Totally amazing: watch this Steadicam operator go full speed on a Segway towards the stage, dismounting gracefully onto it, and making tight circles that would make a ballerina dizzy before alighting stage right:

And that was just a rehearsal. Now see how the shot turned out during the live Eurovision performance (right at 2:40):

Extreme cinematography execution and Segway-manship at its finest, no doubt. Fellow Steadicam pros/enthusiasts are going gaga over the performance, and its rumored that the operator is a certain Karsten Jacobsen.

Ah, but all amazing feats always involve the unheralded, the sidekick who helps the leader look good. In this case it’s the camera assistant, valiantly operating focus and zoom at performance level, making sure not to trip up himself or his wingman.

(Thanks ProVideo Coalition!)

So you and your allies have spent $300 billion to develop what’s hopefully the most kick-ass fighter plane ever (F-22 Raptor, eat your heart out). And by now the whole world knows about the F-35 Lighting II, the star of your Joint Strike Fighter project. Wouldn’t you try your best to secure all that detailed research & development data from the prying eyes of spies?

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Sure, writing about cars here is a bit off-topic for The Gadget Blog. But then cars are gadgets, and once you see how funny the following are, you’ll be really grateful! Read more

The idea is simple apparently: use an airship, take advantage of its spaciousness (compared with aircraft) and turn it into a pretty well-stocked humanitarian platform.

Instead of flying to a major airport at a large city where supplies would have to be loaded onto trucks or helicopters to carry disaster relief, airship can fly directly to any location on earth and deliver humanitarian aid quickly to the exact place it is needed. Airships can deliver help to the most remote locations, even if roads are destroyed as in an earthquake, or flooding.

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Going travelling? The Balanzza Digital Luggage Scale for travelers is a gadget that’s just something you need to pack for the upcoming summer travel season.

With the new increased overweight luggage fees that the global airlines have imposed, from $50-$150 per bag depending on the airline , and the 1 bag $15 fee from American Airlines, a few dollars save will get you more Starbucks. All this makes knowing the weight of your bags more important than ever. Using the Balanzza is a great way to avoid hefty fees and speed up those check-in lines. Check them out here

This Audi A4 by Oxygen Audio has a crazy screen/trunk that slides out from the trunk of the car. Crazy yes. We like the booth girl standing next to it. You can now have a trance party at your backyard and lay them pizzas on the LCD slide. Its one pimp-ilicous car.

Pimping Audi A4 by Oxygen Audio source

This new Siemens Parking system at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5, due to open next March 2008 is a god send for tired car owners. When a driver arrives at the carpark barrier, a numberplate recognition system takes the registration and automatically prints it on the ticket.

An information screen at the barrier tells the driver where to find a space and illuminated arrows on the floor act as a guide to the empty bay, which is marked by a green light above it.

The car is tracked by up to 35 infrared cameras which feed details of where it is parked into the system.

A good and fast parking space leads to more time to shop around the airport. This people are geniuses.

But the nightmare of trudging around the car park, laden with cases, looking for your car will soon be over. Heathrow is to become the world’s first airport to install technology that allows you to find your vehicle simply by inserting your parking ticket into a machine that has a 32in screen displaying a 3-D map.

New Siemens Parking system at Heathrow source

Google has dominated the internet from search engines to online advertising for some time now. Google is grown mainly from a mixture of technologies from different companies all gathered to form one big company, thanks to its acquisition drives the past few years.

So what is Google really? It started off as a search engine and began to diversify, and although they have been plagued by lawsuits like the Youtube-Viacom one, they are still going strong.

Via [allthingsd]

Microsoft has gained another patent perceived to have a tsunami effect on future car audio design. The key points of the patent are, that the docking station can used for a off-the-shelf handheld computer, and includes input/output components which allows the car stereo to communicate with the handheld computer when docked in the station. Numerous car manufacturers are already aware of the news and Ford is in the process of arranging to install the device called “Sync” into almost every model of their cars. Looks like Microsoft came out with some useful this time for car lovers.

Read [crunchgear]

GoPass technology has just become the number one enemy for car borrowing teenagers. At first, they are tracked by their jackets and shoes. Now they are tracked in their cars. The AVL-900 is the device which goes inside a car to track it using GPS technology. It has a small microphone that listens to all conversation that take place inside the car. To start listening, the owner just have to call or text the tracker and the unit will call the person back transmitting all audio sounds that it picks up. It also sends messages containing information such as coordinates, speed and other relevant information to the owner. The downside is this device is powered by an adapter plug which plugs into the cigarette lighter which makes it easily noticeable. GoPass might consider making the device slightly less transparent such as having a rechargeable batteries or internal wiring to provide it with power.

GoPass AVL-900 Vehicle tracker source