projects

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Ben Savage, Danielle Fishel join "Girl Meets World" pilot.

- Wii Mini confirmed, brings cut-price gaming to Canada only.

- HoboJacket.tk lets you donate your RIVAL college's jackets and shirts to the homeless.

- This lamp tells you the weather by recreating it inside your house.

- Why liveblogs outperform other online news formats by up to 300%.

- Follow Sharon Vaknin on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.… Read more

Apple has reportedly taken a page from Google's playbook by offering employees time to work on side projects that fall outside their normal routines.

The Wall Street Journal's Jessica Lessin notes in a video interview today (via Business Insider), that Apple CEO Tim Cook quietly started a program code-named Blue Sky that gives some of the company's employees two weeks to work on projects that aren't part of their job.

While shorter, the idea is similar to one popularized by Google's "20 percent time," which allows company employees to work on side projects … Read more

The Nexus 7 has been one of the smokin' hot tablets of 2012, and unfortunately for one user in China, that was literally the case.

The user posted the photo above to a forum on Baidu (China's home-grown answer to Google), claiming that the device began smoking while plugged in and charging on its original factory charger. In the process, the guts of the tablet seem to have been totally torched.… Read more

Prepare to witness a tantalizing glimpse at our future robot overlords.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency yesterday released a stunning video showing how an autonomous robot can navigate and jump over obstacles with great ease.

In the clip, the Pet-Proto robot -- a predecessor to DARPA's Atlas robot -- traverses a simulated hallway containing a very tall step and a thin walkway. Pet-Proto easily uses its strong arms to balance itself as it climbs a step, then perfectly leaps down with a thud. The highly agile walker stretches its legs to continue its journey along the thin edges of a gutted hallway floor. … Read more

I had the worst case of headphone cord tangle on Friday, and wouldn't you know it? Just as I had finished unwinding and unknotting, a co-worker showed up at my desk with two samples of the Unlace, a colorful and rubbery new twistable detangler that just kicked off a funding run on Kickstarter.

If I'd had these twisties sooner, I could have prevented my most recent cord conundrum, but oh well... I'm excited to have them around for future knotty situations.

Inspired by the look of a shoelace, the Unlace comes in two sizes -- a 5-incher for earbuds and similarly sized cords, and a 10-incher for power cords and other burly cables. The longer Unlace can even be configured into an impromptu smartphone stand. Both sizes come in eight colors: white, yellow, orange, pink, blue, green, silver, and black. … Read more

One of Intellectual Ventures' biggest secrets is under attack.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based patent firm and invention lab, co-founded in 2000 by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myrhvold, owns more than 40,000 patents or pending patents and keeps a tight lid on its collection. So tight, in fact, that you can't see it unless you partner with the company and sign a non-disclosure agreement.

The end result can be that companies with products that might infringe on one of those patents, or that simply want to license one of IV's patents, don't exactly know what they're … Read more

A group inside Microsoft's C++ team has developed a digital note-taking application for Windows 8 that is codenamed "Project Austin."

The app allows users to add pages to a notebook, delete or move them, use digital ink to write or draw and add photos. Notes created in Austin can be shared with other Windows 8 apps, like e-mail and SkyDrive. Users can choose different types of "paper" and view the pages in a variety of ways, including leafing through them like a real paper book.

The Austin team wasn't trying to compete with Microsoft'… Read more

Kickstarter has been barraged by questions regarding its responsibility to people who fund projects on its platform, and today it addressed many of these concerns.

The crowd-sourced funding platform announced that project creators must now address the risks and challenges of their projects, can no longer use renderings of their proposals, and cannot give mass quantities of their finished products to funders.

"It's hard to know how many people feel like they're shopping at a store when they're backing projects on Kickstarter, but we want to make sure that it's no one," the company'… Read more

Check out ThingsWeStart, a Web site launched earlier this week that displays current Kickstarter projects on an interactive map. Users of the site can drag their mouse around and view local projects, or perhaps peep on an endeavor in a nearby city.

Aside from a general search by city, state, or ZIP code, the magnifying glass near the ThingsWeStart logo offers the option to filter by the type of Kickstarter project. This provides a unique lens to see ventures in lesser-known categories, such as fashion, theater, publishing, design, and so on. Clicking on a project lets you view the related video and a link to see the listing on Kickstarter. … Read more