Latest Technologies In The World

Facebook Blocks Friend Exporter

2011-07-05T09:41:00.000-07:00

A Chrome extension called Facebook Friend Exporter that lets you grab all the information about your Facebook friends so you can import them elsewhere has been in the Chrome Web Store since last year. Interestingly, it became popular just a few weeks ago (you know why), and Facebook has decided to block it for obvious reason.

With the rise of Facebook, the world witnessed the biggest migration of recent times. In case you are wondering, it was from Orkut to FB. Later, Google tried to get its Orkutians back from FB land with the help of Buzz, but failed miserably. However, the company is striking at Facebook yet again with its new service called Google+, and this time it has managed to create a lot of interest among enthusiasts. Finally, something to worry the mighty Facebook. Since the Chrome extension was making it easy for users to pack their bags and leave, Facebook decided to block it.

In response, the developer has posted the following message on the extension's page:

"Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by today July 5th 2011. It will no longer work for many people. New version with a different design is currently deploying. You might have to do exports daily. It uses a different approach, and I will maintain this version. Just bear with me".

The developer seems very angry over FB's move, but if you check the website's terms, you can clearly see that Facebook Friend Exporter technically violates FB s Terms of Service, which states the following:

"You will not collect users content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission".

Only time will tell whether Google+ can really dethrone FB. Till then, it will be fun to observe the two internet giants take cracks at each other.

Google Plus features and specialties: a Facebook rival is born

2011-07-03T10:19:00.000-07:00

Web search giant Google is about to publicly launch its new social networking site Google Plus to compete with Facebook, the world leader in social networking. Will new Google social networking experiment beat Facebook?

Google has tasted repeated failures with its previous social networking efforts like Orkut and Buzz.

Google announced its new product on its official blog. Google+ is expected to feature competitive status updates, photo and video sharing options like Facebook. The platform will highlight a special feature for connections called Circles.

It will help you categorize your friends like intimate friends, relatives, family members and many others in simple manner.

According to Google, there will be several similar groundbreaking features with its ‘plus’ social networking site, which is now available only for few people for testing. The company is expected to soon unveil it publicly. As per reports, it looks like that if you are a Google lover, you will certainly move from Facebook to Google+.

However, several skeptics are doubtful of the success of Google+ in a time Facebook stands atop with massive popularity. Many analysts have stated that people will think why they needed to shift from Facebook to Google+ since most of their friends are attached with the latter platform.

Let us wait and see what happens with Google+. Being an online leader, it is necessary for Google not to stay back from the social networking, where most of Internet users hang about these days. Google will never be satisfied with the overwhelming popularity of Facebook.

Facebook Develops New “Awesome” Update

2011-07-03T10:16:00.000-07:00

Facebook’s creator and owner Mark Zuckerberg has announced that on the 6th of July, Facebook will be release a new update consisting of “something awesome” developed by his Seattle team. That little something has turned out to be a brand-new update for Facebook users. Friday, Facebook sent out invitations for an event due to be held at Facebook’s Paolo Alto base of operations on the same day.

NEW YORK: Social networking site Facebook is planning to launch a video chat function next week for its millions of users in association with Skype, says a report.

"Facebook will launch a new video chat product, powered by Skype, that works in browser," technology blog TechCrunch said citing a source.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last week tipped off press that the company would be launching an "awesome" new product next week that has been built by Facebook's Seattle team.

However, the press invitations to the event did not disclose anything more than "please join us for an event at Facebook on July 6."

The partnership could substantially increase Skype usage, which currently has 170 million users.

In addition, the move would "certainly help Facebook become even stickier for users as they start to have voice and video chat as an option to communicate." It has more than 750 million active users.

The report said that product has been built on Skype and will include a desktop component.

However, it's not clear whether it will work if a user has already installed Skype on the computer, or if additional software will need to be downloaded even if the user already uses Skype.

The social networking site has been introducing various services in order to capture more online users. For instance, it has launched a new payment system -- Facebook Credit -- in India.

Acoustic 'cloaking device' shields objects from sound

2011-06-26T03:08:00.000-07:00

Scientists have shown off a "cloaking device" that makes objects invisible - to sound waves.

Such acoustic cloaking was proposed theoretically in 2008 but has only this year been put into practice.

Described in Physical Review Letters, the approach borrows many ideas from attempts to "cloak" objects from light.

