Well, here’s a bit of a twist — a concept device designed to actually a fund a Kickstarter-like service for concept devices. While that may not exactly inspire the most confidence, these concepts from the folks behind upstart Makible are certainly unique enough to get us interested. They included the standard headphone adapter pictured above, which promises to turn any set of headphones into a proper (and eye-catching) headset, as well as an iPhone headset adapter that will let you use any iPhone headset with your Android phone (check it out after the break). Both will apparently be limited to 10,000 units apiece assuming they get the necessary funding, with the headphone adapter setting you back $20, while the iPhone version runs just $10. Want to see them become a reality? Then you can hit up the link below to get your order in.

Makible

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Ever since the Nexus S and its nifty little NFC chip hit the market, there’s been speculation that El Goog was planning a foray into the mobile payment arena currently occupied by the likes of Charge Anywhere. Now, it looks like that plan may be in high gear, as the Wall Street Journal reports that Google’s secretly partnered with MasterCard and Citigroup to test out just such a system. According to the publication, the early demo pairs “one current model and many coming models of Android phones” with existing Citigroup-sponsored credit and debit cards, and is using the phones’ NFC chips with those VeriFone readers we recently heard about.

What’s more, a newly-published patent application from the crew in Mountain View may hint at the software behind such things. The application describes a service that sets up Google as a third-party broker who receives the shopping cart info of customers placing orders via a device (including those of the mobile variety), allows them to select shipping and other options, and provides the total order cost. It then collects payment, coordinates shipment, and forwards order information to the seller to complete the transaction. So companies can have Google handle all their payment-taking needs in return for getting a sneak peek at what folks are buying — something that the WSJ’s sources say might be a component of the setup Google’s testing right now — as opposed to other third-party services, like Paypal, that only obtain and exchange payment info with merchants. Looks like Alma Whitten (Google’s Director of Privacy) has her work cut out assuaging the concerns such a system will inevitably create in an increasingly privacy-minded populace.

Sean Hollister contributed to this report.

BNET

Wall Street Journal, USPTO

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An idea you almost always see in movies set in the future is the self-driving car. Passengers simply step in and the car will whisk them to their desired location. Google has brought us one step closer to that after they showed off their self-driving car program at TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) this week in Long Beach.

Sebastian Thurn, Google’s head software engineer behind the project spoke at TED and had a video showcasing just what the cars can do. The video showed cars on regular roads doing some very impressive driving like avoiding a deer that jumped out in front of the car, or carefully making a turn around a hill as a large truck came towards it. Google didn’t just have a video to show TED attendees, it actually had a live demo set up on a closed track to let people experience what riding in a self-driving car is like.

The videos are extraordinary to say the least. Since it was a closed track Google felt it was ok to program the cars to drive “aggressively”. The cars are driving pretty fast and Google intended it that way, to show that it was capable of it. There is some tire squealing and really shows off the quick maneuverability in the program. Normally passengers would program their destination into the car like a GPS navigation box and the car would calculate the route. Google says that the car has routes from San Francisco to Los Angeles fully automated.

It’s pretty amazing just how well the cars performed. The demo track had to be specially programmed into the car because there were no roads to follow there. I look forward to seeing how Google develops this even further and whether aspects of the technology may have a more immediate application.

[via SearchEngineLand]

Did you know that red eyes are not directly caused by lack of sleep, but rather from dryness and irritation caused by simply leaving them open for too long? While you ponder that bombshell, if you’ve been losing sleep trying to figure out your RedEye universal remote system the company behind the system, ThinkFlood, has something for you. The current solutions allow users to create activities that turn on and control multiple devices simultaneously, but the new “mini” app now available in the App Store simplifies that greatly, a “device focused” approach acting more like a basic universal remote. That’s not exactly how we’d choose to use our $49 IR adapter, but if you’re so inclined this free download should offer more power to the non-power user.

iTunes

Pakistani IT Sector has stolen the show once again as it one of its game development company,  Mindstorm Studios, developed an” Official Game” for the ICC 2011 Cricket World Cup– an event followed religiously by over a billion fans around the globe.

Mindstorm team has single-handedly designed, developed and holding an official licensed title over all leading global game development companies.

Pakistani games makers once again display their unmatched talents in the world and indigenously designed a game self-funded without any support of government or any private sector.

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If saying “I do” is in your near future, Google has launched a wedding planning site. According to The Official Google Blog, Google Weddings offers four main tools for the soon-to-be-married: Google Sites for creating a website that can be shared with the wedding party; Picnik for editing photos; Google Documents for creating seating charts, schedules and budgets with wedding-themed templates; and Picasa for sharing photos online with family and friends. Google asked famed wedding planner Michelle Rago for input on the site’s design. In addition, Rago is also taking part in Google’s $25,000 dream wedding sweepstakes, which will award one couple with a Rago-designed wedding day.

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One day somebody will write a book called “The rise and rise of Android” and this moment will be highlighted in bold. Canalys’ latest smartphone sales figures show that Android phone makers managed to shift a cool 32.9 million handsets, more than any other smartphone platform out there, including the previous leader, Symbian, which sold 31 million units. That’s a mighty leap from the 20.3 million Android devices the stats agency estimates were sold in Q3 2010. Symbian itself grew from 29.9m in Q3 to its 31m total in Q4, but Android’s pace of expansion has been so rapid as to make it irrelevant.

Reuters (Yahoo! News)

A researcher at North Carolina State University is warning of an Android 2.3 security vulnerability that gives attackers access to your personal information, further proof that Gingerbread isn’t all sugar and spice (to be fair, that SMS issue has since been remedied). According to Xuxian Jiang, the bug allows malicious websites to access and upload the contents of a user’s microSD card, including voicemails, photos, and online banking information to a remote server. The flaw apparently resembles a similar bug in previous version of Android, thought to have been addressed with Gingerbread. However, as Jiang points out, that fix is easily bypassed. Apart from removing the microSD card, disabling JavaScript, or switching to a third-party browser, Android 2.3 users have little recourse in squashing the bug. The folks at eWeek reported that Google is working on a solution to the problem, but there’s no word on when we can expect to see an update.

If you’ll remember yesterday, a rather big bit of news (if proven true) seemed to be a story by the name of Android code copying evidence lends weight to Oracle suit. In that article, a man by the name of Florian Mueller provided what he saw as evidence that Android had used code written by Sun Microsystems, now owned by Oracle, without permission, this evidence thus lending itself mightily toward Oracle’s current lawsuit against Google. Today there’s a rebuttal written by ZDNet’s Dev Connection writer Ed Burnette saying that the entire proof is bunk, primarily due to the face that most, if not all of the files in question were not included in the shipped Android product.

And as you may already know, if they weren’t sold, they’re not illegal. Burnette’s notes begin by stating his title, that being an expert developer more than qualified to disprove everything said by Florian Mueller whom he says is indeed “neither a lawyer nor a developer although he plays one on TV.”

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