Author: Nic Boerma

An Apple announcement this weekend has revealed that their App Store has just edged over the 25 billion download mark. It took the mobile company almost four years to hit the 10 billion download milestone, reached in January last year, but a little over a year to more than double that number. Apple has placed a message on their website thanking users for assisting them in attaining this point. At present there are 550,000 applications available on Apple’s store and, the way that downloads have been increasing, the 50 billion mark cannot be too far off. Source: DigitalTrends

The recently launched Windows 8 Consumer Preview has topped 1 million downloads within the space of a day. Microsoft tweeted the news shortly after the milestone was reached. “One day later…one million downloads of the consumer preview” The preview was released on the same day that Microsoft demonstrated Windows 8 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Interest in the upcoming tablet-friendly OS has been high since the launch of the Developer Preview in September 2011 Source: CNET

If the Japanese aren’t creating devices to silence people harmlessly from a distance then they are working on new types of music that utilise brainwaves. Japanese artist Masaki Batoh has produced a music album, aimed at assisting victims of the earthquake in Japan, titled Brain Pulse Music. The music on the album is created from the brainwaves of people who survived the March 2011 earthquake in Japan. Batoh had volunteers wear a sensor-mounted headset that connected to a modified EEG and showed them images of Japan. The modified EEG transmitted their brain’s patterns to another portion of the device which…

Two companies, Immersion and Senseg, demonstrated advances in haptics technology at the Mobile World Congress this year. Haptics technology is a tactile innovation that gives users the impression that they can feel what is being seen on an electronic device. The technology has been around for some time, mostly utilising vibration or force feedback but both Immersion and Senseg have something new to offer. The aptly-named Immersion demonstrated several examples of their haptics technology, including a roller coaster video that replicates the clicking sensation of climbing to a high point and part of the sensation of the subsequent drop. Senseg…

A pair of Japanese researchers have come up with a device that they call the SpeechJammer. It is reportedly able to stop people from talking from a distance, without any physical effects on the person being silenced. The ‘gun’ that does all the work is composed of a directional microphone, a direction sensitive loudspeaker, distance sensor and laser pointer. It functions by recording a person speaking and directing that speech back to the original speaker with a fraction of a second’s delay. The resulting effect, known as Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF), can make it almost impossible for the speaker to…

Samsung presented the Galaxy Beam handset, which comes complete with a 50-inch projector built in to the unit, at the start of this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC). The Android 2.3 smartphone is, according to Samsung, capable of 720p video recording via its 5-megapixel camera. Samsung’s slightly novel handset is an evolution of the I8520 Galaxy Beam that was released by the company in 2010. This model packs in a 15 Lumen projector and boasts elevated hardware specifications over its predecessor. The revised Galaxy Beam will feature a 1GHz dual-core CPU, 8GB of internal storage and 6GB of RAM along…

Panasonic is partnering with Nuance Communications to bring Nuance’s Dragon TV voice control platform to Panasonic televisions this year. Panasonic is following in the footsteps of both LG and Samsung who introduced voice-enabled TV sets at this year’s CES. LG’s planned voice-enabled televisions are also powered by Nuance Communications’ Dragon TV solution. “TVs have become the epicenter of the digital living room, with what seems to be unlimited entertainment and media content. But that content is only as powerful as the experience and the ability for consumers to access it,” said Panasonic group manager of TV product planning Hiroyuki Iwaki.…

Dmitry Itskov, the founder Russian news service New Media Stars, has got a plan to make everyone immortal and he is hoping to achieve it some time in the next 30 years. His proposed project shares a name with the US Military’s recently announced Avatar program except the 31-year-old Russian is far more ambitious. His Avatar project is hoping to, within the next ten years, transplant a human mind into a robotic body. He revealed details of his plans at the recent Global Future 2045 conference and claims that the self-funded project has 30 Russian researchers working on achieving his…

Rovio’s Angry Birds series has cemented itself in tech history by being one of the most downloaded and most played apps of all time and a group called mbed, which provides hardware and tools for microcontroller prototyping, have released a recipe on their online Cookbook that allows fans of the game to take their obsession with Angry Birds to the next level. Players who have mastered the art of demolishing pigs with birds fired from a slingshot can recreate a working USB version of the weapon in their own homes thanks to mbed. The Angry Birds USB slingshot controller is…