Australia

Helicopters featuring coaxial rotor designs are not exactly new. The co-axial design of a pair of rotors mounted on the same mast and with the same axis of rotation, but turning in different directions, has been utilized on a number of military helicopters for around half a century, most notably those produced by the Russian Kamov helicopter design bureau. The coaxial design offers a number of advantages over the traditional helicopter designs, which makes it difficult to understand why we haven’t seen co-axial rotor designs taking to the skies for civilian uses. Now Australian based Wieland Helicopter Technologies (WHT) is hoping to change that by designing and manufacturing a range of new coaxial rotor system small format helicopters for commercial markets.  Read More

SUSHI is a multifunctional furniture design that doubles as both a sofa and a stool from Australian University student Winaya Suwarnaga Kamaputri. The elegantly simple and ergonomic concept uses a high gloss finished fiber glass base with fine fabric upholstery and its unique pattern was created using a laser cutting technique.  Read More

D-link have provided a firmware upgrade to enable printer and hard drive sharing from the USB port on their Xtreme N family of routers. This new USB over TCP/IP technology is called SharePort, and is available for the DIR-628, DIR-655, DIR-825, DIR-855 and DGL-4500 models.  Read More

In 2005 Gizmag reported on an innovative way to warn caffeine-addicts when their coffee too hot to drink, by changing the color of the takeaway cup lid. The Smart Lid has now been awarded ‘Best of Show’ at the AmeriStar Award hosted by the Institute of Packaging Professionals.  Read More

January 4, 2007 Most commonly women’s footwear falls into two categories – fashionable or functional – with precious little overlap. In the spirit of modern fashion, Rosie Roo from Australia is bringing a change to functional women’s wet weather footwear with their spunky new wellies/gumboots/galoshes (depending on what part of the world you’re from).  Read More

January 3, 2007 Desperate parents resort to any number of incentives to encourage their kid to “use the potty”- special underpants, reward charts and for parents of boys, even floating toys in the toilet bowl for target practice! Inventor Joanna Haymes, a mother of three boys, took the latter idea further and developed the “Wee Target”. Inspired by heat sensitive ink on a packet of batteries and driven to help her boys aim in the right direction, she designed a “target”- a black circle made of heat sensitive ink which is fixed temporarily inside the toilet bowl. When the target is hit by urine, the circle fades and a surprise picture appears.  Read More

March 4, 2007 This is a story of two men, one a dreamer, and the other a mechanical genius, from opposite sides of the globe joining forces to bring something new and astounding to the streets of America. It starts back in December of 2003, in Sydney, Australia when 3D designer Tim Cameron sketched a cruiser motorcycle on a scrap of paper. A pure flight of fancy, Cameron drew out an aggressively poised, extreme, low- riding design. As an out-of-hours project, using his 3D computer modelling skills, Cameron began to build what he called his ‘dream bike’ in the only place he thought it could ever exist, the self-contained virtual 3D world inside his computer. He spent 2 months ‘building’ the design in 3D down to the bolt heads, in a type of program normally used for Hollywood-type special effects, to create photo-realistic images of the bike so convincing that the average person would be hard pressed to pick them from the real thing. These images attracted the interest of an Australian custom bike magazine, Ozbike, and became the basis for an 8-page cover story. This story in turn generated interest internationally and the images went on to be published by leading motorcycle magazines in 10 different countries around the world. This all by itself was a satisfying result for Cameron, but pales considerably in comparison with what was about to happen next!  Read More

February 26, 2007 Last Friday, more than 350 industry types hit Doltone House in Sydney, Australia for the Interactive Entertainment Awards. Twenty awards were handed out - twelve industry voted, and eight based on GfK sales data from January 1 to December 31, 2006. Read on for the unsurprising results of the industry voted awards, and the surprising winners (and some truly bizarre categorisations) of the best sellers.  Read More

November 22, 2006 French philosopher Joseph Marie de Maistre's famous quotation, “Every country has the government it deserves”, seems particularly apt with Australia’s citizenry continuing to put up with ongoing ill-considered legislation as the country tries to keep apace with the fast changing world of digital media. The Australian Internet Industry Association (IIA) has issued a warning that changes to Australia’s copyright laws being rushed through Australian Parliament risk making criminals out of everyday Australians. The IIA in conjunction with QUT Intellectual Property Law Research Program has compiled these risk analyses (teenagers, families, small business and industry - all in PDF format) of how Australians could be liable for heavy fines and even jail under the new copyright regime by engaging in activities which many would regard as commonplace. The illustration is just one example - there are dozens of other frightening potential scenarios. “We can’t be sure if this is the government's intent, or whether there has been a terrible oversight in the drafting of this Bill. Either way, the consequences for the average Australian family could be devastating, “ said IIA chief executive, Peter Coroneos.  Read More