tokyo

Sure, you could buy a regular watch that displays the time in a regular way, but where's the fun in that? You're a nerd (you're reading Crave) and you want to be different. So you probably already know about Tokyoflash watches.

The latest is the $99.62 Hanko, and it's a design nerd's joy. The stainless steel watch is named after a form of Japanese stamp art it resembles and it's very simple object-wise, with nothing on the face save the black acrylic lenses. Behind these lenses is an array of LEDs that indicate … Read more

Is the Tokyo Motor Show kaput? The President's new high tech Cadillac; VW will bring a new mini car to the U.S.; Alpine gets in bed with GM, BMW, and Mercedes.

• Tokyo Motor Show on hiatus in 2009?

• The President's new Cadillac

• Alpine supplies car tech to three biggies

• Blaupunkt about to pull the trigger on in-car streaming

• VW Polo coming to U.S.

Thousands of delightfully inexplicable gadgets made only for the Japanese market are hard to come by outside the country. A new site from Japanese importer Dynamism is making it easier for us gaijin to get our hands on them.

Gizmine.com is the new specialty gadgets site from Dynamism. (Dynamism.com sticks mostly to laptops, phones, and watches--"luxury goods," in other words--sold only in Japan.) Gizmine allows the import company to expand into categories of products like alarm clocks, robots, and USB-powered toys.

The site is easy enough to navigate. You can sort by product category, theme (&… Read more

Democratize IT. A banal catch phrase until you see off-the-shelf gaming boxes from PC maker Dell being used for visual supercomputing.

CEO Michael Dell showed the "Stallion" Visualization Cluster at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) running on standard Dell XPS gaming machines during his keynote Tuesday at SC08, a conference in Austin, Texas, focused on high-performance computing. (The keynote was streamed over the Web.)

The Stallion "visualization wall" uses XPS boxes to power 30-inch Dell displays. "The largest display of its kind in the world, at 307 million pixels," Michael Dell said.

"… Read more

Japanese researchers say they have developed a rubber-like material that's able to conduct electricity, paving the way for robots with stretchable "e-skin" that can feel heat and pressure like humans.

The material, described by Tsuyoshi Sekitani of the University of Tokyo in the journal Science, could be used on curved surfaces or even in moving parts, such as the joints of a robot's arm, the researchers said.

Sekitani's team developed their material using carbon nanotubes, a long stretch of carbon molecules that can conduct electricity. They mixed these into a rubbery polymer to form the … Read more

The key railway artery in Japan, the Shinkansen or "bullet train" line between Tokyo and Osaka, will introduce Wi-Fi by March 2009, Japan Railways announced.

These trains are already incredibly comfortable, primarily because they are clean and quiet, and they usually deliver you to a key central location in each city. Another perk is the on-platform food vendors who sell totally passable box lunches, sometimes including sushi, without much of a mark-up.

The main drawback to these trains is they're not cheap. And while the JR announcement (in Japanese) doesn't mention whether there will be a … Read more

Sony's prototype, wind-up Odo digital camera is among the gadgets attracting attention at Tokyo's largest green products fair this week. We're spying from afar at Eco-Products 2007, which includes more than 500 exhibitors.

The Odo looks like a giant, plastic toy sprout when plugged into a planter-shaped base to transfer images to a computer. The camera takes 15 seconds to recharge, either by rolling the charger wheel with fingers or running it over surface. Sony's Spin N Snap takes still photos while the Crank N Capture shoots video.

Other future-forward products attracting attention at the fair … Read more

Lexus offers a look at what could be the next generation RX, with an "H" thrown in to signify that it's a hybrid. The grille gets a treatment similar to that of the LS series, while the whole thing takes on a sportier look than current SUVs.

The dopey-looking Puyo has a soft-gel body coating, intended to protect pedestrians, and it glows in the dark, for greater visibility at night--not that you would want to be seen in it. Honda is short on specifics about the fuel cell powertrain the Puyo is supposed to run on.