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Here's a very clever hack of a Wii Balance Board from engineer Ryo Yamamoto that was on display at Tokyo Make Meeting 06 this past weekend. Mr. Yamamoto's "Diet Chair" is essentially just a regular chair, but with a Wii Balance Board sitting underneath the seat. What's smart about this is that it allows the chair to send feedback to the computer where the user's weight can be monitored over time. Read More

China recently launched the state-sponsored Tianditu.cn or "Map World," the country's homegrown answer to Google Maps. While it's an impressive initial effort, the mapping system does resemble Google's a little too much, and it also performs poorly once you navigate outside of Chinese borders. Read More

A couple of years ago, Google put out a request for ideas that could change the world by helping as many people as possible. The response was phenomenal, with over 150,000 proposals coming in from more than 170 countries. The search giant managed to whittle those down to just 16 and then asked the public to vote for five winners. The results are in, and we're pleased to say that one of the ideas taking a share of the US$10 million prize fund is an innovation Gizmag featured over two years ago, the Shweeb Human-powered monorail. Read More

The follow-up to the Google sanctioned G1 smartphone is on the way and T-Mobile has released official details. The T-Mobile G2 gets Android 2.2, an 800 MHz Snapdragon MSM7230 CPU, applications like Google Voice Actions built-in and 4G speeds via the carrier's HSPA+ network2. The HTC-designed handset also includes a 3.7-inch multi-touch screen, an optical trackpad, a new hinge design for the full QWERTY keyboard and a 5-megapixel camera with 720p video capture. Read More

IFA is billed as the world’s largest consumer electronics and home appliances tradeshow, so it's fitting that the closing address for the 2010 event was delivered by the CEO of one of the biggest players in the technology space – Dr. Eric Schmidt of Google Inc. He discussed the age of the smartphone, cloud computing, plus some tasty samples of Google TV and what's just around the corner for the Android platform including a game-changing tool for mobile speech translation called "conversation mode"... read on for a summary of the key points. Read More

Google Street View, while very useful, fascinating, and full of wonderful bloopers, does rub some privacy advocates the wrong way. Should people on public streets have a reasonable expectation of not ending up with their photo on the Internet? There’s a whole other article in that, but in any case... for all the folks who do have a problem with it, a computer science graduate student is working on a solution: software that digitally removes pedestrians from Street View images. One of the byproducts of the current version of the system is somewhat unsettling, however – areas where people were in images are sometimes marked by ghost-like shapes, or even by disembodied shoes and feet. Read More

There’s no doubt that most people would like to know the future. It’s a desire that has kept palm readers, astrologists and tea-leaf readers in business for hundreds of years. Now there’s a company called Recorded Future that says it can use information scoured from tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to predict the future. And before you laugh, it’s got some heavyweight backers including Google and the CIA. Read More

When Google announced this past Monday that the company would be releasing App Inventor, an app development tool requiring zero programming knowledge, a number of questions arose around the tech sphere. Would this lead to an explosion of Android apps? And if so, how are we supposed to filter through all the 'crapps' that are sure to enter the marketplace (Attention, World, I invented a word: crap+apps=crapps). Does this mark a turning point where programmers start to become obsolete? Read More

Audi is offering the option of a factory-installed WLAN hotspot on its new A8. The system will enable front and rear seat passengers to tap into Internet access at up to 7.2 Mbit/s by dropping a data-capable SIM card into the car's Bluetooth phone or by pairing your existing phone. Read More