It may sound like an impossible dream, but two designers in London have built functioning prototypes of GravityLight, a cheap way for people in developing countries t0 light homes, recharge batteries, or power a radio. And they just exceeded their Indiegogo fundraising goal by more than 500 percent with 21 days left in their campaign, so they’ll have the resources to mass-produce the light for less than $5 a unit.

Source: GravityLight

The GravityLIght comes in the bag that will be filled with dirt or stones to power it

Martin Riddiford and Jim Reeves have spent four years developing GravityLight, which uses the Earth’s gravity to generate enough power to light an LED bulb for half an hour — no electrical grid, batteries, or any external generator required.

Using the GravityLight simply requires removing the small white lamp from its bag, hanging it up, filling the bag with about 20 pounds of dirt or rocks, and attaching the bag to bottom of the device.

Gravity powers a generator, light fills your room, and every 30 minutes, you hoist the bag back up.

The goal is to provide clean, efficient light for the 1.5 billion human beings on this planet who still do not have reliable access to electricity and use kerosene-powered lamps. According to Riddiford and Reeves, the use of kerosene results in vastly higher cancer rates due to smoke inhalation, and 2.5 million burn victims due to dropped or jostled lamps every year in India alone. Not to mention the cost: 10 percent to 20 percent of a household’s income in the developing world can go to fuel for lighting.

The initial run of 1,000 GravityLights will be distributed for free to villagers in Africa and India, the designers say. Based on the results, they will tweak the product and then seek NGO and non-profit organizations’ help in distributing it even more widely.

Here’s their explanatory video:

Thousands of backers have contributed anywhere from $10, which gets a thank-you, to $100, which pays for three GravityLights to be sent to needy villages in developing nations, a GravityLight of your own, and several other perks. And four sponsors have signed up at the $5,000 level to help the project succeed — and get their names and logos on the initial run of devices.

Image credits: GravityLight Project

Check out all of GamesBeat’s Nintendo Wii U launch coverage.

Reviewers found a lot to love about the Wii U. They praised its high-definition graphics as well as the GamePad, which is comfortable enough for young children. As GamesBeat’s Jeff Grubb reported, gamers rushed to scoop up every available console.

The major complaint they found was the lack of battery life, which typically only lasts three to five hours. Read our round-up of the first reviews here.

But a few reviewers did far more than test out the console and play a round of virtual tennis — they went ahead and took the entire thing apart to expose the logic board. Here’s a snapshot of what they found:

• The Wii U hardware is similar looking to the larger Wii. Getting inside the chassis isn’t all that different.
• You’ll need a stack of razor blades to pry off the IHS.
• It only takes half an hour to tear down the Wii U and put it back together.
• IFixit’s expert DIY team was able to improve Nintendo’s design by three or four screws and one square nut.

Check out the detailed teardown descriptions of the Wii on iFixit and Anandtech.

Top image via iFixit 

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Waiting for your Pebble to drop? Rest assured the team is working around the clock and pulling out all the stops to get it done.

I just learned that Pebble’s lead designer, Steven Johns, is, according to my source, “stuck in Asia” working with Pebble’s manufacturing partners to get the product out the door. And he’s canceled a speaking appearance later in October, so he’s planning to stay there for some time.

Source: Kickstarter

Pebble raised so much money that they broke Kickstarter’s site (design).

Pebble is one of Kickstarter’s most successful crowdfunding projects ever, raising over $10 million from nearly 70,000 backers after setting a goal of just $100,000.

But the project is also a poster child for what can go wrong with crowdfunded projects. It’s been delayed multiple times — after an initial shipping date of September, the team has refused to publish a new projected shipping date, not wanting to overpromise and underdeliver.

The project has also been critiqued for lack of updates, which team leader Eric Migicovsky addressed today by showing a new version of the watch, new software and screen designs, and new apps (see his video update below).

In the video, Migicovsky says he’s just back from Taiwan. But designer Johns is still there, according to my source. Johns was scheduled to speak at Interface 2012, a digital health innovation conference in Vancouver, Canada, on Oct. 16-18.

(Here’s his speaker page on the conference organizer’s site.)

But that appearance has been canceled, as Johns will now be staying in Asia, working overtime to get Pebble ready for shipment.

In Migicovsky’s update, he says that the remaining challenges include quality control, wrist strap color variations, and finalizing the Pebble’s software. Pebble is also undergoing various tests: salt water (some people sweat), water proofing, UV aging, dropping, abrasion, and impact testing, and more.

What that adds up to is two to three more iterations before mass production.

But what it means for almost 70,000 project backers, hopefully, is a better quality, fully functioning watch when Pebble finally does ship.

Childhood obesity is quickly becoming a top health concern, with one in three American kids now classified as obese. Pundits often point to technology as the problem.

But building on the mantra that what you measure, you can improve, nonprofit HopeLab and its “social enterprise” subsidiary Zamzee have introduced an activity meter for kids that, like FitBit, connects to a website to display activity, get “pointz,” and engage friends in fitness-increasing games such as “Escape from Alcatraz.”

Source: Zamzee.com

Gamifying health: Zamzee

And the research says that it works.

Today Zamzee released the results of a six-month study of 448 middle-school kids at the 2012 Obesity Society annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas. The kids using Zamzee were 59 percent more likely to engage in moderate to vigorous physical exercise. Girls showed the biggest increase — 103 percent, and even obese children increased their physical activity by 27 percent.

Oh, and if kids should be worried about cholesterol, Zamzee users showed less LDL (“bad” cholesterol).

