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On Thursday, Popular Mechanics magazine will unveil its 2009 Breakthrough awards. Included on the list is a series of innovators, as well as a number of products, including this lawn mower, the Hustler Zeon, which is the world's first all-electric, zero-turning-radius mower. It can cover an acre of grass on a single charge.

(Credit: Popular Mechanics)

Popular Mechanics magazine on Thursday will unveil its fifth-annual Breakthrough Award winners, an august collection of designers and products that could do much more than their share to change the world for the better.

From famous inventors like Dean Kamen to a flying car for the Third World to bacteria-powered batteries--and much in-between--the awards are meant to highlight technologies that will shape the way people around the world live and how they interact with everyday products.

Each year, the magazine's editors scour the country for a worthy group of winners, and this year, in the end, Popular Mechanics settled on one leadership award winner, one next-generation honoree, eight Breakthrough innovators and 10 Breakthrough products.

Photos: Popular Mechanics' 2009 Breakthrough Award winners

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"In all cases, there's a really practical application that we see coming about," said Jerry Beilinson, the magazine's deputy editor, "so these aren't theoretical scientific applications. (They're going to) change the world and have a really positive aspect on people's lives."

Beilinson said that after five years of identifying technological breakthrough products and innovators, certain themes have emerged in the editors' preferences. Among the most important, he said, is alternative energy and products and designers that push that category forward.

"If I look back (at the last few years of doing the awards), we looked at aviation and we looked at medicine," he said. "But over the last few years, I think the things that have been clear themes that we've been looking at that have emerged (are) alternative energy and appropriate technologies for the developing world."

And while the themes can be forward-looking, the individual awards celebrate a "moment in time," he said.

"We're sort of picking the moment at which it's become real, and passed the threshold and seems like its worthy of an award," Beilinson said. "But most of these kinds of things do take some time to develop."

For this year's Breakthrough Leadership award, Popular Mechanics honored Dean Kamen, an inventor with more than 440 patents who may be best known for creating the incredible but commercially disappointing Segway personal transporter.

(Credit: The Straits Times)

We started seeing prototype photos of the CrunchPad back in April. Back then we described it as, "a mobile computing device as envisioned by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington...The project's goal was to design and build a thin, light touch-screen PC without a physical keyboard or onboard hard drive. Instead, the system and its custom operating system would be entirely focused on Web browsing and using Web-based apps."

Since then we've seen precious little official news about the project, so it's small wonder that online tongues were wagging today about an article published by The Straits Times purporting to offer additional details about the device. Under the breathlessly hyperbolic headline "World's first tablet PC," The Straits Times describes a hands-on demo given by Fusion Garage, a company that claims to be developing the device:

The fully working model, called a Crunchpad, has a 12-inch screen and weighs 1.2kg. It allows users to watch YouTube videos, listen to music and edit documents, among other things.

Its operating system, or OS, was also developed in-house. The device will not have storage space--which some analysts have pegged as a big drawback - and will instead run programs hosted on servers: so-called cloud computing.

An early look at the CrunchPad prototype.

(Credit: TechCrunch)

We've previously reported that the Crunchpad would have an Intel Atom CPU, with 1GB of RAM, and Wi-Fi and mobile broadband options. That would make it similar to a Netbook, albeit one that added a touch screen and removed the hard drive and keyboard. An interesting comparison might be the recent Asus Eee PC T91, which added a touch screen to a standard 9-inch Netbook.

At a rumored $400, the CrunchPad is now more expensive than Michael Arrington's original estimates, and may price it out of range for value-seeking Netbook buyers, who can get a 10-inch system for less than $299.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has not confirmed these new details, and posted the following via Twitter early Friday morning: "re crunchpad, obviously i'm completely ripshit mad about all this unauthorized bs press: http://bit.ly/2dVjBQ wtf."

The timing could not be more interesting, coming on the heels of yet another round of Apple tablet rumors and general interest in the touch-screen capabilities of Windows 7. But, as the Silicon Alley Insider points out, any head-to-head competition between an Apple tablet and a CrunchPad tablet is likely to be a one-sided battle, thanks to Apple's superior marketing muscle and the CrunchPad's potentially limited appeal outside of dedicated touch-screen/cloud computing fans.

The conceptual rendition of the near-final CrunchPad design.

(Credit: TechCrunch)

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, who last year boldly proclaimed TechCrunch would break every embargo it agreed to, apparently has broken his own embargo and leaked some news about his little consumer electronics side project, the CrunchPad.

OK, maybe he didn't really break his own embargo, but we wouldn't put it past him. The fact is Arrington says he's "just about nailed down the final design for the device" and that he'll have "first working prototypes" in a few weeks.

