can tell you how to create the gadget you want to create.

• BUG Community | Bug Labs

Here’s a video intro:

You aren’t limited to their pre-made modules either. This is entire system is open-source, so if you have a modicum of electronics training, you can create your own modules. You can find out more about that here:

• Bug Blogger

We’ve come a long way from soldering resistors onto circuit boards and Buglabs has made the barrier to entry even lower for us.

I’m alright with Roomba vacuuming my home. I don’t own one, but I wouldn’t fear it if I did. The Husqvarna Automower, however, isn’t something I’m comfortable handing over to a robot. I don’t want to explain why my lawn mower killed my neighbor’s cat. It’s just a conversation I’m not willing to have.

All joking aside, I AM tempted by it. The idea of being able to just set the lawnmower out on the lawn and letting it take care of the grass is very appealing. If the Roomba is any indication of how easy the Automower is going to be, however, I don’t think it will be very useful unless you arrange your yard so that it will never get stuck between the doghouse and the bushes.

Unfortunately, the Automower isn’t quite ready for a set it and forget it person yet. After watching the demonstration, it was obvious that the Husqvarna Automower uses the same driving algorithm as the Roomba. This is fine for vacuuming up the floor, but for cutting the lawn, it’s just not an option. The lawn cutting would show the nearly random path that your Automower took.

When I was a child learning how to mow the lawn, my grandfather was VERY particular about how it should look. One week, we would cut the lawn horizontally. The next week, we cut the lawn vertically and the third week we cut the lawn diagonally. After that, we would go back to the beginning. Part of the reason we did that was to prevent grooves in the ground where the lawn mower wheels ran, but there was another thought at play in my grandpa’s mind. Cutting the lawn in these patterns was aesthetically pleasing. You could tell how we cut it for a day or so and it looked pretty. I especially liked the diagonal weeks and wondered why he would never let me do circles.

The pattern of cutting on the lawn left by the Automower, however, would be anything but aesthetically pleasing. Honestly, lawn mowing is ALL about making the home beautiful. If the Automower can’t do that, then you might as well use ForeverLawn and be done with it.

Over the next week or so, we’ll be showing you the cool things we saw at the Consumer Electronics Show two weeks ago.

CES was quiet this year. Less people attending and less companies exhibiting. CES tried to hide that by making the aisles WIDE and spacing out the exhibitors. We noticed, though. When it’s possible to see all the booths at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Hilton and the Sands all in one day, it’s hard NOT to notice.

I found the lack of crowds disturbing, but helpful. Since there were a lot less people, I was actually able to see products at the booths. I could walk up to an exhibitor and find out what they were selling without anyone pushing me around. I was even able to see things at the Microsoft booth, which is usually so crowded that I can’t even bear to walk in there.

What was good for me, however, wasn’t good for the exhibitors. There was a slight air of desperation among some of the companies. The big guys like Intel and Motorola weren’t even phased by the slack in the crowds, but the smaller businesses and OEM manufacturers from China and Taiwan had an air of panic mixed with boredom. Every keynote mentioned the slower economy.

I’ve seen this market spike and valley many times now. I wanted to reach out and give the entire industry a big bear hug and reassure them. I wanted to tell them to hold on. The companies that can ride these valleys are the ones that get to be the monoliths during the good times.

Hold on there, my friends.