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Ohmconnect taps into your Nest, Tesla and WeMo products to pay you for reducing peak energy usage

Apr11
by on April 11, 2014 at 1:01 am
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider

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You know what’s better than helping the environment? Getting paid for it. 500 Startups-backed Ohmconnect has built a Web tool that interfaces with products like the Nest, Tesla Model S and Belkin’s WeMo smart home line to earn you money by dialing back energy usage during peak hours. Not all energy is created equal. Power grids are optimized to produce just enough of the cleanest energy possible, which means they fall back on dirty power during high-demand times. Ohmconnect monitors the status of these so-called “peaker plants” and then sends you and supported devices notifications to reduce your usage.The energy you save…

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Lomography’s new Russar+ will view the world from a wider angle

Apr10
by on April 10, 2014 at 11:54 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Insider, Product Launches

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The Lomographic Society has announced an exciting new lens: The Russar+ wide angle lens. With its 20mm focal length and high-quality optics, this new art lens promises to produce sharp photos with warm, vibrant colors and vignettes—perfect for street photography, architectural shots, and landscapes, as well as personal portraits. Its compact design, crafted with brass and chrome-plated, promises excellent distortion control and illumination. Designed by Lomography and manufactured in Russia by Zenit, the Russar+ is an update of the famous 1958 Russar MR-2. That model was recognized as a groundbreaking super-wide-angle lens, named after Mikhail Mikhailovich Rusinov, once the chief optical…

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Spaced360 review: A seriously loud £250 omni-directional wireless speaker

Apr10
by on April 10, 2014 at 11:01 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, Gadgets, Insider, Product Launches, Product Reviews

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You hear a lot of buzzwords in tech. So when I met up with a spokesperson from the freshly launched Bluetooth speaker brand Spaced360 and he immediately started talking about ‘AirSound technology’, I was wary. It’s not that these terms mean nothing, it’s just that in a lot of cases, they don’t mean a lot to the layman. And in product engineering or acoustics, I’m very much a layman. And sometimes they do just mean virtually nothing. “AirSound means that wherever you are in a room, everyone experiences the same music, which is why we are calling this the third generation…

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How to save your next great idea (you never know when you’ll need it)

Apr10
by on April 10, 2014 at 8:58 pm
Posted In: Around the Web, How-To's, LifeHacks

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Justin Fowler is founder of Audio Press. The brain is super quick in establishing connections – it can jump from one idea to the other in a fraction of a second. Your mind is a holding tank for all the memories, experiences, and thoughts you’ve had at some point in your life that haven’t been forgotten. Unfortunately, you can’t hook your brain up to a computer to download information from it… not yet, anyway. With so much information passing through our brains everyday, it’s impossible to manually record everything that comes to mind. But once in a while, you have…

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Simply marbleous: Gorgeous images of marbleized paper

Apr10
by on April 10, 2014 at 8:20 pm
Posted In: Analysis and Opinion, Around the Web

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Deanna Paquette is a digital designer at Shutterstock. This post was originally published on the Shutterstock blog and has been adapted with permission. Papercraft and abstraction are a winning combination in any design environment. As UK-based design blog Present & Correct notes, there’s a slight “obsession with stationery,” and when they tweeted about marbleized paper recently, there was cause to swoon. This admiration for all things marbleized is quite widespread, so I also picked out some stunning examples of the practice. Check out these images that shake up a mixture of moods, from nostalgia to creative fervor. Photo of handmade Renaissance/Victori…

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