Arrington has been posting progress reports on the creation of the CrunchPad, which was originally envisioned as a "dead simple" Web tablet that would cost $200. Arrington is working with Fusion Garage to create the sexy-looking CrunchPad, which will be next talked about publicly "at a special press and user event in July in Silicon Valley." But the good news is you can talk about it privately all you want.

An earlier prototype was making the rounds in April, but this new version will be slimmer (less than an inch) and have an aluminum case, "which is more expensive than plastic but is sturdier and lets us shave a little more off the overall thickness of the device." As it stands, the CrunchPad will run on an Intel Atom chip and is Linux-based.

It's unclear how the new concept will price out. In April, Arrington said the device could be built for around $250 (with packaging) and sold for $300. But we suspect the ultimate, final price tag may be higher. In fact, by the time Arrington gets it finished, there will be plenty of Netbooks with slightly smaller screens that do more or less what the CrunchPad does (except boot up to a browser as quickly), are less fragile, and have a physical keyboard.

Of course, the other possibility is that Apple will come out with its own touch-screen tablet-style Netbook that costs a lot more but everybody wants to buy.

Comments?

(Source: TechCrunch)

An early look at the CrunchPad prototype.

(Credit: TechCrunch)

It's far from being on store shelves, but some additional details and photos of the CrunchPad, a mobile computing device as envisioned by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, have been released. The project's goal was to design and build a thin, light touch-screen PC without a physical keyboard or onboard hard drive. Instead, the system and its custom operating system would be entirely focused on Web browsing and using Web-based apps.

"I wanted something I couldn't buy, and found people who said it could be built for a lot less than I imagined," writes Arrington on his site. "This machine isn't for data entry. But it is for reading e-mails and the news, watching videos on Hulu, YouTube, etc., listening to streaming music on MySpace Music and imeem, and doing video chat via tokbox."

Arrington says the CrunchPad can be built for around $250, with a possible retail price of $300. This is all still very hypothetical, because the design team has just finished its second prototype, and Arrington isn't ready to speculate on a possible commercial release time frame. The current 12-inch prototype runs Ubuntu Linux off of an Intel Atom CPU.

The question naturally arises--in a world filled with $229 iPod Touches and $349 Netbooks, is there room for a $300 product that is essentially a hybrid of the two? The touch screen is an important feature for a portable device to have, but the lack of a HDD or software other than a Web browser makes this essentially a thin client that surfs the Web and does little else (and without a mobile broadband option, it can only do that when in range of an accessible Wi-Fi signal).

Then again, small devices like this are made or broken based on their ease of use and design (see: iPhone versus Blackberry Storm), so if Arrington and his partners somehow manage to nail the user interface and physical package, they could have a very desirable product on their hands.

On this week's installment of the Digital City podcast, we discuss we discuss the dangers of being a Web celebrity, a possible new iPhone, traffic throttling from your ISP, the DTV transition, and read some listener mail (again about Joey's PlayStation fanboyism).

Listen now: Download today's podcast

For years, celebs and CEOs have the luxury of having a personal fitness trainer shadow them, tracking their activity levels, urging them along so they look better and feel better than the rest of us. Fitbit won't provide you with your own personal trainer, but the tiny clip-on wireless motion sensor/recorder may be the next best thing.

Introduced today at TechCrunch50, the small, wearable, $99 device records and then transmits to the Fitbit server an encrypted stream of motion data. Your motion data. The server translates the recorded movement into exercise intensity levels, calories burned, sleep quality, steps and distance. You don't have to do anything.

Click the button on the Fitbit Tracker you're wearing and you get an icon back telling you if right now you're living up to your fitness activity plan. Click it again and you get chapter and verse, or in this case calories burned, steps taken, and distance covered.

This is not your mom's pedometer. You wear the Fitbit Tracker 24/7. It knows when you've gotten a good night's sleep; it knows when you took the elevator instead of walking. Combined with entering your food intake at the Fitbit web site and you have the type of complete fitness picture only the very rich or high-tech Olympians have had until now.

What's more, at the web site which will be up and running when the first Fitbit ships late this year or early next, you'll be able to share your fitness plans, and your data, with others.

(Credit: Bob Walsh)

The scary side: If you thought corporate keycards and RFID tags that can rat you out were an invasion of privacy, those were the warm-up acts. Or maybe not: you're the one who decides for the sake of that (hopefully small) potbelly you're forming from too many hours in front of your laptop who gets to know what you're doing to reduce it. Furthermore, the company says data between the tracker and the web site will be encrypted, that you set your privacy settings there, and they will not share user-identifable data with 3rd parties.

