CES 2009: iTouchless
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.