Used treadmill belts are the latest material to get the iPad green accessory treatment by Seattle’s bag manufacturer, Upcycled Goods. The product is handmade, and if you are already turning to tech products like  Fitbit for your daily exercise, you might as well be recycling your old treadmill belt into these awesome rubber sleeves. Here is a great video of Upcycled Good’s hand production process where they use USA-made felt liners to create a soft surface for your iPad.

These durable, handmade sleeves are pretty affordable at $35. There’s no online shop for now, so you’ll have to contact them personally about these gems. For now, their Facebook page is a great way to keep up with the latest goods.

Via Inhabitat

Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz led “a $15M Series A investment” into FiftyThree, the company that created the bestselling Paper iPad app.

Investor Chris Dixon explained in a blog post:

Paper has been embraced by millions of everyday creators, and has won dozens of awards (including Apple’s App of the Year). It is also one of the top grossing iPad productivity apps ever. But this is only the beginning of FiftyThree’s ambitious plans … FiftyThree didn’t need to raise money, but decided that the opportunity was so large that it made sense to accelerate their efforts with additional capital and resources. They’ll be expanding their engineering teams in New York and Seattle, and will broaden their offerings across software, services, and hardware.

If you have an iPhone, you’ve discovered that the mute button doesn’t actually mute all sounds – and that’s annoying. To deal with iPhones and their inconsistent audio behavior, Ron Adair created the Mutator, a small plug that connects to the iPhone via the headphone jack. The Mutator assures that all of the sounds from all of the apps are silenced. The end.

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The Air Force is hoping to lighten its paper usage with 18,000 iPads over the next ten years. The cost savings could bring in as much as $50 million in revenue, some of its as reduced fuel costs. Currently, paper manuals can weigh as much as 30-40 pounds of paper for each crew member. This number jumps to 490 pounds of paper for a C-5 with 10 crew members.

In an interview on The Street, Major Brian Moritz explains the fuel savings:

By removing all that paper, AMC will capture about $750,000 in fuel savings [annually] just based off the decreased weight Read more

Catching a foul ball can be the apex of a fun and exciting softball game… unless you are using your face. That’s nearly what happened to a lucky spectator who was using his iPad to record the game. Being such a good sport, he continued undeterred after a foul ball slammed into his tablet.

We have already shared a story about an iPad surviving hammer blows after lodging itself into the bumper of a car, but this video actually captures the foul ball incident. Tablets are resilient, but don’t try this at home.

Click here to view the video. Read more

Atlanta driver Alexa Crisa found a stranger’s iPad wedged so deep into her car’s bumper she had to use a hammer to remove the Apple device. The 23 year old driver said she was cruising at 40 mph when she saw something left the top of another vehicle, but decided it was safe to continue when she did not run over anything.

Surprisingly, the iPad was able to withstand the collision and subsequent hammering by Crisa’s dad. They were able to turn on the iPad to trace the owner who was able to get a new tablet through Apple’s extended warranty plan. He also offered to pay for a new bumper for the unlucky driver.

Via WSBTV

Los Angeles’s Mount Sinai Hospital is using iPads to provide mothers with Face Time for mothers of newborns in Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Mothers separated from their newborns are unable to bond immediately after delivery, but the hospital’s new digital communication system, called Baby Talk, allows mothers to see their child and have bonding time when they are unable to be physically together due to medical complications.

Charles F. Simmons Jr., MD, chair of the Cedars-Sinai Department of Pediatrics, states that:

BabyTime will help bridge communication with the family and the baby’s medical team and is an excellent use of technology to help new mothers bond with their babies, even when they cannot be physically at their babies’ bedside. When doctors and nurses are treating a newborn in the NICU, mom can be right there asking questions and getting updates, even if she’s on a different floor.

Each child placed in the NICU receives a bedside iPad along with mom who can log in twice each day to see her newborn.

Apple is no longer alone in the tablet business. Faced with competition, the company is tapping into iPad-love for its new marketing effort which aims to attract new customers.

iPad owners are passionate about their devices and Apple wants to get that message across to potential owners. To do so, the company has introduced a new page on its website titled, “Why you’ll love an iPad.”

Apple boasts on the page: “When iPad was introduced, there was nothing quite like it. And there still isn’t. Today millions of people are using iPad and iPad mini to do just about anything you can imagine. Here are a few reasons why they’re loving every minute of it.”

The page highlights all of the features of the device and points to a study by J.D. Power and Associates, in which Apple ranked “Highest in Customer Satisfaction Among Tablets.” (Via Apple Insider).

For the accessory-curious such as myself, ogling at weird and bizarre objects is just as entertaining as searching for useful apps. Today’s top five list is an examination into the strange world of smartphone accessories that reveal just how many different types of users exists.

1. iPhone Cup Holder: If you are like me, putting down a coffee cup to send a text or make a call is no big deal, but perhaps others wish to text and sip simultaneously?

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A computer hacker has been sentenced to three years of jail for hacking into AT&T’s database and exposing the email addresses of more than 100,000 iPad owners including New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and film producer Harvey Weinstein.

The Chicago Tribune has the story: “Andrew Auernheimer, 27, had been convicted in November by a Newark, N.J., jury of one count of conspiracy to access AT&T Inc. servers without permission and one count of identity theft.”

Auernheimer’s group, which went under the name Goatse Security, shared the leaked data with the media blog Gawker, which broke the story. Gawker explained how the hackers got in:

Goatse Security obtained its data through a script on AT&T’s website, accessible to anyone on the internet. When provided with an ICC-ID as part of an HTTP request, the script would return the associated email address, in what was apparently intended to be an AJAX-style response within a Web application.