MIT undergrad Ben Gulak’s Cambridge-based startup, BPG Inc., has redesigned its electric unicycle — the Uno.
Gulak told Popular Science the Uno now has the ability to transform from a Segway-like configuration with two side-by-side wheels to a more recognizable motorcycle mode. The changes were made to make the self-balancing bike a safer ride.
Just in time for the holidays, BPG is taking $1,500 down payments on the bike now.
A first for criminal courts in the commonwealth could open up a new revenue stream for makers of thermal imagers: Massachusetts police departments. Universal Hub reports Boston Municipal Court has convicted a man of gun possession based on thermal imaging evidence.
After a foot chase through Dorchester, cops used a thermal imaging scanner to show a gun found on the chase route had been recently held. During the trial, prosecutors brought in MIT mechanical engineering student Priam Pillai as an expert on thermal imaging.
by Anthony Duignan-Cabrera, for Portfolio.com
Is there an e-reader on your gift list this year? It wouldn’t be a surprise—the technology press touts that the 2009 holiday shopping season (actually, all of 2010) will see the ascent of the e-reader as the ultimate mobile accessory, delivering novels and newspapers to a public clamoring for convenience
Once a boutique, almost novelty device, the e-reader market is steadily filling up. According to an August report from the Association of American Publishers, electronic-book sales increased 177 percent, to $96.6 million, over 2008 numbers.
Industry pioneer Sony and its upstart rival Amazon, with its Kindle series of devices (this year, the company is believed to have sold three million units), must now battle for market share against iRex Technologies’ iRex DR800SG, the soon-to-be released Alex from Spring Design, and offerings from Barnes & Noble. (more…)
Southwest Harbor, Maine’s Peter Homer won $450,000 in NASA’s Astronaut Glove Challenge yesterday.
This is Homer’s second time winning the contest. Homer’s first win in 2007 launched his startup, Flagsuit. Flagsuit is developing pressure suits using the same technology as Homer’s prizewinning gloves — for use as a wearable substitute for hyperbaric chambers used to treat conditions such as cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, stroke and autism. Down the line, Homer plans to target the the space tourism industry, which Homer sees growing in the next two years.
Last summer, Flagsuit also won the Heinlein Business Plan Competition.
The MIT Media Lab’s Pranav Mistry recounted the history of his SixthSense project at TED India this week. SixthSense started when Mistry took the rollers out of two computer mice (mouses?), attached some pulleys, and made a glove-like hand-gesture interface. Moving through SixthSense’s evolution, Mistry talks about some Internet-synced sticky notes, pens that draw in three dimensions, Google maps that interact with physical objects, and other things that, if said by anyone else, would just be crazy talk.
From there, he explains how he inverted the process, in an effort to “paint the physical world with that digital information.” He started with a projector mounted on his bike helmet that would project pixels onto the physical world. He added a camera and the system eventually shrank down to the pendant we recognize as the current incarnation of SixthSense.
In the video, Mistry demonstrates the system by casually doing things that shouldn’t make any sense: Digitally painting on a physical wall, taking a photo of the Boston skyline by framing it with his index fingers and thumbs, dialing a phone number on numbers projected on his palm, watching video of President Obama’s MIT speech on a print newspaper; reading a tag cloud — “comedian,” “geek,” etc. — that appears on comedian/blogger Baratunde Thurston’s shirt when Mistry meets him; playing a video game on a piece of paper; and copying text and charts from the regular kind of paper and pasting them to his crazy, digital paper, just by picking it up and moving it.
By Jim Connolly
There are those people who walk into a room and enter into a discussion and you know right away, there’s something special about them. They are bright, well-informed, focused and energetic. They’re leaders. Put 10 of them in the room, and you have something dynamic.
That’s the way it was with the 2009 MHT Women to Watch event last spring.