Can FitBit really make tracking fitness so simple that people will change what they do and therefore actually improve their health? "The goal of Fitbit is to make people more aware of their overall wellness, and to help motivate them to set and achieve their personal fitness goals," the company's CEO, James Park, said in an e-mail. "We created the Fitbit Tracker to be effortless and easy to use. By automatically collecting data, and wirelessly updating this information to the Fitbit Website, the Tracker can seamlessly blend into everyday lives, and empower users to improve their overall wellness."

The company has promised me an evaluation unit when they're available; as unsettling as it will be, I need to lose some pounds, and all the usual ploys, diets and pills haven't cut it, so I'll be making my own personal bargain with Fitbit later this year.

The inventor of the T9 keyboard technology for numeric keypads, Cliff Kushler, is back in the game with a new alphanumeric entry technology for today's devices: touch-screen laptops and smartphones. His new technology, Swype, is quite simple to use, although beneath the user interface there's a lot going on.

Swype works with an on-screen QWERTY keyboard like you have on the tablet version of Windows and on the iPhone. But instead of tapping letters out, you press your finger or stylus on the first letter, then, without lifting it, move it to the remaining letters in the word. When the word is done, then you lift.

We tried it. It works. Even on tiny smartphone keyboards, it is intuitive and fast, and we didn't even run the tutorial. Basically, it's an amazing new input method.

A built-in 65,000-word dictionary corrects obvious and even creative spelling errors. A word menu pops up if the correction is somewhat ambiguous; in our tests, the top choice was usually correct, and it can be selected with a simple swipe upward.

Little tricks make it possible to capitalize words (jerk the stylus up and down) or select double letters (wiggle the pen over a letter).

Kushler says he can type 55 words per minute on his product. Discount the developer's advantage: Real human beings should be able to motor along at about half that, we estimate.

The development team is focused on Windows Mobile (smartphones) and also the tablet version of XP and Vista, and Surface. However, Kushler mentioned how great the iPhone hardware was for his method. While no deal with Apple is pending, I do agree with Kushler that his technology would improve the iPhone experience.

The company may also develop Swype for other platforms such as Linux and Symbian.

Challenges for the company: Selling the technology. For it to work best for users, it should be embedded at the operating system level. I really do hope Swype gets those deals.

One of the coolest things to be shown off at the TechCrunch50 conference might not ever become something any of us can use. It was a mythical technology demo from a company called Tonchidot Corporation, which showed off its "Sekai Camera" application. It uses both the camera on your phone and GPS to offer up a near real-time tag of what you're looking at.

The funny thing is the entire demo could have been a complete hoax. We never saw the service in action--just a video of it placed in the gadget-saturated Akihabara district of Tokyo. It identified things like restaurants, local shops, and even products with links to user reviews, ratings, and of course buying options.

If the technology is working, objects on the touch screen get tagged in near real time. Users can then interact with those objects, making use of their handsets' interface. In this case it was the iPhone, so users could manage what they're seeing into ordered lists and candy-colored floating tags that moved as they moved.

According to its creators, the technology does not pull as much information from the camera as it does from your location. The information gets piped over to Tonchidot's servers, then filtered into tags. It also uses a similar model to some of the location-based social networks seen on the iPhone, so users can leave little virtual "hobo codes" for one another around major cities. So say, for instance, you ate somewhere and didn't like it, you could visually tag it and leave your review. Others would then be able to see it when they use the application.

Things we still don't know about the technology include:
-Who will be serving the advertisements attached to local shops and products
-If it's limited to the iPhone or any device with a camera, GPS, and a fat data pipe
-What happens when things change in local areas, since the visual tags are based partially on things the technology recognizes
-When this would be available as something you'd get in the iPhone apps store

(Credit: Tonchidot Corporation/CNET Networks)

(Credit: Valleywag)

Following rumors that MySpace co-founder and "everybody's friend" Tom Anderson was lying about his age on his profile, Newsweek did a little digging. According to "professional license information, voter registration and utility and telephone service applications," Anderson is actually 36, not 32.

Which means that he was 31, not 27, when he co-founded MySpace, and apparently he was either self-conscious or sketched out (or both) about being in his 30s when he founded a youth-oriented social network.

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington expressed concern, saying that "the fact that MySpace and News Corp. had knowledge of the lie, and did nothing to fix it, makes it worse." But Valleywag comments, "(it) would hardly make Anderson the first person to lie about his age on MySpace." (Yeah, a lot of those "99-year-olds" aren't telling the truth.)

In other news, "Tom" is known to be so insecure about his popularity that he adds every single MySpace user as a friend the moment that they sign up for the News Corp.-owned social-networking site, and he also seems to be too lazy to change his dorky profile photo.

Can we get some real news now, please?