The device known as Agitate has a plethora of uses, lending themselves to things like life jacket and livestock tracking, but also, since the device is activated via a nudge – an early warning system for damaged structures.

Agitate is constructed of two plates which when jolted generate enough electrical energy to produce a nanosecond burst of signal across great distances. This signal, although short, is actually more powerful than a mobile phone’s.

A cloud of thermal printers (a printer commonly used for receipt printing) are hung from the ceiling with a microphone in the centre. The floor is scattered with wasted paper printed with odd and often broken-worded rambles of the previous operators.

An Arduino and some custom hardware offers an interface between the printers and a Raspberry Pi. When the operator has finished speaking into the microphone the Raspberry Pi sends the audio off to Google’s speech-to-text engine and pushes the response to the printers.

London and Tokyo based Tangent have developed KIHOU – a bubbly lighting system. The light consists of a transparent viscous liquid and a thin layer of black silicone oil. Air is pumped from the bottom to create a bubble which oozes to the top and belches out revealing the light shining from below.

At the core is the mechanism itself which is enclosed in a dome made of anti-reflective sapphire crystal. A second enclosure holds naphtha-type liquid - the unique fluid which carries the same light-bending properties as air. This construction manipulates the image to make it look as if the timepiece is literally moulded around the edges.

But at £20,700 ($32,000) you’ll be looking to at least sell your children for this watch.

Three of the houses will pop out a little bird in reaction to a either of three triggers – a new follower, a retweet or a @message. The fourth house is a simple clock. By controlling a volume dial the birdsong alerts can be changed.

The internal hardware is an Arduino Uno board and most of the programming is already available as Open Source.

Best of all its only £34.99 from Oticos a new robotics company. They have also chosen to give away four of these bad boys to celebrate their launch.

Entry is simple to say the least – just like & follow Oticos below and boom that’s it. The competition will close 27th April 2013 and is limited to the UK only.

Follow @Oticos

“The Hubsan X4 Micro Quadcopter can be used as a learning aid to practice your flying skills and is ready-to-fly with a 4-Channel LCD display 2.4GHz transmitter, featuring adjustable sensitivity modes for normal or expert flight. Charging is handled via a USB charge cable and the supplied power system provides more than enough power to allow for flip somersaults and rolls.

Featuring a neat moulded fully enclosed fuselage to protect the main electronics, the stylish design looks and performs amazing in flight. Turning cycles, figure of eights, banking are simple.

The Hubsan X4 Micro Quadcopter will perform flips and rolls in all directions when flown in expert mode which is easily selected by the supplied 2.4GHz controller. The stylish canopy houses built in led lights helping to acts as orientation aid and flashes to indicate when the battery is running low.”

Purchase at: Oticos.com

The Vamp is essentially an amplifier with Bluetooth capabilities. Plugging the bare wire of your speakers into it will let you play music from any Bluetooth-enabled device.

If you want to help get this little device to the market you are too late. The Vamp has already achieved funding, but you can still be one of the first to get your hands on one since it still has 20 days to go on KickStarter.

We’ve gotten to the point where developers think the designer should learn to code and the designer thinks the developer should figure out how the site should adapt. Services like this should favour both.

It appears to only support iPhone and iPad views (although screen resizing will do, to an extent), which is silly since they’re both in the minority of their markets now, but the interface is really nice and offers a very good visual representation of what’s actually going on with the design.

What’s most useful though in my opinion is that values are clearly visible. If a developer is handed a Photoshop file it’s often hard to weed out margin sizes, padding, gradient percentages. Things like border radius values just aren’t given. Clicking on an element in Webflow reveals all information about it, ready to plug into your CSS.

Webflow claims that the code outputted is ‘the same that a developer would write’, which is encouraging, given programs like Dreamweaver output spaghetti code.

Check it out, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Source: Jon Thompson