Webware

SAN FRANCISCO--Most of the new ventures launching at the TechCrunch50 conference are standalone Web sites, but not all. In years past there have been the few hardware launches, and this year is no different. Here are two new bits of hardware, and a new hardware platform that are gunning to make their way into your living room and office in the coming months.

The iTwin splits up into two USB sticks that are paired to talk only to each other

(Credit: iTwin )

iTwin is a two-piece bit of USB hardware that acts as a "cableless cable" allowing two computers to connect and share files as long as they have an Internet connection. There's nothing to set up, since both halves of the device are paired together and stay constantly connected. Users just plug it in, and can begin dropping files large and small into a shared folder.

The product will be available beginning early next year for $99, and comes with two paired sides that interlock when not in use. If users lose one of the two sides, they can lock down their account with an SMS message, or by disconnecting the other piece. They can also purchase an additional side, which can be re-paired.

ToyBots is a new gaming platform that lets toy manufacturers plug in their toys to an online network. Much like the Pleo, the personality of the toy can be altered by firmware upgrades, which are directly connected to the Web. Users can then play games and get feedback from their toy, as well as purchase and download new personalities and applications.

The company is hoping to get toy manufacturers on board as partners, and get them to start using the standard firmware profile across their entire line of toys. This would do two big things: let users re-use firmware or applications they've purchased for one toy, onto another, as well as keep money coming in even after a consumer has purchased a toy.

ToyBots' founder demos a toy running the prototype firmware.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

DoInk is a free online drawing and animation tool that runs right in your browser. You can treat it like Microsoft Paint and use it to do just a quick doodle, or take advantage of its layer cloning and vector-based designs to create relatively advanced animations.

I chose the latter, and put together a pretty slick looking animation in just a few minutes. Adding additional frames is simple and intuitive, and the app saves everything you're working on in the background (and in the cloud) so there are no local files to worry about. You can also hop between projects at any time, just like you would in a software app.

DoInk feels a little bit like a desktop application, but runs entirely in Java.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The app does a great job at cloning individual frames, and will show each one that came before it as a "ghost" that remains in the background while you work on the new one. If you notice one or more of them needs to be a little longer you can also begin cloning it several times right from the timeline that sits in the bottom of the screen. This lets you make minute adjustments like moving a character's mouth, or background imagery to create a realistic looking animation.

When done with any creation you can share it with the DoInk community, e-mail it to a friend, or embed it on a blog or social-networking profile. I've embedded one below that behaves like a YouTube video and won't start until you hit the play button. You can also publish anything you've made straight to YouTube, which is a nice touch.

(via Delicious)

WriteOnIt is a simple service that lets you caption and manipulate uploaded photos. Just like BigHugeLabs' Flickr toys project (story), it can take uploaded photos and stick them into magazine covers. It can also slyly insert them onto coffee mugs, billboards, art easels, and fake mirrors within ready-made photos.

CNET's very own Caroline McCarthy gets a (fake) cover.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

You have very little control over the complicated bits, like transparency, placement, and cropping--which are all absent. However, with that simplicity you can very quickly put together something that both looks polished, and that could fool your viewer.

Of all the tools my favorite is the newspaper creator. You have five different periodicals to choose from including Time, Rolling Stone, and Wired. It'll take whatever photo you upload (up to 8MB) and stick it in the background. You can also change the headline and tagline underneath it, but that's the only other thing you can change.

Once you're done with any creation made on the site you can save it to your hard drive, or send it to a friend either by e-mail or through MySpace, Facebook, and Windows Live Spaces. There's also an option to publish it so that other WriteOnIt users can see it, which will put it into a bucket of recently uploaded photos and make it eligible for "battle" where users can vote on which result looks better.

(via BuzzFeed)

Did you forget to schedule vacation time this summer to hit the beach, or another place with that thing called nature? There's hope, albeit a dirty one in the form of ThisIsSand.com. This simple Flash app will let you drop colored sand to your heart's content. You can build up huge mountains to stare at in place of the real world, and it comes complete with a soothing sand sound with each drop.

While not as engaging as the classic falling sand game, the end results have a really neat textured look, and you can swap between colors at any time with a simple keyboard shortcut. You can also blend a spectrum of colors by drawing a line across the color chooser. The default one will simply go from black to white. When finished you can either snap a screenshot of it or send it to a gallery to share with others.

[found on Delicious]

Create huge mountains of sand in color or in black and white, as seen here with ThisIsSand.com

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Adding hidden items in Web sites is what separates good developers from great ones. Below I've compiled a list of 10 of my personal favorites from the past few years. If you have any of your own feel free to share them in the comments.

1. The Konami code. The infamous code sequence that appears in many video games old and new (↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A) has a place on the Internet too. Two sites that we know of take advantage of this to yield humorous results. The first, and most recent, is Google Reader. Inputting the code graces your feed source menu with one of the ninjas found in the newly skinnable sharing pages. This trick also works on GameSpot.com. Entering in the code and hitting enter at the end will take you to the cheats section for Contra, the game for the Nintendo Entertainment System for which it's best known.

