DoorBot - Answer Your Door When You Are Not There

In today's world, many of us are concerned about security and where we live is just another of those areas of wanting security. If you own your own home, the concerns of protecting your home is one that is always there. If you are not at home, how do you address security concerns for people looking for a home where there is no one there. I have seen reports here on the West Coast where people ring door bells to see if someone is home and if no one answers, they often return a few hours later trying to break in. So, what if you could make it look like you are at one when you actually are not. There is technology which will do exactly that by letting you answer the door via a camera and speaker to make it appear like you are at home.

The DoorBot Smart Doorbell has recently received funding via Christy Street and is preparing to come to market by July this year. And the concept is very simple to install for anyone. Requiring 4 screws to attach it, it is powered by 4 AA batteries which are supposed to last up to a year. And there are no wires to run as with the current door bell on your home. With a camera, microphone and speaker, you have all the parts you need to help protect your home.

When someone comes to your door and rings the bell, you are notified on your mobile device via the DoorBot app which you can download for iOS or Android. This is via the WiFi in your home which then sends the information to your mobile device. You are then able to see who is at your front door via the adjustable camera. The angle of the camera is set by you when you install the DoorBot. With a view of the person at the door, you are able to communicate with them as to what it is they want. As far as the person at the door is concerned, you are at home talking to them. And the person at the door cannot see you, but only hear you and assume that you are at home. You can be miles away or hundreds of miles away, but it creates the illusion that you are at home.

The one drawback to this is the label on the DoorBot. It makes it very obvious so someone that you are using the DoorBot and those who looking to burglarize your home are going to know about the devices. While this is a very simple model to install, it may not be the best one for you. If you want something simple to install, this is the one to get.

Swivl - Your Personal Cameraman For Making Videos

If you have worked to create a video to share, you know that it is very difficult to do by yourself. And if you are doing this with your smart phone, there is no way you can move about and show the background or props without having someone hold your phone and move with you. While technology has moved a great deal to provide the ability to shoot a video with a smart phone, there still exists problems with creating your content by yourself the way you need to do. I recently ran across a product which is going to provide a tool in order to let you make videos by yourself and let you move about when you are doing it.

The Swivl is a stand which will hold an iPhone for use as camera so that you can put together your own video. And you will not need someone else to be holding the camera on the iPhone as you move about the room. If you are like me, holding the camera still on my smart phone as I move it has always been a challenge. With the Swivl, the movement is going to be far more steady than if someone is holding the camera. The only drawback to the Swivl is its support for the iPhone and leaving Android out.

The key to the Swivl, other than the base unit, is the remote device which comes with the Swivl. This lets the Swivl track you as you move about so that you are always in the center of the camera. And there is a a built in microphone that comes with it. With this, you have your own camera crew without having anyone there with you. Being able to move about to show things in the background or other props and have the sound being recorded is quite a neat idea.

All of this may sounds really great, but you may be asking about when you can get one to support your Android smart phone. At the moment, there is work being done on the next Swivl after a recent KickStarter campaign and this model is expected to make its appearance in July. And it will support Android devices some time after the launch of this model. If you like to make videos and don't want to rely on others to hold the smart phone shooting the video, you want to take a look at the Swivl.

Drones Go Mainstream In Online Stores

Drones have become extremely popular with the public in spite of all the concerns that people have regarding the government. Those concerns include the US Government using drones against its citizens and is a big concern regardless of what is said to reassure the public. But, with lowering prices on drones and parts, it has come down to the point where just about anyone can go out and purchase one for personal use. The Parrot AR Drone has become a big favorite of many and with a price of about $300, anyone can have one. All you have to do is spend a little time looking around.

As an example of how popular drones have become, I did a Google search for "drone accessories" and at the top of the list was Brookstone which was rather surprising. They sell a wide variety of items, but I did not expect to see them selling drones. The next one I found was Amazon selling a long list of accessories and units. They always provide things either directly or from a 3rd party selling to meet everyone's needs. It seems that you can get replacement blades, hulls, or just about anything you might need to add or replace from an online site. It is a fast growing market right now.

There were some offerings online with a few that did surprise. Such as Verizon Wireless offering the Parrot AR Drone 2.0 for $299.99. A seller of mobile devices moving into selling what has become a hobby product is a surprise. Guess that is because so many of the drones can be controlled by a mobile device that wireless providers are getting in on the action. All of this is continuing to see growth.

And so much of this is for the hobbiest and how they love to fly things. For so many years, it has been the flying of model planes, some of which can get quite large in size. There are sites on the web, such as Flying Toys to meet the needs of those who are now getting involved in the flying of drones. The fascination with flying something which can move in many different directions very easily and quickly has drawn many to purchase one and quickly learn how to navigate a drone.

