There’s a reason why more people haven’t seen the next RedEye universal remote for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad before ThinkFlood makes an announcement: They’re in disguise.

This RedEye mini, which looks drastically different from the original RedEye, was concealed in a custom-molded enclosure, so it could be carried public without attracting attention. When not in use, you would think it was just a standard RedEye base station. Very clever.

The plastic case, which comes apart easily, looks just like the original RedEye base station. When you pry the case apart, you quickly realize that what you thought was a RedEye remote, doesn’t even have a circuit board. And then you see it clearly—the elusive, much-anticipated RedEye mini is lurking in the shadows.

To reassemble the case, all you have to do is place the RedEye mini inside bottom of the acrylic RedEye enclosure before popping the top back on. An ingenious solution to protect future designs from lookeyloos.

One of the best bits is that the case looks like the enclosure FOR the original RedEye base station. RedEye remote hardware is seen so often, that even though this one looks a little weird because the power supply and dock connector are missing, it wouldn’t normally attract any attention in the field.

In fact, if ThinkFlood developer Justin Nguyen had not accidentally lost his RedEye mini at Watch City Brewing on May 25/26, the whole scene would have easily been dismissed as just another oddball-waltham-software-developer who didn’t want to go home fore the evening without his favorite Linux server in tow.

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The Complete Lost RedEye mini Saga:

• This is ThinkFlood’s next iPhone, iPad, iPod touch remote—RedEye mini
• How ThinkFlood lost the RedEye mini
• How ThinkFlood conceals prototype RedEye minis

Watch City Brewing Company. A nice place to enjoy good Waltham craft beers. And if you’re a ThinkFlood software engineer named Justin Nguyen, it’s also a nice place to make the honest mistake of losing the next product in ThinkFlood’s line of universal remotes for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad—RedEye mini.

Justin Nguyen—a Northeastern University 2009 graduate and movie trivia master—is a ThinkFlood software engineer working on the RedEye app, the little program turns the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad into a high-end universal remote, when combined with RedEye hardware. A dream job for a talented engineer like Nguyen who always wanted to work at a hip, young company like ThinkFlood.

On the night of May 25, he was enjoying the fine house beverages at Watch City Brewing Company, a legendary brewpub in silicon savvy Waltham, Massachusetts. He was happy. After all it was his birthday. He was turning 24 that very same day and he was celebrating. The place was great. The beer was excellent. “I underestimated how good Waltham beer is,” he typed into the iPhone he was using to test RedEye mini hardware in the field. The RedEye mini he was testing earlier that evening sat beside him, cleverly disguised as ThinkFlood’s original RedEye remote. It was the last Facebook update made by Nguyen while he still knew the whereabouts of the secret universal remote adapter, right before he abandoned it on a bar stool, leaving to go home.

It was a simple, honest mistake in the middle of celebration. Something that anyone from Matt Eagar to Adam Shapiro could have done. Knowing how ferocious and ruthless ThinkFlood is about product leaks, those beers may have turned out to be the bitterest of his life.

(Almost) Impenetrable Security

Until now, ThinkFlood’s legendary security had always worked perfectly. Perhaps there was a blurry factory photo here, or some last-minute information strategically whispered to some friendly media there. But when it came to the big stuff, everything was airtight.

At their Waltham campus, any gadget or computer that is worth protecting is behind armored doors, with security locks with codes that change every few minutes. Prototypes are bolted to desks. Hidden in these labs, hardware, software and industrial-design elves toil separately on the same devices, without really having the complete picture of the final product.

And lurking in every corner, the ThinkFlood secret police, a team of people with a single mission: To make sure nobody speaks. And if there’s a leak, hunt down the traitor and escourt him out of the building. Using lockdowns and other fear tactics, these men in black are the last line of defense against any sneaky eyes. The Gran Jefe Matt Eagar trusts them to avoid ThinkFlood’s worst nightmare: The leak of a strategic product that could cost them millions of dollars in free marketing promotion. One that would make them lose control of the product news cycle.

But the fact is that there’s no perfect security. Not when humans are involved. Humans can lose things. You know, like the next RedEye remote, the portable RedEye mini.

Lost and Found
ThinkFlood security’s mighty walls fell (on the midnight of ) Wednesday, May 26. At that time, Nguyen was at Watch City Brewing, just 2.5 miles from the company’s Bear Hill Road headquarters, having his fun. Around him, other groups of people were sharing the jolly atmosphere, and plenty of the golden liquid.

The person who eventually ended up with the lost RedEye mini  was sitting next to Nguyen. He was drinking with a friend too. He noticed Nguyen on the stool next to him, but didn’t think twice about him at the time. Not until Nguyen had already left the bar, and a random really drunk guy—who’d been sitting on the other side of Nguyen—returned from the bathroom to his own stool.