It uses simple plastic sheets with arrays of holes, and could be put to use in making ships invisible to sonar or in acoustic design of concert halls.

Much research has been undertaken toward creating Harry Potter-style "invisibility cloaks" since the feasibility of the idea was first put forward in 2006.

Those approaches are mostly based on so-called metamaterials, man-made materials with properties that do not occur in nature. The metamaterials are designed such that they force light waves to travel around an object; to an observer, it is as if the object were not there.

But researchers quickly found out that the mathematics behind bending these light waves, called transformation optics, could also be applied to sound waves.

"Fundamentally, in terms of hiding objects, it's the same - how anything is sensed is with some kind of wave and you either hear or see the effect of it," said Steven Cummer of Duke University. "But when it comes to building the materials, things are very different between acoustics and electromagnetics.

"The thing you need to engineer into the materials is very different behaviour in different directions that the wave travels through it," he told BBC News.

In 2008, Dr Cummer first described the theory of acoustic cloaking in an article in Physical Review Letters, and earlier this year a group from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign demonstrated the first practical use of the theory in an article in the same journal.

That work showed acoustic invisibility in a shallow layer of water, at ultrasound frequencies above those we can hear.

Now, Dr Cummer and his colleagues have shown off an acoustic cloaking technique that works in air, for audible frequencies between one and four kilohertz - corresponding to two octaves on the higher half of a piano.

The cloaking shell is made of easily-manufactured sheets of plastic with holes through them

It works by using stacked sheets of plastic with regular arrays of holes through them. The exact size and placement of the holes on each sheet, and the spacing between the sheets, has a predictable effect on incoming sound waves.

When placed on a flat surface, the stack redirects the waves such that reflected waves are exactly as they would be if the stack were not there at all.

That means that an object under the stack - in the team's experiments, a block of wood about 10cm long - would not "hear" the sound, and any attempts to locate the object using sound waves would not find it.

"How the sound reflects off this reflecting surface with this composite object on it - which is pretty big and has a cloaking shell on it - really reflects... just like a flat surface does," Dr Cummer said.

Hole poking

Ortwin Hess, a director of Imperial College London's Centre for Plasmonics and Metamaterials, called the work "a really remarkable experimental demonstration".

"It shows very nicely that although acoustic and electromagnetic waves are very different in nature, the powers of transformation optics and transformation acoustics are [similar] - I'm quite pleased that there's activity on both ends."

Professor Hess pointed out that the demonstration was for very directed sound waves, and only in two dimensions, but the most notable aspect of the approach was its simplicity.

"It's almost like someone could take a pencil and poke holes in a particular way in the plastic," he told BBC News.

"It's a bit more challenging for three dimensions. I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be possible but it won't be just an afternoon's work."

The work shows that an object can be hidden from sonar, and protected from incoming sound, but the same principles could be applied in the other direction - that is, containing or directing the sound within a space, for instance in soundproofing a studio or fine-tuning the acoustics of a concert hall.

Apple Sues Samsung For copying its designs on Galaxy Products

2011-04-20T04:03:00.000-07:00

Apple sued Samsung Electronics claiming the South Korean firm's Galaxy line of mobile phones and tablets "slavishly" copies the iPhone and iPad, according to court papers, a move analysts say is aimed at keeping its close rivals at bay.

Apple is one participant in a web of litigation among phone makers and software firms over who owns the patents used in smartphones, as rivals aggressively rush into the smartphone and tablet market which the US firm jumpstarted with iPhone and iPad.

Nokia and Apple have sued each other in numerous courts and as recently as last month Nokia filed a complaint with the US trade panel alleging that Apple infringes its patents in iPhones, iPads and other products.

Samsung is one of the fastest growing smartphone makers and has emerged as Apple's strongest competitor in the booming tablet market with models in three sizes but it remains a distant second in the space.

"If Apple fails to fend off Android, it will within a year or two find itself in a situation like Research in Motion, even if at a higher level (initially)," said Florian Mueller, a technology specialist and blogger on patent battles.

"Apple has realised this already as its new lawsuit against Samsung shows, but given what's at stake, I think Apple would have to do much more than this. It would have to sue more Android device makers and over more patents."

Samsung's Galaxy products use Google's Android operating system, which directly competes with Apple's mobile software. However, Apple's claims against Samsung focus on Galaxy's design features, such as the look of its screen icons, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday, alleges Samsung violated Apple's patents and trademarks.
"This kind of blatant copying is wrong," Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said in a statement.

