3d illusion arts: Walyou

Walyou

Smart Boxing Gloves prove you can’t be messed with
Chill: personal cooling unit makes summer bearable
Reward Your Children With Internet Time for Chores With Kudoso
IKEA Brings Puzzle Furniture to Its New Instagram Website
Google Puts an End to Orkut, Focuses Entirely on G+

Smart Boxing Gloves prove you can’t be messed with

Posted: 04 Jul 2014 07:00 AM PDT

This might not be a scouter from Dragon Ball Z, but it gets pretty close: it’s a pair of smart boxing gloves that measure just how strong your hook is.

All kinds of items are getting the “smart” treatment, and now it’s the turn of boxing gloves. This set, deemed the iPunch (which you can support before it launches via Indiegogo) is something you’d want to bring to any training session. The gloves connect via bluetooth to a smartphone, which uses an app to measure how fast and hard you’re punching. Well, does it measure in megatons? Because we are not holding back.

The idea came from the mind of Stephen Cains from Responsive Sports, who had been doing boxing, Muay Thai and Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) for 16 years. Cains, stumped at his lack of progress just crammed some sensors in his gloves, and headed to the gym. Once he tried them out, realized that everyone wanted to try them on too.

The iPunch does more than just measure, though, and can also give audible directions which keep changing according to your progress. Also? It adds a competitive feature where users measure themselves against others using the app: each participant gets three punches, and the strongest one wins. The product will be available for backers of the indiegogo campaign for $139, but once they’re doing mass production, they’ll retail for $149.

Source: Mashable

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Chill: personal cooling unit makes summer bearable

Posted: 04 Jul 2014 06:00 AM PDT

If you’ve been cursed with spending most of the work day in a room without an AC unit, here’s a little something that might improve your situation.

Say goodbye to sweaty palms, no matter how hot summer is. This is a fun little project someone came up with at Instructables, which will provide users with a thermoelectric cooling unit that attaches to their wrist. And, believe it or not, this can rapidly cool your entire body. The unit is meant to be used to cool down after working out, or just because: who doesn’t enjoy being cool in the summer, anyways? As long as you can find some electricity, or are willing to carry a battery around,,,

See the video below these lines to learn more about it, or follow the link to Instructables to see the whole thing.

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories at 12 Must Have Beach Gadgets For This Summer and Samsung hints at Rugged Galaxy S4 and Tablet for Summer 2013.

Reward Your Children With Internet Time for Chores With Kudoso

Posted: 04 Jul 2014 05:00 AM PDT

Aiming to get children away from the Internet and doing the things that they should be doing instead, Kudoso is a reward based Internet router.

Have you ever tried to get a teenager away form Facebook or Twitter by asking them to put in some elbow grease and clean the house? Exactly. You may as well be trying to remove your molars with a knife and fork, a bag of ice to serving as the anaesthetic. It's not that physically painful of course but it's probably pretty close because who really wants to do chores or housework, especially when you're young and have selfies on Instagram to worry about over grey hairs and joint pain? Getting your children to do as they're asked needn't be such an effort though which is why the Kudoso wireless router helps provide you with the one surefire way to get a young person to do anything: take away their Internet.

'Taking away their Internet' isn't quite the way the Kudoso wireless router pitches itself on Kickstarter, though, it actually boasts itself as being able to do the opposite; rewarding with Internet access rather than removing it, but the policies are all the same. How Kudoso works is that via its web interface, you can set a predetermined list of tasks that reward the user (your children or whoever) in question with points which they can in turn cash in for Internet time. The tasks can be whatever you like, it seems, so if on one day your teen's bedroom rivals a pig sty after a post-piggy rave then you can add that to the list even if 'wash the dishes' and 'do the laundry' were only there previously. Alternatively, Kudoso's pairing with learning group Khan Academy means that you can even make academia a task for points. There are also more specific controls that make going to certain sites more expensive so for example the price for Facebook might be higher than YouTube or Twitter, depending on your own choice.

Should Kudoso pass its $50,000 Kickstarter goal it's looking at a release date of August 2014, which for most is just enough time to get your child in shape to study up ahead of a new school year, or maybe the Summer has just made them a little disobedient? The choice is yours and the reasons for using Kudoso aren’t even limited to your children, theoretically anyone in the family could be cut off from the Internet (even yourself) if you feel so inclined to set that up. Furthermore, it's also said that FitBit compatibility is in the pipeline and that fitness activities will be able to be redeemed for points. That's a stretch goal though and for now an amount of $89 will get you the Kudoso software (which is only compatible with a few routers) while forking out $119 gets you the Kudoso router itself, so if its features seem worthy, follow the link below to back to find out how to back the project.

