transportation

The Swipea line of Tangram puzzle apps is impressive. These apps, including Swipea Tangram Puzzles for Kids: Transport, manage to take a very popular puzzle game that children have been playing for decades and transform it into an engaging, colorful mobile experience that takes full advantage of the features of the iPad and touch screen controls. While the lack of clear labels can be confusing as you get started, once the game is underway, your children will have a blast.

One thing that makes Swipea Tangram Puzzles for Kids: Transport so much fun is that nearly everything in them is … Read more

Golf can be frustrating on the best of days. What better way to calm your nerves than to sail around the links on this hovercraft golf cart?

Bubba Watson, 2012 Masters champion, and his sponsor, Oakley, recently teamed up with Neoteric Hovercraft to launch this super sophisticated way of getting from hole to hole.

The hovercraft maker released a video of Watson riding on a 9-foot air cushion at Arizona's Raven Golf Club.

The BW1 has a "footprint pressure" of 33 times less than a human footprint, leaving relatively little impact on the course itself. … Read more

Segways are run of the mill these days. To turn heads with an unusual vehicle, you need something like the Hyundai E4U.

Recently unveiled at the ongoing 2013 Seoul Motor Show, the E4U is a one-seater that can move easily in any direction. It travels on a rotating front sphere and two rear training-wheel-like supports. Propulsion is controlled by foot pedals, which cause the spherical front to tilt.

In a demo at the car show, the pod moved at about walking speed, according to Japan's Nikkei Tech-On Web site, which provides us with this remarkable photo of the E4U and what must be some of the stupidest headgear ever conceived. … Read more

Working to keep an edge on the mapping front, Google announced today that it's boosting Google Maps' live transit feature. Now, users can see several subway and bus live departure times in New York and Salt Lake City and service alerts for Washington, D.C.'s Metrorail.

"We want to make sure you have access to the most comprehensive, accurate, and useful information when you're on the go -- and that includes public transportation," Soufi Esmaeilzadeh, Google Maps partnership development manager, said in a blog post today. "With these updates -- part of the millions … Read more

SideCar, a company providing a paid carpooling service, has sued the city of Austin, claiming that the city is illegally restricting its business.

According to the Austin American-Statesman, SideCar has sued Austin, the week after the Texas capital's city council ruled that services like SideCar, which enable people with room in their cars to offer rides to strangers for a fee, are illegal.

During SXSW here this week, SideCar has been just one of several services offering riders a free way to get around town. After the city council's ruling, SideCar decided to make all rides free during SXSW … Read more

Pop a properly manufactured CD into a CD player, and you'll hear music in a second or two. In more than 30 years of playing CDs I've never once encountered scanning, searching, or error messages; after I press "Play," the music starts. Stick a properly manufactured DVD or Blu-ray in a working player, and you always have to wait a while to start watching the movie -- or it might not play at all. You might have to do a firmware update to play the disc. With DVDs and Blu-rays, there's no such thing as … Read more

If you enjoy dreaming up fanciful ways of tooling around, here's something out of the ordinary: an all-electric plane with a helium-filled balloon topped by photovoltaic cells.

It sounds more like a sci-fi prop, but the Ecologic Aircraft Design Concept by French industrial designer Daphnis Fournier is intended to explore new ideas for prototypes that fly.

After all, we do have a flying car that works, so why not this airship-airplane?

About 71 yards long, the craft would be supposedly be able to achieve speeds of 750 mph propelled by four electric turbines while carrying up to 324 passengers. … Read more

The cloud may be the future of all things storage, but the present is more complicated: it can be expensive, potentially insecure, and you're left trusting a third party with all your data.

That's what inspired The Transporter, a Kickstarter project started by former employees of Drobo. Transporter aims for something more secure and distributed, while still being sharable. The concept largely works like Dropbox, with a Transporter folder that lives on your desktop and syncs with files stored on the physical Transporter drive (which resides someplace you designate). You can easily give others access to specific folders, … Read more

Uber is headed toward another obstacle from city officials, and this time it's in Denver, Colo.

The state's Public Utilities Commission is proposing changes to the rules that regulate motor vehicle transportation, which could essentially shut UberDenver down.

The transportation startup announced today that it's going to fight to keep its service in the state. Uber has created a petition for Colorado residents to sign in support of Uber. The company is also urging locals to e-mail the state's governor, John Hickenlooper, and the chairman and director of the Public Utilities Commission.

"Since our launch … Read more