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This definitely isn’t your average texting setup, because it allows you to send a text message to remotely tell a coffee machine to start making your coffee. This espresso machine also prints the last three digits of your phone number on the foam, ensuring that no one will steal your…

A few years ago we featured PhotoSketch (now called Sketch2Photo), a program that can turn sketches with labels into a picture. Here’s something nearly opposite of that: a camera that outputs a text description of the image instead of the image itself. It’s like Instagram for bookworms.…

For a moment, I thought that this might be another concept design, but it isn’t. The Sony SmartWatch is a real product – an Android-powered watch that will allow you to use your smartphone even when it’s sitting in your pocket.…

This is one of the stranger tech products I have seen in a long time. It comes from Scosche and is called cellCONTROL. The idea is that you plug the dongle into the OBD-II port under the dash of any car from 1996 up, and then put an app on…

This interesting concept is called the DrawBraille phone, created by Shikun Sun while he was studying industrial design. It’s basically a haptic phone that uses a braille board as a display. Braille boards mechanically raise dots so that visually impaired and blind users can read using their fingers.

There is…

This unique watch from Tokyoflash tells time with words instead of numbers or hands. The always-on LCD watch was originally submitted by a 15-year old Canadian and Tokyoflash made it into reality. Tynan Mayhew submitted this design last year and it’s now available for all, through Tokyoflash’s online store.…

ABI Research has unveiled their estimated number of SMS messages that will be sent in 2011. According to the research firm, there will be 7 trillion SMS messages sent during the new year. That is a lot of messages, and I am sure will include billions of spouses and parents…

Otavio Good and John DeWeese worked for two and a half years to produce a program that, to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke’s famous line, is indistinguishable from magic. Good and DeWeese’s app Word Lens is a essentially an OCR (optical character recognition) program. But unlike other OCR software, Word Lens…

The guys over at watchmaker Tokyoflash never cease to amaze me with their creative digital watch designs. Their latest concept is the Instant Trend, a timepiece that not only looks cool, but can display text notifications from your mobile phone.

Assuming the watch ever gets made, the Instant Trend would…

As Wired‘s Charlie Sorrel said, books contain much of human knowledge, but they are quite hard to preserve or archive compared to other media. A setup invented by professor Masatoshi Ishikawa and his team at the University of Tokyo could change all of that. Ishikawa and company are working on…