Adrian Mankovecky from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia has won the Electrolux Design Lab 2011 competition. His Portable Spot Cleaner surpassed a field of 1,300 entries from over 50 countries. The Portable Spot Cleaner has two components. The user separates them, places one on either side of the garment and chooses a suitable cleaning program. Negative ions and steam work together to refresh clothing and remove stains. The Spot Cleaner is powered with a sugar crystal battery and can be used practically anywhere in the world. The theme in the competition’s ninth year was “Intelligent Mobility.” The students were invited to create home appliance ideas that were not only physically portable, but would also provide flexible control to liberate people from the home. By taking first place, Mankovecky wins a prize of EUR 5,000 and a six-month paid internship at an Electrolux global design center. Visit www.electrolux.com/designlab to see the ideas submitted by all the finalists.
“Video Trimmer” is a smartphone application from Sony Digital Network Applications, that makes it easy to trim recorded videos by selecting a scene’s start and end points. Created for the Android platform and retailing for $2.99, the app offers a familiar and fast interface inherited from “Frame Grabber,” Sony’s application that grabs a picture from a video. Video Trimmer helps avoid upload errors due to oversize videos. An on-screen size check and preview show when the video length is too big for e-mail or online video sharing services. Files created with the app are automatically saved in the smartphone’s external memory. After a file is saved, a screen appears, enabling the selection of the final destination of the video clip. Sony has a collection of new multimedia management apps online. See them at http://www.sonydna.com/products/e/index.html
Samsung’s MV800 is an ultra-compact point and shoot camera with a 3-inch touch-screen Flip-out LCD display. The screen tilts up and down so photographers can frame every shot and easily view the images from any perspective. The camera offers 16.1 megapixels for great picture quality, along with a 5x optical zoom and a 26mm wide-angle lens. One interesting feature in the MV800 is the Live Panorama function, which allows easy photography of large groups by simply holding down the shutter button, then previewing the whole scene that’s being captured via the LCD. And by connecting the MV800 to a 3D HDTV, images and panoramic shots can be viewed in 3D instantly. Other creative features in the camera include “Magic Frame,” which has 12 fun background templates, as well as the ability for users to customize their own. The camera’s “Picture-in-Picture” function, lets photographers insert one image into another. With the Flip-out display, a photographer can snap a self-portrait and then insert that image into a photo of a larger group. The “Smart Filter” helps users express their own creativity, through a menu of 14 artistic effects, including the newly added “Water Paint,” for a stylish watercolor finish or the “Cartoon” capability, which transforms any photo into a fun animated film format.
From Guerillapps comes Trash Tycoon (www.trashtycoon.com), a free, green-themed social game for Facebook. The game incorporates awareness for environmental issues and sustainability. In Trash Tycoon, players take on the role of recycling entrepreneurs who collect virtual litter in a trash strewn city and upcycle the trash into higher quality, environmentally-friendly products. Upcycling, a process in which discarded waste is repurposed for valuable use, can range from building a house of abandoned material to finding innovative uses for discarded plastic bags. After completing missions, users collect virtual cash and points to ultimately earn the Trash Tycoon title. The game’s trash-tackling premise directly mirrors the activities of its sponsor, TerraCycle, a real-world company that collects and reuses non-recyclable post-consumer waste.
