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Remember Microsoft hired Seinfeld to do advertising for their new $300 Million campaign?

Here’s the new Bill Gates and Seinfeld TV commercial which I did get to see yesterday for the first time and looks like bunch of people uploaded it to Youtube.

First look tells me that this ad really sucks in comparison to Apple.  There’s not enough “juice” going on to even understand what they are advertising.  (Good advertising should be funny even with the sound off, try watching this ad without sound, it’s BORING!)

Bill Gates will have to do a lot better than this.  It would be cool if he was skydiving or somethin’ with Jerry Seinfeld and then Bill Gates gets squashed by Seinfeld on landing.

Brought to you by: Zedomax.com

Bill Gates and Seinfeld TV Commercial!

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Garmin might be offering a free lifetime traffic feature to the masses, but that comes at a “price” so to speak - it will feature ads.

“One gripe: The nüvi 755T comes with advertisements. My evaluation unit arrived with three preloaded vendors (BP, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo). When you access the traffic menu, one of these advertiser’s names always appears at the bottom of the screen. Also, from time to time, one of these ads will pop up on the map view screen (they won’t appear when you are in motion). A single tap of the advertisers’ name will perform a POI search for nearby retail locations. Unfortunately, you can’t disable these ads, but it’s likely that they help Garmin offset the cost of the live traffic information that it offers free.”

How much are you willing to pay to get rid of the ads, or are you fine with companies bombarding you with promotional material from time to time?

Add a comment | From: Garmin Lifetime Traffic Is Ad-Supported | Visit Ubergizmo

More: click here…

Pantech has unveiled its latest slider phone called IM-S350. From what we can tell (from the image above), with parts of the body being made of aluminum, the device looks quite fashionable and I’ve no doubts some people in South Korea will like it — unfortunately the IM-S350 is a Korea-only device at the moment.

Specs wise, the 9.9 mm thin handset comes with a HSDPA radio, 2 megapixel camera, built-in DMB TV tuner, media player, Bluetooth and memory card slot. Pricing and the exact release date is not known at this stage, though…

[Via: Unwired View]

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The new and re-furbished stores will be based on the design of Cardiff’s flagship city centre shop, following its success since the opening last year. The stores will be designed to enhance the shopping experience, display our full product range from mobiles to laptops and to improve customer service, with a clean, stylish look and feel and open floor space. Features will include modernised displays for PAYM phones, making it easier for customers to browse and view the products on show as well as a dedicated space highlighting Orange only offers.

It seems like the battle for new and existing customers (on other networks) is going to played out at least partly on the shopfloor - with Vodafone announcing stores, now Orange, and other Operators surely making moves, this is going to be an interesting one to watch…..

[Via: Cellular News]

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• Apple Stores open at 8AM for iPhone 3G hopefuls
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3D movie technology is sweeping the nation. More and more theaters are starting to prepare themselves for the day when every movie is in 3D. This revolution of technology has already started when DreamWorks announced that starting next year all animated features will be shown only in 3D, starting with “Monsters vs. Aliens”, releasing March 27. The 3D image is actually two images that are overlapped and slightly different from each other. This effect is first created during filming when the images are captured by two separate cameras. Each camera is positioned to capture the same image from a different point of view, ranging from a few inches to a few feet. The two sets of film are then shot onto the same screen creating the blur effect you see before putting on a pair of polarized glasses. By using special polarized glasses, your eyes capture one of the images for each eye and your brain turns them into 3D images that look incredibly realistic. Light travels in waves, both up to down and left to right. Each projector is fitted with a polarized lens filter. The filter only lets light traveling in a specific direction through and onto the screen. This means that one projector is displaying images with up to down light waves, and the other projector is displaying images with left to right light waves. The lenses in the glasses are fitted with similar filters, allowing each eye to see only one of the projected images. Your brain then translates the data from your eyes to create the 3D effect.

[via Kansas City]

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Stash Reef Sandals

Unless you’re going to the beach with a larger group, you are going to run into a problem: you are in the water, while your stuff is not; how do you make sure it won’t get stolen? The Stash Reef Sandals offer the solution: they have a little “drawer” inside the sole where money, credit cards or keys can be stashed. And who ever heard of flip flop thieves?

The full post can be found on S2999.

Vacuum cleaning robot

Vacuuming must be one of the most boring chores on earth. But get one of these and you’ll never have to do it again.

