Wireless Wednesday for 2/4/15: Tech Gifts for Valentine's Day

Forget the flowers and chocolate, how about some tech items and gadget for Valentine's Day!  You can go wrong with any of these.

Have a listen to Rick and Mitch:

listen to ‘Wireless Wednesday for 2/4/15 on 92.9 The Game’ on audioBoom

1. Lenovo's new line of laptops

Does your loved one suffer from a laptop that won't boot, freezes up or takes 10 minutes to lead a web page?

Rick is trying the Lenovo Thinkpad T540p right now

Operating system: Windows OS

screen size: 15.6 inch

hard drive capacity: 500 GB drive

graphics processor: Intel GPU

weight: 5.3 pound

processor speed: 2.5 GHz CPU

Solid and fast performing and under $700
 

2. BSX Basix earbuds  -  they come in a special red color for Valentine's Day at a great price - $39.99

Noise-isolation earbuds with exclusive flat tangle-free cables ideal for sports and everyday activities.

 Specs:

    Features custom-tuned 8mm drivers for superior bass and crystal clear highs
    Tough aluminum housing protects vulnerable connection points for longevity of earbuds
    Exclusive, dual flatwire cabling is lightweight, flexible and tangle-free
    Gold plated 90 degree connectors compatible with Apple, Android, Windows Phone and other media devices that accept traditional 3.5mm headphone input
    Includes 3 custom size ear tips for secure fit during any activity
    Available in black and red or white and red colors
    Includes soft sided carrying case for portability
Available at: Bostonsoundworx.com, Amazon.com

 
3.  "The Pencil" - digital bluetooth stylus from www.fiftythree.com

* Now in a special Gold edition

Pencil by FiftyThree is the most natural and expressive way to create on iPad. Advanced technology meets beautiful design to keep you in the flow, without needing to switch tools. With Surface Pressure, Erase, Blend, and adaptive Palm Rejection, Pencil puts creative possibility in your hands.
It’s the rare iPad stylus you can actually use like a pencil. One side draws, the other erases. It’s sophisticated enough to make sure your palm will never mark up your canvas or send your app going haywire. In other words, it’s just as easy to operate as the instrument it’s named after. That’s no small feat.

Each Pencil is milled from a single, solid piece of material. Graphite brushed aluminum model shown.
Also available in Walnut and Gold.  Best when used with the "Paper" app

 

4.  Epic ID Medical ID Bracelet  - $34.99
 
A waterproof medical ID bracelet that is easy to set up.
Just plug in to a USB drive, foolow the prompts and fields to type in your conditions and medical history and wear it. No battery to recharge and no fees.
Waterproof USB
Comfortable silicone band
Durable stainless steel clasp
PC/Mac compatible
One size/custom fit
Easy to update

5.  Logitech Harmony Ultimate Home Remote

www.logitech.com

The most powerful, intuitive Harmony remote for entertainment and home control.
The 2.4” vibrant touchscreen makes it simple to access your list of Favorite channels, swipe and tap to change channels, adjust volume, fast-forward or rewind and get vibration feedback for no-look control.
Control your TV and more with this Logitech remote
Guys love their remotes and they will cherish this one.
 


App of the week  -  time to work off all that junk you ate for Super Bowl Sunday
 

Ingredients Handbook 101 - Food Diet Guide

* Free for iOS devices

Ingredient Handbook is compiled for all passionate food lovers around the world. You can become self nutritionist with this simple app, mastering details about thousands of Ingredients. Know every health benefits and hazards of different ingredients in our day to day life.

Know all feature in a quick glance -

* Search - You can search any Ingredient manually to know its description, health benefits, excess hazards, nutritional values and also its molecular composition.

* Categories - Every Ingredient is categorized with regard to their common consumption.

* Gallery - Here you can save different images from our App for further reference.

* Quiz - Assess yourself by playing quiz around Ingredients.

* Nutrients Chart - Check nutritional values of all Ingredients (ascending to descending)

* Favorites - Make your checklist selecting all necessary ingredients to create a recipe with Favorite button.

Wireless Wednesday for 1/28/15: TV Tech

Chances are you will watching the Super Bowl this weekend on television, so it's the perfect time to take a look at some new tech and products for you TV.

Have a listen:

listen to ‘Wireless Wednesday for 1/28/15 on 92.9 The Game’ on audioBoom

1.  Sling TV

A partnership with DISH and Sling TV for cord cutters.

