studios

The lowly drinking fountain has been largely neglected as we fill up our wireless hydration-advice-giving water bottles and wear coats that catch and purify rain.

British design group Poietic Studio has given the drinking fountain a new lease on life with the Tropism Well. It senses when you're nearby, sucks water up a tube, fills up a carafe, and elegantly offers it to you.

You'll need to provide your own cup. Otherwise you'll have to kneel down and try to catch the water in your mouth, and nobody wants to see you do that.

The bowing motion is achieved simply by sending the water up the tube. The weight of the water does the rest. Isn't physics fun?… Read more

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos served notice today that his company is very much a Netflix competitor.

Some analysts predicted that Amazon would not make a serious effort in online video distribution. But at a press event in New York this morning, Amazon kicked Netflix where it hurts the most right now: price and value. The Web's largest retailer announced a series of new electronic readers as well as a tablet computer called the Kindle Fire (See CNET's first look at the device). Amazon wrapped the tablet into a hard-to-beat offer for many movie fans.

Not only is the … Read more

Western Digital announced today its latest in the My Passport family of portable drives, the My Passport Studio and My Passport for Mac portable hard drives. Both drives are designed to work with a Mac out of the box and feature compact, elegant designs.

The new My Passport Studio, which is the update to the version released in 2010, now boasts an all-metal, scratch-resistant design and provides multiple connectivity options, including two FireWire 800 ports and a USB 2.0 port. The reason it doesn't feature USB 3.0 is simply because Mac computers don't offer this option. … Read more

Meet MotionStudio 3D, Corel's inaugural entry into the animation and motion graphics software category. Geared more toward novices and prosumers than professionals, this capable newcomer lets you create 3D text and titles, lathe objects, and a variety of animations with relative ease.

MotionStudio's interface is intuitive, which should be comforting to motion graphics novices. The Edit Window displays your project as you work, and can reflect changes in near real-time--with virtually no waiting for rendering. Also, you can drag objects directly within the Edit Window for a more tactile way to customize basic aspects like position, rotation, and … Read more

Even if you believe that splitting Netflix into two services and raising prices is the right plan for the company in the long term, the moves in the near term have many subscribers asking whether managers value them.

Many Netflix users are outraged for the second time in the past three months. CEO Reed Hastings offered an apology last night in a letter to customers as well as in a video message for the way the company announced a price increase in July. He didn't say he was sorry for the actual price hike, and more importantly, he also said Netflix was splitting itself into two separate services. The new Netflix will be involved in streaming video over the Web exclusively, while the other service, called Qwikster, will oversee DVD by mail.

Some analysts and customers argue that Netflix has made plenty of other missteps in the past several months. The company couldn't close a licensing agreement with Starz, the pay-TV service that owns Web distribution rights to content from Sony Pictures and Disney. That means Netflix's streaming library will offer even fewer films from the top Hollywood studios. Much of Hollywood is lukewarm about Netflix's business model and the company has struggled to acquire streaming rights for popular films. … Read more

Altair ProductDesign announced a partnership with Studio X-Gene to develop a new electric concept vehicle, the Avant GT.

The Avant GT is the brainchild of Taiwan-based Studio X-Gene along with partners Delta Electronics, Wistron, and Qisda.

Altair ProductDesign joined the project to offer engineering development of the vehicle. "Altair was given responsibility for providing a simulation driven design approach for the vehicle's crash, durability, vibration, vehicle dynamics, and computational fluid dynamics drag evaluation along with supporting Studio X-Gene during the architectural design phase," an Altair spokesman said in a press release.

The Avant GT, described as "… Read more

We shoot a lot of in-car video for the Car Tech Blog and Car Tech Live podcast, but even we're wowed by the amount of hardware that graces the dash and boot of the Smart Studio, the smallest mobile TV studio ever.

The Smart Studio is a rolling video rig that Smart is using to produce and promote a fashion and lifestyle video series that takes place inside and around the vehicle. There are six camera mounting points around the vehicle's cabin (we counted four across the dashboard, one in the footwell, and one in the rear backlight), … Read more

In a move to sell off existing stock, Apple is once again selling Final Cut Studio 3, the professional video-editing software it discontinued earlier this year.

Macrumors noted today that Apple put the software bundle on sale, despite having discontinued it months earlier with the release of Final Cut Pro X. The software is only being made available through Apple's phone sales, and not its online or retail stores, the blog notes. The price is $999, which is what the bundle cost before the release of Final Cut Pro X.

An Apple spokeswoman told CNET that the software was still retired.

"As we've done before with many end-of-life software products, we have a limited quantity of Final Cut Studio still available through Apple telesales to customers who need them for ongoing projects," the spokeswoman said.

Apple released Final Cut Pro X as a $299 Mac App Store exclusive in June. Some longtime users felt like the newer version was too much of a departure from previous versions of the software, and responded with criticisms both online and in their reviews of the software. The software was even the butt of a joke by late-night talk show host Conan O'Brien, whose staff produced a video parody of its new features. Apple responded with a frequently asked questions page that noted additional features would be added in future versions of the software.

Apple faced a similar backlash in the transition from iMovie HD 6 to iMovie '09, with the newer version of the bundled iLife software undergoing a complete overhaul. As a result, Apple offered a free downloadable copy of iMovie HD 6 to users who wanted to continue to use the older version while upgrading to the rest of the iLife suite.

Updated at 7:09 p.m. PT with comment from Apple.… Read more

When it comes to the mobile world, it's all about apps.

More than ever, people are using apps to augment the capabilities of their smartphones. They can remind you of your next meeting, play the latest Lady Gaga song, and make catapulting virtual birds into evil pigs a family pastime.

Likewise, they're increasingly important to the technology world. The apps market is expected to generate $9 billion in revenue this year and nearly double that next year, according to Gartner. The lack of apps, meanwhile, has crippled some smartphone platforms. Just ask Research In Motion and its BlackBerry … Read more