No Outlet Battery Charger For Your Mobiles Device

KickStarter Friday - Ultra-high capacity batteries coming from no name company

Batteries seem to be a re-occurring theme in the products that we are seeing. And the reason for that is very simple. When your mobile devices gives you a low battery warning, panic tends to set in when you are not near a power source. That has happened to me on a number of occasions, so I tend to notice when I see something new. And this week, I have found a product which is being created by someone who travels in the range of 200 days per year, though he lists it as 200 nights per year.

These coming batteries are from a company with no name on KickStarter this week and are well worth the look. They have just closed funding to create 3 different size batteries to help the business travelers who are "fighting for outlet space at airport terminals" to charge up their mobile devices. If you have been in that situation, you know. With a goal of $25,000, the project closed today with $144,516 in funding to move this forward.

Since the company does not have a name, we are going to call it the "No Outlet No Problem" company and they are working towards providing 3 different battery charger models. They 3 are:

• Adventurer with 6,600 mAh battery at 2.55 by 3.9 inches and 0.75 inches thick. Weight is 5.5 ounces.


• Expedition with 11,200 mAh battery at 4.8 by 3.2 inches and 0.80 inches thick. Wieght is 8 ounces.


• Destination with 10,000 mAh battery at 3.75 by 5.25 inches and 0.64 inches thick. Weight is 8 ounces.

Using lithium-ion batteries for these, they are providing large sized capacity in a very small form factor. These various sizes will give you the knowledge that you do have a battery to recharge your mobile device when you have to. While these are not going to be the speediest of charges, they will do the job for you. Each of the batteries will contain a charging circuit to control the discharge to your mobile device. And they are including a universal adapter with 8 different adapters to charge up a wide variety of mobile devices.

The "No Outlet No Problem" company is going to be providing a solid product with two USB outlets on each one of their charging batteries. Current plans have them providing the selected battery to backers of their KickStarter project in May this year. There is no indications of when retail sales of these may start nor possible pricing for them. For those who backed this project at various levels, the price for them is $30 for the Adventurer, $50 for the Expedition and $65 for the Destination. If those translate into pricing when it comes to market, this will make it a very competitive product for a battery charger.

Google Now Gives You Boarding Passes On Your Phone

If you are like most of us who love our Android smartphones, you have probably felt some envy for the Apple crowd. That is because the Apple iOS and apps are able to provide the Apple Passbook which gives you electronic tickets instead of paper ones. The big thing is it provides you with boarding passes for airlines so you don't have to pre-print your boarding pass from home or hit the kiosk before you go to the gate. For Android users, we have been looking at this great feature waiting for the day we could get it on our Android phones.

In January, Google unveiled their Google Now with the boarding pass feature. And with that, the envy for the Apple folks goes away and you can now use your smartphone to show your boarding pass at the gate to board. All you have to do is check-in online before arriving at the gate. That is is and you are doing it without paper helping the environment.

Google Now boarding passes are using a QRCode to be scanned at the gate which is different than what you normally see as a bar code. But, as the screen shows, there is everything visible that you need from the terminal and gate down to your seat number and boarding group. All right there on your smart phone. And while not all the airlines are on board with this yet, so we expect to see more of them as time goes by. That is the same situation when Apple's Passbook first came out last year, so watch for a growing list of airlines participating with Google on the Google Now Cards.

This does require the Google Search app in order to use Google Now to show your boarding pass. And it is not limited to that as it has other cards you can create to keep track of things, such as sports scores and electronic tickets to movies. This is a great feature and one that is customizable based on your individual needs. If you have not taken a look at Google Now, this is a great time to do so.

ChargeCard - Credit Card Size Smart Phone Charger

If you are like most people, you are on the go all the time and taking along your mobile devices. And you have probably been caught with a low battery and not had a charging cable with you. I know I get in a rush sometimes and grab the essentials to get out the door and forget about the extras like a cable to charge up my smartphone. Then I have to find someone to borrow a cable from. It would be great to be able to always have one with me so that I do not get caught in this situation again.

And that solution is the ChargeCard from the Charge Card Project which is now coming to market with this great product. A flat charger which you can carry in your wallet instead of the wire cables that we are all so familiar with. The ChargeCard is small and the size of a credit card measuring in at 0.1 inches in thickness making it pretty much unnoticeable in your wallet until the need arises to use it.

