Tag Archives: toys

Angry Birds Christmas Goodies



If you can’t get enough of Rovio‘s Angry Birds (or Angly Birds as my daughter says), then you can satisfy your avian needs over at the Angry Birds on-line store. I’ve seen Angry Birds toys gradually appearing in shops, but I’d no idea there was such a wide range of things, from the expected soft toys to children’s costumes.

Angry Birds Fancy Dress Costume

Anyway, as we’re now officially in the run-up to Christmas, the Angry Birds store has a festive selection from Christmas stockings to tree decorations.

Blue Bird Christmas StockingChristmas Tree Decorations

The Bad Piggies Egg Recipes looks like an eggscellent (sorry) stocking-filler with around 40 egg-based recipes from the classics to the more interesting – the table of contents is shown on the website.

Bad Piggies Egg Recipes

There’s plenty of other merchandise to choose from too, including iPhone cases and flip-flops! Prices feel a little high at times for what are novelty items but the shop does appear to ship worldwide.


Magazines are iPads That Don’t Work



Watch the video below and let me know how you feel after watching it, but for the purposes of discussion, remember two things first. One, to avoid any pro- or anti-Apple bias, ignore the fact that it’s an Apple iPad and assume that it’s just a generic tablet. Two, take what the video shows at face value as one could easily make a case that some of the actions with the magazines are normal behaviour and don’t show anything special.

Add your comments below. I’ll chip in later.


Quirky – Social Product Development



I love these entrepreneurial websites such as Kickstarter. It’s a vicarious pleasure in seeing other people’s ideas and helping these people succeed by investing in their products. I found a new one today – Quirky – which I think takes the idea development to the next level. Quirky refer to it as a “A Socially Developed Product (TM)” and they help you take a product from the idea through product development to production and sales.

Here’s Quirky’s product development process.

The Quirky Process (courtesy of Quirky)

What seems to be unique about Quirky (and to be fair, I haven’t exhaustively researched the topic) is that part of the process is to encourage feedback from Quirky members to improve the product. They call it “community curation”. It’s a great idea especially if it leads to better products.

Taking it further, Quirky has this notion of influence. You earn influence by submitting ideas or commenting on products, and influence converts into a proportion of the profit from those objects that you worked on. The explanation is a bit opaque in places and I’d be interested to see what sort of money people make but it seems to be way to reward everyone who helped make the product a success.

There are some really interesting products on the site and the one that currently has my eye is the Converge docking station. It’s probably less docking station and more charging station but it looks great and solves a problem that many of us have.

The Converge is in pre-sale and so far it looks like it has garnered only 69 orders out of the 1300 needed to put it into production, so I don’t know how many products actually make it from pre-sale to production.

Overall, I like the idea and I’ll be following along but with all of these things, exercise caution. If you’ve got a great idea, it might be an excellent place to get a product into the market. But you need to read the small print and understand ownership of the intellectual property and design, your portion of the profit and so on – I haven’t delved into any of these things yet. If you aren’t happy, walk away.


Sifteo – The Future of Play



“The Future of Play” might be putting it a bit too strongly but Sifteo’s interactive and interacting cubes certainly look a great deal of fun. Each 1.5″ cube is a little computer with a small colour display, rechargeable battery and the ability to sense motion, other cubes and connect wirelessly to a PC or Mac. Once you put all this together there’s endless possibilities for games and puzzles.

There’s a video on the home page of the website which fleshes out how the cubes can work together. It’s definitely worth checking this out and the rest of the site to understand what happens.  It seems that you need to start with at least three cubes to start having fun and you can have up to six working together. Sifteo has six games announced on the website with more to come. When not in use they cubes can dock in a recharging cradle. A single charge lasts about 4 hours.

From the press release, it seems that co-founders, David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi first came up with the prototype for the cubes when studying at the MIT Media Lab. During their research they realized that the way people typically interact with physical objects i.e. picking them up to examine and arrange them, had not been explored by gaming companies.  “Traditional game consoles have lost the tangible and interactive nature of classic tabletop games like Mahjong and dominoes, that bring people together,” said Jeevan Kalanithi, co-founder of Sifteo. “Players tell us that Sifteo cubes reduce screen stare, banish tired thumbs and give families and individuals a more natural way to have fun,” said Kalanithi.

I would absolutely agree with this. After playing “computer” games for many years, I’ve recently had to return to more real-world games courtesy of 3 year old. Although her games aren’t very sophisticated, it’s fun to have fun with someone else.

The Sifteo cubes are competing at CES in the Last Gadget Standing contest and they’ve managed to make it through to the top ten.  Good luck guys!

Yesterday, Sifteo opened an Early Access programme and then closed it the same day. That’s how popular they were.  Frankly, I’m annoyed that I didn’t get in on the action….


Hard Disk Clocks



Looking for a Christmas gift for a geeky friend? Then take a look at these clocks made from hard disk drives and their circuit boards.

Made from old hard drives – a 2.5″ laptop unit and 3.5″ SCSI drive respectively, these are for sale on Etsy for $15.  The vendor several other IT-themed clocks, so if you fancy a keyboard or circuit board clock, check out his shop.

It’s kind of ironic that a device used to operating at the millisecond level is now marking time of a much greater magnitude.