And there are a growing number of apps available and competing for use on smart phones to control the growing interest in drones. As an example, there is the Drone Ace app for controlling the Parrot AR Drone for the Apple iPhone. Or the AR Free Flight app for the Android smart phones. And there are far more than just these 2 available for use in controlling the hobby drones.

The interest that the general public has with drones right now looks like a love hate relationship. There is the hate for using drones to kill people and there is the love of new discovery. Drones provide an educational aspect for learning how they work and may possibly be used for non-military activities. We wrote about some of the other uses for Drones which are positive in nature, including monitoring climate change which is a topic many are concerned about.

It is obvious that drones are now mainstream here in the US and will continue to grow. You add to that the continuing decline in prices and they quickly move into being affordable by everyone to use and learn from. If you have not looked into drones yet, now would be a good time to do so.

Trax GPS Gives You A Tracking Device For Your Loved Ones

KickStarter Friday: Tacking your child's location with GPS

If you are a parent, you probably have had a situation where you may have lost sight of your child. And finding them was the only thing on your mind until you located that ever important person. Now, what if there was a small device which you could give to your child so that you could know where they are at all times. And what if that device could be tracked with your Android or iOS phone through a downloadable app. You would be very impressed and want to know where you could get one of these. This is a simple GPS device that has a lot of features.

Our Kickstarter Friday gadget is the trax GPS tracking device which will be closing in a few hours where they have already exceeded their project goal. The project is coming from Sweden and the trax website is already up and preparing to take your pre-orders. While I am focusing on kids because that is important to me, it could be a pet that is important to you as well. What they are going to be providing is a very small GPS tracking device in real time.

These measure at 1.49 inches by 2.16 inches with a thickness of .39 inches. A small package weighing in at 1.06 oz. A very small compact GPS device. But it will be so much more than that. The tracking portion of this will be done via a SIM card where they are going to give you 2 years worth of free data and roaming charges in a number of countries including the US, Canada, Australia and much of Europe. Now, with a SIM card, they have the ability to communicate to the app you are running on your Android or iOS device. With an included accelerometer and Gyro, they can add further to the feature set providing the GPS location of the carrier of the device.

The largest item in the trax GPS tracker is the battery and is estimated to last from 2 to 4 days. And they keep track of whether the device is moving and if not, the trax GPS tracker goes into sleep mode conserving the battery. This is not something you have to monitor all the time. You can predefine areas where the GPS unit can travel and if it goes outside those boundaries, you are alerted. Or, if you set a distance limit, it will detect whether it is too far away from your location. Another great one is that it is able to identify when the trax GPS is exceeding the speed limit. If they are able to identify a speed boundary, you would be alerted if your child is in a moving car or not. That would be a key feature to track a kidnapped child.

All of this is very impressive and with its small size, this is going to be a desirable item to know where your loved ones actually are. It looks like pricing is going to be about $200 when it comes to market. And that will be after those who pledged to the KickStarter project for the trax GPS tracking device. Current estimates are for those to be delivered in June.

Another great idea funded by KickStarter.

PayTango - Using Fingerprints Instead Of Credit Cards

The days of having to carry a credit card around with you to pay for things may be moving towards a thing of the past. It is not that the credit card itself is going away, only the need to carry one with you. If you could use your fingerprints to charge something, that would make life much easier for everyone. If you are not carrying your credit card with you, it cannot be stolen. This sounds like such a simple process, it is surprising that it has not turned into a product before now given all the problems that the credit card industry has with fraud and the untold costs of that on consumers.

This is where PayTango comes in to fill a void which has been a problem for years. Four recent graduates are doing a pilot test with the concept of using fingerprints to charge your purchases at Carnegie Mellon. They have proven that the simple sign up process of placing your index and middle finger on the scan pad works very well. If the scan of your fingerprints does not find a match, it asks you to tie a credit card to the fingerprints. After you swipe a card, it asks you to enter a cell phone number. That is all there is to the process for you to begin using your fingerprints to begin making purchases.

For many years, fingerprints have been used for unique identification of a person and is an accepted standard. So, the idea of using fingerprints to uniquely identify a person tied to a credit card to make purchases makes perfect sense in today's world of technology. If you forget your wallet, it is not a problem when you are paying by using your fingerprints.

We can expect to see PayTango roll out to Colleges and Universities this year as it is a great match and use of technology. They have built their own scan pad which is connecting to their servers where it does a look up of the fingerprints and if there is a match, it places the charge on to the associated credit card. All of this takes a matter of a few seconds.

While the concept of PayTango is a fantastic idea that I believe will be extremely successful, it does have a similar problem which so many other things in the world have and that is fraud. The process of putting two fingers on the pad and then swiping your credit card on the reader to register is the point where things might fail. Unless someone is verifying the credit card is tied to the person with an ID check, there is nothing to stop someone from using a stolen credit card. The only bright spot in the failing is the fact that they have two fingerprints on file of the person who is using the stolen credit card. That will easily help the police to track down the individual.