The full post can be found on Decide What to Buy.

LayZ Inflatable Spa

The LayZ Inflatable Spa is the ultimate must-have luxury gadget. It can be positioned indoors or outdoors and is the perfect thing to pull out for your next party.The spa inflates within 10 minutes and just by plugging it in. The tub features 80 turbo-massage jets and comes in two sizes, a smaller 2-4 person version for those with limited tiled space in their house, and a roomier 6 person tub.

The full post can be found on Gaj-It.

Lensbaby 2.0 and 3G

The Lensbaby 2.0 and 3G are selective focus SLR lenses, which have a flexible “lens barrel” to give you that smooth out of focus effect in portions of your images. Basically, you bend, push and pull the lens to move the “Sweet Spot” where you want it and blur the remaining areas of the image. The Lensbaby 2.0 and 3G are designed to work with a number of cameras, including Canon, Sony and Nikon digital SLRs.

The full post can be found on Photography Bay.

Storefront Rocket Ride

This is the classic rocket ride encountered in front of supermarketsduring the 1960s, recalling a time when a single nickel and imaginationwas the only requirement a child needed. An authentic unit refurbishedto its original state, including the details of its tapered nose cone,bulbous body, and symbols suggestive of space travel.

The full post can be found on Random Good Stuff.

Krysalid’42 Trimaran Offers $600,000 Sail

Featuring a foldable structure that can be unfolded within two minutes; it proposes to offer more room on the bulky (42 foot) bridgedeck tavern to accommodate 6-8 people .

The full post can be found on Elite Choice.

Carry Your Music with You Everywhere You Go with Reppo II

Jonas Saraanen understands that you may be feeling nostalgive about the love-and-peace era but still need you feet firmly on the ground. The Reppo II includes integrated speakers and high quality digital amplifiers in a backpack that you can carry on your back anywhere you want.

The full post can be found on GadgetsBlog.org.

Thanks to all the sites for their submissions now over to you guys for voting (don’t forget to leave a comment with your reason for a chance to win a $50 Amazon voucher) :

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If you write for a gadget themed blog and wish to be included in next weeks contest check out the CGOTW instructions page.

[ Another $50 Coolest Gadget Contest copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

The JVC DLA-SH4K includes DVI-D (dual-link) x 4 input terminals that accept a wide variety of input resolutions. In addition to the RS-232C and USB connections, an Ethernet interface makes adjustment and installation from web browsers on PCs possible. Furthermore, networking allows multiple projectors to be operated with a single PC and an email function also enables the sending out of error messages and lamp replacement reminders. The JVC DLA-SH4K will be unveiled at CEDIA September 3 - 6, 2008 and will be on display throughout the show in the JVC Theater located at The Denver Center for the Performing Arts next to the Denver convention center.

Long story short: "In many of the patients, one neuron responded every time they saw a particular video," wrote Emma Byrne in yesterday's Financial Times about a new study published online today in the journal Science.

To get you warmed up for the heavy stuff to come, here's Benedict Carey's September 4, 2008 New York Times front page story on the findings.

For the Brain, Remembering Is Like Reliving

Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory, revealing not only where a remembered experience is registered but also, in part, how the brain is able to recreate it.

The recordings, taken from the brains of epilepsy patients being prepared for surgery, demonstrate that these spontaneous memories reside in some of the same neurons that fired most furiously when the recalled event had been experienced. Researchers had long theorized as much but until now had only indirect evidence.

Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories).

The experiment, being reported Friday in the journal Science, is likely to open a new avenue in the investigation of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, some experts said, as well as help explain how some memories seemingly come out of nowhere. The researchers were even able to identify specific memories in subjects a second or two before the people themselves reported having them.

“This is what I would call a foundational finding,” said Michael J. Kahana, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the research. “I cannot think of any recent study that’s comparable.

“It’s a really central piece of the memory puzzle and an important step in helping us fill in the detail of what exactly is happening when the brain performs this mental time travel” of summoning past experiences.

The new study moved beyond most previous memory research in that it focused not on recognition or recollection of specific symbols but on free recall — whatever popped into people’s heads when, in this case, they were asked to remember short film clips they had just seen.

This ability to richly reconstitute past experience often quickly deteriorates in people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, and it is fundamental to so-called episodic memory — the catalog of vignettes that together form our remembered past.

