iSAVE: Airbags Attached To The Outside Of Cars
I am not sure if this is a good way to protect pedestrians, but a team of Japanese researchers developed them: airbags for use on the outside of vehicles. It may sound bizarre at first, but this is not some silly experiment. The air bags (or special car body panels, to be more exact) are the brain child of several Hiroshima-based companies and the local university.
Dubbed iSAVE (sigh…), the airbags deflate rapidly upon impact, just like conventional airbags, to soften the effects of a crash for pedestrians. The prototype car equipped with iSAVE that you can see on the pic above was shown earlier this week and is said to be the first of its kind. iSAVE can be used with electric cars only.
The research team behind the airbags says it expects to sell up to 50 units by year end for 3-wheeled cars before fully commercializing them in 2011 for four-wheeled vehicles. The iSAVE system for 4-wheeled cars will likely be priced at $17,800.
Sorry to say there’s no video available at this point (I looked everywhere).
Via Asahi Shimbun [JP]
View full post on CrunchGear
After Dell Matches $2B Offer For 3PAR, HP Ups Its Bid To $2.4B
It looks like we’re back to square one again. Dell has matched HP’s $2 billion offer to buy 3PAR, and HP upped the ante today with an offer worth $33 per share or $2.4 billion. 3PAR has accepted HP’s bid.
Dell had previously signed an agreement to acquire 3PAR for $18 per share or $1.13 billion, with a provision for matching competing bids. HP then effectively outbid the company and offered $1.6 billion, but Dell matched that offer yesterday, after which HP made a renewed bid for $1.8 billion. HP then offered $2 billion last Friday.
According to the release, the 3PAR board of directors has determined that HP’s revised proposal constitutes a “Superior Proposal” (as that term is defined in 3PAR’s merger agreement with Dell). Accordingly, 3PAR notified Dell of its intention to terminate its merger agreement with Dell immediately following the expiration of the three business day period contemplated by, and the satisfaction of the other conditions set forth in, its merger agreement with Dell in order to enter into a merger agreement with HP on the terms set forth in HP’s revised acquisition proposal.
This latest offer more than doubles Dell’s original bid for 3PAR, which was high to begin with. 3PAR provides a virtualized utility storage platform that enables customers to significant drive down cloud computing infrastructure, storage and associated management costs.
It looks like this bidding war has come to an end, folks.
Crunch Network: TechCrunch obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies
View full post on TechCrunchIT
5 Amazing Time-Lapse Space Videos
Browsing photos of space or experiments conducted on the shuttle missions just isn’t the same as actually being there, but video is definitely the next best thing. Continue reading to watch five amazing time-lapse space videos.
View full post on Tech Blog
Twitter for iPhone/iPad getting push notifications soon
It seems that when the Twitter for iPad app launched a few days ago, a few users were accidentally blessed with push notifications. Those privileges have since been revoked, but it seemed to confirm that the option would be coming soon.
Well, Twitter reached out to Mashable today to explain how it happened, as well as to confirm that push notifications are, indeed, coming to the iPhone/iPad soon, but it’s still being tested internally for the moment.
To quote the original article:
“When we launched Twitter for iPad, there was a configuration error that caused us to offer push messages to a small set of users,” wrote a Twitter spokesperson. We’ve stopped sending push messages, but users may see an option to turn on push until we release an updated version of the app.”
“We’ve been testing push notifications internally,” the rep continued. “Push isn’t ready yet, but we look forward to rolling this out soon.”
This means that users of the app will soon get real-time notifications on certain types of messages — eg DMs or Mentions — making the app that much more useful as a communication tool.
And this comes so soon after we wrote about Notifio.
View full post on MobileCrunch
Neofonie WeTab powered by MeeGo Linux
The Neofonie WeTab that has some birth pangs features hardware specifications which would put the Apple iPad to shame – after all, who can argue with a 11.6-inch display at 1,366 x 768 resolution, HDMI output support, two (yes, not just one) USB ports, a 1.3-megapixel camera and Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity? With an Intel Atom N450 1.66GHz processor running within, it is power packed to say the least – too bad the device isn’t exactly the most popular tablet to tote around at this point in time. Perhaps with the ability to run MeeGo Linux on it, another 10 more units might be sold, but otherwise most other folks would glance this way and give it a miss.
Permalink: Neofonie WeTab powered by MeeGo Linux from Ubergizmo | Hot: iPhone 4 Review, Droid X Review,
BlackBerry Torch Review
View full post on Ubergizmo
Sony Unveils 3D Vaio Laptop at IFA 2010
The famous Japanese tech company Sony looks forward to become the first to introduce to the world 3D laptops with 1080p display capabilities.