Now you can watch all those cable sports, lifestyle, new and online entertainment that was never available on-the-go or without paying a big cable bill for $20 per month with Sling TV.

Oh yea, there is no installation charge, no commitment, contact, credit check or hardware you need to install.

With Sling TV, you can watch all of your favorite programming on an Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire TV Stick, Google’s Nexus Player, various LG Smart TVs, Roku players, Roku TV models, most Samsung Smart TVs, Xbox One, iOS, Android devices, a Mac and of course a PC.

This is going to make life a little easier for cord cutters.

Rick's article with more on Sling TV

http://www.examiner.com/article/sling-tv-delivers-what-you-want-to-watch-wherever-you-are?cid=db_articles


2.  High Dynamic Range or HDR pictures

Been a big part of digital cameras and editing digital pictures for years and now it comes to your TV
High Dynamic Range TV – a process whereby a combination of ultra-bright screens and specially shot footage delivers a much wider range of luminance levels to create pictures that look much more lifelike and dynamic.
 



3.  LG 4K TV's and Quantum Dots

LG will be pushing 4K OLEDs hard in 2015, they’re also dabbling with the technology that many think will steal OLED’s thunder at this year’s show. Quantum-dot displays, which use a layer of light-tuning nanoparticles in between the LED backlight system and the color filters, are expected to help the next generation of LCD sets achieve OLED-like performance at a much cheaper price. While LG is still betting big on OLED—and to my eyes, OLED certainly still looks better—LG does have a 4K quantum-dot set in its 2015 lineup.

The lone quantum-dot panel in LG’s stable is the 65-inch UF9400 UltraHD TV, a 240Hz set with a quad-core processor and Harman/Kardon speakers. According to LG, the quantum-dot film in front of the LED backlight system translates to a “25 to 30 percent wider color gamut and 10 percent more brightness.
 

4.  LG MusicFlow

Improved sound coming out of your TV

 MusicFlow, which uses a dual-band mesh network similar to Sonos and supports 24-bit/192kHz audio.

LG is positioning its new MusicFlow soundbars as an entry point for the system, as they’ll be priced significantly lower than Sonos’s $700 Playbar. The LG soundbars have prices starting at $400, and the general strategy is that anyone who picks one up for their TV room will eventually want to create a multi-room setup. Then they’ll theoretically buy more of LG’s MusicFlow speakers—provided they don’t already have a Sonos setup.
 


5.  The Advent of Smart TVs

More and more Smart TVs will be sold and they keep getting easier to set up.

It’s also likely we’ll see much more advanced interaction between TVs and smartphones/tablets, with more control of your TV functionality being devolved to your portable devices and more potential for easily sharing video and multimedia content across all your video-capable products.

It remains to be seen, though, if the latest smart TV developments will be able to shake off the growing suspicion that maybe Smart TVs are getting too clever for their own good in trying to deliver features that might be better left to personal smart devices.


App of the week

Pro Tools First - for those that like to make music on their computer, tablet or smartphone.
A free version of Pro Tools that lets you get your feet wet. It includes a "subset" of the usual features (you're mainly missing extra tracks, score editing and video playback), but it otherwise behaves like the paid version. You won't have to relearn anything if you hit the big time and start using the full software.

The real catch (besides the lack of a release date) is Avid's dependence on after-the-fact purchases to make money. You'll get 21 audio effect plugins from the outset, but you'll have to pay for more. Also, First only lets you keep three projects in the cloud for free.
 

Wireless Wednesday for 1/21/15: 2015 PGA Show

New Stuff from the PGA Merchandise Show

Rick is in Orlando for the 62nd PGA Show and Demo Day looking at all the new golf tech and products
Rick is also staying at the Reunion Resort in Orlando, home of the Annika Academy... Annika Sorenstam's academy, where they use use high tech traning techniques and fitness technique to make batter golfers.

www.reunionresort.com
www.theannikaacademy.com

Have a listen:

listen to ‘Wireless Wednesday for 1/21/15 on 92.9 The Game’ on audioBoom

1.  Virtual Green by Golf Scene

A dynamic, shifting putting green designed to revolutionize the putting experience in golf simulators. Virtual Green is a moving putting green and software that changes the landscape and contour of flat turf via thousands of pinpoints beneath the surface to mimic an actual golf green.

"As the premiere event for golf professionals, the PGA Merchandise Show is the perfect platform to debut our patented innovation. Debuting Virtual Green in front of thousands of enthusiasts is very exciting, we look forward to enhancing the future of putting in golf simulators," stated Sean Coffman of Virtual Green.
 