The ChargeCard rubber "tongue" in the middle folds out with a USB connection that you can connect to a computer for charging your smartphone up. The end that sticks out is specific to the smartphone connection. MicroUSB, 30 pin iOS or the iOS Lightning connector will all be available in this flat form. The 30 pin iOS modle is currently shipping with the MicroUSB to be shipping here within weeks. The iOS Lightning connector should be available by the end of May which will provide a product line to cover the best selling phones on the market today.

We wrote about the ChargeCard KickStarter project last July and what a great idea it was. This KickStarter project was funded last August and they have been working towards this date ever since. And now that things are starting to be shipped for one model, the talk about the value this provides is going to increase. This is using USB 2.0 and for smartphones which support it, you can transfer data over the ChargeCard as well.

The plan was to provide 3 colors; black, white and teal, but it appears they are only offering black at the moment. The iPhone 4 ChargeCard is currently available from ChargeCard and you can pick yours up for $25.00. While the price may seem to be a little high, you have to remember that this is small in size and has far more value when you are in a situation where you are without your charging cable and have to charge up your smart phone. The ChargeCard looks like it is going to be a very successful product and meets a need that has not been filled in the market.

Smartphone Fingerprint Detection And Recognition

With all the reports of smartphones being stolen and hackers accessing servers, there needs to be another way to improve the protection of your smartphone. We have seen how apps are able to track your phone as part of efforts to locate your lost smartphone or tablet. But the current methods of unlocking the screen via a 4 digit number need to be improved significantly beyond what is available today. Coming technology needs to involve the use of biometric features to recognize you as the owner of the smartphone. Something as simple as a fingerprint could add another level of security to your mobile device.

Today, there are USB devices which can be added to a tablet or computer providing fingerprint recognition, but these do not provide what is really needed for your smartphone. You may have even had a laptop with the fingerprint reader as part of the device. The added feature a fingerprint reader on your computer was great add on, but we really need something for our smartphones which use biometric recognition. This may be the year we see multiple smartphones with their larger screens incorporate a fingerprint scanner. So, where are we know.

The Motorola Atrix smartphone is sold as having biometric features, but is one of the few which provide the features. And the Atrix has the biometric scanner on the back side of the smart phone, as shown above and not the front. In order for the scan to be done on the display side of the phone is going to require changes to the displays for resolution and adaption of the scanner. Smaller smart phones cannot support this due to a lack of space.

In recent news, Sony has filed a patent here in the US for fingerprint scanning. This is generally the first step for coming features on a smart phone and to protect their intellectual property from other companies. This will be a combination hardware and software solution. Today, there are apps which you can download which provide a software only solution, but we truly need a hardware solution. And it does appear that things are beginning to look like we are going to see something in 2013 for biometric scanning of fingerprints for authentication and access to a smartphone.

Apple's purchase of AuthenTec last summer clearly shows an interest in getting into the world of fingerprint detection in the future. Current rumors about the next iPhone coming with fingerprint detection are circulating. These are rumors, but tend to indicate that smart phones with fingerprint recognition is something we are going to see this year. And since Samsung is a big player in the smartphone world, we can expect to see something from them later this year as well.

With companies like Validity who was present at CES this year, there will be solutions for manufacturers to take advantage of. For smartphones, they have a fingerprint sensor which can be added to smartphones. And this is only one of the product offerings they have. Their current products could give us exactly what we need in a fingerprint reader for smartphones this year. It does seem that software and hardware will be coming together in 2013 to gives us biometric features to lock our smartphones. The only way into your smartphone will be through fingerprint recognition.

As this technology comes to market, it is definitely something you should look at for securing your smartphone.

iSmartAlarm - Personal Home Security System

We all hear about how someone had their home broken into and things stolen of value. Or that may have happened to you. One of the options for people is to pay for a service which will monitor your home for you and in the event of someone breaking in, contact the police. But that does come with a cost on a monthly basis and comes with the knowledge that the police will be contacted. But what if you want something less costly?

The iSmartAlarm may be exactly what you are looking for as a way to monitor what is going on in your residence with alerts sent to your iPhone. This is currently an Indiegogo Funding Campaign. And it comes with a variety of components which you can purchase all together or individually for your use. Individual pieces will be available in May for those interested in expanding what they currently have.

There are various parts of the iSmartAlarm which you can purchase individually or as a package. The central unit to this is the CubeOne which has all the intelligence included in it, including a wireless router for communication to you and the various parts. Other parts to this include motion detectors for movement in the residence, contact sensors to detect a window or door being opened and even a camera (iCamera) which can take pictures. When an event is triggered for any of these sensors, it will send an alert to your iPhone. You can then control the camera through your iPhone to see what is going on. It then becomes up to you to decide what to do about it. There is no monitoring service with monthly costs. You become the monitoring service.