You had a room full of people like Cambridge Nanocomp’s Jill Becker who has been building and then selling “atomic layer deposition” systems, sort of like an oven used to develop nanoscale thin films, such as coatings for drillbits. But she often did it one-handed, with a baby in the other arm.
Intel’s Mondira Pant has a batch of microprocessor-related patent applications in the pipeline and has authored some 30 technical papers. She also has focused on developing her skills as a public speaker, being honored as the best speaker at an Intel technical conference, while reaching out to the community to teach dance.
Then, there was Anna Mracek Dietrich, one of the MIT rocket team alums that are building a roadable aircraft, what the rest of us might call a flying car. But Dietrich isn’t just a techie, she’s the business person behind the business at Terafugia. In addition, to show the wisdom of youth, as one of the youngest Women to Watch, she observed that she awaits the day when there will be no need for an event that focuses just on the achievements of women.
For now, though, it’s important to continue to recognize the accomplishments of the women who are driving forward the New England technology sector. So, for the seventh year, Mass High Tech will recognize the women who have contributed to the tech community, but also are poised to be industry leaders of the future.
Time is running out. We need you and your peers to nominate great candidates for the 2010 Women to Watch awards. As members of the tech community you know best who they are.
Nominations close on December 4, with honorees being celebrated on March 18. Please submit your nominations here.
By Rodney Brown
3Com Corp., the company that gave birth to Ethernet, has agreed to be acquired by Hewlett Packard Co. for a total of approximately $2.7 billion in cash, in a deal that already has approval from the boards of both companies.
Buying Marlborough-based 3Com gives HP a well-developed roster of Ethernet switching products, a much stronger corporate presence in China, and a leap into network security products through 3Com’s subsidiary, TippingPoint, which the company acquired for $400 million in 2005.
HP also gets access to 3Com’s large research and development team in China, which came about from 3Com’s partnership with Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. Officials at Calif.-based HP say that the purchase will allow it to boost its next-generation data center strategy built on the convergence of servers, storage, networking, management, facilities and services.
The agreement calls for 3Com stockholders to receive $7.90 for each share of 3Com common stock that they hold at the closing of the merger, which is expected to happen in the first half of calendar 2010.
3Com, which has 5,800 employees globally, posted revenue of $290.5 million and $7.5 million in net profit in the third quarter, a year-over-year drop of 15 percent and 91 percent respectively. It held $200 million in long-term debt, including $46 million due this fiscal year and another $46 million due in its 2011 fiscal year. The company has a market cap of $2.23 billion.
Click here to watch HP’s webcast announcing the deal.
Pranav Mistry, of the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group, is reportedly planning to release the code for his augmented reality system, SixthSense.
The computer system, which you wear around your neck, projects information on the world around you, which you can then manipulate with your hands. Pretty soon, you may be able to build your own for about $350. Mistry told a TED India panel this week he didn’t want to subject SixthSense to corporate whims.
After the jump, watch Fluid Interface Group director Patti Maes present the technology to the TED conference in March. (more…)
happiness hat from Lauren McCarthy on Vimeo.
Local designer Lauren McCarthy, ex- of MIT’s Media Lab, CSAIL, and Visual Arts Program, developed a hat that detects whether or not you are smiling, and if not, it stabs you in the back of the head: The Happiness Hat.
McCarthy’s web site says the hat is the first in a series of “tools for improved social interacting.” She further explains:
An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile. Through repeated use of this conditioning device you can train your brain to smile all the time. The device runs on Arduino.
For my dollar, when I see someone walking down the street with a constant smile on their face, I think “deranged,” not “happy.” But then again, that might be exactly why I need a Happiness Hat.
Popular Science has chosen “10 Young Geniuses Shaking Up Science Today,” and not surprisingly, four of them come from New England. Take that, Rest of the Country.
Among the 10:
PopSci also helpfully notes that, John Cusack notwithstanding, the planet Nibiru will not collide with Earth, wiping out all life, in two years.
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