 
 
2. Robogolfpro

The RoboGolfPro develops a customized swing for each player. You can discover the swing that works best for your body and store it in RGP’s computer for future reference! The robot works so well because it relies on motor learning to train the golfer to automatically remember the correct swing form.

The robotic swing trainer has been grabbing the attention of professional golfers like Vaughn Taylor, who has found quick success from his training. He has even purchased one for his home. Scot W.R. Nei, founder of RoboGolfPro, who has partnered with Lori Heller, Heller Events, to distribute and sell the robot and events across North America and Europe, says, “Vaughn texts me all the time with comments like, ‘I had my best round ever in over 6 years' and says that his swing is better than ever!”

 

3.  DST "Warm Up" Clubs

Golfers get injured when they don't warm up properly

DST had a new warm up club
DST Golf - developer and manufacturer of ground breaking golf clubs that speed game improvement among players of all skill levels - will launch its line of Compressor Warm-Up Clubs featuring patent-pending Delayed Strike Technology at Booth #1606 and Demo Day during the 2015 PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, Florida.
Available in 8-iron and wedge models, DST Compressor clubs simplify the swing by stripping out complicated and unnecessary movements. This is achieved by automatically pre-setting the hands in the optimal impact position, which is identical for all normal shots (chip, pitch and full swing).
www.dstgolf.com

4. Knuth's "High Heat: Driver

A new driver based on Anti-Submarine Warfare

The club is the brainchild of Dean Knuth. Why does that name sound familiar? For 16 years, he was in charge of monitoring handicaps for the United States Golf Association and was dubbed "the Pope of Slope" because he was the primary inventor of the USGA Course Rating and Slope System. Knuth, who turned 60 this year, retired from the USGA a few years ago to move to San Diego, where he ran a software company. Now he's an engineer for Northrup-Grumman, which took over the software company, and he has pursued an inventor's dream — making a better driver.

Knuth got the idea for the High Heat at a World Scientific Golf Congress at St. Andrews in the '90s when he heard a visiting professor theorize that there should be a way to significantly decrease the loss of energy from the driver to the ball. Knuth, who has a masters degree in computer systems technology, had done research on energy passing through different mediums (such as metals, air and water) while in the Navy's postgraduate school, which he attended from 1975 to 1978. His postgrad program focused on anti-submarine warfare.

He needed a tough-but-thin metal to achieve that optimal frequency, but the Chinese titanium typically used in golf clubs broke down in his design. Knuth found a Russian titanium called ET 22 that was strong enough — after he made it into sheet metal instead of forging it, used a laser to cut it and pressed it into a die at 70 tons per square inch.

5.  Yamaha with new golf carts with an AC charge

Just plug them in to get them charged up.

Yamaha now has golf carts with a DC charge, gas, and AC charge.
The AC charge carts have 7 horse power in them, great for climbing hills on the course

App of the week:  Tennis Channel App now available on Apple TV
and the Australian Open app

Good news for "Cord Cutters"  you can now watch Tennis Channel on your Apple TV with a new app, but for the unlimited tennis it will cost you about $70/year

Also the official Australian Open app is available for iOS and Android devices-  download it to follow everything Australian Open.
 

Wireless Wednesday for 1/14/15: Tech Trends for 2015

Tech Trends for 2015

Rick saw a lot of gadgets out in Las Vegas at CES, but a big part of the trip was looking at some of the tech trends that will hit in 2015.

Let's look at some of the tech trends

Have a listen to both parts:

listen to ‘Wireless Wednesday for 1/14/15 on 92.9 The Game Part 1’ on audioBoom

listen to ‘Wireless Wednesday for 1/14/15 on 92.9 The Game Part 2’ on audioBoom

1.  The Self Driving Car

Not only will cars have sophisticated dashboards that point us to our destination and sync cleanly with our smartphones, but they're inching closer to taking over the steering wheel.

Audi and Mercedes were among the car manufacturers showcasing self-driving vehicles.

Meanwhile, BMW and chip maker Nvidia demonstrated technology where the car would serve as an auto-valet, finding its own parking space and returning to your location when ready.

An Audi A7 self-driving car drove from San Francisco to CES this year

 
2. The connected home - eventually everything in the home will be controlled by a smartphone, tablet and even your watch

3.  4K

This is not a drill. It seems consumers have been hearing for years about the display resolution that's

four times sharper than traditional HD.