Apple is bringing 16 claims against Samsung, including unjust enrichment, trademark infringement and 10 patent claims.

"...Samsung has made its Galaxy phones and computer tablet work and look like Apple's products through widespread patent and trade dress infringement... By this action, Apple seeks to put a stop to Samsung's illegal conduct and obtain compensation for the violations that have occurred thus far," Apple said in the court document.

Samsung said it would respond to the legal action "through appropriate legal measures to protect our intellectual property."

"Samsung's development of core technologies and strengthening our intellectual property portfolio are keys to our continued success," it said in a statement.

Samsung faces the challenge of moving beyond being a hardware company, clever at copying ideas, to becoming more creative, better adept at software, at a time when consumer gadgets are getting smarter all the time.

It has yet to come up with the kind of original, iconic, market-leading products that powered brands such as Apple's i-series or Sony Corp's Walkman. Nor has it taken the kind of initiatives in software that Google and Apple did to thwart Microsoft.

FORMIDABLE RIVAL

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has criticised Samsung and other rivals in presentations of new products or technology debates. Analysts say Samsung's response to this has been muted, partly because Apple was Samsung's second-biggest customer last year after Sony.

Apple brought in around 6.2 trillion won ($5.7 billion) of sales to Samsung in 2010 mainly by purchasing semiconductors, according to Samsung's annual report.

John Jackson, an analyst with CCS Insight, said Samsung is essentially Apple's only real tablet competitor at this stage. "It's clear that they do not intend to let Apple run away with the category," Jackson said.

"This is more like a symbolic move by Apple that it is quite serious about rivals advancing and it is trying to hold back its close competitors," said John Park, an analyst at Daishin Securities in Seoul.

"Samsung is unlikely to respond aggressively given that Apple is its core client in the component business," Park said.

To better compete with Apple, Samsung redesigned within weeks its new 10.1-inch tablet, first introduced in February, to make it the thinnest in the category after Apple set the trend with its iPad 2.

The global smartphone market is expected to grow 58 per cent this year and Android is set account for 39 per cent of the market, while the tablet market is likely to quadruple to 70 million units, according to research firm Gartner.

Apple's iPad will still dominate, controlling more than half of the tablet market for the next three years, but its share is seen gradually declining to 47 per cent in 2015 from 69 per cent this year, giving way to Android devices.

4G ? New Verizon phone for $250.

2011-03-15T22:34:00.000-07:00

NEW YORK -- Verizon said Tuesday that its first 4G smartphone, the HTC ThunderBolt, will be available in stores and online starting March 17 for $249.99 with a two-year contract.

It was a long awaited announcement, as the ThunderBolt will be the first phone to take advantage of Verizon's 4G LTE network -- which offers download speeds of 5 to 12Mbps and upload speeds of 2 to 5Mbps.
But the ThunderBolt's $250 price point is higher than most other smartphones, which typically debut at $199 -- including the new Verizon iPhone.

The ThunderBolt runs on Google's Android 2.2 and is powered by a 1GHz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm (QCOM, Fortune 500). It features two cameras, a kickstand for media viewing, 8GB of onboard memory and a pre-installed 32GB microSD card.

The phone can be used as a mobile hotspot to share Internet connectivity with up to eight Wi-Fi devices. Verizon (VZ, Fortune 500) will include hotspot service for free through May 15. After that date, the service can be activated for $20 for 2GB of data per month.
4G is a myth (and a confusing mess)

Calling plans start at $39.99 per month, and unlimited 4G data plans cost $29.99 per month.

The ThunderBolt supports Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) mobile services including Gmail and YouTube, and it features 4G-optimized apps including EA's (ERTS, Fortune 500) Rock Band, Gameloft's Let's Golf, Tunewiki, and Bitbop.
Earlier this month, a comScore report showed the Android operating system became No. 1 in terms of market share in January, beating out Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry for the first time. Android passed Apple's iOS in November, according to comScore.

Meanwhile, it's unclear how successful the Verizon iPhone has been as of yet. It went on sale last month, but Verizon has stayed mum on sales figures. A Verizon spokesman has said the company won't release those figures until its corporate earnings report.

Nokia partners with Microsoft on Windows Phone

2011-03-15T22:24:00.000-07:00

Nokia, the world's largest-volume cell phone maker, and software giant Microsoft are joining forces.

