Consumer Electronic sales during holiday period dropped 6% from last year

Anthony Garreffa | Business, Financial & Legal | Jan 8, 2012 11:27 PM CST

The Consumer Electronics Show starts up this week and right out of the gate in relation to consumer electronics is a report from the NPD Group: Consumer electronic sales during the 2011 holiday period dropped 6-percent when compared to 2010.

But, it doesn't look like it'll get any better. The NPD Weekly Tracking Service notes that the decline comes off of another decline from the year before. 2011's drop was not as bad as 2010's bad, but it shows the direction the market is headed. NPD says:

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Tobii lets you control Windows 8 with your... eyes

Anthony Garreffa | Mobile Devices | Jan 8, 2012 9:24 PM CST

This is something new for me, I've never heard of it before and wow does it sound interesting. Tobii, have introduced eye-tracking technology called "Gaze", where you can control Windows 8 with your... eyes. Yes, the eyes you're reading this text with, can control the next-generation OS from Microsoft. The project is a result of research conducted in 2001 at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology.

Gizmodo tried it out and they seem to have nothing but great words to say about it, and it makes me just as excited to read about it and imagine the possibilities. Gaze's eye control device, which is said to look like a "horizontal rectangle glass obelisk attached to the hinge of a laptop", is incredibly accurate.

Just like smartphones, Gaze requires some personal calibration before you can use it and some unique finger movements. Gaze is said to be very accurate, never missing the target by more than a "few pixels". On top of the eye tracking, swipe gestures are also available through Windows 8 and Gaze. Included at the demo was an Asteroids-like game with Tobii's Gaze and everything that was impressive about Tobii before, was just as impressive in Asteroids, according to Gizmodo.

Continue reading: Tobii lets you control Windows 8 with your... eyes (full post)

Space Quest fan game, Vohaul Strikes Back, a fan-made feature-length sequel to Space Quest

Anthony Garreffa | Gaming | Jan 8, 2012 9:22 PM CST

Team VSB, a bunch of peeps who have built a feature-length Space Quest game called "Vohaul Strikes Back" is now available, and best of all: for free. Vohaul Strikes Back is a labor of love, with nearly 10 years of work going into the game.

It's also the first original Space Quest game of this scale since the official Space Quest 6 which was released all the way back in 1995. Vohaul Strikes Back doesn't include a voice pack, but Team VSB are working on one. If you'd like to help the team out with the voice pack, you can reach them through their forums.

You can check out their website here, and download the game (again, for free!) from here. I'm quite enjoying the amount of love these old-school adventure games are getting, now if we can just get updated Full HD versions of my favorite FMV games such as Night Trap, Under a Killing Moon and others, I'd be in nostalgic heaven.

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CES Unveiled was a wash; check out what we found to be more worth your time!

Chad Sebring | Trade Shows | Jan 8, 2012 8:49 PM CST

So as Cameron and Chris talk me into running through CES Unveiled, I found myself packed in a room with hundreds of people, just after what should have been the biggest tip off of the night. As we passed through the doors, there was a lady handing out iPhone cases to everyone who wanted one. Once we passed through the doors you see food, a bar at each end of the hall, and what seemed to be an iHall.

With select few displays showing convection cook tops, some radar detectors, and the most impressive of the whole room was the ice block that chilled the Vodka for the Martini's that were given away to keep us in the room longer. I realize it was an open bar, and that is all fine and great for us who were in the room, but poor Cameron had to drink his Jack and Cokes with Coke Zero of all things, as regular Coke was something the bartender seemed to have no concept of!

After fighting your way through tons of people and getting slammed by bags from every angle as you try to squirm your way through the masses, I for one was left underwhelmed at what was actually being displayed to kick off the event. Most of my time speaking with others was spent looking at the nuances of the new convection cook tops, as it was seriously the biggest draw to me personally in the room, as I don't own any Apple products. For those that do, there were a couple of cool devices to mix with your iPhone and iPads, but again, enough is enough with the iGadgets.

Continue reading: CES Unveiled was a wash; check out what we found to be more worth your time! (full post)

Steam had a huge 2011, 100% sales growth, 5 million simultaneous users during Holiday Sale

Anthony Garreffa | Business, Financial & Legal | Jan 8, 2012 7:12 PM CST

Valve just released their 2011 growth data for Steam, and during 2011 the platform grew to offer over 1,800 games to more than 40 million accounts. Year-over-year unit sales increased by more than 100-percent for the seventh straight year, and during the 2011 Holiday Sale, Steam's simultaneous user numbers ballooned to over 5 million players at once.

If you're a storage fan, get this: Steam doubled the amount of content delivered from 2010, to serve over 780 Petabytes (with a P!) of data to gamers around the world. To sustain this demand for bandwidth, the Steam infrastructure more than doubled its service capacity and a new content delivery architecture was deployed to improve user download rates.