Recently the firm presented its 3D Vaio laptop prototype at IFA 2010.
It is expected that the new 3D Vaio laptop includes 3D button and Bravia shutter glasses in order to part what the right and the left eyes see.
View full post on Gadgets News
Notifo for iPhone Gets Free User-to-User Messaging, Real Time Twitter Notifications
Last time we wrote about Notifo, we called it a “simple mobile notifications platform for anything” — and really, that’s probably the best way to describe it. You take your iPhone, install the Notifo app, hook it up to your favorite services (like Twitter, or GitHub) or any of the “Projects” (read: plugins, like Growl alert forwarding, or Chrome-to-Notifo ), and bam! You’ve got push notifications coming down to your iPhone from just about anything you could imagine.
All that notification sending takes two things: users to send the messages to, and a message pushing backend to handle all the heavy lifting — the same two things, as it just so happens, that one would need to create a basic instant messaging service. And so they have.
In an update to their iPhone app that went live this afternoon, Notifo launched a service they’ve had in the making for about four months: free text and picture messaging. Alas, it’s only built for messages from Notifo-user-to-Notifo-user, rather than Notifo-to-phone-numbers — but with all that messaging going on between users and the backend, connecting users with each other was really just the obvious next step.
Notifo seems to be less excited about the user-to-user messaging, however, than they are about something else this outbound messaging enables: bots. Now that Notifo users can send messages back to the backend, developers can build services that can “do anything” at a users command, using Notifo as the message handling middle-man.
Additionally, Notifo has tweaked their Twitter alerts system, Push.ly, to use Twitter’s just announced Site Streams beta, making them one of the first to do so. Wondering what the heck that means? In a nutshell: real-time push alerts from Twitter.
Yep. Now you can learn what celebrities are having for lunch the very second they tweet it out.
View full post on MobileCrunch
Clever: Calendar Scarf
What a great idea. Pull the thread and, as the year goes on, the dates of the Calendar Scarf disappear in a pile of yarn on your floor. Or you could hook up the other end to an automatic knitting machine and keep things tidy.
[via Swiss Miss]
View full post on CrunchGear
Done Deal: HP Gets 3PAR For $2.35 Billion In Cash
It’s officially over. After Dell pulled out of the running this morning, HP has announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire data storage company 3PAR, for $33 per share in cash, or a value of $2.35 billion. The transaction has been approved by the boards of directors of both companies.
This morning, HP upped the ante with an offer worth $33 per share or $2.4 billion. 3PAR accepted HP’s bid and Dell withdrew.
The bidding war began when Dell had previously signed an agreement to acquire 3PAR for $18 per share or $1.13 billion two weeks ago, with a provision for matching competing bids. HP then effectively outbid the company and offered $1.6 billion, but Dell matched that offer last week, after which HP made a renewed bid for $1.8 billion. HP then offered $2 billion last Friday, which Dell matched. Now that Dell has pulled out, it will collect a $72 million termination fee from 3PAR for terminating the merger agreement.
According to the release, 3PAR’s storage products will compliment HP’s existing storage solutions and help the company drive growth in the virtual data center and cloud computing markets. 3PAR provides a virtualized utility storage platform that enables customers to significant drive down cloud computing infrastructure, storage and associated management costs.
Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, HP stated in the release: “HP and 3PAR is a winning combination that will accelerate HP’s Converged Infrastructure strategy and bolster our ability to provide customers with the industry’s highest levels of performance, efficiency and reliability…We intend to invest in 3PAR’s technology to create long-term value for our stakeholders.”
So why did HP want 3PAR so bad? As TechCrunch contributor Steve Cheney wrote last weekend, 3PAR is so valuable because of its “thin provisioning” technology enables disk space to be allocated only when applications need capacity, greatly reducing IT management costs. It doesn’t make sense for HP to try to recreate this technology, so buying 3PAR was the best option. HP, in particular, wants to increase its innovations, especially after reports that Mark Hurd wasn’t an R&D friendly CEO.
After two weeks of a pretty intense bidding war, it looks like we can finally put this one to rest.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
View full post on TechCrunchIT
Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Lost Labyrinth Trailer Released
SEGA has just released a trailer showing Sonic the Hedgehog 4′s all-new Lost Labyrinth level, in which “most of the action takes place in a series of twisting mazes without fear of drowning.” Video after the break. Click here for more screenshots.
And the one water-heavy level in Act Two has plenty of air bubbles. Drowning won’t be much of a threat, so all those old frustrations didn’t occur for me even in my first playthrough.
[via IGN]
View full post on Tech Blog
Translator
