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If you haven't already heard, wireless charging is all the rage -- cars, cameras, and, of course, cellphoneshave all benefited from the burgeoning technology. Now a team of researchers at Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) are showing off a 2D power transmission system that could turn your pockets into wireless charging stations. According to its creators, "When a 2.4GHz high frequency signal is transmitted through the sheet, it becomes a wireless conductive object." Electromagnetic waves are captured in the sheet and can be concentrated in particular areas, allowing for individual activation of multiple devices, and thus increasing efficiency -- systems like Qi currently require a dedicated transmitter per device. The NICT says the power it provides is still relatively weak -- about 1W -- but it has plans to eventually bring the technology to soft fabrics. So maybe that Snuggie charging station you've been dreaming o...

Jealous of your Nexus S-owning friends and their fancy NFC chips after yesterday's Google Walletannouncement? Well tech tinkerer Joe Desbonnet has whipped up what he dubs "poor man's NFC" using an Arduino, some magnet wire, and any compass-equipped Android smartphone (which is almost all of them). By placing a coil of wire on the phone and connecting it to the DIYer's favorite microcontroller, Desbonnet was able to send data, albeit very slowly, to his HTC Desire running a special app to decode the signals. Granted, you're probably not going to see American Eagle mod their point of sale systems to talk to your phone's magnetometer, but it's still a neat trick. In fact, we'd break out our Arduino right now to give it a try, but our secret lair is strangely devoid of enameled copper wire. Check out the source link for instructions, and don't miss the video after the break. Random Tech Stuff

There's a pretty widespread outage of Skype going on right this minute, judging by the explosion of tweets relating to it. It's not universal, as we've been able to log in and use the internet communicator for both text and video chat, but something's definitely gone wrong. So far, we've noticed our OS X machines are ticking along just fine, but our Windows computers are not. Importantly, we had to upgrade one of our Windows desktops to "break" Skype, which indicates it could be a fault contained in the latest version, but then again, it could have simply been just a case of terrible timing. The iPhone andAndroid apps look to be unaffected, but skype.com is down and out. Skype is on the case right now and will have more details for us "soon." Update:  Skype has a solution for bringing tech savvy users back online. It requires deleting the shared.xml file, instructions for which are available for Windows 7, XP and Mac OS X (so yes, Apple compu...

There's been rumors of a Google-fied mobile payment system for some time, and now it looks like the Mountain View crew is teaming up with Sprint to finally make it happen. Last month, we heard that the Now Network would bring NFC payments to its customers this year, and  Bloomberg  reports that the partnership and payment system will make its debut on May 26th. Apparently, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington D.C. are the first cities getting the service, which is a much broader initial footprint than its Isis mobile payment competition. The anonymous sources also say that Verifone and Vivotech are providing the hardware and software that will let you replace your credit card with a Nexus S -- because you  always  wanted to replace your credit card with your Nexus S. Update:  According to  All things D , the payment system will be put through its paces by none other than El Goog's Exec...

You've got to hand it to Tokyo's University of Electro-Communications, the school's researchers have presented some truly unique methods for interfacing with our electronics -- fake finger sliding, a head-mounted video display, a thing that makes it feel like you've got insects on your palm, and, of course, the old kissing machine. A few recent inventions have expanded the latter trend, giving us creative new ways of getting intimate with our machines. There's the tickle interface, for one, which beams images from a connected smartphone creating the illusion that the person on the other end is tickling your palm -- made all the more real by tactile vibration hooked up to the rear of the device. And then there's the older, oddly-named Sense-Roid, sort of a clunkier version of the Hug Shirt, which, among other things, lets you "hug yourself." Both are demonstrated in a pair of videos after the break. Whatever you do, don't miss the second one. ...

It was pretty much known about since last night, but Microsoft and Skype have now obliterated any lingering doubt in the matter: the Redmond-based software giant will acquire the internet telephony company for a cool $8.5 billion in cash. Xbox and Kinect support are explicitly mentioned in the announcement of this definitive agreement, as is Windows Phone integration -- both the gaming and mobile aspects being presumably key incentives for Microsoft to acquire Skype. Importantly, this purchase shouldn't affect Skypers outside of the Microsoft ecosystem, as Steve Ballmer's team promises to continue "to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms." Skype was first sold for a relative bargain at $2.5b to eBay in 2005, who in turn sold most of it off to Silver Lake in 2009 at an overall valuation of $2.75b, and now Redmond is concluding proceedings by tripling those earlier prices and offering Skype a permanent home. A new Microsoft Skype Division will...

No matter how hard Skype and others try to convince us otherwise, we still do most of our web communications via text or, if entirely unavoidable, by voice. Maybe we're luddites or maybe video calling has yet to prove its value. Hoping to reverse such archaic views, researchers at the MIT Media Lab have harnessed a Kinect's powers of depth and human perception to provide some newfangled videoconferencing functionality. First up, you can blur out everything on screen but the speaker to keep focus where it needs to be. Then, if you want to get fancier, you can freeze a frame of yourself in the still-moving video feed for when you need to do something off-camera, and to finish things off, you can even drop some 3D-aware augmented reality on your viewers. It's all a little unrefined at the moment, but the ideas are there and well worth seeing. Jump past the break to do just that. Kinected Conference (MIT Media Lab)