Something I'm looking forward to seeing at CES 2014

Reading through almost a thousand emails and press releases announcing new products to check at CES, I finally found one that very different. I don't have a need for this, and it's expensive, but it sure  looks VERY different. Here's the pitch email I received

Dick, I wonder if you may be going to CES next week? If so, I wanted to reach out to you regarding Panono, a throwable ball camera, which has recently announced that it has upgraded the camera modules to boost the camera from 72 to 108 megapixels.

This makes the throwable ball camera the first consumer camera to cross the 100 megapixels mark -- and they are about to close their $900,000 funding campaign on Indiegogo, possibly later today.

The ball-shaped Panono is simple to use - you throw it in the air, and at its highest point all the 36 cameras fire simultaneously to capture a richly detailed panorama of everything, in every direction, including the photographer. It is available to pre-order at a discounted price of $499 on Indiegogo.com  for the next week.

Do let me know if this may be interesting to you. If so, I can set up a conversation with the founder, Jonas Pfeil, as well as a hands-on demo where you'd be welcome to try out the throwable ball camera if you wished to.  Pia

I love my Dropcams, and now I love my new Dropcam Pro even more.

I have one on my boat and it’s a great way for me to give a quick look no matter when I am, to make sure everything is okay. And I have two Dropcams in my Gizneyland studio. I turn them on when we record The Giz Wiz, so folks can see ‘backstage’. And now there’s a completely reengineered Dropcam, called Dropcam Pro. This next-generation camera incorporates a six-element, all-glass lens, a first in the home monitoring category, and a larger image sensor to provide 2x sharper video during the day and 7x better performance in low-light conditions and at night. Dropcam Pro supports an amazing 130-degree field of view – 20% wider than the prior-generation Dropcam. And it now offers pinch-to-zoom with an enhance feature that supports up to 8x zoom for Dropcam Pro and 4x zoom for Dropcam.  A new microphone offers double the sampling rate and a new speaker for sound that’s louder and clearer. And for iOS folks, there’s mobile setup so you can set it up without a computer. (iPhone 4S or later, iPad 3rd generation or later, and iPad mini). Dropcam Pro supports both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi networks for improved wireless connectivity. And in beta is Activity Recognition. Using advanced computer vision and machine learning technology, Dropcam Cloud Recording can now recognize motion patterns in your video stream and group together like activities. Customers can name these activities and customize alerts for them. Bluetooth LE. Dropcam Pro integrates a low power Bluetooth LE radio that is used for mobile setup and allows Dropcam to integrate with additional devices. Greg Duffy, Dropcam CEO and co-founder should be proud of his latest ‘baby’.  Dropcam Pro and Dropcam include full 720p streaming, motion and sound activity alerts, night vision, two-way talk, and pinch-to-zoom. With the optional Cloud Video Recording service, customers can access stored footage for the past seven or thirty days. It’s still an indoor camera system, so keep that in mind when you’re installing it. Dropcam Pro retails for $199 while the Dropcam (formerly Dropcam HD) continues at $149. Live video monitoring is always free, but there’s Optional Cloud Video Recording. CVR plans are $9.95/month for seven days of continuous recording, $29.95/month for thirty days. Discounts are available for annual subscriptions and multiple cameras.

www.dropcam.com

Leo & I talked about Dropcam on The Giz Wiz here: www.twit.tv/giz1446

It's not a gadget, it's a book! But there's a digital Kindle version too.

Inside MAD, An Ill-Conceived Collection of the Magazine’s High-Quality Stupidity from the “Usual Gang of Idiots” and Their Celebrity Fans. (Yep, I'm in the book too.)  Features Special Introduction by Judd Apatow and 17 Celebrity Guest Essays.