The Random Really Drunk Guy pointed at the RedEye mini disguised as the original RedEye remote that was sitting on the stool, the precious prototype left by the young ThinkFlood engineer.

“Hey man, is that your RedEye base station?” asked Random Really Drunk Guy.

“Hmmm, what?” replied the person who ended up with the RedEye mini.

“No, no, it isn’t mine.”

“Ooooh, I guess it’s your friend’s then,” referring to a friend who at the time was in the bathroom.

“Here, take it,” said the Random Really Drunk Guy, handing it to him. “You don’t want to lose it.” After that, the Random Really Drunk Guy also left the bar.

The person who ended up with the RedEye mini asked around, but nobody claimed it. He thought about the young guy sitting next to him, so he and his friend stayed there for some time, waiting. Nguyen never came back.

Thinking about returning the Wi-Fi-to-infrared bridge the next day, he left.

When he got home, he downloaded the RedEye app to his iPhone and tried to play with the networked universal remote. I was buzzed and exhausted, so after trying to get it working for two minutes or so, I gave up and went to bed,” he told me in a telephone interview.

He had no clue that something was amiss. “It seemed like normal RedEye hardware,” he said. “It looked just like one—except I was confused because it seemed like the device’s owner was controlling bar TVs with it earlier in the evening, despite the fact that it had no power supply. I reasoned that maybe he took the AC adapter home with him and accidentally left the rest of it behind.”

When he woke up after the hazy night, he took a look at what he had carried home the night before. He immediately realized that there was something very strange about this RedEye.

At first it didn’t appear to have any special features, just a sticker that read, “JN’s Rm,” in the spot where you would normally find the device’s serial number, MAC address, FCC ID, and IC ID. All of the usual hardware identification numbers had been scratched off.

He already knew that the power cord was missing, but it was more than that. The 30-pin dock connector was gone too. He picked up the device and was stunned by what he hadn’t noticed in the crowded brewpub: something inside the base station was loose and rattling around.

He held the RedEye hardware up in the morning sunlight and finally saw that there was something other than a circuit board inside. After tinkering with it, he managed to open the fake RedEye base station.

There it was, a tiny and glorious thing, completely different from everything that came before. He immediately started Googling for the “JN” from ThinkFlood, who was sitting next to him the night before. Several minutes later he found a picture of ThinkFlood developer Justin Nguyen.

He reached for a phone and called a lot of ThinkFlood numbers and tried to find someone who was at least willing to transfer his call to Nguyen, but no luck. The company had recently relieved him of his occasional telephone duties so he could focus on finishing code for the in-app TV guide, that would soon be free for all RedEye remote users in the US and Canada.

He thought that eventually Nguyen would check his voicemail, and that he would receive a call back, but his phone never rang. The receptionists at ThinkFlood, who were unaware of the missing RedEye mini, thought the calls were part of an elaborate prank by ThinkFlood’s competitors (who often call to feel around for unpublished company and product information). Not to mention the fact that the caller’s tale was nearly identical to Gizmodo’s Lost iPhone Saga.

He thought that eventually the ticket would move up high enough that he would receive a call back, but his phone never rang. What should he be expected to do then? Walk into a retailer that sells the original RedEye system and hand the RedEye mini to a 20-year-old who might just end up selling it on eBay?

The Aftermath
Two days later, MoreControl.com got it for $100 in rolled quarters and a king size box of Swedish Fish. At the time, we didn’t know if it was the real thing because the RedEye mini didn’t work with the version of the RedEye app currently in the App Store (and all RedEye hardware is supposed to work with a single app).

Once we saw it inside and out, however, there was no doubt about it. It was the real thing, so we started to work on documenting it before returning it to ThinkFlood. We had the portable universal remote hardware, but we didn’t know the owner. Later, we heard the whole story, but we didn’t know for sure that it was Nguyen’s RedEye mini until today, when we finally tricked a receptionist at ThinkFlood to transferring our call.

Justin Nguyen: Hello?

Steve MacKinnon: Is this Justin?

J: Yeah.

S: Hi, this is Steve MacKinnon from MoreControl.com.

J: Hey!

S: You work at ThinkFlood, right?

J: Um, I mean I can’t really talk too much right now.

S: I understand. We have a device, and we think that maybe you misplaced it at a bar, and we would like to give it back.

J: Yeah, I forwarded your email [asking him if it was his RedEye mini], someone should be contacting you.

S: OK.

J: Can I send this phone number along?

