StickNFind Bluetooth stickers let you tag and locate your goods with a smartphone (hands-on video)

We've all misplaced keys, gadgets and occasionally even children. Well, no more. StickNFind is a nifty, inexpensive solution for tagging and locating electronics, keys and pets. For roughly $25 a pop (estimated retail), you get a small adhesive disk that can be affixed to any flat surface or attached to a keychain. Inside, there's a replaceable CR2016 watch battery that's said to last more than a year, a Bluetooth module and antenna, an LED-lit ring and a piezoelectric speaker. A free Android or iOS app then lets you hone in on any stickers within a roughly 100-foot (line of sight) range. The current version can only display distance, but an update, set to hit before StickNFind ships, will add direction, leading you directly to your target. You can also activate a (fairly faint) beeper, and an LED ring around the perimeter of the sticker, further helping you to find the device, even in a dark room. The app will offer several other features, including a "Virtual Leash" that alerts you when the sticker goes out of range -- a "Reverse Virtual Leash" will make the device (perhaps attached to your keys) beep, letting you know you've left your smartphone behind.

The product designers will also be offering an SDK, so developers can even create their own apps for StickNFind. For example, you could write an app that uses the stickers as triggers -- apparently one museum plans to affix the device to art, so as visitors approach, a text notification will pop up describing the piece. Another company is considering using stickers at an upcoming conference, and with Bluetooth transmitters placed around a venue, they can track the precise location of attendee badges (and the individuals wearing them), and even send "pages" by triggering the beeper and light. During our hands-on, StickNFind worked quite well, though as we mentioned, the current alpha version of the app only displays distance, not direction. The device is currently available for "pre-order" on Indiegogo, with an estimated March ship date. You can snag a sneak peek of it in action though, in our hands-on video after the break.StickNFind Bluetooth Location Stickers hands-onSee all photoswhen.eng("eng.galleries.init")

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Source: StickNFind (Indiegogo)

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By: Dilusha On 11:48 PM

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Steam launches real-money marketplace to buy in-game goods

Valve has been very busy during the past several months, releasing a plethora of new Steam features like Big Picture, Green Light, Linux support and publishing non-gaming titles. The company's latest endeavor though, promises to shake things up even more: a place to buy and sell digital goods called the Steam Community Market.

The Steam Community Market is currently in beta and only supports Team Fortress 2 items, but this is Valve's first step toward a broader market place that plays host to selling digital goods across many games using Steam Wallet funds.

Not only will the market be useful to players, but it'll also help line the pockets of developers and Valve itself. For every item sold on the market, Valve shaves off a flat five percent of the final sell value. It sounds like developers get their own cut of the transaction too -- an amount of their choosing. In this case, TF2 (a Valve game, incidentally) currently nets the company 10 percent of the sale value. That makes the total transaction fee for every TF2 item about 15 percent of the total sale cost -- five for Steam and 10 for the game's developer. 

Valve isn't the first company to introduce real-money transactions for digital goods. Blizzard's controversial Diablo 3 auction house is possibly the most infamous example of such a market. Like your typical app store though, Blizzard trims a healthy 30 percent from digital item sales -- that's quite a bit more than Valve's meager five percent, so it'll be interesting to see just how profitable it is.

To access the Steam Community Market, just open up your Steam client and click "Community" and then "Market". 

With the advent of a real-life marketplace for game-makers to exploit, developers and publishers have yet another tool at their disposal for monetizing their work -- are we about to see even more F2P titles?

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By: Dilusha On 2:59 PM

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