Panasonic’s solar-powered table wirelessly charges your gadgets

It has happened to all of us: you’re running around town all day only to look down and realize your phone’s battery is in the red, but you don’t have your charger and you’re not going to be home any time soon. What do you do? Panasonic has the answer with a protoype it showed at the Retail Tech Expo in Tokyo of a solar-powered inductive charging table. The table is able to juice your phone, or any other device with a Qi battery, by just setting it down. Inductive charging has been around for a few years now, but this is the first time we’ve seen a wireless version. Back in 2010 we saw the first inductive charging power mat, made by Energizer, but it needed external power to charge the devices. Panasonic’s table is unique, however,...

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Posted in: Gadgets,Technology

Chinese e-commerce giant opens furniture showroom

BEIJING – China's e-commerce giant is stepping up its heated rivalry with bricks-and-mortar retailers with the launch of a five-story home furnishings showroom in Beijing. Alibaba Group's Taobao, an Internet platform through which an estimated 3 percent of all retail sales in China pass, opened the showroom Friday for customers to try out sofas, tables and other big-ticket items before placing an order online with one of its merchants. The mall is a new intrusion into the territory of China's real-world retailers by e-commerce rivals that are growing so fast some suggest they could become the country's leading retail force — its version of Wal Mart. "The dominant retailer in China someday may be an online retailer," said Morgan Stanley...

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Posted in: Quick News

MIT develop Wear Ur World, 6th sense hand gesture gadget

MIT researcher Pattie Maes demonstrated a new gadget earlier this week at a technology conference in South California. It is called Wear Ur World (WUW), or 6th Sense and allows you to access information as though you always have a PC in front of you, but controlled by hand gestures. What the researchers have done is combine a number of standard gadgets including a webcam, projector, and mobile phone, to form a brand new interaction experience. In its current form the battery-powered projector is attached to a hat, the webcam is hung around the neck (or also positioned on a hat), and the mobile phone provides the connection to the Internet. The wearer uses hand gestures combined with the gadgets to perform actions. So, for example,...

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Posted in: Gadgets,Technology

Japan, the Twitter nation

By AKKY AKIMOTOAccording to Twitter's official blog (blog.twitter.com), when the clock stuck midnight last New Year's Eve, Japanese Twitter users went crazy, recording 6,939 tweets per second—a new record at the time. In fact, globally 14 percent of all tweets are in Japanese—second only to English, with 50 percent—which explains why Japanese was the second language to be added to twitter menus. And according to Virginia-based research firm ComScore, 20 percent of all Japanese are using Twitter, while only 8 percent of people in the United States are users. Twitter has grown so much in Japan that it now has more visitors than Japan's most well-known social network service, Mixi. And last month, Twitter appointed their first international...

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Posted in: Quick News

Walkman's latest version and a new camera from Panasonic

By RICK MARTINIt was not without a little sadness that we witnessed the end of Sony's Walkman cassette model last year. Sure it was a long time coming, but the Walkman brand is only rivaled by the iPod in the history of portable music. Thankfully, the brand still lives on in more modern Sony products. The latest of these was revealed earlier this month, as the company announced its new Walkman B Series. This new Walkman series (the NWZ-B160/B160F) of mp3 players is very reminiscent of Apple's popular iPod Shuffle line. They're tiny, they're available in a wide range of bright colors, and they have a convenient clip on the back.The B Series is an elongated player nearly reaching 10 cm in length, and weighing just 28 grams....

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Posted in: Gadgets,Technology

Exposure of Tepco pair exceeds limit "Cumulative dose of workers over new crisis cap of 250 millisieverts"

Two Tokyo Electric Power Co. employees working at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant may have been exposed beyond the 250-millisievert limit set for the crisis, Tepco and the government said Monday. The two men, one in his 30s and the other in his 40s, have been at the plant since the March 11 disasters triggered the crisis. Both may have a cumulative exposure of several hundred millisieverts, a company official said, while adding the two are "not at a stage that would require emergency medical treatment."To cope with the country's worst nuclear plant crisis, the government raised the legal limit on the amount of radiation a worker can be exposed to in emergencies to 250 milliseiverts from 100 millisieverts.The National...

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Posted in: Quick News

2012 Release For Windows 8, Ballmer Reiterates

At a Microsoft Developer Forum in Japan today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed what we’ve all been assuming: the company plans to release Windows 8 in 2012, just about three years after the release of Windows 7. Unfortunately, that’s as specific as the famously enthusiastic CEO cared to be, and no new features or details about the release were discussed, though we can glean some tidbits from his remarks. First, as evidenced by the upcoming ARM port of Windows, one of Windows 8′s focuses is adaptability and modularity – more than any previous version of the OS, Windows 8 will be written to power everything from tablets to netbooks to high-end workstations, or as Ballmer put it, ”Windows 8 slates, tablets, PCs, a variety...

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Posted in: Invention and Innovation,Technology