Benoit Deseille and Benedetto Bufalino has taken an unused phone booth and converted it into an aquarium for the Lyon Light Festival in France. Now city council workers will have to feed the fish as part of their daily chores. Personally I could stand outside and watch these fish all day if I had the chance.
[via UberGizmo]
Acer has unveiled another Ferrari notebook as part of a branding deal that they have made with the automotive company. The Acer Ferrari 1200 LED screen is 12.1 inches and uses an AMD Turion X2 Ultra dual-core mobile processor with up to 4GB of DDR2 memory. THe laptop comes with a Bluetooth mouse and VoIP handset. There is a large capacity hard drive and slot-loading DVD drive along with it. The laptop will be available in the first half of 2009.
[via Slashgear]
The GigaPan Epic is a robotic mount that helps photographers create detailed panoramas. David Bergman used his Canon G10 and the GigaPan Imager to take a panoramic photo of Obama’s inaugural address. The GigaPan Epic and Stitcher software is available for $379. And the GigaPan Epic 100 will be available for $49. The Epic is very easy to use. First you connect a digital camera to the Epic. After that a small roboto mount automates the picture taking process. And then hundreds of thousands of images are connect together using the Stitcher software.
“Today we are offering the general public breakthrough high-resolution imaging technology that is the result of years of research by scientists at NASA and Carnegie Mellon University,” stated Henry Hillman Jr., Founder, President and CEO of GigaPan Systems. “The potential applications for the Epic are limitless. The GigaPan.org site already features more than 10,000 panoramas, and our beta users have taken fantastic panoramas not only of President Obama’s Inauguration, but of Yankee Stadium, Chicago skylines, Hawaiian landscapes and thousands of extraordinary images.”
Many of the panoramic photos available on http://www.explorechicago.org were taken with the use of GigaPan. The pictures include the Chicago skyline, Millenium Park, and the CME Group Financial Trading Floor.
It is available at: http://www.gigapansystems.com.
[via PhotographyBlog]
Ajoka, a micro surveillance solutions company has recently created the Real Lighter DVR. The device can record 640 x 480 or AVIs in QVGA at 30fps. The device can support up to 8GB through a microSD card. The lithium ion battery is good for 6 hours of filming and it can be charged by USB. The device retails for $150 from Ajoka.
Gonzalo Álvarez lives and works on an island called Tenerife. He makes fancy clocks and furniture in his spare time. Check out the aesthetics of this one-of-a-kind clock: Spanish steampunk clock.
[via BoingBoing]
The 16GB Leyio File Sharing Device has a built in fingerprint scanner to ensure that nobody jacks your files. The flash drive also has a built in digital screen and USB port built in. The Leyio 16GB file sharing device has Wi-Fi built in but can only connect to other similar Leyio devices.
The device will be available in April 2009.
Authorities in Tampa has been using the Microsoft Surface to visualize safety information for Raymond James Stadium, the spot for Super Bowl Sunday. The Surface will be displaying Microsoft Virtual Earth map for region tracking events, incidents, resources, and real-time tasks. All of the tracking using Virtual Earth will be done in real-time.
Check out the video below:
Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) has released the numbers for their 4th quarter and WOW, are they stellar! Netflix’s 4th quarter profit climbed 45%. Netflix’s growth was driven by low prices and streaming video services.
Netflix’s customer base grew by 718,000 in the last three months of 2008. This is more than double the growth that management expected. Netflix has about 9.4 million customers now. Netflix launched about 10 years ago and charges about $5 to $17 per month to rent DVDs.
“We are very fortunate to have a great value proposition,” stated Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Netflix’s revenue for the fourth quarter is $359.6 million, up from $302.4 million in the same quarter last year. Netflix’s revenue for 2008 was $1.365 billion. The company expects to make between $1.58 billion and $1.635 billion in revenues for 2009.
VeriSign is planning to buy Certicom about three days after Research in Motion decided to pull out of a hostile bid for the security company. VeriSign will buy Certicom for $73 million. Certicom is an elliptic curve cryptography company. VeriSign plans to enter new markets through the use of Certicom’s ECC public-key encryption technologies.
VeriSign one upped RIM’s deal by $21 million. RIM proposed $52 million to buy out Certicom from their shareholders this past December. To counter the bid, Certicom filed a lawsuit to block the bid stating that RIM breached nondisclosure agreements. This past Monday, a court ruling stated that RIM did in fact breach the agreements and shareholders were unable to accept the offer.
RIM already owns several forms of ECC technology, but the acquisition of Certicom would have made things more cost-effective. Certicom expects that their shareholders will accept the VeriSign deal and that the transaction will close in March.
[via AP]
The Zune may soon be a device of the past as it continues to plummet in sales. The almighty iPod and iPhone seems to keep consumers wanting more Apple and less Microsoft. According to a report filed with the SEC, the revenue of the Zune for the 4th quarter was less than half of the previous year. As a matter of fact the “Zune platform revenue decreased $100 million or 54% reflecting a decrease in device sales.”
Fortunately for Microsoft, the Entertainment and Devices Devision is still profitable thanks to the Xbox 360 and the PC platforms. Revenue for the Xbox and the PC platform increased by 6% bringing them up to $2.2 billion. Apple had about a 3% increase in iPod sales in the same period.
[via Engadget]