S: [Contact information]

He sounded tired and broken. But at least he’s alive, and apparently still working at ThinkFlood—as he should be. After all, it’s just a stupid, little universal remote dongle for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, and mistakes can happen to everyone—Justin Nguyen, Gray Powell, Phil Schiller, you, me, and Steve Jobs.

The only real mistake would be to fire Justin Nguyen in the name of ThinkFlood’s legendary impenetrable security, breached by the power of locally brewed beer beer and one single human error.

The Complete Lost RedEye mini Saga:

• This is ThinkFlood’s next iPhone, iPad, iPod touch remote—RedEye mini
• How ThinkFlood lost the RedEye mini
• How ThinkFlood conceals prototype RedEye minis

Immediately after I finished writing about Verizon’s remote control and DVR Manager apps, Comcast started talking about their Xfinity Remote prototype for the iPad. Good timing.

The app was demoed by CEO Brian Roberts at the Cable Show 2010 (see video below), and honestly, I was pretty impressed with what it had to offer. It looks like the app makes effective use of the iPad’s large user interface, which seems to be fairly uncommon among many iPad apps we’ve seen so far. Although, this is tough to judge until you get your hands on the app yourself.  The remote app also implements some useful features – most notably the attractive, searchable channel guide and the ability to invite a friend to watch a show “with you.”

The Xfinity Remote works by sending a signal via Wi-Fi to a Comcast server that responds by telling your Xfinity box to perform the desired action. It’s a web-based app, so it should work on any device with a compatible browser (iPhone, Android, etc.) Although this seems like a great app, it lacks the ability to control any additional devices you have in your setup.

Both the RedEye and the soon-to-come RedEye Mini control your devices by emitting infrared signals. This gives you a significant advantage over the Xfinity Remote because it allows you to control not only your Xfinity box, but also any additional IR devices you have in your setup. And to make your RedEye experience even more enjoyable, the next software update is going to add a channel guide into the RedEye app (it will be released in roughly two weeks.)

The Dillinger Escape Plan is giving out 2,000 TV-B-Gone universal remotes with its upcoming album. Watch the anarchy unfold...

Hardcore (-ish) band The Dillinger Escape Plan recently announced that it will include a television quashing universal remote in limited edition box sets of its upcoming album, “Option Paralysis,” on sale March 22.

The band appears to be encouraging its fans to, “Be Here Now,” by arming them with the TV-B-Gone.

The TV-B-Gone is stripped-down universal remote that only controls one function, power. While it can turn almost any television on or off, The Dillinger Escape Plan only appears to encourage using the TV-B-Gone to shut down blaring televisions that are on for no particular reason.

How does it work? When you push the only button on the TV-B-Gone remote, it sends out a sequence of infrared power codes for nearly every television imaginable.

Users will find that 90% of televisions will turn off within 17 seconds of pushing the power button. It takes 69 seconds for the remote to cycle through all of its power codes; fortunately the device emits codes for the most popular televisions first.

Check out TV-B-Gone’s website for a hilarious collection of customer testimonials. Here’s an excerpt from one of my favorites:  “I can’t wait for the next time I go to my doctor’s office so I can turn off the continuous pharmaceutical ad video that runs in his waiting room. “

Dillinger has tour dates scheduled all over the world between now and mid-August; no region is safe. Watch out for unruly, remote-toting fans. I’m picturing Gizmodo’s TV-B-Gone hijinks at CES 2008, but on a much larger scale…

Call me old fashioned, but I still don’t get this whole gesture control movement that is being adopted for TV’s and other devices.  I get the use of it in video games — it’s more fun playing tennis in a video game when you get to at least swing something instead of just pressing a button.  There is that associated action of swinging your arm and playing tennis.  The problem is, I don’t have any motion or movement that I would like to associate with TV viewing.  Like what’s the thumb’s up gesture associated with? What was the hand wave for page up again?

This doesn’t seem to phase Microsoft and their Project Natal for the X-Box 360.  Yeah, I know Project Natal is originally for playing games but some recent talk from Microsoft shows that they are extremely interested in using Natal as a complete input for your home theater.  Granted they also want you to run that entire theater through an X-Box 360 of course.  With services like SkyTV and Netflix they want to provide all of your media content which you could control via your Natal, or Project Natal, or whatever it will actually be called.

Having your media content centralized in a single place is awesome, I love my XMBC setup but I don’t feel I need any special way to interact with it except for my remote control.  Now to be fair, Microsoft is actually touting the facial recognition and voice recognition as the main way to control your media via Natal, but do I really need a 360 and Natal for that?  The facial recognition is nice since everyone one has different tastes and you can have custom content for each user.  The voice recognition on the other hand, isn’t too special.  My Macbook has been able to recognize voice commands for a few years now, if I wanted to I could easily set all that up myself.  In fact that is a good idea, I think I’ll go do that now.