With traditional home security systems, you have a company which comes in to install all the pieces for you. But with the iSmartAlarm system, you can install it yourself as there are no wires to run because of the built in WiFi. All the parts communicate with the central CubeOne over the air, which is far different from the systems of today.

You can still participate in the the funding campaign and place a pre-order for iSmartAlarm at various levels to receive the early shipments which are planned for April 2013. Prices start at $79 for those who participate in the Early Bird funding and will be much more when they come to market. As of the moment, this is planned around iOS for communications to your smart phone, but there is work being done for an Android version of iSmartAlarm and should be released some time this year.

Samsung HomeSync Enters Media Hub Market

Media Hubs have been around for a few year. Apple TV functions as one currently, though there is still speculation that Apple will be able to provide content from the major networks in the future. Google has also been involved in bringing content to your TV. Due to a variety of issues, we are not going to see media hubs providing TV content for a while. In the mean time, we are seeing TV media hubs as the future for merging TV and the Internet together. Roku is another of the well known names in that area. And the media hub market is gaining another company to compete for your home.

The Samsiung HomeSync is coming to provide you with a home media center which will be running Android (Jelly Bean) and was announced this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. There are several things which make this different than others on the market today. The first one is the on board storage which is set at 1 TB. That provides for a decent amount of disk space for videos that you might download. The bigger feature for the HomeSync is that it lets you use your Galaxy mobile devices to control the HomeSync as a remote control. That gives you access via your Samsung Galaxy S3 or Galaxy Note as an example to control this media hub.

The ability to use your own mobile device to control this is great and removes the idea of having yet another remote in the house. Coming with a dual core 1.7 Ghz processor and 1 GB of memory, along with 8 GB of NAND storage for apps guaranteeing fast performance. You can either use a wired network connection or WiFi to provide for streaming data or other activities. Performance over WiFi may be an issue, so for the best performance, stay with a wired connection. Since this is part of your network, you can share things from other sources on the network. Or you can go to the Cloud to pull down other content. Samsung has their own Cloud service and we expect to see them offering a decent amount of storage space for free with the Samsung HomeSync.


The current planned release for the HomeSync is set for April with no pricing revealed at the moment.

Lumio Book Provides Portable Light When Open

KickStarter Friday - Book provides light for up to 8 hours

Every now and then, we see something which is very unique and provides for a great functional purpose. In our time of moving about to work or enjoy life, there are times where having more light than what we have at the moment would be a wonderful thing. But carrying a light around is not something you can do when there is no place to plug one in. Using your smart phone to provide that light will surely drain the battery very quickly which is not desirable. So, this weeks KickStarter report is all about providing light in a very unique way and through the use of a book.

A book providing light sounds interesting and the Lumio Book light can provide that and is currently an active KickStarter project where their goal of $60,000 has already passed $374,000. It is the marvel of what this can do which is drawing a lot of people and money to the project which is expected to begin deliveries in July of 2013. Carrying around something which looks like a hard covered book and opens up providing for light just over the equivalent of a 40 watt light is a novel idea.

As you can see, just opening the book turns on the light and provides illumination to the area. It seems such like such a simple concept and yet, no one has provided something which looks great both open and closed. The light book weighs in at about 1 pound and the LED light can provide light in a limited area to meet your needs. The rechargeable lithium-ion batteries are charged via a standard USB charger, so there are a variety of ways to keep the battery charged for the Lumio book light. There are no other wires or connections associated with this and with the USB cable removed, it looks like any book measuring 8.5 inches tall, 7 inches wide and 1.25 inches thick.

The Lunio Book Light will come in three different covers of blonde maple, warm cherry and dark walnut. Choice is always a great thing in a product and they have considered that here. There are so many different ways that the video below shows how it can be used. Take a look as it is versatile and functional in a small package. You can control the amount of light being produced by opening the Lumio book a little or a lot. The more you open it, the more light you will get.


As with anything, there are some concerns. One is how long will the battery last? It should last for a period of about 5 years. More than long enough especially since it is not something you can replace. The LED light should last for about 6 years, so the life on this is petty good. The only other item which we could not find is a battery level indicator. We are not sure how you can determine how much of the battery charge is left and when you should charge it. There may well be a solution to that when they start shipping the product. Expect to see the Lumio Book light coming to market for everyone, after the pledgers receive theirs, by the holiday season.