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HANNOVER, Germany--Some vehicles don't fit easily into one category or another.

Organic Transit's Elf -- a battery-boosted, solar-powered, covered tricycle -- is definitely one such device.

The North Carolina startup has begun selling the vehicles through Kickstarter and now directly on its Web site. It's now built 12, and it's showing off the $4,000 machines at the CeBit trade show here.

"This is targeting commuters," said Alix Bowman, director of strategy for the 15-person company. One possibility: People can go to work on battery power so they don't arrive sweaty, then can … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--For those who want to take their music with them, a more convenient option than lugging loudspeakers is now available: fist-sized, battery-powered devices called vibration speakers.

These chunky widgets transform a table, floor, car roof, or even window into a large speaker. One one end is a tweeter for playing higher-frequency pitches, and on the other a driver that moves the surface to which it's attached, converting it into a giant woofer.

The devices were thumping loudly on the CeBIT tech show floor here as manufacturers tried to drum up customers, distributors, retailers, and business partners. … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--Enough with the cutesy little quadcopter drones.

Instead of pint-sized four-rotor aircraft good enough to experiment with swarm dynamics or to carry small cameras, German startup E-volo is building an 18-rotor model that can carry a human passenger. It's the latest attempt to realize the dream of the flying car.

The Karlsruhe-based company plans to begin selling its VC200 in 2015, said Jeromin Schwenk, a student with the Karlsruhe University of Applied Science who's one of about 60 people working on the project.

"It's going to be the personal aircraft for everyone," Schwenk said, … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--Intel today debuted a technology called display as a service (DAAS) that it hopes will transform how people use their gadgets.

The technology breaks the hard link between a video source and a screen the way virtualization software breaks the hard link between an operating system and a processor. With DAAS, people can view what's on their tablet on a big-screen TV, mirror the same imagery on multiple displays, or link up multiple displays to create a single, bigger display.

Another possibility, which Intel Labs' Divya Kolar described on blog post, is to combine multiple devices' video onto … Read more

HANOVER, Germany -- IBM is trying to advance supercomputing technology in processing, optical communications, and memory in conjunction with an international project to peer at the Big Bang's radio remnants.

The radio telescope, called the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), will be built from 2016 to 2024 in southern Africa and Australia. Before that, though, IBM is working to develop the necessary computing technology through a five-year partnership with the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (Astron). At the CeBIT show here, the two groups are showing off some of the fruits of the cooperation, called Dome.

The idea is to … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--You're traveling and your coworker needs your key to get into your office. Why not just e-mail it?

That's the idea behind Fraunhofer Institute's Key2Share technology, which the German research lab is developing in partnership with Bosch and showing off here at the CeBIT show.

Key2Share uses smartphones equipped with near-field communications (NFC) short-range wireless networking abilities to unlock phones. But because approval to use the key becomes digital data, a person can e-mail that approval.

It could be useful for other situations, too, said Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, a researcher involved with the project. For example, a … Read more

HANOVER, Germany--IBM showed off technology today designed to let people use their smartphones to take command of their real-world shopping.

Big Blue showed an app idea from IBM Research in Haifa, Israel, that uses image recognition to identify products on store shelves, then lets people sort those products by attributes such as price and nutrition information. A customer could select only gluten-free products, pick food that's from nearby, or filter electronic gadgets by operating system.

"The same experience people expect online is available in the store," said Amnon Rebak, a research staff member on the project, at … Read more

HANNOVER, Germany--In today's James Bond world, smartphones get you instant access to top-secret information. In the real world, security constraints mean mobile phones generally aren't nearly so clever or convenient.

BlackBerry and Secusmart hope to change that through a partnership that at least has won over the German federal government. It has authorized purchases of phones with the BlackBerry 10 operating system augmented with Secusmart's SD card-mounted security chips for classified communications, said Hans-Christoph Quelle, Secusmart managing director, speaking here at the CeBit technology show.

The approach uses a feature in BlackBerry 10 called Balance, which partitions … Read more

When I got my Panasonic cordless home phone system about two years ago, I was amused to discover that its voice-announce features used two different voices. The voice that reads the caller ID is female. The one that talks me through the voice-mail options is male. It's pretty clear that this is not the result of an intentional design decision, nor an homage to "Airplane," but rather, because these two systems were built separately and grafted together at the last minute. Look close enough at this phone and you can almost see the duct tape.

I thought … Read more