In the study, a team of American and Israeli researchers threaded tiny electrodes into the brains of 13 people with severe epilepsy. The electrode implants are standard procedure in such cases, allowing doctors to pinpoint the location of the mini-storms of brain activity that cause epileptic seizures.

The patients watched a series of 5- to 10-second film clips, some from popular television shows like “Seinfeld” and others depicting animals or landmarks like the Eiffel Tower. The researchers recorded the firing activity of about 100 neurons per person; the recorded neurons were concentrated in and around the hippocampus, a sliver of tissue deep in the brain known to be critical to forming memories.

In each person, the researchers identified single cells that became highly active during some videos and quiet during others. More than half the recorded cells hummed with activity in response to at least one film clip; many of them also responded weakly to others.

After briefly distracting the patients, the researchers then asked them to think about the clips for a minute and to report “what comes to mind.” The patients remembered almost all of the clips. And when they recalled a specific one — say, a clip of Homer Simpson — the same cells that had been active during the Homer clip reignited. In fact, the cells became active a second or two before people were conscious of the memory, which signaled to researchers the memory to come.

“It’s astounding to see this in a single trial; the phenomenon is strong, and we were listening in the right place,” said the senior author, Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Tel Aviv.

His co-authors were Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv, Michal Harel and Rafael Malach of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Roy Mukamel, of U.C.L.A.

Dr. Fried said in a phone interview that the single neurons recorded firing most furiously during the film clips were not acting on their own; they were, like all such cells, part of a circuit responding to the videos, including thousands, perhaps millions, of other cells.

In studies of rodents, including a paper that will also appear Friday in the journal Science, neuroscientists have shown that special cells in the hippocampus are sensitive to location, activating when the animal passes a certain spot in a maze. The firing pattern of these cells forms the animals’ spatial memory and can predict which way the animal will turn, even if it makes a wrong move.

Some scientists argue that as humans evolved, these same cells adapted to register a longer list of elements — including possibly sounds, smells, time of day and chronology — when an experience occurred in relation to others.

Single-cell recordings cannot capture the entire array of circuitry involved in memory, which may be widely distributed beyond the hippocampus area, experts said. And as time passes, memories are consolidated, submerged, perhaps retooled and often entirely reshaped when retrieved later.

Though it did not address this longer-term process, the new study suggests that at least some of the neurons that fire when a distant memory comes to mind are those that were most active back when it happened, however long ago that was.

“The exciting thing about this,” said Dr. Kahana, the University of Pennsylvania professor, “is that it gives us direct biological evidence of what before was almost entirely theoretical.”

Here's the abstract of the original report by Fried et al, as published September 5, 2008 in the journal Science.

Internally Generated Reactivation of Single Neurons in Human Hippocampus During Free Recall

The emergence of memory, a trace of things past, into human consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries of the human mind. Whereas the neuronal basis of recognition memory can be probed experimentally in human and nonhuman primates, the study of free recall requires that the mind declare the occurrence of a recalled memory (an event intrinsic to the organism and invisible to an observer). Here, we report the activity of single neurons in the human hippocampus and surrounding areas when subjects first view television episodes consisting of audiovisual sequences and again later when they freely recall these episodes. A subset of these neurons exhibited selective firing, which often persisted throughout and following specific episodes for as long as 12 seconds. Verbal reports of memories of these specific episodes at the time of free recall were preceded by selective reactivation of the same hippocampal and entorhinal cortex neurons. We suggest that this reactivation is an internally generated neuronal correlate of the subjective experience of spontaneous emergence of human recollection.

The abstract of the Science paper (cited above) reporting findings in rodent brains follows.

Internally Generated Cell Assembly Sequences in the Rat Hippocampus

A long-standing conjecture in neuroscience is that aspects of cognition depend on the brain's ability to self-generate sequential neuronal activity. We found that reliably and continually changing cell assemblies in the rat hippocampus appeared not only during spatial navigation but also in the absence of changing environmental or body-derived inputs. During the delay period of a memory task, each moment in time was characterized by the activity of a particular assembly of neurons. Identical initial conditions triggered a similar assembly sequence, whereas different conditions gave rise to different sequences, thereby predicting behavioral choices, including errors. Such sequences were not formed in control (nonmemory) tasks. We hypothesize that neuronal representations, evolved for encoding distance in spatial navigation, also support episodic recall and the planning of action sequences.