Garmin nüvi is an interesting traveller’s companion that helps you with locating your destination, navigating through the map and also behaves a as cool media device.

This time around, you could turn your compatible Garmin nüvi into a real time diagnostics computer. This would allow you to save fuel and conserve energy thanks to all the fuel-efficient navigation. For this, you would need to get yourself the ecoRoute hd, which is an east to install device that was unveiled at the CES 2010.

Garmin International Inc., a unit of Garmin Ltd. certainly has reasons to celebrate as the device has been met with considerable excitement and you would be able to know how your car is performing every single second.

Looks like we have a big winner here! It would certainly be a great device to be with, when you go out into the wilderness and get yourself into trouble. I am not sure how much this costs, but it sure should be a good investment.

Via: Garmin

The days of micro snooping are fast evolving and to mark the progress of the nifty little spying devices, an all new gadget has now been introduced by Spy Gadgets called the Car Camera – Dash Cam Dually. This all new automobile surveillance camera sits neatly on a car’s dashboard and monitors every event that places in the vehicle. Ideal for various scenarios, the Dash Cam Dually is one of the most sophisticated and discreet spy gadgets for civilian purposes.

The Dash Cam Dually is available for $385 a piece and features two cameras, one that provides the heads on view of the road and the other camera gives the footage of what’s happening at the back of the car. The cameras provide a conventional 1.3 mega pixel image quality, that is quite enough for a clear image inside the car and is also enough to read the license plate of the oncoming vehicle.

The Car Camera – Dash Cam Dually is equipped with four Infrared LEDs that provide illumination for the cameras to capture the events in the car even at night time without disturbing the concentration of the driver or the resting passengers. This nifty little device is embedded with Speed detection, Compass and a built in GPS & G-Sensor. Also, to ensure that the users can make the most out of Dash Cam Dually, Spy Gadgets has integrated it with an integrated Google Map window and a memory card for mass video feeds’ storage.

Via Red Ferret & Spy Gadgets.

Travelling by air isn’t that very difficult because all you have to do is buy a ticket and be at the airport on time. The stress upon the pilots and the flight controller, on the other hand, is nearly toxic. To prevent colliding with other planes, and birds, in the air, pilots have to rely upon data from radars and live visibility. This is often not possible in the case of bad weather conditions and the best option remains maintaining an extremely safe distance between planes (whilst in air) and flights (during takeoff).

Attempting to take aviation service to the next level, and to keep up with the steady rise in demand, a new automatic surveillance system has been designed by the Federal Aviation Administration. The Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast (ADS-B) uses GPS for navigation and is a part of the Next Generation Air Transportation System. Shortened to NextGen, the ADS-B displays via satellite the weather conditions in the area, the location of airports on the ground, and the location of other planes in the air (including those that are dependent on ADS-B).

The use of the GPS enabled ADS-B would make it possible for pilots to fly the craft even in zero visibility, keep track of other aircrafts in the same area and would not need the constant help of the flight controllers on ground making each flight less strenuous for both parties involved as well as increasing the safety of everyone.

Via: NYTimes

In effect, it shows you direction without you having to see. Call it an external instinct that works for you! At the moment, its uncanny appearance and utility looks a little odd for lay people like us. But then the gadget has an immense potential to become the navigation device for those who cannot see – the sight impaired.

The ear navigator is called Pull-Navi. It has six helmet-mounted motors to pull the wearer’s ears forward, backward, left, right, up and down, in the respective directions that is. Designers of Pull Navi say users can follow its lead nearly at the instinct level. They can move forward, backward, speed up or even slow down, when they move. It is a finely tuned helmet. Connect the thing to a GPS, and the blind in sight would not have to be at the mercy of helping hands or their walking sticks.

Via: Engadget, Kaji-lab

Designers Sheng Zhe Feng and Yu Chi Huang have launched an all new sea safety ring that has the capability to keep its occupant alive till the time the rescue arrives. In any sea related tragedy casualties are due to a cooling phenomenon called, Hypothermia and also due to the lack of drinking water and food.

However, the all new SOS Rescue Lifesaver Ring is designed specifically keeping the above mentioned factors in mind and thus provide the victims with enough alternatives to survive. The SOS ring is rigged with a GPS unit, that is embedded inside the floating ring and is activated as soon the ring touches water. However, the most astonishing of all features in this highly useful and perhaps life saving ring, is the presence of a heat belt, that has been provided inside the ring.

This heat belt draws energy from the surging sea water and in turn give ample warmth to the victim. This new feature could be the primary reason for successful sea rescues in the future, as the victims will not die due to hypothermia. Along with the heat belt, the SOS Rescue Lifesaver Ring also comes with compartments, that can be used to store packets of food and small bags of drinking water.

Via Yanko Design.

Chyngle is one of Demopit winners at TechCrunch50 2009. Just like its snazzy name suggests, Chyngle allows you to find out your location and discover services and people nearby while you are in a stadium (say you are watching a football match in a football stadium) as its branded apps use GPS. This is really awesome and unique.

