For behind the scenes pictures, stories and special contests, follow us on Facebook!
Subscribe:

Search Results for: boat

Viral Marketing Done Right: American Eagle Announces Paint-On Skinny Skinny Jeans

By David Ponce on 03/25/13 • Leave a comment!

Spray-on-AEO-Skinny-Skinny-jeans

Yes, they’re trolling. But it’s a darn good one. The 30 second advertisement featured below is about a purported new range of skinny jeans from clothing retailer American Eagle. “It’s our skinniest fit yet and is so comfortable you’ll feel like you’re wearing nothing at all,” boats the narrator. And that’s when you realize that the pants are quite literally painted on. The campaign doesn’t end with a simple video however, as they provide you with a link to a special page on their website where you can contemplate buying a can of the spray-on fabric. There is even an option to add the $50 “Limited Edition” set to your shopping cart; pressing the button brings up an “out of stock” warning. Right.

Let’s be clear, this is absolutely a tongue-in-cheek hoax, as confirmed by the company’s vice-president last friday on the Today Show. But it does show the company hitting one out of the park in the field of viral marketing. The video has racked up over a million views in three days and got the Interwebs chatting.

Check out the video, below.

VIA [ DamnGeeky ]

Exploring The Underwater World While Sitting Comfortably In A Boat, iPad In Hand, Has Never Been Easier

By David Ponce on 02/07/13 • 1 Comment

The-Submarine-Camcorder

About 70% of this planet is underwater. As vast as the visible land is, the world that lives hidden from view, under our oceans and lakes, is vastly larger. Exploring it usually requires a pretty substantial amount of effort, but not if you have some money to throw at a remote controlled submersible craft equipped with a quasi-HD camera. The Submarine Camcorder is a 19″ L x 14 1/2″ W x 7″ H submersible craft in a marine-grade, hydrodynamic ABS housing. It has electric thrust and lift propellers, and is capable of forward/backward (5 kts forward; 1 kt reverse), left/right, and up/down movements. It is tethered to a surface boat by a 100ft. cable, though communication with the device is done through WiFi and an app installed on an iPad, or even a laptop. A 1280 x 720 feed is sent directly to the iPad, where you can take stills or record footage.

The virtual dashboard (an iPad’s motion sensors can also steer the sub) includes a joystick, camera controls, and displays depth, heading, battery level, and temperature data received from the sub’s built-in sensors.

The Submarine Camcorder is available from Hammacher Schlemmer, which tends to be more of an upscale/pricey sort of retailer. This time is no exception: the thing costs a whopping $6,300.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ LikeCool ]

Use Sonar And Your Smartphone To Catch Fish

By David Ponce on 01/29/13 • Leave a comment!

Assuming that going fishing isn’t just an excuse for you to go get drunk on a canoe, the Realsonar system pictured above might interest you. It’s an ultrasound device mounted on a buoy, which then communicates with your smartphone through Bluetooth. In this fashion, you get to see where the fish are up to a depth of 150ft. It works at about 4 frames per second, which should be plenty for you to cast your line in the direction and depth required.

But that’s not all the Realsonar does. There’s a Bite Alarm that lets you know when a fish is nearby, so you don’t even have to look at the screen (or even put your line in the water) while you wait. There’s also a mapping feature that lets you get an idea of the underwater topography, which is welcome to any boat owner that doesn’t want to run aground. Salinity and temperature sensors give you an idea of water conditions. And should you lose your buoy in the dark, you just press a button on the phone and it’ll light right up.

The Realsonar system is in the funding phase on IndieGogo. It’s $79 if you get in early, though there’s plenty of room right now.

[ Project Page ] VIA [ DVice ]

$17,000 Rifle Uses Linux Wizardry And Fancy Scopes To “Auto-Aim”

By David Ponce on 01/14/13 • 1 Comment

Let’s get the moral aspect out of the way first: we’re not big fans of killing for sport. We’re not going to turn this into a debate on the topic, but we’re only covering the TrackingPoint XS1 because, frankly, that’s some impressive tech. What is it? It’s a rifle that takes so much guesswork out of aiming, a child could do it. Not that a child should, but we’re just sayin’. The company calls it a PGF, a precision guided firearm. And this is how it works:

To shoot at something, you first “mark” it using a button near the trigger. Marking a target illuminates it with the tracking scope’s built-in laser, and the target gains a pip in the scope’s display. When a target is marked, the tracking scope takes into account the range of the target, the ambient temperature and humidity, the age of the barrel, and a whole boatload of other parameters. It quickly reorients the display so the crosshairs in the center accurately show where the round will go.

The shooting mechanism is also different than a regular gun. Once you’ve pulled the trigger, the shot won’t go off until you line up the reticle with the previously set pip; at the precise moment they’re lined up, the bullet leaves. This eliminates a lot of the shakes associated with pulling the trigger and dramatically increases accuracy. But you can also change your mind and take the finger off the trigger altogether, and cancel your shot.

Hit the jump for a promotional video with a few seconds of the mechanism in action, as well as links.

… Continue Reading

iOS 6 Sees 29% Surge After The Release Of Google Maps

By David Ponce on 12/20/12 • 2 Comments

It was just last week that we were reporting on the return of Google Maps to the Apple App Store. In the article, we mentioned that a lot of people were still living with iOS 5 because of the absence of Google’s mapping solution on iOS 6. But few people had idea idea just how many people were in that boat! According to research by mobile ad company MoPub, in the five days following the release of the application, they saw a 29% increase in iOS 6 users, which they attribute to Google’s Maps being available again.

