Emotiv is a company I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more about soon. It made news yesterday with a formal announcement of its Project Epoc, a developmental technology that interpolates electrical signals emitted by the brain and converts them into actions on a computer. I had been communicating with Emotiv going into GDC and as fate would have it, my meeting was scheduled for shortly after the press release began to circulate.
First let me give you a little perspective on the landscape of brainwave measuring controllers. For a long time I have imagined a day when gaming would be controlled by body motion suits, brainwave headsets, all the stuff you wish you had from your favorite Sci-Fi film. Over the years I’ve seen and experienced a multitude of products that made claims similar, or identical, to Emotiv and its Epoc. Given those experiences, I was quite skeptical entering our meeting yesterday morning morning.
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starts turning its eyes towards NAND-based flash drives for portables instead of standard disc-based drives, Samsung has developed a hybrid that couples an 80-, 120-, or 160-GB standard hard disk with 128- to 256-MB NAND RAM in one physical drive. The flash-RAM portion acts as a super-buffer for read/write tasks; as information is pulled from the physical disc, it’s stored in the NAND, where it can be accessed without the physical discs need to spin constantly. Because the on-drive transfer is near instant, the NAND acts as a low-power, fast place for required information to “stand by” to be accessed, meaning the physical discs can be put to rest, saving precious battery power.
This next-step in drive evolution is meant to work with Microsoft’s ReadyDrive, a little-used component of Vista that makes for rapid booting and shutdown. The drive should give performance increases to any laptop, though, no matter what operating system it’s running, and should be available early summer for not much more than what drives sell for now.
Companies that feature “prosumer” products usually have a good rep. and their products are usually worth the extra cash. However, memory cards I just can’t see becoming “ultra extreme pro” or anything like that. But going against the grain, SanDisk and Lexar have announced multiple high-end memory cards. Lexar will offer a 4GB CF card and 2 and 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo cards as part of it’s Platinum II line of cards.
SanDisk is doing the same crap with it’s Extreme III line of cards. Expect to see a 4GB SDHC card, a MicroMate card reader, and a 4GB Memory Stick Pro Duo. Prices for all these cards range from $55 up to $180. Lexar’s offerings will be available by April while SanDisk’s are set to drop by May.
SanDisk, Lexar announce high-end memory cards [Electronista]
Slim CRT TV [via Gizmo Sight]
HP Photosmart R837 [Laptop]
Being a sometimes-media critic (in years past, I wrote for the media magazine Editor & Publisher), the effects of news aggregation sites like Digg on news organizations is a topic of constant interest.
Not so long ago, the vast majority of our news diet came from a single channel — reading (or listening or watching) a chosen news source. Whether it was our habit to pick up the Times every day, or to tune into 60 Minutes, whatever they decided was news, we’d learn about. In those days, the prestige and distribution of the news organization had an immense impact on the proliferation of a story.
Of course, times have changed. These days, the Web has added two more news avenues to the mix: search-directed results (Google, for example), and community-driven news aggregation (Digg, most prominently, but also awful chain emails.)
The spread of these channels, and Digg in particular, is having immense impact not only on our access to the news, but also on the type of reporting that news organizations undertake. And I’d venture to say that the end result could be nothing short of catastrophic.
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As we all know, fanboys are a breed apart, a group of rabid, half-human chimeras that will violently defend their opinions to the death, usually in broken English. To that end, Lore Sjöberg at Wired wrote a guide to being — and fighting off — fanboys. His advice is priceless and very applicable.
So how can you bear the proud mantle of fanboy? The first step is to pick a video game system to give your undying allegiance. Most fanboys ally themselves with one of the latest generation of consoles, but a few diehards are still rooting for the Dreamcast.
I’m still rocking the WonderSwan, friends, and everything else sucks.
You, Too, Can Be a Fanboy [Wired]
Leica, the camera company you’ve never heard of, will release the C-LUX 2 this May. The 7.2-megapixel point-and-shoot has a 2.5-inch LCD and a 3.6x optical zoom, which isn’t bad at all. It also maintains the familiar Leica styling, which basically means it looks very metal-y. The only other thing worth mentioning is that Leica will implement intelligent ISO exposure control. All that means in English is that you should see an improvement in low light photography and taking pictures of sporting events and other fast, um, events.
Product Page [Leica via Tech Digest]
Since Blake is apparently taking a cat nap and watching COLT flicks at GDC, I’d like to bring something to your attention. They had a round of talks at GDC called “Burning Mad – A Game Publisher’s Rant.” Basically, a select number of publishers and developers got to scream about whatever they hate. When Chris Hecker of the Spore team got his turn, he went on a crazy tirade on how Nintendo sucks.
