Cool Hunting

Philips Prestigo Touch Screen Universal Remote
Beautifully designed, highly functional and easy to set-up, Philips' Prestigo remote rivals top-of-the-line models with similar features but costs significantly less. The latest model, the STR9320 (still yet to hit the market), hosts 300,000 devices in its memory, requiring little more than a few taps to program it to work with up to 20 components. But the "activity" settings are the real revelation, allowing...

Skimmer: Social Aggregation by Fallon and Sierra Bravo
With so many ways to stay socially connected these days it's difficult to keep track of it all. The new Adobe AIR application Skimmer sorts this problem out with its clean, minimal interface that conveniently aggregates Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and Bebo activity in to a single list view while still allowing you expand each item to view the full details—all within the application. Skimmer...

Plastic Logic Reader
Still one year out of consumer reach, the Plastic Logic reader is already being touted by some sources as the Kindle killer. At this week's Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York, I had a chance to see the reader prototype in action and get my hands on one, albeit briefly. With a form factor equivalent to that of a legal-size pad of...

Backblaze Online Backup: Mac Beta Access
Perhaps the most intuitive backup solution on the market, Backblaze launched last September as an online data storage center emphasizing simplicity at a reasonable—if perpetual—price. While initially drawing ease-of-use comparisons to Apple's Time Machine, they recently released their own Mac platform, currently in Beta form. Like the PC version, Backblaze continuously monitors files for changes and uploads them to an offsite server. Though the...