Bouncing Red Ball

Sony’s hand-powered Odo series of colorful and playful gadgets. Photo by CNet Japan.
Cnet Japan’s online gallery of the Eco Products 2008 Expo is one of the most extensive there is. It is worth a look.

Business Media 誠：エコプロダクツ2008：オフィスで使用済みコピー用紙を再生紙に——明光商会 via kwout

Meiko Shokai, which has a large market share of shredder machines in Japan, wants its customers to do more with those shredded paper. At the recently held Eco Products 2008, it introduced its Paper Recycler, a chemical-free equipment to recycle used paper without leaving the office.
Developed with office equipment maker Seed, [...]

Sony featured its kinetic-powered Odo line of gadgets at the recently held Eco Products 2008 Expo at the Tokyo Big Site.
Among these is the Twirl N’ Take, a 3-megapixel CMOS-sensor-equipped hand-powered digital camera. It looks like a pizza cutter and you roll the round part to power the camera before taking a shot. (The [...]

Blogger and flickr user beve4 has an online gallery of the recent Eco Products 2008 expo that was held in Tokyo Big Sight for 3 days from Dec 11 to 13. Below are some interesting photos. {You can browse through the whole gallery on flickr.}
Soy sauce made of chicken entrails. Apparently, it passed the user [...]

The NetTansorWeb (NTW) doesn’t have Kitty-chan’s looks nor Plen’s rollerskating skills but it does one thing that other robots can’t: it blogs. This is probably the world’s first robot blogger, if you discount splogs that are created by net bots.
This harmless-looking robot might actually replace real bloggers in the future.

This Wi-Fi enabled robot has a [...]

At just 3.4cm, Takara Tomy’s Robo-Q is indeed small and you have to wonder how they fit the computer, sensors, actuators and battery in such a tiny bipedal, humanoid machine. It’s main purpose seems to play football and they have little soccer fields in Robo Japan with several of these robots kicking soccer balls (controlled [...]

Although not strictly robots, Nabaztag and Chumby are two of the most popular “smart objects”, so called because of their ability to connect to the Internet and interact with various Internet applications (to read news headlines, weather forecasts or email for example).
Nabaztag is a bunny-shaped (”nabaztag” is Armenian for “rabbit” I read) Wi-Fi enabled France-born [...]