Fernando Alonso took his sixth win of the season and the Mild Seven Renault F1 Team took its seventh win of the season at this afternoon’s 2005 German Grand Prix in Hockenheim. Fernando Alonso converted his third position on the grid into a comfortable victory after another McLaren DNF led to Kimi Raikkonen’s retirement from the lead halfway through the race. The Spaniard’s run to the chequered flag was uneventful, and he controlled his pace throughout the final stint. Any doubts about Alonso not becoming the youngest F1 champ in history were dispelled with the win – he now leads the drivers’ championship by 36 points with seven races to go. At 10 points for a win and six points for a second place, he could conceivably win the title if he didn’t turn up for the remainder of the season given the unreliability of his main adversary’s car. McLaren has had the fastest car at the last half a dozen races, but has failed to take advantage of its speed. Read More
Canon already the major player in the networked imaging solutions arena, but the latest move by the company is still an interesting one. The Canon Web Access Software Kit is the first ever Web browser to be designed to run on multifunction devices. Unique to Canon, the software allows the use of Canon multifunction devices (MFDs) as"information kiosks" that access and print information directly from an intranet or the Internet. This makes it ideal for organisations that have a significant number of staff who do not have access to PCs but who need to access forms, documents or information on the company intranet, such as in retail, logistics or manufacturing industries. Read More
There is nothing as precious as a baby and there are few points in a child’s life when it is more vulnerable than in a vehicle with mum concentrating on the road. So when we saw the BabyCam from Rostra Precision Controls which allows safe and easy monitoring of children in their car seats without taking driver focus from the road, we figured we should let people know about it. The system is designed for Toyota SUVs/trucks, and features a small, compact, wide-angle view that enables mum the driver to turn around to check on an infant in a reverse-oriented car seat. A flush-mount installation places the state-of-the-art high-quality color camera in the center of the vehicle's roof interior/headliner for a streamlined, OEM-like appearance. The camera plugs directly into the mirror for easy driver viewing. A 3.5" LCD color display is included that is built into the rearview mirror to allow quick driver monitoring of children. Read More
Mac-Gray is America’s largest provider of laundry facilities management services to college and university residence halls, which makes the company’s latest announcement significant. The company is adding wireless capabilities for its LaundryView monitoring system so it can now connect to a school's network using either its wired or wireless network infrastructure. The LaundryView eMonitoring System, part of Mac-Gray's Intelligent Laundry Systems, enables students to have real-time information about the status of the washers and dryers in their campus laundry rooms from any device that has a web browser.It’s a small step but a significant one as it is the first of many that students will encounter in monitoring the many things that are important to them. This is the second Mac-Gray product we’ve featured in recent times, so we guess that makes the company on the extreme side of innovative. We’ve previously featured the company’s craftworks fridge (which looks like a tool chest) but it also makes energy-efficient MicroFridge appliances. Read More
FingerGear, the consumer brand of biometrics specialist Bionopoly, has announced a Computer-On-a-Stick Flash Drive. The Computer-On-a-Stick is a bootable USB 2.0 Flash Drive that is the first flash device to feature a complete onboard Operating System. The device also features the OpenOffice Productivity Suite, along with many of the most commonly used desktop and Internet applications. The Computer-On-a-Stick allows users to take their entire software environment with them anywhere securely. The device is bootable from any PC with an x86 processor, regardless of its resident Windows or Linux OS. All bookmarks, address book, emails, and office documents are stored securely on the device and never leave a trace on the host PC. Users enter a login password at each session. Read More
The Live8 concerts of July 2 will forever mark the beginning of interdependence consciousness and hopefully we will develop a more civilized world based on what was crystalised by the event. More than a million people attended concerts across four continents to demand that the Group of Eight (G8) wealthy nations cancel the debts of poor African countries and boost aid at a summit in Scotland. Many records were set as people across the globe joined in a way we haven’t seen before but one which we feel compelled to acknowledge from a sheer technological viewpoint was that of the London-based Mobile Interactive Group (MIG) which set a new world record and a benchmark for efficiency by enabling the biggest ever text lottery of its kind in history. The lottery received 2,060,285 responses and has been officially recognised by Guinness World Records. At the peak time during the Live 8 lottery, MIG was receiving 611 SMS messages per second through its gateway. Read More
UPDATED July 23, 2005 NEW IMAGES With a resting heart-rate of 32 beats per minute and 6.99 victories in the month-long, 3500 kilometre Tour de France cycling race, Lance Armstrong almost qualifies as a Gizmo in his own right. He’s always the one to watch in the event because he has always proven the most competitive in the two stages that are the most distinctive and demanding: the climbing and time trial stages. Armstrong excels when race conditions allow superior talent to shine through. As Armstrong lined up for his final Tour de France, Trek, the company that has supplied his bikes in each of his famous victories, delivered two special machines: the Madone SSLx climbing bike and the TTX time trial machine. Both are lighter, stiffer and faster than anything the company has built before. Read More
Artificial Life has released Version 2.0 of its flagship product: V-girl -- your virtual girlfriend which was introduced in V 1.0 last October and the new version of the evolving interactive game continues to meld reality with role-playing. The virtual girlfriend is described by company CEO Eberhard Schoeneburg as “a new mobile entertainment paradigm - an interactive mobile movie, an evolving mobile sit-com and an innovative mobile dating role play game all in one.” A massive hit in Asian countries, V-girl blurs the line between fantasy and reality perhaps more than the previous version adding locked and secret scenes, real time based calendar events and several interactive role play games in addition to all the synthetic girlfriend routines the player watches and becomes involved in an ever-evolving daily and weekly schedule which includes your girlfriend visiting her virtual home, work or bar, and shopping with her virtual girlfriends. Messages sent to your V-girlfriend are responded to with text and voice messages. Read More
Fancy your very own Bentley or Pininfarina limited-edition, extreme gravity race car and a spot on the grid of what we believe will become a very prestigious race series? The cost is US$30,000 but it’s one of those rare opportunities to get in on the ground floor of something that could be big, and we think that Extreme Gravity Racing will be big! Really big!! Last year the series began to take the shape of the vision of its founder Don MacAllister with automotive manufacturers building cars for the event - Porsche, Volvo, Mazda, Bentley, Nissan and General Motors. This year they will be joined by Audi, Oakley, Pininfarina, Volkswagen, Lamborghini and Chrysler plus corporations wishing to participate can simply roll up on the day to find their limited edition high-tech Bentley or Pininfarina Gravity Racer painted in company colours. There’s also a pit row tent for clients, employees, friends and family and a dinner and luxury accommodation package for three nearby. If you’d like to run a pre-event day choosing your driver from employees or clients, Extreme Gravity can provide 16 identical cars and stage that too. At the end of the weekend, you get to keep the car produced by a world famous auto design studio. Read More
One of the most important works in scientific history was published in July 60 years ago – an article in The Atlantic Monthly entitled “AS WE MAY THINK”. Written by Vannevar Bush, the article describes the “memex” – a theoretical analog computer designed from the cutting edge technologies of the day to enable access to large amounts of information. The machine and linking systems Bush describe are remarkably similar to today’s hypertext and Ted Nelson who coined the term, hypertext" in the 1960's, acknowledges his debt to Bush. Bush was a visionary and his work in creating the environment which nurtured the development of what became the internet is well documented in several excellent articles in Wired magazine and ibiblio. "Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, ``memex'' will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory." - Vannevar Bush The original article can be read for free on-line at the Atlantic Monthly which is still published. VIA SLASHDOT Read More
