Starwood Hotels and Resorts Testing Smartphones to Unlock Doors

Hotel chain Starwood Hotels and Resorts plans to start using tech as an alternative to traditional plastic hotel key cards. The hotel will allow guests to unlock their door to the room they are staying in with a smartphone.

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The hotel chain has a location in NYC called Aloft Harlem and one in California called Aloft Cupertino. Both those locations will be using lock tech from Assa Abloy and the program will start in about 60 days. Guests at these hotels will be able to check in using smartphones via the Starwood mobile app. They will then get a text message with the room number and a virtual key allowing them to bypass the front desk.

The technology uses Bluetooth to open the door and works on any iPhone 4S or higher and Android 4.3 or higher devices. It’s unlikely that the program will be rolled out broadly any time soon because of the costs involved in changing lock systems.

[via Greenville Online]

Tara Reid is back for Sharknado 2


Ian Ziering and Tara Reid will return to play their respective roles in the sequel to Sharknado. Its name “Sharknado 2: The Second One” was chosen after much debate on Twitter. The first movie had...

Aereo stops taking new customers in New York

Aereo launched in New York in early 2012 to let people watch over-the-air TV on their gadgets, but a recent hiccup means denizens of the Big Apple can no longer sign up for the service. The culprit? Aereo says it all comes down to capacity, or lack ...
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Star Wars Rings

Star Wars Rings
This is a collection of Star Wars rings by J.A.P. created for the 20th anniversary of the franchise. They’ve got all kinds of characters like R2D2, Yoda, Vader, Chewbacca, and many more! Although some of them, I could’ve done without. Seriously who’s gonna want C-3PO or Jabba the Hutt on a piece of jewelry? Is [...]
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Bud Light Super Bowl 2014 Ad Whatever Film Released Online


Anheuser-Busch is kicking off a major new campaign for Bud Light at the Super Bowl 2014. The Super Bowl XLVIII marks the launch of Bud Light’s new creative campaign, “The Perfect Beer for Whatever...

Making Prototypes with a 3D Printer & LEGO: faBrickation

3D printing can help you create prototypes or mockups quickly. Or should I say relatively quickly – it can take a 3D printer hours to print even moderately-sized objects. To speed things up, students from the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the Hasso Plattner Institute tested adding LEGO to their workflow.

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Researchers Stefanie Mueller, Tobias Mohr, Kerstin Guenther, Johannes Frohnhofen and Patrick Baudisch call their project faBrickation. The idea is to print just the crucial parts of a prototype, then build the rest out of LEGO. To do that, they wrote a program called faBrickator, where they can open 3D models…

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…and “Legofy” it at the press of a button.

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Then they just mark the parts of the model that will be printed…

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…and build the rest with LEGO using instructions generated by faBrickator.

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They can also use faBrickator to go back to a 3D model, modify it and then print only the parts that were changed, once again saving time.

The group claims that on average, faBrickation lets them make prototypes nearly two and a half times faster than using 3D printing alone. I wonder if they can make a reverse faBrickation scanner, so laypeople can start making a “3d model” out of LEGO instead of a modeling software, scan that LEGO model then run the resulting model through faBrickation.

[via Hasso Plattner Institute via PSFK]

Tablet deals of the week: 1.31.14

Been considering a slate-style purchase? Well, today may be the time to make the leap. While Microsoft's Surface Pro (no, not the deuce) gets a massive discount, and may very well be the most attractive tablet/hybrid buy of the week, we've nabbed a ...
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