liquid

Tube TVs did best weathering an overall decline in television sales during the first quarter, largely due to a softening economy and a lower price point than their plasma display panel and liquid crystal display TV competitors.

Total North America TV shipments declined 34 percent in the first quarter over the previous quarter, according to recently released results from DisplaySearch, an NPD Group company. Plasmas fell by 38 percent, while LCD televisions dropped by 35 percent.

But in comparison, shipments of the old CRT (cathode ray tube) TVs slipped only 14 percent in the quarter, the study found.

"We … Read more

My final Under the Radar session today focuses on tools for business collaboration. In the past year, Webware.com has covered each of these four applications, but now they're each back with something new to bring to the virtual table.

Blist, an easy, engaging online database, will be releasing a premium version for small and midsized businesses. The easy, rich database environment can be used for business needs such as data storage and applicant-tracking, and features 3D graphs, drag-and-drop query-building, and document storage inside a database.

Next week Blist will add the capability to use others' data structures as … Read more

If you use Microsoft Project, you might want to seriously consider three alternatives that run completely on the Web. In addition to supporting more contemporary features right now, and getting updated with even newer gadgets more frequently than Microsoft can muster, these products, being completely Web-based, offer much more robust collaboration tools.

First up: Liquid Planner. We saw this product at Demo 2008 but it will be on stage again at the Under the Radar conference that I'm moderating on Thursday. This tool's special sauce is its embrace of uncertainty. Users can put in best-case and worst-case estimates … Read more

CORK, Ireland--Researchers for years have devised cooling systems that sit next to or on top of chips and other hot components. Now, researchers in Ireland are trying to make one for inside these components.

The University of Limerick in Ireland, in conjunction with Cork's Tyndall Institute and other research organizations in the country, is working on a liquid cooling system for inside chip packages. Chip packages are those blue/brown plastic sleeves that surround semiconductors and let them plug into a board. When you look at a chip, you're really looking at the package.

In this system, a … Read more

Maybe goth isn't the gadget trend of 2008 after all. The theme of choice this year might well be the flask.

Last week Iomega tipped its hand, perhaps literally, with a new hard drive that was suspiciously flask-like in appearance. Now, only a few days later, we get word of the "NEC Flask," apparently a mobile phone of some kind that is said to be powered by liquid fuel as seen through its tinted but transparent casing.

The handset will also supposedly sport touch-sensitive navigation and possibly a touch screen as well, though Chip Chick says no … Read more

Try not to leave this camera in the sun. You wouldn't want your lens disappearing in a puff of steam. The camera in question? A USB camera with a liquid lens called the IVIN-2M USB 2.0.

The technology has been around for a few years, but this model claims to be the "first 2-megapixel CMOS digital camera with a variable-focus liquid lens." Talk about a niche.

It's recently been announced by Varioptic and IVA. Practical? Well, it's meant to be used as a surveillance videocam. Impressive specs? It shoots up to only 1,600 … Read more

Hundreds of Web developers, designers, and ordinary geeks gathered this weekend to build usable applications for Apple's iPhone. The barcamp.org event was hosted at Adobe Town Hall and featured dozens of sponsors. The hack-a-thon began on Saturday morning, and wrapped up late Sunday afternoon when each team had a chance to present its app.

Some teams included a group of Yahoo! developers, and others included complete strangers who had just met the day before. I give credit to all teams who participated, but here are the 10 most memorable creations:

10. iPhoneVote This application was the first one presented at the hack-a-thon, and it was used as a voting system for the event. You would tilt your iPhone in portrait mode to vote yay, and tilt it horizontally to give a negative vote. There was a laptop set up in the front of the room, and it was updated in real time. Unfortunately, I don't think the app reset each time a new team would present, so the votes just tallied up into the 80s. Even though it wasn't used for its official purpose, it was a great burst of hope for future apps like this, and boosted the morale of the developers in the room.

9. AppMarks If you have an iPhone, make AppMarks your Safari home page. The interface models the iPhone front door, but instead, each icon links to a Web app or HTML bookmark. I mentioned AppMarks in this blog post a few days ago. AppMarks is cool, but I want to see more functionality. If the AppMarks people want users to add AppMarks as their home page, they need to always be thinking of new features. There are other products, like Mojits, that are right on their heels.

8. PickleView The only sports application presented was called PickleView. Ryan Christianson from the Walt Disney Internet Group explained that in baseball, a pickle is a play in which a base runner is trapped between bases with fielders tossing the ball back and forth and usually ending with the runner being tagged out. Most will remember it well from the 1990s classic,The Sandlot.

Their iPhone app visualizes a box-score view of your favorite teams’s stats, and then displays a mock Twitter feed of PickleView's friends. I am not sure if that's how this app works, but the developers have a cool concept.… Read more

This month at CNET Car Tech we are focusing on all things green, so how opportune that Roush, the pimp-upper extraordinaire of Ford Mustangs and pickups, should choose today to unveil its latest creation: the propane-powered Ford F-150. The Roush F-150 LPI (the suffix stands for liquid propane injection) runs solely on propane and, according to its designers, delivers the same horsepower and torque as a regular gasoline-powered 5.4-liter V-8 F150 pickup.

While it uses the same engine platform and drive train as its petrol-burning siblings, the F-150 LPI is modified with dedicated propane fuel lines, fuel rail assembly, … Read more