For more than six decades, MAD Magazine's irreverent humor has warped the minds of countless readers. Now MAD's legendary writers, artists, and celebrity fans pull back the curtain, or lift up the venetian blinds, or some window treatment analogy like that, to share and comment on their favorite MAD spoofs of all time in Inside MAD. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone who wasted their formative years reading MAD wound up as a complete failure. Despite having their minds irreversibly rotted by the magazine, some readers actually went on to be, well, successful! And now, for the first time ever, these successful readers share what reading and appearing in MAD meant to them! Roseanne Barr, Ken Burns, Dane Cook, Paul Feig, Whoopi Goldberg, Harry Hamlin, Tony Hawk, Ice-T, Penn Jillette, George Lopez, David Lynch, Todd McFarlane, Jeff Probst, John Slattery, John Stamos, Pendleton Ward and Matthew Weiner all ignored their management’s advice and contributed essays to Inside MAD.  But wait—there’s more! (Regrettably.) To get the perspective of highly unsuccessful people too, MAD – an imprint of the much more successful DC Entertainment – invited its own editors, writers and artists to share their all-time favorite MAD articles.  Contributors include: Sergio Aragonés, Tom Bunk, Tim Carvell, Paul Coker, Jack Davis, Dick DeBartolo, Desmond Devlin, Mort Drucker, Mark Fredrickson, Drew Friedman, Frank Jacobs, Al Jaffee, Peter Kuper, Tom Richmond and many more. (Not to be confused with noted writer Manny Moor.) As a bonus, Inside MAD also features an all-new, specially commissioned gatefold poster by Sergio Aragonés illustrating the mayhem of the legendary MAD offices and a never-before-reprinted Alfred E. Neuman pop art poster! MSRP $29.99, but it's cheaper online.

The Giz Wiz ‘behind the scenes at MAD’ tour for World News Now: http://abcn.ws/1b9M9yN

3D! No, not 3D TV, a handheld 3D Scanner.

3D printers are becoming more popular each day. And now there’s an easy, not-too-expensive way to scan your 3D projects too. It’s from Cubify, a division of 3D Systems. The Sense 3D scanner can scan small and large objects, people and scenes. Here’s some info from the company about this device: Sense 3D has the most diverse scan range in its class with auto-optimized settings for small and large objects like a book or a motorcycle, heads to full bodies and scenes as large as 10 feet tall and wide. Full integration between the Sense 3D scanner and Cubify Sculpt 3D Printer gives you the creative freedom to import your scans and combine them with other favorite designs. Sense 3D scanner software is intuitive, fast, accurate and easy to use. Scans process in seconds and can be cropped, enhanced and solidified for printables in just minutes. No design experience is necessary. Hand-held mobility gives you the freedom to scan spontaneously everywhere you go.  --- And now back to me! You can see the Sense 3D Scanner in action when they scanned my entire head. $399.00.

http://cubify.com/sense/

The Giz Wiz gets scanned! http://youtu.be/MHm07WWBOvA

At last, you can stay connected to the egg tray in your refrigerator!

The second weekend of November 2013, Engadget produced a show at the Javits Convention Center called Expand. The theme was “Experience the Future of Technology”. Here area few gadgets and gizmos I discovered at that show.

The folks at Quirky have teamed up with GE to produced Nimbus, a highly customizable 4-dial dashboard that tracks what’s important to you. In one of the stranger displays at the show, there were four people in one bed. They each represented one of the personalized gauges of the Quirky Nimbus dashboard. The dashboard uses your mobile device to keep an array of info up-to-date and available at a glance. So you can wake up, look up and see your commute traffic conditions, the weather, your emails, calendar, social media networks, and more. You pick the four things you want to see on your four display Nimbus dashboard. It even works with Fitbit and other some products in the Quirky collection. They’re virtually interconnected via Link technology.  Some of them are a bit strange, like Egg Minder. It keeps track of have many eggs you have in the special refrigerator tray. Porkfolio brings the old-fashioned piggy bank into the Internet age. You can track your balance and set financial goals from afar, or more likely use to get kids to save; the nose lights up every time a US coin inserted. And for security, an accelerator detects movement that might mean theft. Quirky’s famous Pivot Power, a bendy power strip that twists and bends to accommodate bulky adapters has been retooled into Pivot Power Genius. It uses an app to independently control each outlet from a mobile device. A high-power USB outlet and four AC outlets are available in the new Wink unit. Price: $79.99. The fourth Wink product is called the Spotter. It’s a sensor pack that measures temperature, humidity, vibration, light or sound. It can be programmed to send scheduled updates on the status of whatever room you've left it in, to your mobile device. It sells for $49.99. Compatibility: iOS 6 and above, iPhone 4 and above, and Android phones/tablets with OS 2.2 or higher. The main Nimbus Dashboard is $129.99. It will be available later this month at Quirky, ThinkGeek and some other high end retailers. Other link devices will be added as time goes on.    

Here’s how Nimbus works: http://www.quirky.com/shop/596-Nimbus-Your-Personal-DashboardAt