Verizon Lures News Media With Beer and Father’s Day Toys

by Wayne Rash

This is the Adidas MiCoach Smart Ball, which is an instrumented soccer ball to help dedicated forwards improve their goal kicking skills. The ball communicates with your Android or iOS device. Notably, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen this ball. Its first appearance was in the pages of eWEEK when we found it at CeBIT in 2012. Here, Verizon employee Andrew Mucci offers us a chance to kick it, which we wisely decline.

Why go to a meeting if you don’t have to? Or better yet, why not send a robot to the meeting so you can get some real work done? Here Rob Pegoraro, columnist for Yahoo Tech and USA Today, has a chat with an unidentified Verizon employee who is using a VGo robot to attend the event. The robot can communicate using video over either WiFi or 4G LTE wireless networks. That person is missing the adult beverages, but on the other hand, got to avoid the Washington, D.C., traffic.

We promised you drones, and here’s the first one I got to. The Parrot Jumping Sumo is a sort of ground-drone. It has an HD camera and can roll around on the floor looking at things, but if it gets to something where a higher angle will provide a better look, it can jump into the air. This will scare the dickens out of whoever is near it when this happens. Here, Andrew Mucci gives me a close look at the drone without having it jump and startle me.

You know you hate it. You’re at an event where everyone wants to take a photo, and several people hold their iPads or other tablets in front of everyone so they can take a photo. Finally, HTC has an answer to the problem with the RE, a gadget that looks like a periscope but which you hold in your hand. Now, you can hold the slim tube of the HTC RE up to get your photo or video without bothering anyone. The RE uses Bluetooth to connect to your phone, and it can use your phone to send 16-megapixel images directly to YouTube.

We couldn’t have a drone event without actually flying a drone. So here’s the one flying device we saw at the event. Here, (left to right) Verizon Associate Director of Public Relations Melanie Ortel, guest Nancy Neill and Verizon employee Andrew Mucci keep an eye on the drone that Andrew is flying inside the meeting room. This particular drone is the Parrot Rolling Spider hovering in flight mode while Andrew controls it with an iPhone.

Whether it’s Father’s Day or not, worrying about your kids can lead to stress, and that’s no fun. This is why LG created the GizmoPal, a sort of simplified cell phone for young children that also provides location services. The child who is wearing it can call one of two preregistered numbers, it can receive calls, and it can share its location with authorized users on a smartphone.

By now you’re heard people, including me, make reference to the fact that nearly everything, including light bulbs, seems to have an IP address. Here’s one of those light bulbs with an IP address. You can connect to the Philips Hue light bulb with your smartphone and tell it to display any one of millions of colors. Here Andrew Mucci and Verizon marketing team member Sharon Oddy watch it shining in a deep purple, even though it doesn’t look like it due to a limitation in the camera, not the bulb.

One of the things I found when I reviewed Verizon’s version of the Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphone was that it was capable of using wireless charging. I couldn’t test wireless charging at the time because the charging pad wasn’t available. Now it is and you can use the Verizon Wireless Charging Pad with it. This means all you have to do to charge your device (assuming it’s compatible) is place the device on top of it and the battery will charge.