BMW’s been teasing us with its vision for electric motoroing for years, and today, folks, the trend continues. The German automaker has unveiled two concepts from its upcoming i sub-brand: the city-dwelling i3 and a rehashed version of its i8. This is the first time we’ve officially seen the smaller of the two, as the car formerly known as the Megacity had only been spied in an official render and during routine testing at the arctic circle. It’ll haul four peeps with its 150km range (around 100 miles) and accelerate from 0-60mph in around 8 seconds. As for those with range anxiety, the German company will soothe such fears with an optional range-extending motor dubbed “REx.” Either variant could land in your garage in 2013, where you’ll be able top them up in 6 hours with a standard socket, or up to eighty percent in an hour if you’re rocking a spiffy high capacity charger.

The i8, which you’ll recall for its radical aerodynamic design and hybrid diesel-electric drivetrain, has received a bevy of aerodynamic tweaks and junked its oil burner, opting for a gasoline one instead. Engine swap aside, the sporty coupé apparently drinks only 2.7 liters per 100km — 87 mpg (!) for yanks — which is unreal in a car that’ll accelerate to 62mph in 4.6 seconds. Sound too good to be true? We’ll have to wait until 2014 to see if München can make good on those promises, but in the meantime feel free to peruse the galleries, videos, and PR after the break.

Continue reading BMW unveils new i3 and revamped i8 concepts, we await our automotive future (video)

BMW unveils new i3 and revamped i8 concepts, we await our automotive future (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jul 2011 14:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink CNET  |   | Email this | Comments
Engadget

For example, the 1 series is a hot item right now. It is new to the United States, and the German company is proud to have it here. It is a spirited car with a 3.0 liter, six cylinder engine. It packs a lot of power and comes with a five year or forty eight thousand mile warranty. You get the features with the 1 series in a whole new way with this new model.

If you want a 230 horsepower engine with a variety of engine and transmission options then check out the 3 series. Each of the series lines are different. You can tell their differences in the numbers of the series. The larger the number, the more expensive the car. They go all the way up to a 7 series, and that is around ninety five thousand dollars before tax and licensing.

BMW offers many different types of vehicles. This includes the sportier models of the Z4. With a horsepower range of 225 to 335 you can get around town in a whole new way, faster than you imagined. Plan on spending around fifty to seventy two thousand dollars if you choose the Z4 as your favorite.

The M series is BMW’s answer to the sedan, and they have class, power, and styling all wrapped into their cars. The M3 packs a 4.0 liter V8 engine so you can cruise down the road in power and style. The options are all different with the M series, and the price varies with the series number.

If you are really looking for the ultimate driving machine, the M6 is the car for you. This car will set you back $115,000. For this price, you get the 500 horsepower V10 as standard equipment. It is a two door, four passenger coupe. This car was built to tear up the road whether the road is straight or curvy.

The family buyers will want to take a look at the BMW SUV’s, the X3 and X5. Again, the biggest the number series is the bigger and pricier the vehicle becomes. The smaller X3 has a purchase price of $45,000 to $60,000 depending on options. The X5 is, of course more money.

The BMW auto dealers Woodland Hills are available to help you with any questions you may have and can help you if you would like to test drive one of their models. They pride themselves on having the models in stock that you need. Take a test drive at Orange County BMW Dealers today and see why people say there is nothing that drives like a BMW.

Warner Bros. is notorious for its attempts to squash piracy, which have included suing popular music search sites and hiring interns whose sole purpose is to find pirated content and issue takedown notices. The company also began embedding each film distributed to theaters and critics with a unique identifier, so that Warner could trace leaked and pirated movies back to their source. But, in a piece of delicious irony, it seems that Warner Bros. may have actually stolen this technology from a German company called Medien Patent Verwaltung (MPV).

