chairs

This is a new kind of flat-pack furniture. There are no Allen keys, no screws, no scratching your head over Ikea-style instructions. Instead, Noumenon designer Carl de Smet's Memories of the Future furniture just needs a little loving warmth.

It's made from shape memory polyurethane (SMP), a material invented by Mitsubishi Heavy Industry that expands when heated. This allows de Smet to manufacture the chair and squash it down to 5 percent of its size for packing and shipping. When the owner gets it home, it blows up like a balloon with the application of a little heat. … Read more

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This week on Crave, The Count counts 1 billion views on Sesame Street's YouTube Channel. Plus, the DRM chair self-destructs after eight sittings, we run screaming from a concrete-tossing robot dog, and sex up your iPhone with Sexy Smarty Pants underwear from Japan. All that and more goodies on this week's show. … Read more

What if your dishes dissolved to liquid after you used them a set amount of times? What if your furniture fell apart after a certain number of uses? A team of creators answered that last question with the DRM Chair, a self-destructing seat that can only be sat on a limited number of times.

The DRM Chair looks sturdy enough, but each time someone sits it in, it triggers a sensor and makes a clicking noise as it counts the uses. After eight people have applied their tushes to it, a lick of smoke starts to emanate from the joints. The joints then melt down and the chair falls into a pile of parts, much like a furniture version of a "Mission: Impossible" tape player.

… Read more

LAS VEGAS--We've seen more than a few innovative, stylish keyboards at CES this year, but few can claim to be pieces of furniture.

Meet uChair, the keyboard that lets you type in true comfort. It's basically a recliner with a split keyboard embedded in the armrests.

You sit back, adjust the headrest, pull up a screen, laptop, or tablet attached to an articulated bracket, and get to work. Or fall asleep, depending on how comfy you find it. … Read more

Kick back in your rocking chair. Relax. Knit some booties for your basset hound. Blast some AC/DC through built-in speakers and recharge your iPad at the same time. You have an iRock, an iPhone and iPad-charging rocking chair.

Though it's still listed as being under development, a lot of details are already available for the iRock. It comes in five colors ranging from white to bright red. It is made from Swedish pine. It has a very classic shape. There's no attempt at making the rocking chair look like it was built by Apple's design team. That's pretty refreshing.… Read more

Well, the iPhone event finally happened, and now we have nothing to talk about.

Just kidding!

We decided that everyone must be sick of talking about the new iPhone, so we did everyone a favor -- including ourselves -- and talked about everything but that. Hallelujah!

On this week's show, we continue to not care about HTC's possible tablets; we talk to TechCrunch's favorite sources and learn that a browser-based version of Spotify might be in the works; and on Thursday we will finally learn Wii U pricing and its release date -- that's almost two … Read more

I always thought an original-style "Star Trek" captain's chair would be my personal holy grail of memorabilia. Unfortunately, a really great replica costs $1,000.

Now there's an option that will only cost me $25 and a bit of lung power. The "Star Trek" Inflatable Captain's Chair from ThinkGeek arrived along with a slew of April Fools' products like the "Star Wars" Admiral Akbar Singing Bass and Electronic Hungry Hungry Hippos for iPad.

The inflatable chair, however, is very real. Before you get too excited, though, let's look at the fine print.

The chair is only rated to hold up to 120 pounds. That makes it suitable for child Star Fleet recruits, slim adults, or Captain James T. Bark, your 6-pound chihuahua. William Shatner and the majority of Trekkies are out of luck.… Read more

One of the prettiest looking games on Apple's iOS platform turns out to be pretty profitable too.

The popular Infinity Blade franchise, which grew to two games last month, has earned Epic Games and developer Chair Entertainment more than $30 million since its debut near the end of 2010.

Epic announced that figure today, while noting that Infinity Blade II has brought in net earnings of $5 million in the month since its launch, a benchmark the company says took the first game three months.

The series was unveiled at Apple's once-annual music event in 2010 and was … Read more