Now comes the rush of affordable TV sets and compatible programming to satisfy your desire for only the highest of high-definition. But don't get too comfortable. There's already talk of 8K.

Because 8K is already here, 4K will be more affordable.
 

4. We are running out of data storage space...

The world could run out of computer space by 2020, a leading data storage ... Seagate said we are facing a data capacity deficit of more than six zettabytes. To put that into context, a single zettabyte is the equivalent of 34,359,738,368 smartphones, assuming a typical device has 32GB of storage.
Seagate was looking into heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) as one experimental technology to increase space.

This technology uses lasers to heat the storage device and magnetically record data onto it.

Techradar reported that this could lead to 50 terabits of storage per square inch, compared to the few hundred gigabits now.
 



5.  The End of Customer Service Desks

As users expect service in real time and crowdsourcing support is becoming more prevalent, the effectiveness of reactive processes of service desks is dwindling.  Companies will build transition strategies that enable a proactive business productivity team.

Answers to questions will come in real time, through internet and social media platforms.
 


App of the week:  Vida Health Coach for iOS  -  Free to download the app, but $15 for the coaching

Lose weight, feel better, and hit your health goals with a real-life, professional Vida health coach. We’ll instantly connect you with a live expert coach to create an ongoing, personalized health program that fits your style and schedule.

HOW VIDA COACHING WORKS:

• Vida coaches are experts in nutrition, fitness, health, and motivational psychology. It’s like having your own personal trainer, nutritionist, mentor, therapist, and accountability partner all in one, always by your side in the Vida app.

• Our coaches are available on your schedule, 24/7 and connect with you through daily text messages and weekly video check-ins. They fit your style so you get the motivation and encouragement you need.

• Get started with a FREE video consultation with your Vida Coach. They’ll go through our proven 32-point health assessment to learn more about you and put together your own 100% personalized health plan.

• Stay accountable with daily reminders, tips, & inspiration from your coach.

Wireless Wednesday for 1/7/15: CES and the App of the Week

Rick is at CES  in Las Vegas this week. Looking at all the new gadgets and tech trends.

This is the annual Consumer Electronics Show and is attended by nearly 160,000 people.  It runs through Friday.

Have a listen:

listen to ‘Wireless Wednesday for 1/7/15 on 92.9 The Game’ on audioBoom

Let's talk about CES

1.  What is CES and what is it really like?

160,000 people. Long lines, expensive hotel rooms, for the most part.
Multiple convention centers. All the latest gadgets...

2.  CES Pre Show events

Officially, CES didn't kick off until Tuesday, but Rick already attended two pre show events- "Unveiled" and Pepcom's Digital Experience. These are "media only" events, where the press gets to see many of the new products ahead of time.
Rick went to both and both were crowded with new products and media.

3. Show floor opened today.

Miles and miles of aisles at LVCC< Sands Expo, and some of the convention centers in hotels.

4. Monday's Press Conferences

Many of the big companies have "press conferences" on Monday where they make new product announcements.  LG announced their new LG G Flex 2 phone and new washing machines and dryers.
Shaq was there for Monster audio and other celebs will be throughout the show...

What's Hot???

1. Wearable tech
2. Tech for the home
3. New Phones, laptops, micro chips

App of the week:

UA Record   -  Under Armour's new fitness app

UA Record, a new health and fitness network app that Under Armour is launching here at the Consumer Electronics Show.

UA Record, which you can download free starting this week in the Google Play Store or Apple's App Store, aims to simplify your personal health data with fitness activity tracking tools, and to connect you to a digital community of folks who might motivate you to get and stay in shape.
 Under Armour ambassadors you might choose to follow — among them ballerina Misty Copeland, skier Lindsey Vonn, tennis player Sloane Stephens and retired baseball star Cal Ripken Jr. You can also follow a feed from MapMyFitness, which Under Armour owns.

Record is a repository for tracking your steps, calories burned, sleep, heart rate and weight, with the data provided by third-party wearable devices and sensors.

After downloading UA Record and creating or logging into your account — you can use Facebook, or sign in with an Under Armour-owned MapMyFitness account — you connect the devices you'll use for tracking. Out of the starting gate, UA Record can connect to apps and devices from Garmin, Jawbone, Withings, MyFitnessPal, Fitbit, Suunto, Misfit, Wego, Polar and Fitbug.

UA Record is free right now, but premium features are coming