While some of their marketing sites for PayTango need some work, this will be the future for charging purchases. It will take some work to break into the large retail chains or smaller stores, but it will happen. As an example, we have all moved to an app to charge our Starbucks coffee. How much simpler it will be to pay with fingerprints instead. Your hands will be free from holding your smart phone in making your payment. Others have tried the use of fingerprints for making payments, but PayTango looks to be one of the better ones.

Watch for this as the year progresses as you will be hearing more about PayTango in the future.

Water Heater For Your Future - Nuclear Reactor

Talking a hot shower in the morning is something that most of us take for granted. Having natural gas or propane to heat of the water that is delivered to warm the water is taken as a given. Some even have electricity to heat the water instead. Which ever the method, it looks like that may be changing in the future based on an article that I came across talking about the idea of having a nuclear reactor in your home which could heat the water. While many are dead set against Nuclear Power, we have to consider alternatives as existing fossil fuels are not going to last forever.

Much of the current conversation which is taking place is based on an article from Forbes talking about how a Nuclear Reactor is going to replace your water heater. While the title is an attention grabber, it is a little misleading. But it does get your attention. The idea of having one in your home is a scary thought, but these are not the ones we all think of when the topic comes up. The idea of a nuclear meltdown is something that I want to be as far aware from as possible.

Instead, a low-energy nuclear reactor (LENR) uses common, stable elements like nickel, carbon, and hydrogen to produce stable products like copper or nitrogen, along with heat and electricity.

They are talking about the Low Energy Nuclear Reactor (LENR) which is not using nuclear material or splitting atoms. The LENR is using things for power that we are all familiar with. Items such as nickel, carbon and hydrogen would be used in this small nuclear reactor. And it is quite possible that the first application will be for heating the water in your home. As the picture shows, heating water is currently a byproduct of cooling the nuclear reactors.

They are referencing electricity as another product, but that is more than likely not going to be the first supplication. Just like solar in the home, the first application was to heat your water and years later it moved to providing power to your home. Given the general purpose of a nuclear reactor to provide power, using it for heating water would not necessarily be the best use of the LENR process. But it will probably be the first in getting it into the home.

All of this is coming out of NASA and their Langley Research Center, so there is legitimate research going on to move in this direction. But that research is a long ways from completion before it can become a safe and reliable method of provide heat for your water. How far off that will be is an unknown as this is still the early stages of the process.

There is going to be a lot of resistance to the idea of providing a nuclear reactor to hones. Much of that is going to be due to the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster of 2011. Studies are still going on from that and will continue to be in people's minds for many years to come. Nuclear continues to be a situation of changing people's minds as to its safety.

Battery Issues Impact Both Electric Vehicles & Mobile Devices

We are faced with a need for new technology to address the ongoing limitations in battery life that we are seeing every day. If you are the owner of an all electric vehicle, the majority of them on the road today have a very limited range of driving before you must stop and charge them back up. Few cars exceed a range of 100 miles and if you exclude the Tesla, the average across all models drops a lot. You can only go so far before you have to stop and recharge. The same issue is impacting our mobile devices today where getting an all day charge on your smart phone seems to be very elusive at best. It seems that technology and desire has exceeded the capabilities of today's battery technology.

Future Battery Technology

The existing batteries which are being used does not meet the needs and without new discoveries, we will continue to be limited in battery life. Current solutions to extend all electric vehicles for decent ranges are extremely expensive as demonstrated by Tesla. For mobile devices, the current solution is battery extenders which attach to you device and add life to the battery. Neither of these are acceptable solution. There is continuing work being done by a wide variety of groups on the next big breakthrough. And it is a race because the winner will make a lot of money.

The future is being held in new discoveries, such as one using Graphene layers to improve batteries. This one is supposed to improve battery capacity and speed up charging times. Existing Lithium batteries are being researched for ways of improving that technology. Other research for smart phones holds promise to increase capacity 10 times greater than what we have today.

There are numerous researching activities going on at universities which will hopefully result in significant improvements in battery life for electric vehicles. While one might think that it will benefit only all electric vehicles for what has been discovered and brought to market, that would not be correct. That new technology would be passed on to mobile devices as well, benefiting us all. But how long it will be before all the various research which is being done will come to market is an unknown. And that is part of the problem as there is no known time frame when we can expect to see the hoped for significant battery life improvements.

With the coming technology shift to provide far better battery life, we are concerned about how long can we go before having to charge things up again. Given our appetites, it would appear that we will never have enough of a charge to meet our needs. Be it for the all electric vehicle or the ever popular mobile devices. We all want to keep using them and never have to worry about charging them up. That is not available for today, but is the hope for tomorrow.