We’re pretty used to the story that technology is bad for kids. And perhaps that’s true, if it’s just TV and Xbox and PSP. But this study shows that monitoring and gamifying health works for kids just as much as it works for adults.

Zamzee is much cheaper than a FitBit or FuelBand, costing just $30. Richard Tate, a spokesperson for Zamzee and HopeLab, told VentureBeat that was the goal from the beginning.

“When we designed Zamzee, we were really focused on our purpose … we wanted a price that would work for anyone.”

Access to the Zamzee website for tracking and competing with friends and family is free.

HopeLab was founded by Pam Omidyar and is funded by her and husband Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.

photo credit: robad0b via photopin cc

Lytro cameras, the much-hyped photo gadget from a Silicon Valley startup, finally began shipping to customers on Wednesday, four months after the company started taking pre-orders. The cameras use something called light field technology to capture “interactive” images, on which you can change the focus after you take the picture.

After a stretch of build-up, starting with an announcement of the new company in June of last year, Lytros are finally out in the wild and we can see how the public takes to the images. Will the re-focusable photos go viral and change photography, or will they be a fad? While the camera is undeniably cool and based on impressive technology, it may have difficulty finding commercial appeal outside of a few hardcore gadget lovers, and perhaps real estate agents, due to combination of technical limitations and a high price-tag.

A lot of the excitement surrounding Lytro stems as much from the revolutionary technology inside as from a tech community hungry for a truly unique physical product — a welcome change from the glut of mobile apps and daily deals sites that usually come out of Silicon Valley. And it is definitely unique.

Small and rectangular, with a lens on one end and an iPod nano-esque touchscreen on the other, the Lytro camera produces a proprietary still image file-format (Lytro calls it a “living photo”) that can be posted on Facebook or embedded as an iframe in a website. You can click anywhere on the image to refocus it, or create 3D images using the companion Lytro software. The camera comes in two memory sizes and starts at $399. (The interactive images won’t embed in our site, but you can see samples here.)

Two focus options from one Lytro image.

While being able to change the focus on an image after shooting is a useful feature, and clicking to focus and refocus photos a fun diversion, photography is about much more than an image being in focus.

There are other limitations that could hinder the Lytro: The final image size is small (though Lytro claims it can’t be measured in megapixels since there’s an extra dimension of data); all images have a shallow depth-of-field; options for sharing the interactive images are limited; and there’s no way to edit the file in popular editing application without first flattening it into a JPG — which could be especially disappointing to the Instagram generation. The camera itself is minimalist, with only a handful of controls and no flash, exposure, video, or sharing options.

What the camera does best is act as an advertisement for the revolutionary technology inside.

“We are in a crazy megapixel war, but we share photos at a relatively small size on a screen. How do you take that explosion of digital sensor [technology] and make it actually worthwhile? Instead of blowing up into two dimensions we’ve blowing up into three dimensions.” said Patrick Chung, a partner at venture firm NEA which led Lytro’s series B funding round in 2010.

“It’s a single first product, but eventually it will also be resident in a camera phone, it will also be resident in a DSLR,” Chung said. He spit-balled some other excellent possible uses for the sensor, including in security cameras (“you can focus on the face of the thief”) and X-rays. Chung said Lytro founder Ren Ng met with Steve Jobs last year, which brings to mind the tantalizing idea of a light-field sensor in an iPhone. Indeed, the numerous partnerships and commercial and industrial possibilities for the sensor seem huge, so why start with a one-note commercial product?

Ren Ng

“Having pictures that have this interaction is a very deliberate choice, because they’re what can act as little ambassadors into the world, and very quickly, almost instantly, get new people to recognize that something dramatic has changed,” Ng told us in an interview in October.

Ng developed the light field technology when he was a PhD student at Stanford. He then made the unusual decision to create his own consumer product from scratch instead of licensing or selling the sensor technology to established camera companies. It was a big undertaking, and Ng did it the Silicon Valley way, with a dream team of financial backers — the company has raised around $50 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, NEA, and K9 Ventures.

A spokesperson told VentureBeat that Lytro is not announcing any sales numbers at this time, though Chung says there is a wait time for new orders, which indicates that there has been a surge of initial demand. However, early reviews are middling, with the most positive feedback focused on the potential of the technology and not the camera or images themselves.

That commercial potential is undeniable, and niche or not, this first consumer product could be more effective as a calling card than a stand-alone money-maker. Even if most of these early Lytros end up collecting dust in a drawer, like Apple’s ill-received QuickTake digital cameras, the Lytro is already a success in many ways.

“It’s almost like a digital signature for a camera system, for a light field camera,” said Ng. “That opens the door to all these things in the future.”

Top two images via Lytro, bottom image via VentureBeat.

Camera startup Lytro has won the Last Gadget Standing competition at the Consumer Electronics Show for its “revolutionary” light-field camera.

Lytro debuted its camera in mid-October to considerable buzz, thanks to its engaging technology that changes how you can take pictures. The light field camera lets you take a photo once and go back later to change the focus point. Lytro’s light field tech also lets you display pictures in 3D.

The Last Gadget Standing competition at CES featured other upcoming gadgets including the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga, the PlayStation Vita handheld console and the Samsung Galaxy Note tablet/phone.

Lytro’s cameras can be pre-ordered now and the units are expected to ship in the next few months. The company will sell the 8-gigabyte version of its camera for $399 and the 16-gigabyte version will run for $499.

For more gadget news, be sure to check out VentureBeat’s live coverage from CES 2012.