A New Tech Mashup With Old Tech.

 Monday, January 24, 2011, Netcast 1271

At CES I ran into Ty Liotta, head buyer for Think Geek. He’s the one responsible for roaming trade shows uncovering gizmos and gadgets for geeks. Turns out that geeks and just plain gadget lovers do buy gadgets! Sales for 2010 at Think Geek should pass $64 million. That’s up from $49 million in 2009. Ty told me he’d show me one of their newest gadgets that will be coming to Think Geek in Spring 2011. It’s the iCade. The iCade began as an April Fools joke at the ThinkGeek website. But the folks at Ion Audio loved it so much they decided to bring the prank to life. And the result is pretty nifty. There’s a desktop sized retro-design arcade cabinet that uses an iPad as the screen! It adds a joystick and 6 buttons. But wait, there’s more! The iCade project also teamed up with Atari to deliver some classic arcade games. The Asteroids demo at the Ion booth was indeed ‘classic’ and utilized the joystick and two of the buttons. Ty showed me the inside of the iCade and there’s quite a lot of switches, wires and connectors. It uses Bluetooth, so there’s no physical connection between your iPad and the iCade. That’s pretty clever engineering. You can pre-order one now for Spring 2011 delivery. Retail price is $99.99.

 http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/retro-gaming/e762/#tabs 

See or hear this Netcast: www.twit.tv/dgw1271