According to a complaint filed by MPV, the company demoed its anti-piracy tech for the film distributor at Warner Bros.’ invitation in 2003. MPV claims that Warner then began using its technology in 2004 without its permission. A suit has now been filed in New York that seeks to prevent Warner Bros. from using the anti-piracy coding on future film prints, and attempts to collect financial damages incurred from the patent violation. If it turns out that Warner did steal its anti-piracy technology, you can bet it will be one of the biggest stories of the year. After all, pirating anti-piracy tech makes for a great headline. [From: The Hollywood Reporter, via: Techland]

Filed under: Audio/Video, Playroom

Warner Bros. Sued for Pirating Anti-Piracy Tech originally appeared on Switched on Tue, 25 May 2010 12:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Warner Bros. is notorious for its attempts to squash piracy, which have included suing popular music search sites and hiring interns whose sole purpose is to find pirated content and issue takedown notices. The company also began embedding each film distributed to theaters and critics with a unique identifier, so that Warner could trace leaked and pirated movies back to their source. But, in a piece of delicious irony, it seems that Warner Bros. may have actually stolen this technology from a German company called Medien Patent Verwaltung (MPV).

According to a complaint filed by MPV, the company demoed its anti-piracy tech for the film distributor at Warner Bros.’ invitation in 2003. MPV claims that Warner then began using its technology in 2004 without its permission. A suit has now been filed in New York that seeks to prevent Warner Bros. from using the anti-piracy coding on future film prints, and attempts to collect financial damages incurred from the patent violation. If it turns out that Warner did steal its anti-piracy technology, you can bet it will be one of the biggest stories of the year. After all, pirating anti-piracy tech makes for a great headline. [From: The Hollywood Reporter, via: Techland]

Filed under: Audio/Video, Playroom

Warner Bros. Sued for Pirating Anti-Piracy Tech originally appeared on Switched on Tue, 25 May 2010 12:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

The watches are originally German and they’re selling them online at Essex-Watches.com. Click through for press release.

Thanks to a German company called Kettler, kids will never have to endure the inevitable crashes and injuries resulting from learning to ride a two-wheeled bicycle again. Besides having four wheels which means you don’t have to worry about balancing, the Kettquad features pneumatic tires for tackling off-road terrain, a protected enclosed chain drive, no-shift reverse, disk brakes and it will be available in the U.S. sometime this year. Who cares if it will cost over $800 and is only designed for kids aged 5-12? That’s not stopping me from ordering one.

And if you’re still not sold on it, check out the trailer below which not only clearly illustrates how awesomely extreme the Kettquad is, but also has a Metroid-esque shocking reveal at the end!

[ Kettler Kettquad ] VIA [ CrunchGear ]

This seems like a really good idea. A German company called Armatix has developed a handgun that can only be fired by someone wearing a biometrically unlocked wrist watch. An LED light on the gun glows green if it’s set to be fired or red if it’s locked.

According to the product page:

“To activate the wrist watch, the authorized person’s fingerprint must first be read by the wrist watch. An internal database compares the current fingerprint against stored prints and responds accordingly. The wrist watch is then activated for a definable period – e.g. an officer’s work shift or until manually deactivated.”

So probably not great for cases when you need to fire as quickly as possible (unless whatever’s going down happens within the unlocked time frame) but ultimately very safe for plenty of other scenarios.

The .22 caliber handgun will apparently be available sometime next month with a price of 7,000 Euro (almost $10,000) — definitely a niche item at first but perhaps the technology will become more widespread in the future, causing prices to decrease.

Armatix GmbH [Armatrix.com via DVICE/Wired]

By David Ponce

German company Citron sure knows how to put the “multi” in multitouch. Where most multitouch systems these days are happy to track 2 points of contact, Citron’s dreaMTouch can track up to 32 simultaneously. It’s neither resistive nor capacitive, but rather uses IR technology which gives it “no special dependency on touch operation medium (stylus, finger, glove, …)”. More specs below:

quick reaction with 50 coordinates per second

optional medium between the display and the user (glass, plastic, air, …)

no shadow spots or blind areas like with other IR multitouches

no drift

no mechanical wear

At this stage Citron is developing this hardware and there are very few software applications using the dearMTouch’s capabilities. Recently, Germany’s Elektrosil partnered with NUITEQ to integrate Snowflake Suite on the dreaMTouch, but that’s about all we know in terms of current software integration. This of course might have something to do with the fact that dreaMTouch won’t officially be commercially available until January 2010. The system is awaiting patent approval.

