By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

It’s winter and that means that the real men who loved our coverage of the Hemi Grill need a wintertime outlet. Rest easy. Here’s one for the snow and sleet - a V8 Snowblower.

Kai Grundt’s V8 snow blower raises the bar on the traditional snow blower in every respect. With electric start, electric block heater, antifreeze heater and eight cylinders, it has no drive belts to freeze up and you’ll never get bored with the job as the 454 cubic inch big block Chevrolet V8 produces 412 horsepower, 430 foot pounds of torque and can throw snow 50 feet at just 3500 rpm. Nor will you get cold as the machine has been ingeniously designed to route the engine coolant through the handle bars, with the rear mounted, enclosed radiator keeping the operator nice and cosy. Source: Gizmag

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Personally, I use margarine, and specific brands, without trans fatty acids, mostly for health reasons. My mother-in-law swears by butter though. And one of her complaints is how hard the stuff is when she takes it out of the refrigerator. That complaint could be a thing of the past with the ButterWizard.

A UK-based company has launched a portable, temperature-controlled butter dish, ButterWizard, which keeps butter at what it says is the optimal spreadable temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit.

It has a built-in fan and a chip which together control the temperature, adjustable for different textures, be it super-soft bread, crusty toast or delicate biscuits. “We were trying to find out what people’s frustration with butter was. It’s either too hard or too soft,” said David Alfille, managing director of East Sussex-based company Alfille Innovations Limited.

“ButterWizard heats or cools the butter and you can adjust the temperature to suit yourself.” Source: Reuters

We Say: I’ll admit, I’m someone who will spend 15 minutes (or more) looking for the TV remote control instead of walking up to the set to turn it on. I’m as lazy as the next person. I understand this is a convenience, but isn’t the ButterWizard just a little extreme? I also wonder how it gets power … rechargeable batteries, AAs or ?? I’ll admit I’m a soft margarine user, but even if I used butter I just couldn’t see myself buying this.

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

A Dutch company has announced a Linux-based VCR-like device that can connect and download content from a variety of P2P services (Edonkey, Bittorrent, Kazaa, Gnutella and Overnet). It has a DVD burner (unclear from the site if it’s dual-layer) and various-sized hard drives; the cheapest version has 40GB of storage and costs 279 euros ($328). You can also add your own hard drives.

The LamaBox is an intelligent mediaplayer, connectable to the internet. The player is special because it’s fully integrated with the internet, including connection to the big Peer-to-Peer networks*. Choose from an impressive collection of audio and video. The latest movies en televisionshows, playable on your television at the press of a button.

Watch live video- and audiostreams (with time-shifting), top-10 previews of movies in the theatre, the latest weather forecast or watch photo images from your digital camera and share these with friends and family.

Searching for a good movie? Make the search-spider work for you, or choose from a popular preselection. The LamaBox is simple to control and easy to use. Source: LamaBox.com

We Say: While this device has virtually no future in the U.S., apparently the Dutch supreme court ruled long ago in favor of the then Netherlands-based Kazaa that only the upload of copyrighted material is illegal. This implies this device only leeches (downloads), and doesn’t upload, but it’s unclear from the site if that’s the actual behavior. According to the site there’s a high demand and a five week (!) backlog.

By Mark Evans
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

It is not a good day for Blackberry-maker Research in Motion after a U.S. judge ruled a $450-million patent settlement reached earlier this year between RIM and NTP can’t be enforced. U.S. District court judge James Spencer will now decide whether and/or how to impose an injunction that could prevent RIM from selling Blackberrys in the U.S. So what does RIM do now? They can settle the patent dispute with NTP, which will cost them a whole lot more than $450-million; they can wait until the U.S. Patent Office completes its review of NTP’s patents, which RIM disputes; or RIM can implement a software work-around that will continue to do business in the U.S. even if an injunction comes down.

We Say: My sense is both sides are so well-entrenched and so convinced of their positions, a settlement could be the last of the three options explored.

(I’ve been nominated for the Canadian Blog Awards in two categories - Best Business Blog and Best Media Blog. If you want to vote - round one ends today - please click here. Thanks, Mark)

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

The repo man was so last century. At least that’s what a dealership in Viginina is thinking when it came up with a newer way to get high risk car buyers to keep making their monthly car payments - how about shutting off the car when you fall behind? As they put it, no pay, no drive.