• iPhone controlled R/C Car
• An actual Oldsmobile
• Dance lights
• A minivan (2007)
• R2D2
• Dog feeders
• Military Drones
• A helicopter

What next? How about a bi-pedal walking robot named Walky.  The robot and controller were developed by a group of grad students from Keio University in Japan. Video after the break.

Walky understands a set of touch gestures that allow him to walk, jump, and kick.  Apparently they had attempted other methods of control like a PS3 Controller unsuccessfully and had settled on the iPhone. The touchscreen is more intuitive than a joystick since you can simulate walking using two fingers — remember the old Yellow Pages ads? Walky is pretty simple, but still seems well made and I like how they have broken the mold here with iPhone gestures.

No offense to Motorola, Verizon, or their Droid commercials, but this doesn’t seem like a very closed development system to me. Yeah, it’s true that the App store requires some approval, but that doesn’t seem to be discouraging too many people. The iPhone SDK is well thought-out and by far the easiest mobile development platform out there. Period. Plenty of people are using it to develop for reasons other then making money in the App store, including academic and scientific pursuits such as this one. I’m not going to be looking for the Walky Robot app on iTunes, but it’s nice to know that I could develop something like this if I wanted to.

I’ve seen a few cars being driven by the iPhone, that’s cool and all, but the guys from Mythbusters have basically been doing that for years.  Starting your car with the iPhone makes sense, but driving hands free?  The people from Engineer Awesome, which is a part of Waterloo Labs at National Instruments, make it clear… why drive inside of a car when the outside looks so much more fun?

Weather it is called Redneck Surfing or Ghost Riding, it’s most certainly dangerous (i.e., don’t do this at home), but for the sake of science and engineering it’s pretty cool.  The system is pretty simple, though they destroyed the in the process (seeing how it’s an Olds ‘88 I doubt anyone will cry over that).  I’d like to see someone try this out on a Ferrari, although they should wear football pads.

People continue to find some pretty random uses for iPhone, not to mention the 100,000 apps that are already out there, but there are still quite a few more things we’d like to see come out for the iPhone.  At least we can cross ghost riding off that list now.

Bowling can be pretty frustrating — unless you have those awesome bumpers we used at my 5th birthday party.   I’ve always wanted to bowl a perfect game like Mort Goldman, but to be honest I think the LHC has a better chance of actually getting started first. Until now. With the RC900, a remote control bowling ball from 900 Global I could cheat my way there.

The RC900 uses internal mechanism to control the direction the ball rolls. For those who like to roll in style, it also has flashing lights.  Of course you have to charge a battery in the ball, but if that wears you out, you can launch it from from a ramp instead of getting up out of your seat.

Normally we’re pretty big on remote controlled gadgets, but the RC900 just takes the fun out of the game.  Still, if your an amateur and your goal is roll a 300, then the RC900 may be right up your alley.

P.S.  Holding back on the Big Lebowski jokes thanks to Gizmodo…

Bet you didn’t even think there were ten songs about remote controls. Well, rest assured, we’ve searched high and low to bring you the ten best (only?) songs exclusively about man’s other best friend: the remote control.

Neil Patrick Harris “Put Down the Remote”

The Reddings “Remote Control”

Melanie Gerren “Remote Control”

Eric Avery “All Remote and No Control”

Jazzy “Remote Control Me”

Age of Electric “Remote Control”

Camel “Remote Romance”

R. Kelly “Remote Control”

The Clash “Remote Control”

The Beastie Boys “Remote Control”

A little more like KITT: TV screens come to the connected car

Soon, Glen Beck can drive you crazy… all the way home. Chrysler has just announced it’s plans to integrate a live TV service that will surely turn us all into mindless, drooling media-hungry zombies make your daily commute a little less boring.

Starting in December, Chrysler will be offering its new Flo TV service for $625 — plus installation. Just imagine: paid advertisements filling the calm of your car with all the oatmeal and free credit report commercials you can take. Why, it’ll be almost as fun as, well… your morning commute, I suppose.

Boasting national coverage and including cable networks like CBS, NBC, CNN, Comedy Central, ESPN, FOX, MSNBC, MTV, and Nickelodeon, it seems we are one step closer to physically cruising along the information highway.

Seeing that many states have banned texting while driving, I’ll be curious to see how channel surfing is any less threatening (though the actual viewing screens will remain behind the driver). And with claims like “For endless entertainment, all you have to remember is where you put the keys,” it sure makes me lose a little bit of faith in humanity as a whole. But hey, it’s got a remote control!