This is not entirely surprising: it was reported earlier that Google Maps was downloaded 10 million times in the first 48 hours. This is, we suspect, much to Apple’s chagrin.

VIA [ UberGizmo ]

CDW Cloud Collaboration Takes The Grunt Work Out Of Enterprise Unified Communications

By David Ponce on 12/19/12 • Leave a comment!

Enterprise level IT can be a demanding field, one usually reserved for larger companies with many employees.  At that level, any attempt to develop a homogenous and unified computing infrastructure is always a daunting and expensive task.  But there are companies out there, like CDW, who aim to relieve the burden somewhat by offering first class solutions that can either complement or replace those you might create yourself.  

Take, for instance, their new CDW Cloud Collaboration offering.  In a day where more and more applications  are going to the cloud, this does just that to a variety of communication tools, like voicemail, mobility, videoconferencing, contact center services, instant messaging and presence.  The product uses Unified Communication tools from Cisco systems, and mates them to CDW's managed services to deliver a seamless experience that doesn't suffer from many of the regular drawbacks to a traditional UC rollout. For instance, the fact that CDW hosts this service at their 485,000-square-foot Tier IV facility means that if should you experience any unexpected usage spike in your services, they'll be more than able to handle to surge.  Matter of fact, CDW boats of "four nines of uptime", which means they're up 99.99% of the time.

And while the Cloud Collaboration offering itself is a new bundle of CDW's services, they are not new to Unified Communications at all, having completed over 4,000 Cisco Unified Communications rollouts over the past decade.  You'd be dealing with an experienced team, and essentially outsourcing a chunk of the more undesirable UC workload to them so that you can free up your IT team to do stuff that is more valuable to your company.

You can read more about this at CDW’s Solutions blog, or watch the video, embedded above.

 

CDW is a current advertiser on my blog.  All opinions are mine.

Oru Kayak Folds Up Origami-Style

By David Ponce on 11/26/12 • Leave a comment!

Kayaking is fun; it’s a good exercise and you get to be outdoors and on the water. That’s about as radical as it gets in relation to the daily grind here at OhGizmo. But kayaks are bulky and we generally resort to renting one wherever the opportunity arises, which somewhat limits our chances to practice the sport. The Oru Kayak on the other hand is super light (25 lbs.) and ultra portable since it folds up into a 33″ X 29″ X 10″ case whenever you’re not using it.

Each Oru Kayak is engineered of a single sheet of double-layered plastic. The single seam is sealed with a watertight rubber gasket. Solid ribs offer strength and rigidity.The corrugated plastic skin is extremely tough and durable.

It’s not a toy boat either; it has a sturdy coaming (cockpit rim) that fits spray skirts and easily-adjustable footrests, as well as a comfortable foam seat and backband. Bill Vonnegut, a professional kayak guide/instructor says “It accelerates like a rocket, and carves a turn like a dream.” Sure, that might be a paid endorsement, but then again this might be a truly innovative product. The Kickstarter campaign has achieved its goal almost threefold, so the marketplace interest is there. An $800 pledge would get you yours by May 2013, and you’d be able to decide for yourself.

[ Project Page ] VIA [ Damn Geeky ]

Custom-Made Gravy Boat Lets a Cat Puke All Over Your Food

By Hazel Chua on 11/05/12 • 5 Comments

Puke Cat Gravy Boat

Nobody wants to eat puke. Cat vomit doesn’t sound very appealing, either. So if you’re the type of person who gets a kick out of grossing people out with the food on your plate or with the stuff that you put into your mouth, then this gravy boat’s for you. While you definitely shouldn’t put real cat puke into it, you can whip up otherwise gross-looking sauces and syrups to pour over your grub to give people the illusion that your catty gravy boat is puking all over your food.

This Puking Kitty Gravy Boat was made by artist GingerELA, who described it as follows:

It’s a cat. It’s a gravy boat. It’s puking. It’s the first thing I’ve made for myself and I LOVE IT. Inspired by the barfing squirrel gravy boat posted on Laughing Squid, I just had to make my own.

Hit the break to watch a video of the cat ‘barfing’ all over her waffles!

… Continue Reading

Man Makes Giant Hamster Wheel To Walk Across The Irish Sea

By David Ponce on 10/11/12 • Leave a comment!

Why sail when you can paddle, and why paddle when you can walk? Isn’t that the proverb? No? Well, it should be if you’re going to pull a cool watery stunt, like Chris Todd here. He built the contraption you see above and called it the Treadalo. It’s a human-sized hamster wheel fused to a catamaran hull, and is propelled by a walking human. We think the name is a play on the word “pedalo.” We like pun-y names like that. And we like that he thought he could use it to walk across the 66 miles that separates Wales from Ireland. Chris believed he’d do the trek in two days and actually got halfway there before he was done in by waves that were too big for the vessel to handle. He was forced to tow the Treadalo back to Wales with a rescue boat and the thing broke on the way back. It’s sad because Chris wasn’t doing this just for fun: he was trying to raise money for charity. But a broken Treadalo is not failure, merely a setback. The man is already working on making a second attempt later this month.

[ Project Website ] VIA [ Inhabitat ]

Copyright © 2013 OhGizmo!