If you enjoyed all those not-at-all tiresome “May the 4th be with you” tweets yesterday, then this is likely right up your equatorial trench. Wicked Lasers, makers of the eye-meltingly powerful S3 Krypton laser has developed a $100 attachment for the same that will bring a few not-so-little boys’ dreams true. The ahem LaserSaber add-on takes the pin-sharp beam of light from the company’s S3 range of lasers, and sends it down a 32″ polycarbonate “blade”. A so called magnetic gravity system imitates the powering-up and down of those other famous sabers, but they stopped at adding sound effects. Bear in mind, you’re still dealing with imperial levels of light here, so dueling is most definitely not recommended, but if you want the nearest thing to the real deal, remember, May the 5th we told you.

Panasonic and Sanyo have only been life partners for about a year and a half now, but already the relationship has created a bundle of joy — of a sort. Hot on the heels of some less-than-chipper financial news comes word that Panasonic is spinning off a portion of Sanyo. Sanyo DI Solutions is the name for the new creation, which will represent the company’s efforts in producing OEM digital cameras — cameras that get slapped with other manufacturers’ labels before being sold as such. According to AV Watch, Panasonic’s ownership had put a strain on Sanyo’s fragile manufacturing partnerships, partnerships that can now bear beautiful, rebadged fruit. Sanyo DI Solutions will start with 10 million yen in capital and will go fully independent on July 1st. Hopefully it remembers to call home from time to time.

SOURCE via Panasonic

Designed by Paul Sammut, the LED Ramos alarm clock could very well be the second most effective alarm clock out there, the first being the money shredding alarm clock of course. Featuring a remote keypad that can be placed anywhere, the Ramos forces its sleepy owner out of bed and into another room such as the bathroom or kitchen.

Lazy people who love to press their snooze button can definitely forget about this one. The Ramos doesn’t come with a snooze option, and it also doesn’t let you unplug it either, as it switches immediately to battery power after that. In addition, once it comes close to time for the alarm to go off, the Ramos won’t let you disable it.

This leaves you only with one option, dragging your butt out of bed to the keypad and punching in the day’s date to turn off the alarm. Of course another option would be to throw the alarm clock across the room and hope it smashes to pieces, but we highly doubt anybody is going to do that with its $200 price tag.

Originally a project on Kickstarter, the LED Ramos alarm became insanely popular and raised $150,000 in less than two months. With 400 orders already waiting, Sammut says he hopes the Ramos will be shipped out by the end of summer. For more information or to pre-order your own, head on over to the LED Ramos page here.

If you don’t have a fancy NFC-enabled phone then it’s hard to join the mobile wallet club. Fortunately, Barclays has introduced the PayTag that turns any phone into a contactless card. It’s a square of plastic a quarter the size of a credit card that’s sticky on one side — yup, you just jam it on the back of your phone and hey presto, you can buy sandwiches, or any purchase up to £15 (£20 from June), without opening your wallet. The sticky squares will be rolling out exclusively to British Barclaycard customers over the next few months, although we’re not sure what it’ll do to the trade-in value of your handset.

SOURCE via Guardian

If your abode has ever been touched by the space-saving hand of IKEA, you’ll be familiar with its clever, wallet-friendly wares. Now, the Swedish furniture giant is bringing its quirky ideas into the technology market. Frustrated with cable spaghetti ruining the otherwise sharp lines of its TV storage units, the Scandinavian firm has taken it one step further, and built the TV right in to the furniture. Yup, “Uppleva” is an all-in-one TV and stand with storage built in co-operation with China’s TCL Multimedia. Not only that, it also incorporates a Blu-ray / DVD player and surround sound (with wireless sub-woofer.) Details on the TV itself are sparse, but there’s a brace of USB inputs and four HDMI ports (so you can re-add in some wires), plus FM radio and internet connectivity, but beyond that we’re left guessing. More importantly — for the casual IKEA customer we assume — will be the array of colors and designs it will ship in. The delivery man will be kicking up Autumn leaves by the time you can get your hands on one, with prices starting at 6,500 Swedish crowns (around $960). In the meantime you can unpack a video after the break, which just like those shelves you bought, doesn’t seem to contain everything.

