Monthly Archives: June 2012

Text Me When My Milk is Gone Off – The ‘Milkmaid’

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Did you ever experience that sinking feeling when you pour your milk into a freshly made mug of tea and the milk breaks into a million bits? Gone-off milk is all too familiar to us, especially in the summer months when leaving milk out for any length can end in pouring it down the sink.

Introducing the ‘smart milk jug’ or the ‘Milkmaid’, a jug that sits neatly in your fridge and through LED lights, tells you when your milk has gone bad. Not only that, it also measures how much milk you have left and sends a text message to your phone to get more milk. Here’s how it works. The milk goes into the jug, and as it begins to go off in the fridge, a set of pH and temperature sensors located in the jug’s metal base will relay that information to the pedestal or ‘SmartBase’ which the jug sits in. Also nestled inside the SmartBase is a weight sensor to detect how much milk is left in the jug, along with a GSM radio module, an antenna, a SIM card, and a hefty rechargeable battery to keep the whole thing humming along. And to top it off, the Milkmaid is a very attractive addition to your fridge.

The smart device was the winner of a Quirky and GE competition run in early May where people were challenged to come up with ways to improve everyday objects by making them smarter with software. Quirky and GE then took the winning idea and got to work on designing and engineering a user-friendly and eye-catching product by 31 May 2012.

The Milkmaid is the result, and it remains to be seen if there will be a demand for it, or whether we prefer to rely on our own sense of smell, and weighing the carton.

Lollipops, for a Better Quality of Life

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Did you ever get the hiccups? Of course you did, we have all had them at one time or another, so you know just how annoying and, tiring they can be. For many of us it is just a sporadic problem solved by various (usually unsuccessful) techniques of, getting someone to give you a fright, drinking water upside down, holding your breath, etc. But for some, in particular, anyone undergoing chemotherapy or those suffering from the after effects of a general anaesthetic hiccups are more than a nuisance, they reduce one’s quality of life.

Mallory Kievman tried swallowing saltwater, making herself gag, eating a spoonful of sugar, sipping pickle juice and, the old faithful, drinking a glass of water upside down, when her hiccups would not budge back in 2012. Nearly two years later the 13-year-old is teaming up with a group of M.B.A. students from the University of Connecticut to build a company that can bring her Hiccupops, or hiccup-stopping lollipops, to the market this summer. She had developed the product in her family’s home in Connecticut, combining her three favourite cures, lollipops, apple cider vinegar and sugar, into a single confection. “It triggers a set of nerves in your throat and mouth that are responsible for the hiccup reflex arc,” said Mallory, “It basically over-stimulates those nerves and cancels out the message to hiccup.”

The young entrepreneur hopes Hiccupops will become a permanent fixture in school nurses’ offices and pharmacies. She also wants to explore a medical niche, “It always has been really appealing to me to be able source a product out there that can help people,” she said. “I want to become a doctor and go into medicine.”

www.hiccupops.com is not yet fully developed, it is merely an enquiry form which you can fill out if you want to know when the product goes international.

Well done to this enterprising young woman for bringing this product to the market. Let’s hope it is more effective and less undignified than drinking water upside down.

SIMple Solution to Sleep Deprived Children

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UK statistics claim that over one third of UK children who own a mobile phone, are sleep deprived, while one in four have been bullied. This is a worrying scenario for any parent and it is with this in mind that the Bemilo System came into being.

The Bemilo System promises to keep children safe from bullying with a SIM card that can be remotely controlled from a computer. It runs on the Vodafone network and is sold to parents as a ‘safety pack’ where the SIM card can be installed like any other SIM into their child’s phone. This allows the parent to control the child’s use of their mobile phone, including blocking calls and texts, setting up the times the phone can operate between, and controlling what the child views on the internet.

A recent qualitative study prepared by the NSPCC found that teenage girls in particular were coming under increasing pressure to text and email sexually explicit pictures of themselves. It also found that the primary source of pressure was not from strangers but from peers, reflecting the increasing sexual pressures experienced by children. A remote system such as Bemilo would allow the parent to be able to read the child’s texts and monitor who they are in contact with.

UK’s Family and Parenting Institute welcomed the Bemilo System, and any move by networks to come up with ways of preventing children from being exposed to unsuitable content. Dr Katherine Rake, Chief Executive of the Family and Parenting Institute, said: “Parents constantly tell us they do not want their children experiencing too much too young. It’s clear that more needs to be done to protect children from extreme online content including pornography, and to help parents regain control.”

 

Grandma’s Baking By Text

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My Grandmother had an AGA for cooking. It was cream, and the main feature in the kitchen. It also acted as the main source of heat in the house. It seemed to be constantly on the go even in the summer months. But to think of AGAs as a thing of the past would be a mistake. The AGA has developed along with modern day living, always endeavouring to remain at the heart of a family’s home. Our current technological age has offered AGA new opportunities to be innovative and current.

Introducing the new AGA iTotal Control, a stove that can be operated remotely using a mobile phone, smartphone, PC, laptop, iPad or tablet. Those AGA iTotal Control owners who don’t have a smartphone, tablet or laptop can still take advantage of this technical revolution – simply by sending a text message to the AGA. The AGA can also be controlled via the web, so even if you have no phone signal you can use a wireless network to ensure the cooker is doing exactly what you want it to.

Each cooking range has its own SIM card, and therefore phone number, which users can text with commands such as ‘roasting oven on’, ‘all ovens on’ or ‘all zones off’ in order to control its functions. A text message reply confirms that the prompt has been successful. The iTotal Control is available in stores in the UK and internationally for GBP 10,090, but those looking to use the text message function will also need to pay an extra GBP 5.95 per month for line rental.

I’m not sure if my Grandmother would have ever been great at texting her AGA, but she was mighty good at baking with it.