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Is making machines more efficiently as simple as folding paper cranes? Industrial Origami is betting that its technologies for folding sheet metal will help manufacturers cut costs and waste on the factory floor.

Industrial Origami's metal forming techniques work with existing manufacturing equipment but slash costs by 70 percent, said president and CEO Rick Holman. It offers a software add-on for CAD design systems.

Industrial Origami focuses on car parts and home appliances as well as heating and air conditioning system. It licenses its fold-and-cut technologies to Whirlpool and Eaton Electric, which makes enclosures for electric equipment.

Key to … Read more

Business is booming in the field of illegal, high tech weapons export, as shown by the Department of Justice's recently released Fact Sheet of Major US Export Enforcement Actions.

The roundup offers a "snapshot" of some of the more entertaining arrests and convictions of 2007. Military night vision goggles, aviation helmets, rocket launchers, guided missiles and microwave integrated circuits all made the list of off limit items. In many cases the export related crimes were further compounded by money laundering, drugs, theft and in the case of a Florida based mother and son team, conspiracy to murder.… Read more

Next to guitars--real, virtual or something in-between--the most popular musical instruments we've seen on Crave are drums. From fingertip pads to several types of rollaway versions, percussive gadgets appear to be everywhere. But they usually don't look like a cookie sheet.

That's what the "Ion Digital Drum Station" resembles, though ThinkGeek nevertheless claims that it has "eight natural feeling, velocity-sensitive drum pads." They also come with their own sticks, headphones and MP3 inputs to help create custom tunes, or you can just play along to programmed patterns with 233 sounds available … Read more

Time to re-write one little section in my Webster's Dictionary. That's an old-time thing, ink on paper, you remember? It gives the fifth definition of "glacial" as "as slow as the movement of a glacier." Need to change that to read "fast" in the future.

British researchers have found the movement of Antarctic's glaciers is speeding up. During the decade ending in 2003, these southern glaciers speed up by 12 percent. That means these huge rivers of ice are speeding toward the ocean. There three things can happen: the ice melts, … Read more

Beginning in 1991, every summer NASA has measured the ice sheets of Greenland. Past data indicates significant thinning of ice along the coast. Meanwhile some ice sheets have thickened in Greenland's interior. Overall, there's much less ice on Greenland's surface than there was 100 years ago.

This summer's NASA expedition to Greenland has returned with fresh data. Now the analysis begins. One piece of equipment used is an ice-penetrating radar that can find bedrock up to 2 miles below the ice surface. NASA estimates an average drop of 9 inches in the height of Greenland's … Read more

Zoho, who was at Under the Radar last week, upgraded their spreadsheet application, called Sheet, on Friday. The team added Zoho Chat integration and the ability for multiple users to work on a spreadsheet at the same time. Users of Google Spreadsheets will be accustomed to this functionality, and with the update, Zoho joins the fray of online collaborative tools (see our Under the Radar roundup of this category.)

Also new with the update is support for OpenDocument Sheet, which allows users of OpenOffice to work on and freely exchange documents.

Zoho Sheet still doesn't have the option to … Read more

Presenters for the post-lunch session today focused on two challenges. First was how to help people simultaneously collaborate on projects. Equally important was how to keep a room full of sleepy bloggers, analysts, and venture capitalists awake and alert after a lunch of turkey sandwiches. Luckily, we've played with all four of these applications before, and so we stuck with the roast beef.

Editgrid kicked off the round of presentations. Instead of PowerPoint, they used a tabbed spreadsheet in Editgrid to present. One of the really great features of Editgrid, which we've discussed before, is the option to … Read more

We've always had a secret desire to be a concert pianist, but there was just one problem: We never learned how to play the piano. The reason, of course, was that it's just too difficult to turn the sheet music and play at the same time.

If only one of these hands-free page-turners from Hammacher Schlemmer was available when we were kids. Not only does it solve the multi-tasking conundrum, but this digital tablet also doubles as a library that can store thousands of scores and display them on its 12-inch backlit LCD. It even has an MP3 … Read more