It’s worked wonders at Norfolk’s Patriot Auto Sales, where nearly every car that drives off the lot is outfitted with a PayTeck Smart Box, a system that hands over a five-digit code in exchange for each payment. Come due date, the car won’t crank until the customer punches the code into a palm-size keypad wired into the dash. Patriot is the kind of operation that specializes in steeper interest, high-risk car loans. It advertises “no turndowns” — a corner of the used car business that deals with a “credit-challenged” clientele, as the industry puts it.

“Bad credit?” said Art Madden, Patriots general manager. “I’d be happy if they just had bad credit.” Not surprisingly, default rates are high. It’s not unusual for more than a third of the cars sold off such lots to wind up being repossessed. Since Patriot began using PayTeck three years ago, its repos have dropped from about 45% to less than 15%. Madden figures he has close to 500 of the $200 units on the road — an investment that has not only cut repos but boosted business. Source: USA Today

We say: Doesn’t sound very “patriotic”, but business is business.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Most longtime readers now that I long to fly and own some sort of cool ultralight plane. I’ve covered personal helicopters and flying cars and everything in between, but today I found a video of an ultralight crash that definitely made me stop and think. The weird thing is how there is no warning, the guy is happily flying and then BOOM. Result: broken back, broken pelvis, punctured lung, and so on.

View The Video Here via Furl

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I don’t usually bother writing about online stores. Most offer the same old electronic shopping basket and check-out experience, most have their shipping and handling in order and I enjoy the ease of ordering online. Blah, blah, blah. But when I decided to take the Podcasting plunge and ordered up the new M-Audio Podcast Factory, I stumbled onto a site that takes customer service to a whole new level. Sweetwater.com (they do music and technology related to audio.)

To be clear, the company has no idea I am writing this, and I certainly am not benefiting financially from this posting. I found the site purely by luck after doing a Google search on the “Podcast Factory” product name and seeing they had a low price and free shipping, but when it turned out that the product was not shipping yet, a guy from Sweetwater named Art Hill (no relation) called me personally to make sure I knew it would not be arriving before Thanksgiving. Not only was he nice on the phone, he also wrote me when the product was ready and mentioned it seemed like a cool product when we were talking about the delay. Here was a guy sitting in a cube somewhere, and yet he wanted to know about this Podcast product. (He also had no idea about this blog or who I was.)

Anyway, my product arrived yesterday and inside was a new catalog, a receipt signed by two inspectors, and even some candy. Yum! So, to the folks at Sweetwater, let me just say, you had me at hello. Great service, and a great reminder that even though online shopping is faceless, it’s still a chance to connect with your customers. And give young Art a raise!

Give them a try here

By Alfred Poor, HDTV Resource Center
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Earlier this month, Maxell announced that they will come to market late next year with a 300 GB removable disc storage device. The interesting feature is that it does not use magnetic media like a hard drive, or mechanical pits like a manufactured CD, or heat-sensitive dye like a DVD+/-R, or even phase change media like DVD+/-RW or -RAM. What’s left?

Holographics. Yes, intersecting signal and reference laser beams store data as a three-dimensional hologram. This means that data is not written on a single layer — or even multiple layers — as is the case with current optical disc technology. Instead, the data is stored throughout the plastic disc. And data transfer rates are improbably fast. A standard DVD movie has a bandwidth of about 4.7 Mbps. The first generation of Maxell’s technology will be capable of writing “a million bits of data to be written and read in parallel with a single flash of light,” achieving 160 Mbps throughput. Maxell is developing the product in partnership with InPhase Technologies, and the roadmap for future generations calls for even greater capacities and throughputs, reaching 1.6 TB on a 5.25-inch disc.

We say: Don’t count on this shipping on time, scheduled for late 2006. Recent experience shows just how difficult it can be to bring a new storage technology to market. And don’t count on the discs being particularly cheap; Maxell is talking about $100 for the first generation. Still, that’s a good deal compared with the equivalent stack of 60 DVD-R discs. But if they can deliver on this in a reasonable time and at a reasonable price, we might all just stop caring who wins between HD DVD and BluRay.