[ The dreaMTouch ] VIA [ Technabob ]

How did you shift from entertainment products to personal computers? Did you seek them out or were you pulled in? And were there others besides Apple? Was there a chance you might have ended up sharing your Snow White design language with some other company, turning a competitor of Apple into the iconic “cool computer” maker of the day?

My second client in 1970 was the German company CTM, an offspring of Nixdorf, back then a leader in making data processing affordable and usable to mid-size companies. They were quite successful and together we created the first ergonomic desktop terminal with a tilting display and detached keyboard in 1978 which won international acclaim.

Apple’s “Snow White” design language was the result of a very close relationship and collaboration with Apple, and ultimately expressed the very specific values and aspirations of Apple. The key was that Steve Jobs wanted “the very best design, not only in the computer industry but the entire World”. This allowed us to create a totally new design paradigm for “digital-convergent products” without historic precedence.

How have product considerations evolved in the same time? What was the 1979 equivalent of hardware vs. software? Or physical button vs. touch surface?

Let’s take Sony as an example: as of 1976, we were working on remote controls for multiple sources from TV to Audio-Systems and “Home-Control” with software screens, activated both by buttons and direct-touch. Even as the key problem – aside of cost – was slow processing power and LCD screens with little contrast. Our objective was to simplify usage and some products went into the market in Japan. So to your answer: we already had it in 1979.

What design trends were hot in the late 1970s that are coming back around now? Which trends from the 1970s will NEVER come back?

The late 1970s were very much defined by the shock of the oil crisis and the subsequent recession especially here in the United States. In Europe and Japan, there was a wider acceptance of energy-saving and ecologically responsible product strategies. The hot design trends were “personalization and miniaturization” – SONY’s Walkman being the best manifestation – and with the Japanese domination of electronic consumer electronics making professional-grade technology – e.g. cameras – accessible and affordable to millions. This also was a time, when the United States lost out big time in this field. The late 1970s also were the “Golden Age” of product design – and this trend will return for product experiences and hyper-convergence – which means to design how people feel.

Isn’t part of design envisioning products that use technology that doesn’t yet exist? What were the sorts of things you envisioned in the 1970s that are commonplace today but didn’t yet exist? What are you envisioning now (or what have you envisioned lately) that will take some time for technology to catch up?

This may sound a bit arrogant, but in 1968 I proposed an “Atomic-Time Radio-Wristwatch” for a watch competition. People laughed at it, but in 1986 frog designed exactly such a product for the German Junghans company.

Sometimes, technology surpasses human speed: today we are using mobile phones with more computing power then could be imagined 20 years ago – and even science fiction authors like William Gibson or Arthur C. Clarke didn’t even anticipate them – but the user interfaces are split into “old-phone-physical” and “agnostic-digital” (Apple’s iPhone succeeds because it is the first product to bridge this idiotic chasm).

Looking a the future, I think that technology and our body will grow closer together – a couple of years ago, we designed “Dattoos”, the vision of a protein-based computer “living” on human skin. Closer to reality are concepts of enhancing brain activities by electro-magnetic impulses. Already, design is expanding from “bits and atoms” to “neurons and genes” – one could call it BANG-Design.

Were there times when companies were afraid to go as far as you wanted them to? Are there any examples of companies that refused to make design improvements—perhaps because of cost—and paid a larger price for that?

Strategic design is not about “going as far as possible” but about “going the best way together”. As said above with the Apple Snow White example, the interactive relationship between client and designer is a vital element for success or failure. So, even as I may push for more advanced solutions, the client may have many reasons not to follow. At the end of a day, each jointly achieved result shall be a healthy compromise, motivated by achieving the best for the user and/or consumer. Naturally, there are some negative examples where I couldn’t convince clients, which I also describe in my book: Polaroid which stuck too long to chemical image creation, Maytag which refused to innovate in a strategic way and Motorola which missed the opportunity to create the iPhone long before Apple did.

Dr. Hartmut Esslinger, founder of Frog Design, just published a great book entitled A Fine Line, on the lessons he’s learned in his career and on the future of business informed by design. We encourage you to check it out.

Gizmodo ’79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.