This is some what appropriate for today (knee deep in snow here), the robotic snow plough AKA Yuki-taro.

Yuki-taro may look like one of Bob the Builder’s friends but he’s (or should that be it) one high tech piece of machinery. By using a GPS system and video camera eyes Yuki-taro is able to find snow, suck it up and compress it into blocks for easy storage, these are then expelled out of the back, so he craps blocks of snow so to speak.

Yuki-taro is a working concept at the moment and won an award in the recent Good Design Contest . The robotic snow plough is planned for commercial release in the next five years.

Source: Pink Tentacle

You can never be too safe these days when walking around, which is why it is prudent to get this Taser C2 for the lady in your life. It looks like a shaver at first glance, but when one’s eyes glaze over the lightning flash symbol, it definitely spells trouble. The Taser C2 is touted to be the next wave in citizen defense, enabling you to stop a threat that is up to 15 feet away to keep you and your family safe. In case you are assaulted, the C2 can also be used as a contact stun device to repel the assailant.

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How many of you actually own some kind of home weather station at home? Most of the time, these personal weather stations offer nothing more than a myriad of readings that range from barometric pressure to the level where the mercury is at. The Animated Weather Forecaster is slightly different from the rest of the offerings as it comes with a miniature weatherman inside. This digitized avatar actually looks more like a boy who just hit puberty than anything else, but I’ll let that slip by for the moment. I guess the overall kiddy look is due to the fact that this device targets the children’s market rather than adults.

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After a one week and a half break on my part, I’m back in good shape to bring you some of the best concepts/patents ever created. Maybe best is not the right word to describe them, I think that idiotic or laughable is more proper and you will see why on the upcoming series. My plan is to reach at least 10 series, but as you know most plans always have some kind of problem and afterwards a stupid excuse, I hope that isn’t the case with mine…

Anyway, for now I present one useful but still idiotic patent:

Smokers Hat – US Patent Issued In 1989

Whoever made this hat had no problem with the awkward looks smokers would get from non-smokers, but the special hat actually protects them by sucking the smoke and more…
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It’s not exactly warm these days, it is winter after all. That’s not bad if your in your nice house that is at a comfortable 72 degrees, but if you have to walk out to your each morning it’s not going to be so lovely. Instead, the seats are going to be freezing and it’ll be 10 minutes before the heater is ready to do its job. You could have someone run out in the cold to start it for you or you could do it yourself. Don’t be silly, I didn’t mean you yourself would run outside to do it, you’d have it done automatically with the Design Tech Remote Car Starter.
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Social networking sites have spread all over the Internet. The likes of MySpace, Orkut and Facebook are among the most trafficked sites on the web, but that is not enough, they are planning to invade the mobile landscape as well.

Vodafone, the leading mobile operator, announced in fact plans to deploy a service that will enable subscribers to access to social networking sites directly from their handsets. According to an article over BusinessWeek the logic behind that move comes from the younger audience that most social networking sites have, and “that same audience is equally attached to its cell phones. Millions of younger people live without a traditional landline, or use it mostly as a fast Internet connection. As a result, the convergence of social networking and the mobile phone is all but inevitable.” Read the rest of this entry »

Canon may not have been listening when I asked for a bluetooth camera but it looks like Ricoh were!

The new Ricoh 500SE is automatic, it’s systematic, it’s hydromatic… Errr, where were we? Oh yes, it’s a waterproof, ruggedised 8MP digital camera with Bluetooth, Wifi and GPS all built in - how cool is that? I don’t know how well - or even if - it will work with the Seagate DAVE since neither product has been released yet but I do like the idea of having a hard drive getting the photos directly from the camera.

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Researchers at Duke have developed a 3-dimensional woven scaffolding material and process that will serve as a base to join with stem cells to form natural cartilage to replace your existing knee cartilage.

This is great, and amazing, as it is a fully therapeutic, and uses stem cells (see they’re awesome) to grow the actual cartilage on the scaffolding.

What this means is, in 3 to 4 years this process should be ready for it’s first human testing.

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