Did you blink during the Super Bowl commercial breaks? Too bad if you did, because it means you may have missed the anemic number of gadget or tech-related commercials worth talking about tomorrow at the water cooler. But! Megan Fox!
Megan Fox is an obvious choice, for obvious reasons (if she’s your thing): She had a Motoblur, and we’re a gadget blog! See? Obvious. Anyway, tweeting from a tub on her new phone, she pondered what would happen if she sent a picture of her bathing out to the world. Hijinks ensued, people were hurt, and even a gay couple somehow got distracted by the fox that is Megan Fox:
Then there was Beyonce, fresh off her Grammy performance, performing again for Vizio. Surrounded by Internet memes and celebrities, Twitter and what appeared to be an army of automobile assembly line robots (hopefully not ones from Toyota), she sang and sold that company’s Via/Internet Apps technology. Think Internet on your HDTV, not because I say so or because that’s exactly what it is, but because that’s the message Vizio assaulted viewers with during the 60-second clip:
Tough love was the story for Intel’s Jeffrey the Robot. The commercial was supposedly for Intel’s Core processor line, but I know the truth: Robot uprising. It 20 years’ time we can all look back at this commercial, when poor Jeffrey was snubbed For The Last Time by his human overlords:
Lastly, there’s one we actually covered yesterday. Google. Its poignant ad about a search-happy boy in love with a French girl aired yesterday, on the Internet, which is probably fitting. We’ll revisit it again here if you missed it tonight:
Sigh.
Personally, for me the ads were a bit stale this year. Even the Bud Light beer ads, which have made me laugh out loud on occasion in years past, felt a little tired. Betty White was a standout though, and there were back-to-back ads depicting grown men in their underwear. Possibly a first there. Also a first: Seeing a two-timing baby talk about eTrade while his “milk-a-holic” girl on the side blew up his shit over a webcam.
The one Bud Light ad I will give props to, however, was their Autotune bit. It’s a stretch including here on Gizmodo, but we have a history with that app (iPhone, anyone?), and we’ll take an opportunity here to thank Budweiser for hopefully killing the tech off for good with this Super Bowl ad:
OK, I admit it, I smiled a bit watching that a second time. Guilty.
The entire crop is over at YouTube in one convenient package (Fox’s is notably absent at the moment, although they appear to be updating throughout the night).
Posted on February 8th, 2010 at 2:55am by Jack Loftus
It looks like Yinlips is looking to beat Apple to the market, and possibly confuse iPad shoppers. Its upcoming iPad clone will sport a 6-inch e-ink screen, instead of a boring LCD display. You’ll get a battery that can last up to 20 hours on a full charge and support a variety of formats such as PDF, TXT, CHM, FB2, RTF, TCR, PDB, OEB, HTM, PRC, HTML, EPUB, DJVU, IW44, IW4, DJV and picture files. Considering that it looks quite a bit like the iPad, do you think the arguments of the iPad’s design can be leveled against this eBook reader too? The official pricing of this device don’t seem to be available just yet, so let’s keep an eye on this upcoming eBook reader, shall we?
Paper is a huge waste of paper, and ink is a huge waste of money. The PrePeat printer could be a huger waste of money, but at least it doesn’t use paper or ink. Instead, you feed it special heat sensitive plastic sheets and it uses a precision thermal head to print out gray scale text and images. Feed the sheets through the printer again, and a different temperature will erase everything or just write over it. Don’t wash, don’t rinse, but feel free to repeat up to a thousand times with a single sheet of paper.
The PrePeat printer itself costs $5500, and each sheet of the special plastic paper is $3.30, which is certainly a tad steep. Want to know what else is a tad steep, though?
That’s piracy, man. Piracy on the high seas of ink. It may not actually make any fiscal sense whatsoever for you to replace your personal printer with a PrePeat (think more like a medium to large office that’s still stuck in the seventies) but it would strike a blow against the tyranny of the empire of black gold. Huzzah!
A few years ago we brought you the PlayPump which was a clever water pumping device that was not only disguised to look like a piece of playground equipment, but was also powered by kids as they played with it. And that’s essentially the same idea behind the sOccket Ball; to convert the energy from kids playing into something useful. (Not that there’s anything wrong with kids playing.)
Inside the ball is an inductive coil system like you’d find in those flashlights you have to shake to recharge, but instead of shaking, the kids simply have to kick the ball around to charge the battery inside. 15 minutes of play results in enough energy to power an LED light for about 3 hours, which is a far better alternative to kerosene lamps. The one downside to the sOccket, if you could even call it that, is that the ball isn’t ‘regulation’ meaning it has a slightly different feel and weight than a regular soccer ball. But if the company behind the design is able to get them into production and into the hands of kids in developing nations, I don’t think anyone’s going to care.
Wacom has set professional digital doodlers free with its updated Intuos4 professional pen tablet now featuring Bluetooth wireless technology. Wacom says removing the USB cable shackles makes the Intuos4 Wireless an ideal choice for collaborative work sessions, client presentations or use in a seminar setting such as an art class or photography seminar…
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Did you blink during the Super Bowl commercial breaks? Too bad if you did, because it means you may have missed the anemic number of gadget or tech-related commercials worth talking about tomorrow at the water cooler. But! Megan Fox!
Sigh.
