Cool Ideas and Gadgets: October 2007

Nutri-weight Food Scale - For all your Food and Nutrition Needs

Gadgets and innovations have always fascinated me, as you might have guessed by the Tech Blog that I write. But as a chef who loves to cook, and yet likes to live a healthy life with a balanced diet so I don't put on all that extra weight, I keep looking for ways in which I could keep a tab on what I eat so that I never go overboard. One such cool and neat kitchen gadget that I came across on the web was this ultra-sleek, retro Nutrition Food-Scale. Yes, just like a regular weighing scale, except that it looks like a laptop, this one is for the foods you eat, and it tells you clearly what's the nutrition content of your meal so you don't need to go by the rough estimates that you get from calorie and nutrition counters on the web!!

A look at this super-functional Nutriscale and you'll know I'm not kidding. It analyses the nutritional content of your food by portion size, calculates the calories, protein, carbohydrates, total sugars, total fat, fiber, sodium, cholesterol, net carbohydrates and GI value of your food and then displays all this invaluable information in an easy-to-read format on a large LCD screen. This product that is sold by Salter Nutrition, has the advantage of a large data base that stores the nutritional values for over 1,440 foods and liquids, plus memorizes an additional 100 foods/recipes of your choice. And, it's constantly growing, so you can be sure most of your foods are going to be on their list!!

It also comes with automatic predictive-text feature for quick and easy on-screen food search. You can even place all your raw food in a bowl and it'll give you the combined results, minus the weight of the bowl. Find it too good to be true??!! I sure did, especially when I saw that it comes with a 10-year warranty, and is bundled at an affordable price of just $99.00 - that's less than the consultation fee for most nutritionists!!

It even allows you to record daily food intake and set dietary goals, then review progress so you never lose focus on your goal. It's like your own personal trainer, right in the convenience of your home!! And it is battery-operated making it a portable device. It is easy to clean and maintain, and looks really sleek. The only drawback I found in it is that it would only work for raw ingredients, not if you used it for a prepared dish, but then it's easier to just weigh all your ingredients first so you know ahead of time how many calories you are eating and can adjust the amount that goes into making your dish accordingly, right? This device sure would work for me to keep a tab on my food intake. So if you are looking for gift ideas, this is one thing you should strongly consider. I am really inclined to buy one of these myself! If you'd like to order one too, here's one place I found on the web - MetroKitchen

Touchscreen Coffee Table and Furniture!

With the advent of mobile devices, remote PC's, laptops and seamless mobility, humans rarely have to sit at their desks to complete their work, and people hardly find time to sit through sitcoms at home. The traditional model of advertising is hence undergoing a major transformation. Advertisers are now targetting users on the cell phones, or IPTV or Interactive TV ads, and one new player in this ever-booming market is the Touchscreen Coffee Table.

With coffee shops providing free Wi-fi internet, you see a lot of youngsters and professional spending quite a bit of time in these cafes sipping lattes while surfing the web. But now you don't even need to have a laptop to surf the web. A San Francisco-based startup called TableTouch has come out with a coffee table with a built-in Wi-Fi-enabled touchscreen and a software that allows you to browse the internet using your fingers. Customers can now choose and select to read the news and stories on their table while they have their cup of caffeine, and advertisers have found an innovative way to pop their products amidst these stories. So if a user finds something he likes, he can click on it and get more details, or disregard it and move on! Also featuring a built-in Bluetooth connection, the tables can send audio to your headset, so you can listen to the news without opening your eyes!! Now, that's living like a prince, right?!! Apparently, the company also plans to extend this concept to regular furniture, TV consoles and more.

Trials with the first batch of these machines is live in Tully's Coffee shops in the Bay Area, and the company's founder and CTO John Calder is all set to install these smart and cute Coffe Tables in other cafes, airports, and bars in the coming year. This 5-year old startup is now competing with Microsoft, who is ready to launch its own brand called "Surface", which is based on a similar concept. But is John afraid of the giant? No, because apparently, this market is growing so rapidly there's room for a couple more players too!

So, may the best man win! I for one surely love this concept! No more carrying around a laptop on loong plane flights just to kill time during intermediate halts! Find your nearest Coffee Shop and you'd probably find a TouchTable already installed!! To read more about the company tableTouch, click here.

Smart Web Printing from HP

With the growth of Web 2.0, most of the research is done online, and people turn to the web to find answers to simple questions or confounding conundrums. Gone are the days people referred to books for planning a vacation or for solving a math quiz. These are revolutionary days of Google, where you can find all your answers online. And what's the first thing you need when you've found what you are looking for? Yes, a Printer, to store the vast amount of information that the web provides you with. But don't you think you waste a lot of paper while juggling and printing material from different sites?? If you answer YES, read on to discover a new alternative- the Smart Printer from HP.

HP (Hewlett-Packard) has come out with the perfect solution that is much more convenient and so very eco-friendly. HP's Smart Web Printing enables simple, predictable web printing and also provides control over what you want and how you want it printed. This is the first software of its kind which allows you to select, store and organize text and graphics from multiple web pages and then edit and print exactly what you see onscreen. So surf the net all that you want, keep all your web pages open, then choose the content/graphics/images you want and place them in your custom document creator. Now you can choose to store it as a PDF file, edit it or print what you see. So isn't it the same as copying everything to a Word document and printing it?? well, here's what sets it apart....The software automatically scales web page output to fit the width of your paper. This helps ensure that your print copy contains all the information you see onscreen, without you taking the trouble of resizing images and text (which you might have to do in MS Word). Neat, huh??

I agree this is not a new concept, and people have already used document editors to do this. But you have to agree with me that this for sure is a cleaner way to do it, as the software that you install takes care of everything. Pretty handy when you don't have MS Word installed on your PC, right? And most important, the Smart Web printing software is FREE!! Visit this site for a brief demo and free software download!