Before Angry Birds, Call of Duty, and Halo, there was Pong. And before that there was Tennis (cartridge 3) for the Magnavox Odyssey. And that machine was Ralph Baer's baby. An inventor by trade, Baer developed the first working prototype, "the Brown Box," in 1968, and just four years later, the Odyssey burst onto store shelves, jump-starting console gaming as we know it.
Some people are so desperate to become entrepreneurs, they create ridiculous products.
And sometimes, like in the case of the Snuggie, their ideas pan out.
More often than not, these products bomb. You have to wonder why anyone would think investing time and money into a "potty putter" or a flatulent-capturing blanket is a good idea.
At the very least, these products are amusing.
The HAPIfork, made by HAPILABS, smart electronic fork is seen on display at the Consumer Electronics Show on Tuesday, Jan. 8 in Las Vegas. The fork vibrates and lights up to help its user slow down to a healthy eating pace.
Your business card design separates you from your competitors. It is no longer enough to have an elegant but simple design on your business cards. Make the best impression to your potential clients by coming up with a design that’s in line with your branding and possesses something that no other business card has.
Below is a list of the best business card designs and concepts that can help make your business much more memorable to your possible customers.
Today we visited a startup based in New York City called Quirky.
It's founded by Ben Kaufman, a young entrepreneur who wants to help everyone with a good idea see their inventions get sold to the masses.
The first year, Kaufman's team turned four community-generated ideas into products that are actually getting sold. The second, it made 20. The third year it made 40. It has turned a total of 79 ideas into products that are now sold worldwide.
Matthew Inman, proprietor of web comic The Oatmeal, is on a mission to build a crowd-funded museum dedicated to inventor Nikola Tesla, who Inman refers to as "the greatest geek who ever lived." Inman's goal was to raise $850,000 (which would be matched dollar-for-dollar by a New York state grant) in 45 days. But surprisingly, a little more than a week into it, the online campaign has gathered more than $1.1 million in donations. Many of the inventor's fans think Tesla was more brilliant than his more famous contemporaries, including Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Even though Tesla isn't exactly a household name, his unsung accomplishments and wild imagination have turned him into something of a folk hero. Here, a rundown of five of Tesla's craziest inventions:
Protecting your concepts and ideas is regularly neglected by people, despite it being an essential part of nearly every single industry in the world. When you create an original work, you want to make sure that you are acknowledged as its author or creator. Don’t let your ideas slip away from you. A little caution and effort can save you from that dreadful saying: “if only I…”
Here is a practical guide to keeping your ideas, yours.
Think necessity is the mother of invention? Not always. There is a very thin line between brilliant innovation and absolute failure, as some of these inventors famously found out.
Some of the most popular products we use today were accidents stumbled on by clumsy scientists, chefs who spilled things, and misguided inventors who--in the case of the glue used on Post-it Notes--were trying to create the opposite of what they ended up with. But we can all take comfort in knowing even some huge mistakes can come with silver linings, sometimes big enough to change entire industries. And sometimes, even forgetting to wash your hands has its advantages.
The masterful engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are busy working on a type of 3D display capable of presenting that elusive third dimension without any eye gear. We say “elusive” because what you’ve been presented at your local cinema (with 3D glasses) or on your Nintendo 3DS console (with your naked eye) pales in comparison to what these guys and gals are trying to develop: a truly immersive 3D experience, not unlike a hologram, that changes perspective as you move around.
We previously explored how science fiction movies, books, games and more inspire the technology we use today. So, what about the future? What great inventions from science fiction are lurking around the corner? For example, what if you could ride around town in your very own landspeeder, or travel the world by simply standing on your very own teleporter pad and telling it where to send you?
Here's a list of the top 10 most promising up and coming technological inventions inspired by the pages, scenes and sounds of science fiction.
How close to reality are some of our most futuristic fantasies? Consider that going to the moon was once a giant step for mankind, but in the near future you’ll be able to purchase a two week vacation to the International Space Station (if you've got a few million bucks to spare, of course). Here’s our list of ten incredible technological innovations that are poised to change our lives within the next decade.
