Lego, founded by father and son Ole and Gotfred Kirk Christiansen in Billund, Denmark, in 1932, injection molded its first modern-style Lego brick in 1963. Shortly thereafter, in 1964, they introduced the first of their Lego system toys that included printed instructions. Since that time, Lego has manufactured models that range from about ten pieces up to their largest set ever…
In April, 2009, Time Warner Cable, amid mounting concerns about flagging US competency in core technical areas, announced that it would be giving away $100 million to educational programs working in core science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines—the so-called STEM fields. Their Connect a Million Minds initiative, which is scheduled to run until 2013, has already collected almost 400,000 of its stated million-pledge goal.
Motorola’s high-end Atrix 4G Android smartphone swept the awards at CES 2011, where it was introduced, taking home media awards from CrunchGear, IGN, Laptop Magazine, Maximum PC, MSN, Notebooks.com, Popular Mechanics, and Popular Science, as well as CNET’s prestigious Best of CES 2011 in the “Smartphones” category. At the time it was introduced, the Atrix was the most powerful smartphone on the market.
Founded in 1990 by a trio of MIT alums, iRobot’s first big break came in 1998 with a DARPA grant that lead to the development of their now-famous PackBot. The automatic vacuuming robot Roomba, the company’s flagship civilian product, was launched in 2002 and has become a resounding commercial success, with more than six million units sold to date.
Founded in 1987 in Rocklin, California, Parallax, Inc. manufactures the famous BASIC Stamp microcontroller. The Stamp has been popular among electronics hobbyists since the early 1990s, thanks to such user-friendly features as an embedded BASIC interpreter.
We were all pretty wowed back in January of last year when Parrot introduced their Parrot.AR quadrotor drone. Wowed because A) it’s a quadrotor, and we’re still kind of on our collective honeymoon with the quadrotor concept in general; B) its fancy fly-by-wire system makes it so stable and easy to fly that virtually no training or practice is required…