It makes you really royal, and your experience for watching an event in the stadium will be like never before. It provides you the list of all the bathrooms nearest to you, the food stalls along with the menus. You can simply order while still in your seat using your iPhone. Contacting medical assistance is a button away. In case you want to find tickets for sale by other fans or a ride home, the app lets you call them nit only easily but also anonymously.

However, the company charges the venue $2,000 per month for the app. They also provide customized apps for any event location. Todd Sullivan, the CEO prefers to term it as “in-pocket marketing”. I absolutely agree with him! However, it will be wonderful if this app is made available everywhere.

Via: TechCrunch

Are you willing to be a walking human recorder? If you are, then there’s a device that’s coming up for you. Life recorders are in the offing. There’s at least one start-up that has been fine tuning such a device for more than a year now. The fulfillment of your ambition to record your history in real time may come sooner than you expect because the product may go to market in 2010.

Before you bask in the thought of what the life recorder can offer, read up on a brief description of what it will actually do. The small device may be worn as a necklace or a wrist watch, so it can very well be a fashion accessory if you wish. It shall ‘take photos every few seconds of whatever is around you and record sound all day long. It has GPS and the ability to wirelessly upload the data to the cloud, where everything is date/time and geo stamped and the sound files are automatically transcribed and indexed. Photos of people, of course, would be automatically identified and tagged as well.’

Now, do you really want to have anything to do with all that audiovisual material? What’s more, would you really want others to search and access every bit of your personal life? That’s tons of personal documentation.

But don’t be squeamish, now. You’ve already been sharing so much of yourself on Facebook and Twitter, more than you can comfortably deal with later. The only difference is that this life recorder may be just a little more up close and personal – and much, much more comprehensive than you could ever imagine.

So, if you’re still up to it, just worry about the fashion get-up that you wish to match it with. Let Microsoft, Google, and Amazon worry about the storage of your massive volumes of data – and I mean, massive.

Image

Via TechCrunch

One of the big hitters in the field of on-the-go navigation, TomTom, a Dutch manufacturer, specializing in the field of automotive navigation systems, has released an application designed for Apple iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, that provides the users with driving instructions and turn their mobile phone devices into GPS navigation systems.

The navigation device was first introduced in New Zealand and now has been launched across the United States, Western Europe, Australia and Canada. The entire application is excludes the TomTom iPhone car kit, estimated to priced at $194, that has a mapping software along with a car mount that enables you to position your iPhone any way you wish to and all while charges the phones as well.

TomTom navigation is available via the Apple apps store, that can be accessed via the Apple iTunes. The application is priced at $95 for New Zealand, $80 for Australia, $100 for U.S & Canada and $140 for Western Europe.

Video of TomTom Navigation Application in action.

Apple iPhone TomTom navigation car kit.

Via Apple iTunes & Recombu.

Nobody saw that coming: while he thoroughly studied the operation of WebOS, the operating system based on Linux used in Palm Pre, Joey Hess noticed that the smartphone collects and it sends to Palm periodically a package containing several information.

Without the user’s consent.

The reports sent by the apparel to the manufacturer include a complete list of all of the applications installed in the apparel, by how long each program was used along the day and, the most preoccupying, the current coordinates of the apparel, obtained using integrated GPS.

This information, which is also sent to Palm, has a supposedly useful purpose: to help the company to purify and to improve the system, tracking conditions that cause bugs to affect the stability.
The private data are collected by a daemon (a program that turns in second plan) called “uploadd”, and for a program auxiliary called “contextupload”.

The Terms and Conditions of Use of Palm Pre, published in the site of Palm, makes clear that the company can collect of times in times information on the apparel. But doesn’t specified which information will be send.

In a reaction to the news, and never denying the statements of Hess, the company defended saying that the coordinates of GPS are collected to obtain better results for the user when this makes searches through Google Maps.

Via: Geek.

Style, design and speed were the obsessions of car designers of yester years; the latest vogue seems futuristic and fictional- a driverless car! Mike and Maaike, an industrial design firm from San Francisco that was behind the creation of the Google Phone, has now created the ‘ATNMBL’ read as autonomobile. This self-directed seven-seated four-wheeler is for those travel freaks who hate driving.

This concept car expected to hit the roads in 2040 has no steering wheel, brake pedal or drivers seat. Instead, it has a spacious and posh interior with large display for info, searches, browsing, and communication, open-source software with downloadable apps for carpool and carshare through social networking and a bar to keep you occupied through the drive. The large windows give you a scenic view of the horizon that you often miss while driving. This fully electric powered plus solar assist autonomobile takes you wherever you want, thanks to its driverless navigation via GPS, Lidar, radar, stereo camera and accelerometers.

Now, all you have to do is pack your bags, get into it through an electric glass sliding door into a standing-height entryway and enjoy your journey with family and friends. ATNMBL would surely redefine the joy of driving, but sad that it would take another three decades for it to reach us. Well, as someone said- the fruits of patience will surely be sweet.

Via AutoBlog/ MikeandMaaike