The foundational phone—Alexander Graham Bell’s “speaking telephone,” exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia—was less a product than a lab experiment in a box: A needle transmitting, via sulfuric acid, the vibrations of the voice to an electromagnetic receiver. Apart from looking of its age—you catch a whiff of Victorian steampunk here—there’s little to indicate what it does (Bell’s own patent referred to “improvements in telegraphy”). The flared tubular column could be a speaking tube, or it could be the megaphone of some new-fangled Victrola.
The world's most famous inventors are household names. As we all know, Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, Alexander Graham Bell invented the phone, and Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.
Except they didn't. The ideas didn't spring, Athena-like, fully formed from their brains. In fact, they didn't spring fully formed from anybody's brains. That is the myth of the lonely inventor and the eureka moment.
"Simultaneous invention and incremental improvement are the way innovation works, even for radical inventions," Mark A. Lemley writes in his fascinating paper The Myth of the Sole Inventor. Lemley's paper concentrates on the history and problems of patents. But he also chronicles the history of the 19th and 20th century's most famous inventors -- with an emphasis on how their inventions were really neither theirs, nor inventions. Here is a super-quick summary of his wonderful distillation of the last 200 years in collaborative innovation.
After two decades as an electrical engineer, Randy Sprague quit his job in 2008 to start a solar power company. He had been planning the venture for years, saving up, getting his wife’s blessing. But then one morning while taking a shower, he had a brainstorm for an entirely different idea: contact lenses that could act as part of a wearable display. Users could instantly augment their view with information—say, the price of an antique in a store or the species of a tree in the forest—or transform their field of vision into a virtual videogame screen. Suddenly the solar company no longer seemed as appealing.
Precocious young physicist Aisha Mustafa just patented a new system that could propel spacecrafts to the final frontier without using a drop of fuel.
In short her system taps one of the odder facets of quantum theory, which posits that space isn't really a vacuum. It's really filled with particles and anti-particles that exist for infinitesimally small periods of time before destroying each other. Mustafa thinks she can harness them to create propulsion, resulting in space craft that need little-to-no fuel to maneuver around in space. Fast Company reports...
Greatest Hits, a Melbourne-based collective of artists, has created a perfume that captures the smell of opening a newly purchased Apple product. That's right, a MacBook pro is the new, new car.
According to the company's blog, the scent, "encompasses the smell of the plastic wrap covering the box, printed ink on the cardboard, the smell of paper and plastic components within the box and of course the aluminum laptop which has come straight from the factory where it was assembled in China.”
Apple has invented a killer 3D imaging camera that will apply to both still photography and video. The new cameras in development will utilize new depth-detection sensors such as LIDAR, RADAR and Laser that will create stereo disparity maps in creating 3D imagery. Additionally, the cameras will use advanced chrominance and luminance Sensors for superior color accuracy. And if that wasn't enough, the new cameras will not only include facial recognition but also facial gesturing recognition. Intel discussed the coming 3D revolution back in 2010 and it appears that Apple wants to be one of the first to introduce this killer 3D camera. While others may have beaten Apple to market first, the technology described in today's invention will definitely provide iOS devices with the ability to view killer 3D images that could only be appreciated on Apple's "Resolutionary" Retina Display. Apple's resolutionary experience has only begun. With the ability to view stunning 3D imagery, photos and videos on our new iPad displays, the resolutionary experience is only going pop our brains even further.
Shiva Ayyadurai, is a shimmering intellectual. He holds four degrees from MIT (where he lectures), numerous patents, honors, and awards. He also says he invented email, and there's a global conspiracy against him.
Guess which one of these statements is true.
A new patent application by Apple reveals the company's plans to re-imagine the conventional keyboard as a thinner, lighter device, reports Apple Insider.
The application describes the "Single Support Lever Keyboard Mechanism," which would allow the keyboard caps to be made out of nearly any material. Materials mentioned include wood, glass, and even "polished meteorite."
V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai is a fraud who has been masquerading for years as the pioneering mind behind email. At least according to a bunch of geeks who mobilized from all corners of the digital world to try to set the record straight.
