Friday, January 7, 2011

New England companies show off tech gear at CES

By Rodney H. Brown

Isabella Products Inc., TomTom NV, Immerz Inc., iRobot Corp. and Iomega are among the companies with local ties that are trying to make a big splash with new products and new deals at the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Straight out of Concord comes both Isabella Products and TomTom (technically based in the Netherlands, but with its U.S. headquarters in Concord). Isabella, which launched its wirelessly connected Vizit digital frame earlier this year, has followed that up with the Mini, a wireless USB stick that allows a digital frame with a USB port to receive new photos remotely.

Connected by the AT&T broadband wireless network, Isabella’s Mini will be available in the second quarter of 2011. Photos can be sent to it via e-mail or through the website Vizitme.com. One area that Isabella hopes to tap with the Mini is digital signage. Images on a remote digital sign could be updated from a central office.

TomTom has teamed up with Nike to create the Nike+ SportWatch GPS Powered by TomTom. The new running watch can be set to alert runners of specific waypoints on a route, all based on routes set on a Nike website using TomTom’s maps and GPS data. It also tracks using GPS as you run, so you can go on a new route with friend, get home, plug the watch into your computer and have the TomTom software map out the route you just completed for future use.

Cambridge-based Immerz, meanwhile, has inked a distribution deal with game retailer Play N Trade for its KOR-fx full sensory immersion gaming gear. The KOR-fx chest-worn device will be available at more than 200 Play N Trade retail stores across the United States and in Canada. The units, which will cost $189, can be pre-ordered and they are expected to ship to pre-order customers in March.

The KOR-fx uses acousto-haptic technology to create sensation within the chest cavity that can give the gamer a sense of being within the gaming world, by locating impacts or concussions in three dimensions by feeling them.

Not content to let its bathroom-cleaning new robot the Scooba hog all of the CES stage, iRobot of Bedford was showing off its new AVA telepresence robot. The robot, which looks like someone attached a Roomba to the top of a four-foot high shaft that ends in a Segway-like covered wheelbase, is capped with a display screen that shows your face to the scared humans around you. A set of PrimeSense sensors – the same ones used in the Kinect from Microsoft – help guide the robot around its environment, and it can be controlled with and communicated through an iPad or an Android-based device. No official statement on the price or when you can buy one to scare your dogs.

And Iomega, which is technically a California company but is owned by Hopkinton’s EMC Corp., has jumped with both feet into the set-top box world with Iomega TV with Boxee, a line of products that bring the web and TV shows – via Boxee – to your TV. The boxes come in two flavors – one with a choice of 1 terabyte or 2 terabytes of data storage, and one with no local storage. The remote control has a QWERTY keyboard for surfing the web or searching Boxee for shows or VUDU for content. The devices will be available next month and run from $229 to $349 in price.