Through the magic of corporate law (or lack therof), the device formerly known as the Crunchpad had risen from the dead and been reborn as the JooJoo. Following Michael Arrington’s announcement last week that the device would never come to market, former joint venture partner Fusion Garage trotted out their version of the story and a working prototype at a press conference earlier this week.Read more

Amazon’s Kindle electronic book reader and it’s proprietary document format is facing new competition. 5 of the biggest U.S. publishers of newspapers and magazines announced a joint venture to develop technology for display of publications. Yesterday, Conde Nast, Time Inc., News Corp., Hearst Corp., and Meredith Corp. outlined their plans as an alternative to Kindle’s black and white electronic ink concept, with color display and multiple devices supported.Read more

A full size working replica of the world’s first electronic computer is to be on display at The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The original Atanasoff-Berry Computer was built at the Iowa State University from 1939 to 1942. A replica of the ABC, currently displayed in the lobby of Iowa State’s Durham Center will be moving to the museum next spring, as part of a 25,000-square-foot exhibition opening in the fall of 2010. The exhibition will show more than 1,000 artifacts to tell the story of computing history.Read more

A new type of artificial larynx is being developed by researchers at the the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. The new voice box will do away with the robotic, harsh sounding speech produced by current devices, such as that used by physicist Stephen Hawking. The system senses contact between the palate and tongue to figure out which word is being mouthed, with the aid of speech recognition software, and generates audio using a speech synthesizer. Read more

Cisco’s Flip division has announced a new accessory for their popular Flip mini-camcorder, which has sold over 3 million units since it’s 2007 launch. Flipshare TV is a small box that plays 720p video on your TV or HDTV. The device comes with a remote and a USB dongle that connects your computer to the Flipshare base station box, which then connects to your TV. The device comes with software that installs on your computer, Flipshare 5.0, to manage your videos. Even if you don’t have a Flip camcorder, you can watch shared videos from friends who do online on so-called Flispshare channels.Read more

Facebook’s 1 million Vietnamese users are having trouble accessing the popular social networking site since early November, and could soon be blocked entirely from using the service, reports the IPS news agency. Sources at telecom companies in the country have admitted being asked by Vietnamese government officials to block Facebook. The government has denied any involvement with the access problems people are having.Read more