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Amazon acquires Touchco, a touch screen start-up

Ray Morrison — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:50:43 +0000

Amazon has reportedly acquired Touchco, a New York start-up specializing in touch screen technology in an effort to play catch-up with the Apple iPad.

The New York Times reported, the touch-screen technology is developed by Touchco and is substantially cheaper than the capacitative touch screens used for the iPad, their cost is at around $10 per square foot.�

The technology is called interpolating force-sensitive resistance (IFSR), the technique uses resistors to detect varying levels of pressure, and requires very little power. The touch screens alllow the device to detect an unlimited number of simultaneous touch points, and to distinguish between the touch of a finger and the touch of a pen.

The Kindle and Sony Reader’s displays are made by E-ink. Amazon has resisted adding touch screen technology, on the basis that this would affect legibility.Touchco’s technology has claimed to be completely transparent, so the screen clarity would not be affected. It would also allow the Kindle to move to color screens, as E-ink doesn’t expect a color screen until next year.

Remote Display Lets You Use Camera from 500 Feet

Jessica Moreno — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:50:52 +0000

The Pro-View wireless camera display squints its eye up to the viewfinder so you don’t have to. The two-part gizmo uses a video camera to peek into the optical viewfinder of a DSLR and beams the image up to 500 feet where it can be viewed on a 640 x 480 LCD screen, similar to the resolution on the last generation of DSLR cameras (around 3K pixels).

The transmitter comes in a variety of fits designed to work with most DSLRs from Canon, Nikon, Olympus and Sony, and you can use up to four of these with one screen/receiver unit, flipping between them or showing all four on screen at once. The transmitters will last four hours on a charge and the screen ten hours.

The idea is sound, but it could be better. There is no way to use it to trigger the camera or remote control it in any way — for that you’ll need to buy a separate (and likely expensive) remote release. It beats out the current alternative, though, which is OnOne’s software that lets you live-view remotely on an iPhone screen, but requires that the camera itself be hooked up to a computer via USB.

Soon enough, there will be a dongle that hooks into your camera and another which hooks into the iPhone, allowing this kind of control from afar, but using something you already have in your pocket. And we expect that it will cost a lot less than the $400 that Pro-View is asking for this setup.

monome turned into DIY low-res Twitter display

Abren Michaels — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:15:36 +0000

In an ideal world someone would read this and send me a monome of my own to play with, but the button-encrusted control surfaces are in short supply (and not too cheap). Since controlling music isn’t the sole use of a monome, but still the task most people connect them with, some owners are pushing forward their DIY projects showing that a monome can be pretty much anything you have the imagination for: here, Robert Böhnke repurposes his as a low-res Twitter display.

For the uninitiated, a monome is a board of backlit rubber buttons laid out in a grid; they range from early, compact 8×8 models up to huge boards with hundreds of keys. One of the most common uses is for controlling music, either directly playing the monome (hooked up to a software synth or music package) as an instrument, or for triggering samples.

However, the open-source nature of the hardware and software means that the sky is pretty much the limit for canny developers, hence Robert Böhnke’s Twitter app. Not especially useful, perhaps, but still awesome.