Disney’s Appmates – the future of iPad gaming

If you have kids and a tablet you know that your kids love them and you hardly get any time with it yourself.

Disney is going to release their Appmates toys next month and then you won’t get your tablet back at all from your kids.

So what is Appmates? It seems to be a new iPad interface which lets the user (or small and big Kids) control a Cars-themed iPad games using the toys above.

The toy cars have special conductive pads that are recognized by the iPad and interpreted by the app.

As you drive around the virtual environment of Radiator Springs, you’ll hear the character’s voice react to each bump or jostle. Mirrors inside the toy car will reflect light from the iPad through the toy’s headlights, and Mater’s siren as well.

Check out the video after the break

Free your mouse (or your desk)

having worked in IT before and now working on lots of cool emerging technologies and experiences, I always seem to have multiple PCs on my desk that I am simultaneously working on.

At some stage I had 4 keyboards and 4 mice on my desk and no more space for my lunch. So I am constantly looking for solutions for that and I have played around with software and hardware KVMs. Most of them are buggy and the hardware ones just add too many cables to my desk.

Today I came across a little tool build by a developer in the Microsoft Garage project called Mouse without borders.

Simply put it is a software kvm that can connect 4 of your PCs that are on the same network and you can use your 1 keyboard and mouse for all of them.

A simple installer and setup process and you are up and running. It works quite seamlessly and you can easily configure the location of your physical machine – just drive your mouse out of the screen towards the next and it will appear there.

Other feature are copy and paste, drag files across

you can download it here and try it for yourself.

let me know your thoughts in the comments.

@maniac13

A little Google+ experiment

A Google+ experiment where you can meet some of Australia’s most provocative characters, just  add them your circles.

Idea Envy: VW BlueMotion Roulette

This is one to file under ‘ideas you wish you’d come up with’ – in this case it was VW’s Norwegian agency Apt that got there first.

So how do you make people care about a boring-but-important feature like a car’s fuel consumption? What about asking consumers to upload their favourite fuel-economy related stories to your Facebook page? Or not.

In fact, these guys decided it would be more fun to turn one of Norway’s longest highways into a giant game of roulette. The person who correctly predicts where the BlueMotion will run out of fuel gets to keep one – finally giving people a real reason to research fuel economy…

(Kudos to @lyndonjhale for spotting this)

@BdeCastella