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'Tis the season to revel in holiday-induced techno-fantasy. Better design. More innovation. And Moore's Law on steroids. This year's best products, whether inexpensive stocking stuffers or pricey lifestyle augmentation, let lucky recipients open up whole new worlds, important for any new, must-have technology.
Life mapping with Memoto
Avid lifebloggers have found the perfect tool to help keep track of their lives, especially those small moments that can easily vanish. The Memoto, successfully funded by kickstarter, is a tiny camera and GPS you wear that takes pictures of nearly every moment of your life, with information when and where it took them. This means that you can literally revisit your past ( a short promo).
Without buttons, it's small and unobtrusive, automatically taking photos as long as you're wearing the camera - two geotagged photos a minute. Take it off and it stops.
Later the Memoto's app organizes the photos into "moments" on a timeline, which presents you with keyframes (about 30 per day) each representing one moment. You can
tap a moment to relive it in a stop-motion-like video of all the pictures in that moment. Rest assured that the Memoto offers secure photo storage at a flat monthly fee, which will always be a lot more affordable than hard drives.
This is probably the best way to take effortless vacation photos without stopping to pose every few minutes. Once you're home, the whole trip will simply unspool, triggering hundreds of already forgotten, barely observed moments.
You can order the $279.00 camera from Memoto, and it will ship in April 2013.
A must for high altitude paparazzis
At over $100,000, the Aeyron Scout is probably out of everyone's budget, but definitely worth ogling over for Christmas. It's a micro-sized unmanned aircraft built by
Aeryon Labs in Waterloo, Ontario, and has already shown Libyan rebels opposing artillery positions, accident investigators geo-referenced crash scenes, and oil refinery maintenance engineers tall flare stacks.
The Scout can be snapped together at the scene and flown using an iPad by an amateur pilot to downlink day video, night thermal imagery, and custom sensor data to a tablet ground station more than two miles away. It takes off vertically, can follow a programmed flight plan, and, with the steep price in mind, calculates remaining battery life. According to Aeryon President Dave Kroetsch, "The customer has the same expectations of a micro air vehicle as a larger UAV... You can't sacrifice performance for size." Watch the Scout in action:
For a more detailed write-up, read this article from Avionics Today.Battling "energy illiteracy"
While we're becoming more aware of our direct energy use (heating, cooling, appliances, etc.), few understand that manufacturing is one of the largest areas of energy consumption. Broadly speaking, most people are "embodied energy" illiterate.
The UK's Agency of Design
has created a deck of cards they call Energy Trumps to help designers create more ecologically sound products by identifying the environmental properties of 45 different materials (short promo film).
Those properties include embodied energy, embodied carbon, embodied water, recycled content, extraction intensity and years of reserves. Producers can choose between materials in a fast and practical way. Inhabitat reports that quick answers are also found on an accompanying app that explores the volume of each material that could be manufactured with a megajoule of energy (Agency of Design's pdf, Designing with Energy).
You can buy a deck for ?12.50. Orders placed after the 21st of December will not be shipped until the 2nd of January.
Italian style and beauty
When it comes to marrying elegant style and function, Italians rule the road, and
trendsetting urban bikers love the aggressively svelte Rizoma 77/011 Metropolitan, a beautiful machine that lunges along city roads with its technology propelling cutting-edge style (meet the designers in this video).
Evolving out of a racing motorcycle, accessory design shop, a review on TogoParts.com raves about this new urban toy:
...perhaps the most outstanding feature of the Rizoma 77/011 is the missing seat tube, resulting in a sleek and 'flowy' frame (see more photos)... In line with the maintenance free concept for urban bikes, the Rizoma 77/011 uses a Gates single-speed belt-driven transmission, which eliminates the use of
any grease and chain replacement. The saddle is an interesting sculpture of carbon and aluminium; the stem and handlebar are integrated as a single piece of billet aluminum.
The bike is available in only one size, cautions road.cc. The seat is adjustable between a narrow range of 91cm and 96cm from the ground. If the best height for you isn't in that 5cm range, remember, riding this bike is all about looking good, not necessarily feeling good.
Made in Italy, the 77|011 is available in both shiny carbon and matt white for $4,800.
Small, off-grid, backup battery power
Give yourself a boost! BoostTurbine2000 is a durable backup battery with a hand-cranked generator that provides power whenever you need it. For
everyday or emergency use, the small charger enables you to power up your mobile devices anytime. After hand cranking for one minute, it produces enough power for a 30-second call or a few critical texts.
The case is made of tough but lightweight aluminum and fits in your pocket. Use its micro-USB DC input with most smartphone chargers and a standard USB port for charging any mobile device. It's completely self-contained and all you need to supply gadget backup energy (spec sheet).
Buy it at their site for $60.
Motorcycle speed metal
No ChemE Christmas list would be complete without the possibility of a near-death experience. And that's where Confederate Motorcycles comes in. This is the Benchmark Confederate X132 Hellcat Combat, a brutal bike with a massive engine that not only flies, it screams, recently setting a salt-flats speed record.
A few months back, the bike set a record of 172.2 mph at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats, making it the fastest big block V-twin engine on two wheels, according to Wired.
Hitting that speed with a 500-pound motorcycle (plus rider), with drag and engine size forming a performance plateau, is hard to do, but Confederate did that with a V-twin engine in the world of four cylinder superbikes. Watch the record run:
All that speed pulls down a big price tag, and the Hellcat's totals $72,000 for the rare privilege of hanging on to a record-breaking piece of American machine art. Act fast if you want to own one - Confederate is only producing a limited run of 36 bikes. If you manage to get one out of the factory, your name will be engraved on the gas tank so onlookers will know who just totaled a motorcycle worth as much as a small Southern starter home.To order this new $72,000 motorcycle, check the site.