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Art exhibit turns tweets into a colorful sphere of emotion
Even if you see thousands of tweets per day and all the emotions that go with them, that's just a tiny fraction of Twitter's total traffic. A new art project wants to help you grasp the joy or fury expressed by all of the users around the world at once. The Fuse Studio's "Amygdala" installation at the CUBO Centro Unipol in Bologna, Italy crunches up to 30 tweets per second and translates each into one of six emotions: Happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, amazement or fear.
Sonoro's saucy Swarovski-covered elements stardust radio demands $2,500
"Sonoro" and "absurdly expensive" have always gone hand-in-hand, but even we're a bit taken aback by the sticker on this one. The company's latest example of extravagance is the elements stardust, an "exclusive" AM / FM / MP3 clock radio that's smothered from one end to the other in Swarovski crystals. This thing's not all looks, though -- it's got a LED-illuminated metal ring for quick-touch control of tuning and volume, a full-range speaker, and an integrated bass reflex tube. Too bad you'll have to sashay down to Saks Fifth Avenue with $2,500 and an evil grin in order to take one home.[Via Blast]
Hands-on with Sonoro's cubo elements and cubo fusion clock radios
Sonoro has been hawking its appropriately named "cubo" clock radio in Europe for a while now, a fashionable little beast that comes in a wide variety of colors (seriously, check the gallery) and packs a bassy punch. CES 2008 marks the German firm's first official entrance into the US market, where it will be first selling the original cubo -- just your standard AM / FM / CD device -- and then following on with a series of more interesting devices later in the year. We had a chance to check out the new models, the cubo elements and cubo fusion, and we're dazzled by their glossy sheen, giant, HAL-like controls, and bright, attractive displays. The cubo elements will be available in both AM / FM and FM / internet radio versions, the latter of which is compatible with an external dock for controlling and charging the iPod of your choice (though the AM / FM model has an AUX in, so you can still pipe in your external tunes that way). The cubo fusion ups the ante with an integrated iPod dock -- no external accessory necessary -- and a CD player, but loses the internet radio which could be a deal breaker for some folks. Have a gander at the gallery here, and notice the white gloves all the Sonoro peeps are wearing -- they take that black lacquer finish pretty seriously!%Gallery-12766%
IZI Robotics' CUBO reads books to kids, teaches English
We're pretty sure the CUBO must come from a combination of the words "cute" and "robot" (or perhaps, cueball?) because this is just the most adorable little thing that we've ever seen. IZI Robotics has just demoed this brother of Netoy at the Next Generation Computing Show 2006 in Korea, and the staff of AVING was wowed by its myriad of abilities; CUBO can read books to kids, teach English, provide "home monitoring," update the news and weather, give a wake-up call, and even comes with something called "robot mail." We're not sure what that is, but we're hoping that it isn't the sinister communications channel that we've been fearing all robots have for when they take over the world with their collective cuteness.
