Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Mitsubishi's laser TV coming to CES


Frank DeMartin, vice president for marketing and product development at Mitsubishi, casually mentioned in a recent NY Times article that the company will be showing off its large-screen laser TVs at the next CES (in January, put it in your calendar!). As we mentioned in 2006, the new tri-laser projectors are said to have higher picture quality and a larger range of color than LCD or plasma screens, making them a bit of a threat to the status quo -- although currently it looks like the TVs will be promoted to the "premium" end of the market, thus waylaying any direct competition (save for the videophile crowd). Then again, since we'll all be getting these under the tree this year anyway, we're not sure what the big deal is.

 

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NEC develops 8MP CMOS sensor for cameraphones


While LG's ambitious plans didn't exactly pan out in 2005, the idea of upping those megapixels in mainstream cameraphones sure is getting a lot of attention today. Shortly after Kodak announced its plan to unveil a five-megapixel iteration for future phones, NEC is hitting back with a development of its own. Apparently, the company is already shipping samples of a "system chip capable of processing cameraphone images at resolutions of up to eight-megapixels," which even includes "image stabilization circuitry as an option." Best of all, the CE131 sample device is priced at just ¥4,000 ($33), and hopefully that cost will diminish even further as mass production goes forward in October. [Warning: Read link requires subscription]

 

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Corian Z. Island: taking kitchens to the year 3000

Corian is known for producing all types of wacky materials for your countertop, but the company has dashed straight into the 23rd century with its new "Z" kitchen island (and assorted accessories). The Zaha Hadid designed centerpiece boasts LED touch panels embedded in the table's surface, a mounted Mac for multimedia functions, and three very bizarre looking aroma "devices" which protrude from the island, and can be tweaked to produce various scents. The unit also controls a wall of abstract lighting fixtures, allowing you to alter their color and intensity. Basically, it's the perfect thing to own if James T. Kirk stops by wants you to heat up his coffee and make the room smell like rose petals. [Via chipchick]

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Convert Images, Documents to Adobe PDF via EMail Attachments

convert document to pdf KoolWire is a new and wonderful email based file conversion service to help you convert your Microsoft Word (.doc), Powerpoint (.ppt), Excel Spreadsheets (.xls) or even pictures into Adobe PDF documents.

Just compose a new email message, attach document(s) that have to be converted into PDF and send the email to pdf@koolwire.com. The PDF file(s) should arrive in your inbox the next moment.

free_adobe_acrobat_conversion

The big advantage is that Koolwire PDF converter requires no software installation and, unlike Google Docs or PDFOnline, you don't have to upload documents to any webserver in order to print them as PDF - just send them across as email attachments. PDF creation couldn't be simpler.

Best of all, you can attach multiple documents / images to the same email message and Koolwire will batch convert them into PDF. Don't think any free PDF writer software offers such a convenient option to create multiple PDFs in one go.

koolwire.com/ | Developer Blog | PDF Presentation

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Save time with an upload manager

Photographs selling their pictures on Micro Stock websites always have to cope with a cumbersome task: tagging their pictures and uplaoding them. The easier way si to use softwares like Photoshop to tag pictures and an ftp manager to upload them. But it still remains the boring part of the job. Creation is fun administration is not. Moreover moderation is sometimes erratic and a good picture that would sell might get rejected and the tagging and uploading time might just be a waste of time.

One software can rationalize those operations:prostock master. It manages very easily tagging and uploading on major microstock sites (8 of them so far). And because it uses Java it is Multi platform.

I wonder what will be the consequences if this kind of software get massively used. The market might be reshaped. Anyway this high growth market might still surprise us in many ways…

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