What the bleep? (Kitchen Tech Part 3)

Would you store your food in green goo?  How about something that charges your cell phone with no wires?  Is it the future?  Some of it is, some of it you can buy right now...  This post could be originally seen on Design Kula.

Electrolux Biorobot food storage device: Ok, at first glance this thing looks gross. Would you be OK with putting your food in green goo to keep it fresh? That concept might take some getting used to, but a few years ago we never thought we’d be using our phones as computers either. The idea behind this concept refrigerator is that you stick your food in the green goo, it forms pods around it, and by using the light in the room the goo stays cool and germ free. Also, since your food is separate from other items, there is no odor transfer. Interestingly, Sub Zero utilizes this same concept in their refrigerators with multiple cooling zones driven by multiple compressors. This keeps odors from moving from one area to another so your food stays fresher longer. If this goo concept were ever to come to market, there would be so many uses for it. Imagine instead of one giant food cooling area, you could have multiple “goo units” that store food at the point of use. Your wet bar could have a small area for fruit, and a main area for beverages. This could also be great in restaurant use as well.

Inductive Charging Mats: How many kitchens have you walked into that have cell phone, ipod, and game system chargers all over the countertops? We’ve got so many things that we need to recharge these days, and a lot of that goes on in the kitchen. If you’re clever, you can create a nice charging station to manage all those wires. But why manage the present when you could bring your kitchen into the future? How about wireless charging? Powermat, and Energizer make these great mats that can charge your devices by just dropping them on the mat. No wires needed. Older devices will need to have an adapter slipped onto the battery, but a lot of new cell phones are coming with inductive charging built in. Check out this video to see it in action, it’s F***ing awesome!

There is a lot of great kitchen technology out there, and this list doesn’t even scratch the surface. Consumers see more of this technology, they want it integrated into their designs. It makes sense, if they can have all this powerful technology at their desks, why should one’s kitchen be in the stone age?

Kitchen Technology Part 2

This is a follow up post to my last post on kitchen technology.  This post as originally featured on Design Kula.

The Brizo SmartTouch faucet: Did Brizo re-invent the faucet from the ground up? Nope. But they did add a “touch” of technology that really improves the way you use a faucet. You can touch this one to turn it on and off. Doesn’t sound that exciting huh? I’ll admit, it doesn’t shoot lasers, but it is hugely useful in the kitchen. Imagine this: You are cooking and your hands are all dirty. You need to wash off, but you don’t want to get your BBQ sauce covered fingers, or worse, your raw chicken coated fingers all over the faucet. With Brizo SmartTouch, you just tap your forearm, elbow, nose, or other fleshy bit on the faucet and you’ve got clean flowing water to rinse off in. I recently “forced” a client (my mother) to get one of these. She thought it was the most unnecessary thing when I explained it to her. After a day of using it she can’t stop raving about it! Allegedly a facerub from you cat can also activate the faucet, so curious water hating cats: you have been warned. Brizo seamlessly blends style and technology into all of it’s products, unlike Aquabrass who have attached a Playstation controller to the end of a faucet.

ZigBee Appliances: You may never have heard of ZigBee, but it’s a pretty interesting thing. ZigBee makes wireless transmitters, and the associated computer magic to get appliances to talk to one another. Why does it matter if your appliances can talk together? Not so they can plan world domination, but so they can work together to save you money. It all starts with your electric meter. If you have a ZigBee wireless electric meter it can send out lots of useful information, most importantly when electricity is the cheapest. Your appliances talk to the meter, and know when it’s the best time to do energy intensive tasks. For example, your dishwasher can automatically run at 3am, when electricity is cheapest. Your refrigerator can defrost then too. Of course, you can override these settings if you need your favorite jeans washed right away. Check out this video by Consumer Reports to see some of these appliances in action. This video features GE appliances, but SubZero also is in the ZigBee appliance game.

Stay tuned early in the week for the summary of all this kitchen technology!

Kitchen Technology, Part 1

This post originally appeared on Design Kula.  This is a fabulous blog and I suggest you check it out.

Technology: It’s everywhere these days. It’s evolving at a blistering pace. We all know how it goes, that shiny new aluminium tablet you bought two months ago is already out of date, replaced by something that is twice as fast, and half the price! That’s not just all marketing hype, there is a law, Moores Law. Moore’s law talks about the amount of transistors on a chip doubling.... Ok, I’ll forgo the technical jargon before you jump to your Facebook page. Basically the law says that computers will get twice as fast and half the price each year. This has been true for the last 50 or so years!

So how has this affected the kitchen in today’s market? Well, there is TONS of tech out there for the kitchen. Some of it good, some bad, and some just plain odd. I’ll guide you through just some of the things I have discovered in my travels. Before we start, I think I need to get some geek credentials out of the way:

My name is Eric Schimelpfenig, AKBD. I am a kitchen and bath designer, Sketchup modeler, trainer, public speaker, blogger, and a firm believer that the Internet is here to stay. At an early age I assembled my own computer in a cardboard box, and today I have no less then three screens on my desk at any given time. I could keep going, but I think you get the picture...

First up: The AlessiTAB. This tablet is a touch screen tablet that was developed for use exclusively in the kitchen. It runs on that all familiar Android operating system, and even features a TV tuner! I think it’s a great idea, but it’s going to be a dismal failure. Since it’s got all the tablet specs, it’s got the tablet price, without the tablet portability. The idea of having a computer or tablet in the kitchen is something a lot consumers want. With so many great apps out there for the kitchen why not get an iPad Chef Sleeve or just in put it a Zip Lock bag? (Yes, that actually works really well!)

