Fantastic Surround Sound Accessories for Home or the Office

The ultimate fan speaker.  I’m getting one… I wanted a fan anyway… this is just too cool to not buy and show off.

Just a pretty sound bar and sub?  Nope… the kicker is that it plays Blu-ray discs, streams Netflix/Padora, and has USB- in and an iPod dock, with optional wi-fi.

All I want are freaking speakers… in my light bulbs… is that too much to ask?

These are simply pretty.  I like’em.  Phillipe Starck’s Zikmu Parrot Wi-Fi iPod Speakers.

Journal Live – tracking your employees

Think you can use this tool to see where your employees are spending their time?  Facebook anyone?

Windows only: See how much time you spend instant messaging friends and crafting PowerPoint presentations with time tracker app JournalLive. JournalLive logs everything you do on a computer, from gaming to email, including who you communicate with and what documents you’re working on in applications. It automatically generates all sorts of reports for tracking productivity on the web site, including timesheets—perfect for keeping recording billable hours. The pro edition allows managers to track employees, presumably so hard workers can be recognized and shirkers sent to human resources for a stern lecture. The personal edition is free, the professional edition costs €10 per user, for Windows only.

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Mitsubishi – 65 inch LaserVue HDTV – $6,999 (American)

Just in time for your holiday wish list, Mitsubishi has announced that its stunning 65-inch LaserVue HDTV is now on sale at select specialty retailers nationwide. From what we’ve personally seen and from what we’ve gathered from those lucky enough to critique it in detail, this here set is a real winner. Of course, coming up with the $6,999 in order to bring one home is another matter entirely, but those who feel like stimulating the economy and their retinas can absolutely do so starting today.

Gigashift – File Sharing With a Business Model

A new NY-based startup launched today in beta named GigaShift. Gigashift is a file-sharing service which notes several areas that they believe give Gigashift a competitive advantage over the other 9 million file sharing services on the market. These advantages include: your file recipient can begin downloading while you are still uploading the file, all files are encrypted, pause/resume functionality, and the ability to upload a 10gig file in one upload.

The service uses a simple Java applet which provides pricing once you select the files to upload. Up to 200mb is free, and then the pricing model kicks in. I tested a 3 gb file and the price was $3.50 for 7 days of storage and 3 free downloads. There are options to increase the storage to 30 days for 75 cents and the number of downloads can be increased up to 10 – 5 downloads are $7.

Gigashift appears to compete directly with other popular file sharing services including YouSendIt and Rapidshare.  Gigashift files can be secured with a password and you need the unique id for each file to download it.

For Gigashift to be successful, they clearly need paying customers. Will the average file sharer want to pay? I’d target agencies who need to share files between offices and clients. Gigashift will also need to pound the pavement to get traction and make sure they clearly communicate their market differentiation – otherwise they will just be lumped in as “yet another file sharing service”.

RIM Announcing BlackBerry With Touchscreen AND Full Keyboard, Storm With US HSDPA in May?

The holy grail is right… a blackberry bold with a touch screen and a full keyboard… now that I’d upgrade to.

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Boy Genius—whose BlackBerry track record is close to impeccable—has early word from his sources that RIM is dropping not one, but two berry-flavored bombs at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium in May: a Storm that runs on full U.S. HSDPA (i.e., AT&T’s 3G, not just the 2100MHz band), and more awesomely, a BlackBerry wiith a touchscreen and a full QWERTY keyboard, basically a Bold with touch—the holy grail for some BlackBerry users.

RIM’s track record at launching stuff on time can be horrible, so we might not actually hear about these in May. But when we met with RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis to check out the Storm, he said that they had looked at doing a touchscreen with a slide-out keyboard, but it made the phone too fat. A Bold-like phone with touchscreen, though, would obviously solve the fatass problem, and the Bold’s giant screen would give you a fair bit of real estate to poke your greasy finger around. And a Storm in a fully baked GSM flavor at some point just seems like duh—Verizon can’t have all the love forever.

Laser Tape Measure

Here’s a cool toy for those of you in commercial real estate like me.

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Laser tape measures have been around for awhile, but not until recently have they become cost effective. The SonicTape Laser Tape Measure ($50) Can calculate area and volume and convert readings from feet to meters and inches to centimeters (if you were so inclined). Measures up to 50-feet with a 99.5 percent accuracy

New Real Estate Tech – Wifi Lights!

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Researchers at Boston University (whose football mascot, incidentally, is a giant light-emitting germanium diode) think they’ll be able to combine LED bulbs with wireless networking technology, allowing for nearly complete ubiquity of wireless access points. The technology will be able to communicate data with visible light at up to 10Mbps, and can be adapted to existing power lines.

The bulbs will use the same diode for lighting the room and providing the network connection, flickering, as the Register put it, “like tremendously fast signal lights.” Boston U is working on the project with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of New Mexico with a hefty $18.5m grant from the US National Science Foundation. The researchers see the concept and theoretically sound, but don’t have full working models yet.

Thanks to research, decent 3D displays getting closer to reality

I dream of… 3d TV… yes it’s true.  Imagine a 3d monitor in your boardroom?  Going to be here in 5 – 10 years?

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Terrafugia Transition Flying Car Unbelievably Close to Reality, Going On Sale Next Year

Ok… this isn’t real estate related… but come on… a flying car?  It gets you to your listings faster?  Actually, it’s just very cool.

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Unlike so many other pie-in-the-sky tech masturbation fantasies masquerading as projects that’ll see the light of day, Terrafugia’s Transition flying car amazingly looks like it really will go on sale next year, as its creators claimed three years ago. Gregory Mone from Pop Sci even got to sit in the $194,000 car, which is basically “a single-engine, rear-propeller airplane that just happens to be street-legal.” It’s still on track for its first test flight next month, and experts expect that it will indeed fly. We won’t get truly Jetsons giddy until it does take flight, but we’re pretty excited in the meantime.

And here’s another cool gadget coming out sooner than later!

Azentek apparently managed to get a few of its SmartMirror rearview mirror replacements out the door back in August, but that brief spat of availability promptly gave way to back orders and waiting lists, and no doubt a few disappointed customers. According to the company, however, it’s now not only ramping up production of the GPS-packing mirrors, but promising that they’ll be available at “major retailers” by the end of the year as well. In case you missed it the first time around, the $800 device crams a 4-inch GPS unit up alongside an apparently standard-sized rearview mirror, and it surprisingly doesn’t skimp on too many features, with it boasting handsfree Bluetooth calling, a built-in speaker, text-to-speech functionality, and an SD card slot for expansion (a 2GB card is included). For some true redundancy, you can also use the mirror as a monitor for a rearview camera.

BlackBerry Curve 8900 (Javelin) Video Hands On and Comparison

Following up their review of the pre-release BlackBerry Curve 8900 (aka Javelin), the CrackBerry guys decided to shoot a video of it, including both a feature walkthrough and a comparison with the older Curve and the new Bold. It’s helpful, since the Javelin really is a combination of the two. Anyway, have a look—thankfully the CB dudes made the video embeddable, so your clickin’ finger can rest awhile.

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