Steamworks-powered games hit 14.5 million copies registered in 2011, a 67-percent increase over 2010. Included Steamworks titles were huge sellers like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, and more. Since Steamworks started over three years ago, it has shipped in over 400 games. Gabe Newell, co-founder, president of Valve and my personal super hero, says:

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Acer unveil Aspire S5 Ultrabook, includes Thunderbolt

Anthony Garreffa | Laptops | Jan 8, 2012 6:24 PM CST

CES 2012: Acer started their CES unveiling with quite the bang, showing off its second ultrabook, the Acer Aspire S5. The Aspire S5 is due for a Q2 arrival, is just 15mm thick and weighs under 1.35kg.

It sports an Onyx Black magnesium-aluminum alloy cover, a 13.3-inch LCD screen, chiclet keyboard, an Intel Core processor, a solid state drive, and a MagicFlip I/O port panel, which includes HDMI, USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt connectors. Thunderbolt, on an ultrabook? Very good news for 2012 products.

Acer also include their Green Instant On technology which provides super fast booting and resume, and the Always Connect solution which enables users to 'manage their multimedia and data on all their devices at anytime, anywhere'. At the moment, there's no details on Aspire S5's pricing.

Continue reading: Acer unveil Aspire S5 Ultrabook, includes Thunderbolt (full post)

Storage Visions 2012 MemoRight Shows 768GB 2.5" SSD

Chris Ramseyer | Storage | Jan 8, 2012 5:00 PM CST

CES 2012 - Long before SandForce, Marvell or even Intel were churning out SSD controllers MemoRight was breaking new ground on the SSD frontier.

We've been reviewing their products for several years now and always found MemoRight SSDs to be of the highest quality no matter what controller was used.

A big reason for the high quality coming from MemoRight is their military division, products designed for use in aircraft, marine and in infantry platforms. Here we see a military class SSD with several surface mount capacitors. MemoRight explains this as like having a UPS built into each drive.

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Hands-on with the Crucial Adrenaline SSD caching drive at Storage Visions 2012

Cameron Wilmot | Storage | Jan 8, 2012 4:42 PM CST

Alright, so our first video from Las Vegas this year at CES is from Storage Visions 2012 where we ran into Rob from Micron. He was a little reluctant at first, but we managed to get him on video to give us a little hands-on and some details about their newest product called the Crucial Adrenaline.

This is an SSD drive that will be coming out sometime soon (we are guessing late January to early February timeframe) and it will come with a capacity of 50GB. Why only 50GB? You shouldn't really think of this drive as a traditional SSD, it's a caching drive. It is designed to complement your existing system and introduce some of the performance benefits you can see from flash based storage.

It works in tandem with your current HDD setup and the Adrenaline caches the most common files that you use to provide an easy to install and afford boost to system performance. We've already been told we can expect a review sample in the next two weeks and you can probably expect to see it go on sale just a little after that based on previous products we have got in from Crucial to review.

Continue reading: Hands-on with the Crucial Adrenaline SSD caching drive at Storage Visions 2012 (full post)

Samsung Galaxy M Style, an "affordable" handset

Anthony Garreffa | Mobile Devices | Jan 8, 2012 5:29 AM CST

Samsung in the last few days have launched a new smartphone, touted as an "affordable" handset, the Galaxy M Style. The Samsung Galaxy M Style is a mid-range smartphone featuring a 4-inch Super AMOLED display and a slim form factor of just 9.9mm.

The Galaxy M Style sports Android 2.3 Gingerbread, a 1GHz single-core processor, 4GB of internal memory and a microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB) and sports dual cameras, with a VGA front-facing camera and a rear-facing 3-megapixel camera. It also supports HD (720p) video recording.

The Galaxy M Style is only going to splash onto South Korean shores and will launch in three colors: Platinum Silver, Blue Black, and Lavender Pink. Samsung haven't confirmed whether Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) will come to the handset. Galaxy M Style is priced at just $500, which is significantly less than their flagship ICS-powered Galaxy Nexus handset.

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Snooki will be at CES, asks where the Smush Room is

Anthony Garreffa | Trade Shows | Jan 8, 2012 2:14 AM CST

CES 2012: One of the first things to report about CES, is one of the most important: Jersey Shore star, Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi will be attending. Not only that, but the hair-do boy himself, Justin Bieber will also be in attendance. Back in 2010, Lady Gaga herself made an appearance at CES, taking the role of creative director at Polaroid.

Bieber will appear at a booth for TOSY, a Vietnamese robotics company. Bieber won't be doing interviews, so Cam will be mad about that! (ha!) Now onto Snooki, she'll be there to build hype for iHip, a maker of audio accessories. She'll also be hosting a fist-pumping VIP party at the Planet Hollywood Hotel and Casino during the week, and will also be making appearances on the floor of the Last Vegas Convention Center.

There are a bunch of other celebs attending, with one of them my favorite from Buffy: Eliza Dushku. She played Faith on Buffy, and has been in various shows and movies since, and will be at CES as an ambassador for the Entertainment Matters program which is sponsored by Variety magazine and Ericsson, 50 Cent will announce new audio products through his company, SMS Audio.

Continue reading: Snooki will be at CES, asks where the Smush Room is (full post)

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