Chris has declared that “The Wii is a piece of shit!” and that Nintendo should make a console that doesn’t “suck ass”. Why is Chris so frustrated? The craptastic Wii’s processing power isn’t sufficient enough to develop next-gen games on and Nintendo only wants to make “fun” games. And did you know Nintendo just doesn’t see video games as art? Terrible!
Where do I sign up for the Chris Hecker fanclub?
Spore developer lambastes Wii [Games Are Fun]
Well, sans Hulk at least. Cingular has partnered with the WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment) to create premium content available for wrestling fans. Everything from wallpapers to ringtones to videos will be available. However, getting your fix of Macho Man Randy Savage will cost you a pretty penny. Some videos will be included as part of Cingular’s media service plan while others will require a $4.99 premium video package. Ringtones are set to sell for $2.49 and wallpapers, graphics, whatever you call them, are going to go for $1.99.
All the content is available now, just watch out when Jake The Snake comes to kick your ass for not downloading his ringtone.
Cingular to bring wrestling to mobile phones [Washington Post]
FairPlay. Fair enough, a number of folks at the time thought that DRM was a good way to get the digital party legally started. While iPods sold and Microsoft worked on playsforsure and planned Zune, we pulled together more of the picture on DRM which adds insight to Steve’s Thoughts on Music. Read More
Sony’s finally adding Wi-Fi to one of its cameras. The six-megapixel Cyber-shot DSC-G1 is able to tap into 802.11 b/g networks so that users can instantly upload their photos to the Internet, be it Flickr, Facebook or their completely unread personal blog. Better still, the camera can link up with other Digital Living Network Alliance (an industry group that strives to forge common standards between different companies) devices. That can be another camera, a PC or one of those new WiFi-enabled igneous rocks.
The DSC-G1 also has a roomy 3.5-inch LCD. Too bad the optical zoom is only 3X. Sony’s even throwing us a bone by including 2GB of built-in storage. Shame they still insist on making us use their proprietary Memory Stick storage format.
It is nice to see Sony finally adopt a WiFi camera, making the company now only two years behind the times. Oh, and they’re charging the full Sony premium on it, too, demanding $600 for the camera. We’ll ignore the fact that you can grab lower end DSLRs for that kind of money because, hey, WiFi is just that awesome.
Sony Announces Its First Wireless Digicam [PC Magazine]
Not even a minute into this video and I was cracking up. It’s not even because he’s rapping (poorly) about UNIX-commands, it’s that this is the biggest display of geekism ever. The beats are not fresh, the bassist has a frickin’ music stand to read notes off of, and the keyboardist is wearing the most unfashionable glasses to date. Oh, and last time I checked, unless you’re The Roots or something, you don’t use a live percussion setup for hip-hop.
The lyrics are pretty funny though, so that makes up for everything else. Plus these dudes are completely serious, so have a gander and I’m sure you’ll day will become just a little better.
Dude raps about Unix commands at Stanford [Digg]
The Zenum Organum portable media player player makes up for its underwhelming stats and features with its overall aesthetic. In other words, it looks really good. Might you call it iPhone-inspired?. Those features? Try 2GB of storage, 1.8-inch screen and support MP3, ASF, WMA and WAV. Pretty basic stuff, which is why Zenum had to go out of its way to make it all shiny and pretty. It should be here by the end of the year.
Zenum pulled one of these “it’s so terribly basic, but boy does it look swell!” stunts last year when it starting showing off its Opteris smartphone. Incidentally, the Opteris might even see the light of day during next week’s CeBIT. Let no one ever tell you style is not any more important than substance.
Product Page [Zenum via Unwired View]
I was about to go snarkstorm on this product, which is some sort of video player. Now that I look at it, however, it’s abundantly clear that it’s a bit of viral frippery. The real value, I think, is the video which involves a set of dirty, ugly hippies getting all coked up and pressing buttons. Don’t go watch it, however, because, as I’ll explain, that’s exactly what they want you to do. Let’s see if we can get to the bottom of this, shall we?
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Made you look! The folks at Scramby offered us three free copies of Scramby as well as its suite of audio applications. The first three people who email me at contest at crunchgear dot com with the subject “SCRAMBY” get the download key.
Previously: Let Out The Voices In Your Head With Scramby
UPDATE – All three are gone. Thanks for entering!
. The 80GB iPods initially had problems and needed a ‘dirty hack’ because the kernel had trouble mounting the Root-FS. You should bow down to DataGhost and his genius in allowing us to have the penguin on the pod. </p>
<p>If you’re unsure why anyone would want Linux on their iPod, well the answer is quite simple… because we can. Actually, it allows for infinite possibilities on expanding your hard drive driven device. </p>
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5.5g Wiki [via 