Outdoor grilling, it’s one of the great outdoor pastimes. Imagine this: You are outside on your deck, you’re surrounded by friends, great smelling food, and wonderful weather. What could possibly make this day any better? Being able to leave all that and go hide inside. But how can you go inside to play another round of Angry Birds or check your Match.com inbox without the risk of burning your delicious meats? You can’t trust your friends, but you can trust iGrill. iGrill is a remote meat thermometer that communicates over Bluetooth to your favorite iOS device. Yup, you can look right at your iPhone or iPad and see the status of your meats without ever having to leave that computer chair. Frag on oh “master of the meats”.

Stay tuned to this spot towards the end of the week and I will unveil even more exciting (and actually useful) kitchen tech!

join.me: The coolest screen sharing app.

This past week I was in Chicago for NeoCon 2011. While I didn’t spend too much time in the MerchMart, I did hang around the Brizo showroom with a group from Interior Design Chat for a live chat.

If you aren’t familiar with Interior Design Chat, it’s a Twitter chat that happens every Tuesday night at 6pm EST. A bunch of interior designers get together and chat live on Twitter using the hashtag #intdesignerchat. The chat is fast, like a cheetah with a rocket pack on its back fast. You need quick fingers and quick wit to keep up. It’s worth it though, the people you can meet are really interesting. The chat was started just about a year ago and has really blown up in the past year. People from literally every side of the planet participate. I heard a statistic that the chat is read by some 44,000 people.
After the live chat we met the next day at the Lightology showroom in downtown Chicago. Lightology is the worlds largest lighting showroom, and certainly makes lights look like artwork, not just utilitarian electrical to photon converters. While we were there, we were given a design challenge. We divided up into four teams, fired up Sketchup, and set about creating big kitchens in a small amount of time. Since we’re all members of Interior Design Chat, we naturally were all over the social media while we were designing.

As far as the technology goes, I am never satisfied with what is available, I always want the next thing, almost to a fault! I had been playing around for the past few months with join.me. join.me is a simple online meeting app. If WebEx or GoToMeeting were wearing suits, join.me would show up in flip flops and a Hawaiian shirt. At first, you may not take it seriously because it doesn’t have all the “big boy” features like our suit wearing friends, but it does have one magical feature: Simplicity.

WebEx and GoToMeeting are great online meeting apps to use. They’ve got a ton of features that suit wearing, BMW driving business types will find extremely useful. With all that power comes complexity, and price.

How often have you been on the phone with someone, and you just wanted to show them your screen? With join.me you can do just that, and in a matter of seconds. All you do is go to join.me, click “Share” and a tiny little app fires up. It gives you a link that you can paste into an email, or a chat. Once the person on the other side clicks the link, within seconds they are seeing your screen. No complicated software installs, no signup, or configuration. Just instant screen sharing! It’s amazingly simple and you wouldn’t believe how fast it is. There is even a phone conference as part of it. The best part, its FREE! I use this service all the time when I am talking to clients about a design.

So what does this have anything do to with our design competition? Well, as we were designing, people were asking us questions about what we were doing on Twitter. Rather then answer them in 140 characters, I just fired up join.me and Tweeted a link! People from all over the world logged in to see what I was doing. In the course of a few hours, I had over 60 unique viewers watching me design live! Mind you, there was no planning, and no promotion of this. It was just a last minute thing I decided to do. Soon, I had each team in the room tweeting a link, and we had viewers from all over the place watching us create these kitchens. The level of engagement was amazing. People were using the live chat feature to ask questions, and even tweeting, and retweeting the link all over the place.
Maggie from the join.me team even stopped in to see what we were up to. I told her how pumped I was about this neat use of their software, and I asked her if she’d answer a few questions about it here in this post.

Q1> So join.me is free, but I also noticed that you have a paid version. What’s the difference between the two?

join.me pro is really for those who love join.me but need a little more. They might want to have their own personal URL, or the ability to schedule meetings in advance, or have a few presenters on the account. It’s as simple to use as join.me, but with a little extra. You can start your free two-week trial here.

Q2> So join.me is ridiculously simple to use, but would you have any tips for beginners?

I guess my tip would be like any other tip I’d give someone who is using a new service: Get your hands on it. Use it. Share your screen; view others. Check out how everything works. If you want, you could share between your computer and your mobile device (iOS or Android). The best part of join.me is the experience. You can also check out our blog if you want to dive deeper into some of the features.


Q3> Have you ever seen someone tweet what is on their screen like we did for the design competition?

I haven’t, but it’s a very cool way to use join.me. We have people who use join.me in all sorts of ways, like joining virtual book clubs, holding virtual “office hours” for students, reviewing projects and documents with colleagues - it’s really interesting to learn how join.me can fit into their lives.

For what I do on a day to day basis as a designer, WebEx and GoToMeeting are too complicated, and too expensive me. They do have their place though. join.me is so fast, and so easy to use it’s just amazing. If you’ve ever thought “I wish I could show what’s on my screen to someone else” in the easiest, fastest way possible, join.me is your app.

WebPad for iPad

So to add even more awesomeness to the iPad, I have discovered a new app called WebPad.  WebPad lets you draw on your iPad, live on someone else's computer screen.  Ok, I realize that doesn't sound that exciting, so let me give you a real life scenario for this:

A customer called me a while back, I had been working on a design for them.  There was a particular detail that I was describing to them.  I had a picture in my head, and I was attempting to put it into words.  Like a lot of customers, they aren't telepathic, so they didn't understand what I was talking about.   If I was talking about this face to face, I would have fired up Adobe Ideas and draw out the sketch for them.  In this case, I didn't have that choice.

Enter WebPad:  With WebPad, I can fire it up, instantly email my customer a link.  Once they click on the link, they see my iPad screen live on their screen!  As I draw, it shows up on their screen.  AMAZING!  Virtual paper.  Watch my demo live below!