The weather is warming up and heck, you don’t want to be staying inside, do you? Nah…
So take a look at this great wrap up of mobile devices for staying productive in the great outdoors. Danny Dumas and Steven Leckart of Wired Magazine give us a look at the “perfect gaggle of gadgets” including the VIA-based Samsung NC20 mini-notebook, rugged waterproof Trimble Nomad, Novatell MiFi 2200 that grabs and “barfs up Internet” and a couple of great laptop bags from Hammacher Schlemmer and the Chrome Warsaw bag. Catch Danny and Steven on a Torker bicycle built for two as they grab some rays on a super San Francisco afternoon (and still get some work done). http://www.wired.com/video/outdoor-office-gadgets/26620346001.
One might dismiss the millions of views that Blendtec has received for its the blending of an iPhone, Chuck Norris action figures, glow sticks and who-knows-what-else in their powerful blenders as pure entertainment. But the fact is that CEO Tom Dickson and Marketing VP George Wright are marketing geniuses. Their online antics have made high end blender company, Blendtec, a household name while putting big wide grins on the faces of anyone who has seen pulverization of everything from marbles to a GPS device the company’s “Will It Blend” videos on YouTube. But what many don’t know is that their powerful blenders are perfect for many health drinks, enabling you to spin up things you never dreamed could be liquified.
The first time we ever met up with the Blendtec guys we knew we wanted to have them join us at the press lunch and innovator showcase Lunch@Piero’s during CES, where they blended a garden rake, a steel tape measure, and spoke with the crowds of reporters about the power of social networking and viral campaigns. Cited as one of the top 10 marketing ideas ever by Entrepreneur Magazine, George and Tom talk about the magic of Blendtec in this YouTube video. www.blendtec.com
Anthony Verducci of Popular Science’s online Instructables.com has taken the VIA ARTiGO and breathed new life into a piece of technonostalgia that many of us still have in our attics, the Super Nintendo. (For you Millennials, the SNES was a much beloved 16-bit gaming system from the early 1990′s.) Anthony inserted the tiny ARTiGO into the Super Nintendo housing, having removed a few of the Nintendo bits and pieces with some Dremel tool deftness. He built in a DVD drive and gave it a slot for outside access, slapped a Nintendo emulator on it, gave it lights, power and voila, a PC that’s also a Super Nintendo that plays Xvid movies!
The VIA ARTiGO and of course the newest VIA Nano processor will be on display January 8 and 9 at Lunch@Piero’s, the working press and innovator lunch during CES in Las Vegas.