2. Yahoo's singing yokel. If you remember the 1990s you'll remember this wonderful yell--the sound of the Yahoo yodeler. To hear it any time just click on the ! at the end of the Yahoo logo on Yahoo.com.

3. JetBlue wants a sandwich. The infamous peanut butter jelly time dancing banana (background) was briefly a part of JetBlue's travel search site. Typing in "PBJ" into the search box while holding shift and clicking the search button would pull up a clip from Fox's Family Guy with the dog Brian doing the dance. It was removed shortly after it was discovered. You can still see a shot of what it looked like here.

4. Google Easter eggs (3 parts)

• Google bombs come and go. Their very nature depends on search relevancy, so no one Google bomb will stick around forever. Two of the more prominent ones had to deal with the George W. Bush presidency, including the infamous faux 404 page for "Weapons of mass destruction" and the search for "miserable failure" which would link up to Bush's profile at the White House Web site. A more humorous iteration exists using Google's built-in calculator in relation to Douglas Adams' masterpiece The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Searching for "the answer to life, the universe, and everything" yields 42, which you'd understand if you had read the book.

• Google Moon. Google's mapping services are chock full of secrets. For a while Google Moon had a really great one. When zooming too far into the surface of the moon it became cheese, something that was later removed probably at NASA's request or improved topography. Here's a video someone captured of it by KoolAidGrenade at Metacafe.



Is The Moon Made Of Cheese?!? ACCORDING TO GOOGLE.COM - video powered by Metacafe


• Ridiculous languages in Google Search. Remember the Swedish Chef from The Muppets? Why not make him your liaison to the world of search? Amidst the myriad of language options in Google you'll find "bork, bork, bork" which serves up your results in the gibberish language of the fictional Swedish Chef. Believe it or not Google gets over a million page views a day in Swedish Chef according to Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user experience.

  If Swedish ain't your thing, there's also Elmer Fudd from Loony Toons and Esperanto, the language that belongs to no nation or people. However the best of all is Google for h4x0rs (hackers), which you can get to by going to 600673.com (Google spelled out in leet speak).

Continue reading for 5-10.

One of my buddies who is a finance nerd spends weeks at a time working on giant, awe inducing Excel spreadsheets. He seems like the perfect type to enjoy SensibleUnits, a silly service that takes standards measurements and converts them to real-world items like Alaskan moose-antlers, football fields, and London buses. The hope is that you can take any number of units (large or small) and make it a little more interesting. Any writer or storyteller would be wise to bookmark this.

For the more visually inclined, check out Nikon's Universcale site which maps out objects in the world and beyond both large and small on a very flashy interface. We wrote about it back in March of last year.

Some of the measurements are better than others. For instance, we can see laying batteries or CDs side-by-side, but not the fetus thing.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Pixel art has held a special place in the the world of Web 2.0. Most recently it reared its head at Adobe Systems' Engage event earlier this year, where attendees received a poster with pixel art characters using various Adobe products. The poster was professionally designed, but that doesn't mean you've got to go out and buy some special software or take digital art classes to have some fun making your own.

Enter Cubescape, a simple app that gives you some easy-to-use tools to create 3D pixel art on a large canvas. You can drop blocks down one at a time, on top of one another, and even explode them. The app tracks your progress and lets you or others play it back to see what you did, much like some of the fantastic tutorials that come with PhotoShop to show you how people create their digital masterpieces.

See also: Smashing Magazine's roundup of cool pixel art.

[via Delicious]

Create your own tiny and old-school digital masterpieces with Cubescape.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

You know those highly intrusive Flash ads that you occasionally find while surfing? The kind that march all over the page and are impossible to ignore and sometimes get rid of? From that same technology comes an enjoyable service that lets you see your favorite sites in a whole new way. Netdisaster, which picked up an innovation award from Yahoo UK three years ago is still pretty innovative by letting you turn any Web site into a playground of destruction and/or defilement.

The service provides more than 30 ways to destroy a site, and a good majority of them manage to do it humorously. All you need to do is plug in a URL and pick the terror you wish it to befall. Certain options cause more damage than others, and many feature an "auto-repair" option that will seal up the holes caused from explosions, letting the mayhem continue into infinity. This is especially helpful if you're using the chainsaw tool or nuclear blast, as they tend to do some pretty serious damage.

The one thing I really enjoy about this service is that you can try out other disasters without having to jump back to the home page and plug in the URL all over again. You can tweak the options ad nauseam, and simply click one button to get the action going again. It's a nice touch, and really keeps you trying out everything that's there.

If you're a really big fan, you can also install the toolbar, which lets you call up a disaster on any site you're on without having to click off the page. Webmasters also have the option of adding disasters or the disaster selector toolbar to any of their pages with a few simple lines of JavaScript, which I've done after the break.

[found on DownloadSquad]

Cut into some news this morning in a whole new way with Netdisaster. See what we did there?

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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