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DARPA head joins the list of speakers at Engadget Expand!
Fall's nearly here and so is the next Engadget Expand event. On November 7th and 8th, we'll once again take over New York City's Javits Center North to let you experience the future of technology and hear from the leading minds in the industry.
RJD2 will join us at our free Engadget Expand event in NYC!
On November 7th and 8th, Engadget Expand heads back to New York City's Javits Center and this time around, admission is free! And if the Big Apple isn't where you'll be that weekend, no sweat -- we'll keep you updated with live streams from the stage and dispatches from the show floor. Now that we've got your attention (hopefully), let's experience the future of technology together, shall we?
Mad Catz' STRIKE M gaming keyboard fits in your pocket, cramps your fingers
Diminutive Bluetooth keyboards? Yeah, we've seen those before, but we've never really been able to fault them for their size. These tiny peripherals are meant for light work at best, but the Mad Catz STRIKE M wears a facade that outpaces its utility. From its skewed angles, to its collection of quick keys, under its backlit keycaps and behind the highlighted WASD keys -- the STRIKE M wears the colors of a serious gaming keyboard. It isn't one. Excusing its appearance, the STRIKE M is actually a decent little HTPC keyboard. It has a suite of media keys, an embedded scrollwheel and even an thumb mousepad -- but the actual keyboard layout is just too small to match its design language. Laying hands on the keyboard's home row required us to mash our fingertips tightly together, offering a cramped, uncomfortable typing experience. These tiny keys leave no room for error, and require precision to a degree that makes the red-accented WASD seem ridiculous. Showing off the keyboard at Expand NY, Mad Catz' representative actually agreed, saying it's more of a media keyboard than a gaming one. Still, he showed us the one advantage its size offers: the device fits comfortably in a jacket pocket. It's something, at least.
Choosing reality: why sci-fi author David Gerrold doesn't want a flying car
"I think we built the right future," declares David Gerrold on Expand NY's stage. "If it's a choice between the flying car or the internet, tablets and smartphones, I'll take what we've got." It's almost a shocking statement, considering the choice: Gerrold had a hand in writing episodes of The Twilight Zone, Sliders, Babylon 5, and three different Star Trek series -- not to mention dozens of original novels envisioning a future of his own. As an architect of fictional futures, his statement is almost puzzling, but as he elaborates, his true feelings become clear: He doesn't need to choose science fiction when we can build science fact.
Reggie Watts admits he's an impulse tech buyer, but it's those digital interfaces that still need work
When Reggie Watts took to the Expand stage, he was wearing a Pebble. The performer said that he's obsessed with the wearables and picked up multiples of the smartwatch during those early adopter deal days. "If it's something I'm curious about, [something} that provides a service or that I'm interested in," then he makes the purchase. These early adoptions have to survive a very narrow success rate. "About 80 percent of these might not get integrated into my life -- and those go to my friends." How about Pebble? "It's great to not look at my phone to see SMS messages," Watts said, adding that he hated the disconnect that happens when people are talking and those smartphone notifications pull one half of the conversation away. Touching on what Watts outlined during a recent episode of Peripheral Vision, he said that technology was a means of expressing creativity -- and he's been obsessed with most things tech since he was little. "I used to lick batteries a lot. I thought licking a 9-volt battery would give me super powers." From there, it went in a safer and arguably more productive direction, as deconstructed X-Wing toys, Casio keyboards and music began to dovetail, quite neatly, into that obsession. Does technology inform his music? To an extent: "It inspires me to add layers, project them in a complex way." Most of the times, as displayed in his quick set at the end of the session, he's layering over himself, adding and enriching his own vocal and beatbox lines. When it comes to his performances, Watts explained that his equipment has to fit into his bag, and as such he's always looking for ways to shrink that volume down. He's involved himself with littleBits' synth kit collaboration with Korg, -- which seems pretty on target. However, he doesn't expect his equipment to unify into a tablet or smartphone controller any time soon. To begin with, there's a lack of tactile sensation that you can only get from IRL dials and switches. That's not to say he hasn't done a smartphone-only performance in the past -- he has -- but Watts added that now "inputting the information, the interface ... is the problem." "[At the moment] we're still like cavemen."
DIWire attempts to fill the gaps left by 3D printers (hands-on)
It brought solar-powered smartphone chargers to the streets of NYC, now Pensa, a Brooklyn-based design firm, is taking on desktop prototyping. Its latest invention, DIWire, is a compact CNC wire bender. A machine designed solely to bend wire clearly has its limitations, but DIWire was actually born from the limitations of more versatile technologies. The team traditionally used a 3D printer to build furniture models, but found that the resulting models didn't stand up to testing. With tiny broken chair legs as inspiration, Pensa set out to make an accessible machine that addressed the laborious nature of hand-bending and the impracticality of mass-production wire bending.
Don't miss Reggie Watts, Mark Frauenfelder, Sparkfun, Techdirt and Sol Design Lab at Expand NY!
With every subsequent post, our excitement for Expand New York grows -- and this is a particularly good one. We might go so far as saying that this is our most exciting speaker post yet, but we'll leave that for you to decide. Improvisational musician / comedian Reggie Watts will be on stage discussing and demoing his sampling setup. We'll also be joined once again by Boing Boing founder and Make Magazine editor-in-chief Mark Frauenfelder, along with Sol Design Lab founder Beth Ferguson, Techdirt CEO Mike Masnick and Sparkfun's educational outreach coordinator, Jeff Branson. And, of course, we've already announced a number of folks who will be joining us on November 9th and 10th, including LeVar Burton, Ben Heck, Peter Molyneux, Ben Huh and folks from companies like Google, Sony, Pebble, Adafruit and The Electronic Frontier Foundation -- and we've still got plenty to come. Check out the full list below.
