High-tech tea stick for purists

Something for the tea lover and gadgeteer in your life that won't break your holiday budget.

The Tea Stick from Chiasso for US$20 is a stainless steel spring-loaded stick and sieve. You use the tiny shovel to scoop loose tea and load it in the stick. The stick is completely enclosed when dunking.

Via Crave CNET

Blow away the Joneses with a ceiling TV

Once upon a time, just having a wall-mounted flat-panel TV was enough to make a huge impression by itself. Never satisfied, of course, showy consumers have since tried to one-up each other with plasmas and LCDs that lift from cabinets, hide behind mirrors, and pop up from the bed frame or even out from underneath it.

So what's left? The ceiling, of course.

The "Automated Ceiling Lift" from Chief Manufacturing "will make your TV like a drop-down projection screen", according to Electronic House. And it's not one of those small drop-down numbers like those under-cabinet kitchen models either: It can handle displays of more than 61 inches, the company says, or up to 190lb.

Still, there's more than one way to make a statement. For our taste, we'd prefer the bar TV.

Via Crave CNET

A strip of paper that speaks

Now, your pictures can speak for themselves.

Labels That Talk, from Kailua Hawaii, has come up with software that lets consumers print high-density barcodes on strips of paper that store recorded voice messages. Scan the paper with a cheap handheld scanner--or a cell phone with a built-in scanner--and it plays back a message. The strip of paper you see in the picture can hold about eight kilobits, enough for a 10-second voice message, said Ken Berkun, president and founder.

"We're trying to get it to 20 seconds," he said.

The idea is to let consumer enhance their mementos with sound. "I have a daughter and I have photo albums," Berkun said, explaining how he came up with the idea for the company. Another large potential market lies in pharmacies and hospitals, which would put labels on medicine bottles. Thus, Mick Jagger, via your plastic prescription vial, could sing "you go running to the shelter of your mother's little helper" every time you go for a Paxil.

Hewlett-Packard is working on something similar called Memory Spot, which is a sticker that contains a NAND flash chip. Memory spot prototypes can contain 256 kilobits to 4 megabits of data, so you could store videos in them or additional pictures. Pictures and videos on Memory Spots could be beamed to a nearby computer or cell phone via an integrated networking interface.

Although flash costs continue to drop, chips invariably will always be more expensive than paper, Berkun said. HP, in fact, has estimated that Memory Spots could cost ten to 50 cents each when (and if) they finally come out. Labels will cost far less, says Berkun.

Other companies have experimented with talking barcodes, too, but the barcodes typically contained canned messages from a vendor.

Labels that Talk wants to concentrate on making and selling the software to consumers and printer makers. The company is currently trying to line up partners to make scanners. Some cell phone makers, he said, are already in discussions with the company.

Although you don't see a lot of startups like Labels that Talk out of Hawaii, some believe the picture could change in the future. Ira Ehrenpreis, a partner at Technology Ventures, calls it one of the last untapped geographies for start-ups. His firm has made a couple of clean energy and medical deals in the state in the past few years. The state's somewhat generous tax credits offered to in-state tech companies help too, added Berkun.

Via Crave CNET

LCD monitor designed for the colorblind

This is one of those random facts that, if true, makes one wonder why technology hasn't caught up with reality: More than 200 million people worldwide are thought to be colorblind, according to some estimates, with more than 10 million of them in the US. If even part of those statistics are accurate, it makes sense that companies would step up efforts to market products for that population.

Although technologies for the colorblind have been developed in the past, Japan's Eizo believes it has come up with a unique system that will allow colorblind individuals to "see" the graphic displays on its new 24-inch LCD, according to Akihabara News. Through Color Universal Design principles, it uses such techniques as lighting, shapes, positions, patterns, and labeling to help those who can't discern differences in color.

Eizo's FlexScan system is on the Japanese market at present, but it's not hard to imagine something like this taking off worldwide if it proves effective. After all, if anything transcends language and cultural barriers, it would seem to be something like this.

Via Crave CNET

Philips exposes your body

There are lots of wonderful cameras out there that can shoot beautiful portrait shots or even a nice sharp macro of a not-too-sharp snout.

But a head shot of your brain?

Philips Medical Systems has announced the Brilliance Computerized Tomography (CT) scanner which is capable of scanning the body with a series of 256 X-ray pulses every 0.3 second. In layman speak, that means this million-dollar scanner can produce a high-resolution, three-dimensional image of a beating heart complete with detailed blood vessels and valves… all within two heart beats.

Via Inventorspot

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