Philips WOWvx – 3D TV

I just came across the coolest thing this year. A 42″ TV that is capable of displaying 3D images without the need of the dorky 3D glasses.

The gizmo costs around $12k, and it’s currently used in casinos around America.
Philips has a dedicated site to this technology (http://www.wowvx.com). Here you will find many more presentation videos.

$150 laptop – Cheapest Laptop in the World

Medison Celebrity just released a laptop that aims to be the cheapest laptop in the world, priced at only $150.
On their website, http://www.medisoncelebrity.com/ they present a laptop with:
# Intel® Celeron 1.5 GHz CPU
# 14″ Widescreen X-bright LCD
# 256 MB Ram memory
# 40 GB Hard Drive
# 802.11g Wireless LAN

but HOW DO THEY DO IT?

What I think their business model is:

If they buy laptops for $250 (directly from China) and they sell them for $150, they get a loss of around $100/laptop. If you add shipping and labor(installing Linux), you get a loss of about $140/laptop. However, if they could sell advertisement on their website, and because of the “scam look”, they would have a very low ROI (0.02%), it is possible for them to make a profit.
For ex.: They have 1 million visitors checking out the product, but only 200 actually buy a laptop, that’s a $28.000 loss, but I believe advertising to a million people would cover that and make a small profit (if you’re an advertising expert, drop a line on this forum).

They could make huge money if they ship laptops with Google as default search engine (with their own adsense ID build in the system) and setup the OS with all sorts of ads and affiliate programs (similar to Windows and Apple – iTunes, MSN live, MSN shop, etc.).

This is not a new business model, Mozilla does this with their Firefox browser with comes with a personalized version of Google. Printer manufacturers also do this, when they sell their printers cheap and charge big for accessories. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo also do this, when they sell their consoles at half the manufacturing price, hoping to get a big profit selling the video games.

In fact, according to this article: http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.115391 , they really want to make a profit from ads and affiliate systems (or as retailers).

Nokia 888 – the future of cell phones?

What do you think about this new nokia 888, probably the future of the cell phone.



You can view a small video with the phone here: Nokia 888 video

Free Image Viewer Software

I recently discovered XNView, a free (for personal use) image viewing software and I was amazed. At only 3.5 Mb, it is a full featured image viewing program with decent looks and the fastest image processing I ever saw.

I worked with a couple of image viewers in the past, and I used IrfanView for over 3 years. Nothing compares to XNView. It loads images up to 10 times faster then any other freeware or commercial software, and not only that, but it’s zoom in/out works instantly.

It has a lot of options you can customize, it has built in filters and effects, red eye reduction, color management, screen capture utility, batch rename, batch edit, resize and batch resize. It can view around 400 file types and can convert to and from around 50 file formats.
This amazing little software can also create you a web page from your favorite photos with only a few clicks.
XNView can also generate thumbnails of movies.

You can download XNView from their website.

The laptop of the future

LG came up with a concept laptop, the LG eBook, which won the 2006 Red Dot Award as one of the 12 “best of the best” design concepts. I only found to pictures of this new laptop with OLED (Organic light-emitting diode) display, no visible keyboard and a very thin, book type design.
The futuristic LG eBook laptop PC uses organic light-emitting diode (OLED) panels for a display that consumes less electricity and operates on eco-friendly alcohol power. Making it even more unique, the transparent cylindrical hinge is used as storage for clean fuels like methyl alcohol. Also, like the popular LG Chocolate phone, the eBook’s keypad is made of an OLED panel giving it a very slick look.

The use of OLED displays, allows this new toy from LG to be extremely thin and to consume less electricity then normal LCD screens and uses eco-friendly alcohol.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

The new Adobe Photoshop Lightroom beta 4.1 has arrived and it’s free to download.

This piece of software is awesome. You can retouch your photos very easily, add effects to them and then create a very nice web album with a click of a button (literally).

The download size of the software is only 11 MB, easy and quick to install and it has awesome features. The only con I could find, and it’s really the only one, is that it needs a pretty fast computer if you don’t like to wait for large images to be processed.

Create free PDF files with PDFCreator

A very nice piece software I just discovered is PDFCreator. You will have to install it (as a new printer) and you will be able to create a PDF file from any document on your PC.

PDFCreator is free even for commercial use, so I can also recommend it for companies that need to create PDF files.

Batch resize images, the free way

Hello and welcome to my blog!

I was recently asked to offer help in resizing a DVD full of 7 megapixel photos. The company didn’t have a Photoshop license, didn’t want to purchase one, so I recommended Irfanview, a little, free and easy to use software, that you can download from Tucows.

Resizing a whole bunch of images, from a DVD, CD, directly from a camera, phone or hard drive, is a piece of cake, if you use Irfanview.

Just start the program (I assume you already know how to intall and start a program on your computer) and press ‘b’. A new window, entitled ‘Batch conversion’, will open.
Select the source, where your original, big images are. If you wish to also include subdirectories, check the ‘Include subdirectories’ button, or press ‘ALT+b’. Click the ‘Add all’ button (middle of the window, has a bunch of buttons near it). If you did everything OK, you should see a list of your images in the left pane.

Now select the output directory (input box in the middle of the window) and under the ‘Work as’ panel, select ‘Batch conversion’.
As the output format select ‘JPG -JPEG Format’ (it should be selected by default). Click on the ‘Options’ button to modify the JPEG compression (90 is the default value, but you can select any other value – between 70-90 highly recommended due to close to none image quality loss).

Check the ‘Use advanced options’ checkbox and click the ‘Set advanced options’ button.

Check the ‘RESIZE’ box (second from the top). Then select ‘Set new size’ and ‘Set long size to’ 800 pixels (or any other value you want, but 800 is recommended if you want to easily upload the image to the Internet). Now check the 3 boxes below: ‘Preserve aspect ratio (proportional)’, ‘Use Resample function (better quality’, ‘Don’t enlarge smaller images’.

Click ‘OK’ in the bottom right corner. Click ‘Start’ (top center) and you’re done.