Source: TechCrunch, Kudoso Kickstarter

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories Google wants you to be online: Project Loon brings internet everywhere, Google Now Cards No Longer Require an Internet Connection

IKEA Brings Puzzle Furniture to Its New Instagram Website

Posted: 03 Jul 2014 01:30 PM PDT

The Russian ad agency of IKEA added a new facet to the already multi-sided social image of the Swedish furniture retailer. IKEA’s new Instagram profile doubles as a website showcasing one of the retailer’s collections.

IKEA is definitely no stranger to new technologies, its augmented reality-enabled mobile apps being an edificatory proof of that. While Instagram is not new, it’s in any company’s best interest to build a strong online presence that covers a lot of social networking sites. The retailer’s ikea_ps_2014 Instagram account has one goal and one goal only, to showcase the PS collection for customers from the Russian market (and possibly from other slavic countries).

When clicking (or tapping, if you happen to use the mobile version of Instagram’s website, or even the Instagram mobile app) on any of the 34 exhibits, a new Instagram account appears with the details of that particular piece of furniture. The social network’s grid structure and tagging features were put to really good use in this particular case, as the ikea_ps_2014 looks very much like a stand-alone website without the additional costs.

Come to think of it, IKEA’s Russian ad agency managed to save the company quite a lot of money which otherwise would’ve been spent on a separate domain, hosting, a team to build a new website from the ground up (that last part no longer takes so much time nowadays, since there are many capable content management systems out there).

At press time, the ikea_ps_2014 account only had 13,392 followers, which I assume it’s only a fraction from the Russian audience of the retailer. However, as the Instagram profile gains momentum, I bet that a lot more people will join the trend.

IKEA’s approach should serve as an example for other marketers, as this idea could turn into a win-win situation, both for Instagram and for companies looking to extend their online presence. On one hand, this stands to prove that Instagram’s functionality can be expanded, and on another hand, it shows how companies could have a greater reach by turn their attention to communication channels that aren’t typically used for marketing.

This new Instagram profile comes a couple of weeks after the Swedish company almost shut down IKEAHackers.com, an independent site that showed people how to use the pieces of furniture in ways IKEA designers had not thought about.

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories about the IKEA app that employs AR to deploy virtual furniture in your home and the arcade machine enclosed in an IKEA cabinet.

Google Puts an End to Orkut, Focuses Entirely on G+

Posted: 03 Jul 2014 12:30 PM PDT

After 10 (not so) glorious years, Google decided to discontinue the Orkut social network, in order to focus all of its efforts on Google+.

On September 30, users of the Orkut social network (if any), will have to bid this service farewell, as the search giant will shut it down on that day. To be frank, I don’t consider that to be a great loss, as Orkut has become highly unpopular, and only occasionally made the news due to controversy. Fake and cloned profiles, as well as hate groups and censorship in several states is what brought Orkut again and again to public attention.

In an Orkut blog post published this past Monday, Google unveiled the reasons behind its decision: “Over the past decade, YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off, with communities springing up in every corner of the world. Because the growth of these communities has outpaced Orkut’s growth, we’ve decided to bid Orkut farewell.”

If you went to Wikipedia and looked on any social network’s page, you would notice that almost each and every one of them has an approximate number of users. That’s not the case with Orkut, though, and as if that wasn’t enough to raise an eyebrow, Google declined to reveal this social network’s number of users. If that happens, it’s usually because the numbers are ridiculously low. One thing I’ll never understand is why Google had to wait for 10 years to shut down a service which was destined from the start to be unpopular.

Vic Gundotra, the head of the search giant’s social networking services, left the ~~building~~ in April, and since he supervised the launch of Google+ back in 2011, people started wondering if Google really has an interest in social networks.

As of July 1, people can no longer create new profiles on Orkut. Google permits the users of this social network to transfer their profiles using Google Takeout. One thing I’m certain of is that Orkut won’t be missed, as there are plenty of other sites on which we can share our most private information, so that NSA and other governmental agencies can stalk us. Not to mention that some social networks (ehm, Facebook) even conduct experiments on their users.

Additional details about Google shutting down Orkut are available on the Help section of the Orkut Support site.

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories about the file transfers that Google introduced in GTalk, and Google+ Stories.