SOURCE via Reuters

It’s a little strange crowning a “winner” when only a single company enters the contest, but that’s exactly what happened during the L Prize celebration in August of last year. Philips was the only outfit to take the US Department of Energy up on its offer, earning some $10 million to develop what might go down as the most radically designed, wildly expensive bulb your table lamp has ever seen. That said, the victorious bulb is a big fan of Ma Earth (and her of him), using just 10 watts of energy while outputting light similar to that of a 60 watt incandescent. It’ll hit retailers like Home Depot this Sunday (Earth Day) for around $50 a pop, while some utility companies may subsidize ‘em in an effort to hit the magical $20 price point. Hey, no one said saving energy would be remotely affordable, right?

SOURCE via Bloomberg

Resembling a surveillance unit from a sinister dystopia, Logitech’s newest webcam is strictly for the corporate environment only. The BCC950 Conference Cam holds a Carl Zeiss-lensed HD webcam atop a motorized stalk that can pan across 180 degrees. The camera itself has a 78 degree field of view, ending the era of huddling around a laptop. Its full-duplex speakerphone has a range of eight feet and will also happily let you Skype from the middle of a crowded bullpen. It’ll be exclusively available to suited-and-booted customers at a cost of $250 (£200 in the UK) from May — perhaps a tad too expensive to wheel around your office trying to catch someone napping at their desk.

Sure, iRobot may have a strong presence in the impending robot apocolypse world of autonomous vacuum cleaners, but lest we forget about the others like Neato Robotics. The company’s introducing the retro-futuristic XV-21 Pet and Allergy Vacuum for those of us wanting rid our domains of sniffle-inducing dust particles. Although the XV-21 looks similar to last year’s XV-12, it features a new filter for improved airflow and suction, which Neato claims will catch three-times as many tiny bits around your domain as its normal kit. If that wasn’t enough, the cleaner is also loaded with newly developed bristled brush to aid in sweeping up the likes of pet hair while keeping its noise levels to a minimum. If you’re ready to leave the cleaning to the bots, this little guy is set to hit shelves in late April for $429 alongside a $60 Pet and Allergy kit packed with the filter (30 bucks on its own) and brush. Current Neato owners shouldn’t fret either, as the add-ons are compatible with all of the company’s vacuums, requiring only an upgrade to the latest firmware via USB.

It remains to be seen if it’s a full-on change of policy, but it looks like Amazon is at least shifting it stance when it comes to where some of the ebooks put out by its Amazon Publishing division are sold. As you may recall, Barnes & Noble and other booksellers recently pulled print editions of Amazon Publishing books from their store shelves because the ebook versions were only sold in the Kindle Store, a stance that B&N said “undermined the industry as a whole.” Now, Amazon has confirmed that its latest addition to the Amazon Publishing roster, a series of short biographies edited by James Atlas, will indeed be sold outside of the Amazon ecosystem in both print and ebook form. Whether B&N and other bookstores will actually carry them remains to be seen, of course, but an Amazon spokesperson told The New York Times that its “intention is to distribute these books as broadly as possible.” That change was further clarified by PaidContent, which was told by Amazon that “the books will be available to be sold everywhere in all formats.”

SOURCE via New York Times

A few years ago, the design of one Royal College of Arts student caught the attention of the tech world. It took the usually bulky, three-prong British plug and turned it into a slimmer, sexier, more compact design. South Korea-born Min-Kyu Cho was the man behind the design but he has since teamed up with businessman Matthew Judkins to bring it to life. Now, three years later, the product is coming to market. Last week it was announced that the Mu, as it is now called, had finally hit pre-order status. It ships now.

At the moment, the Mu serves as a USB adapter for charging cables, but wouldn’t it be great if this unique design eventually ended up on laptop adapters, lamps, and pretty much anything else with a plug. It may be wishful thinking but that cool folding design looks like it might finally eliminate the special kind of pain that comes from standing on a UK-region plug.

The Mu costs £25 and is available from the official website.