As part of a new agreement, Nokia will adopt Windows Phone as its choice smartphone platform, and Bing will become the default search engine on all of Nokia's phones.

In return, Nokia will provide services such as mapping programs and other software to help flesh out Microsoft's offerings, as well as leverage the handset giant's relationships with cellular carriers.

The companies' chief executives jointly penned a news release that went out early Friday morning in advance of the formal announcement in London. The materials describe the strategic partnership as "long term," though no timeframe was given.

Some experts say Nokia may be better served by looking to Google's Android platform instead. Android, a system provided to manufacturers for free, has quickly risen as the biggest challenger to Nokia's mobile dominance.

The Symbian platform from Nokia has shown versatility, but it hasn't aged well. The system is criticized for being clunky and especially awkward in an increasingly touchscreen-focused environment.

Still, Nokia remained the top seller of smartphones last year, with 37.6%, according to a report from research firm Gartner. But the cell phone giant had dropped from the 46.9% it held the year before, the data shows. Meanwhile, Android phones had 22.7% of the market in 2010, compared to about 4% the year prior.

(In the U.S., the numbers are stark. Nokia's presence there has almost entirely vanished.)

Like Nokia, Microsoft's global share of the heating smartphone segment fell during the same period -- by more than half, the Gartner data shows.

But Microsoft unleashed a major new smartphone system late last year, called Windows Phone 7. Microsoft's hope is that this will turn the company's fortunes in the mobile industry around.

In the few months it's been available, Windows Phone has gotten off to a slow start. Major manufacturers including Samsung Electronics and HTC initially pledged support for the software with launch devices, but most are now banking on the success of Android.

Nokia had begun developing a new system called MeeGo, along with Intel. This initiative will be dropped in favor of Windows Phone.

With a global juggernaut like Nokia signed on, Microsoft's chances at success have improved, experts say. Stephen Elop, Nokia's first non-Finnish CEO, was formerly an executive at Microsoft.

Elop sent employees a dramatic message this week saying that Nokia is "standing on a burning platform." In the e-mail, he highlighted the limitations of Symbian and contrasted it with Apple's and Google's successes at stealing away market share over a short time.

"Nokia, our platform is burning," Elop wrote in the widely circulated memo. "We are working on a path forward -- a path to rebuild our market leadership."

Elop, along with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, will expand on this path in the meeting with analysts Friday morning.

"Nokia and Microsoft will combine our strengths to deliver an ecosystem with unrivalled global reach and scale," Elop said in a statement. "It's now a three-horse race."

IBM unveils supercomputer cooled by hot water

2010-07-12T07:59:00.000-07:00

IBM has announced that its first-of-a-kind hot water cooled supercomputer has been installed at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). Named the Aquasar, the system not only consumes up to 40 per cent less energy than an air-cooled machine but the direct utilization of waste heat in the building's heating system translates to an 85 per cent cut in carbon dioxide emissions.

During warm summer months, one of the best places to work is in the server room of a networked office building or data center that uses cool air to prevent processor overheating. Such systems though are not too energy efficient so IBM started on a novel approach to cooling servers about a year ago as part of an initiative to create new technologies to solve business problems. Using warm water as a coolant might seem counter intuitive but the results speak for themselves.

Installed at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at ETH Zurich, an IBM BladeCenter Cluster is comprised of three IBM BladeCenter H chassis with a total of 33 IBM BladeCenter QS22 servers (two IBM PowerXCell 8i Processors each) and nine IBM BladeCenter HS22 servers (two Intel Nehalem EP Processors each). Of those, one chassis is air-cooled for direct comparison and contains 11 QS22 servers and three HS22 servers. The rest have micro-channel liquid coolers attached directly to processors and some components within the server which are then cooled with warm water (up to 60C).

The warm water allows the processors to function well below the maximum allowed operating temperature and the coolant removes heat from the processor "4,000 times more efficiently than air" and in doing so also offers a higher-grade heat at the output, which is passed on to the building's heating system.

"With Aquasar, we make an important contribution to the development of sustainable high performance computers and computer system," said ETH Zurich's Professor Dimos Poulikakos. "In the future it will be important to measure how efficiently a computer is per watt and per gram of equivalent CO2 production."

In high performance LINPACK benchmark testing the Aquasar achieved a performance of six teraflops and had an energy efficiency of about 450 megaflops per watt, whilst also giving back some nine kilowatts of thermal power to the building's heating system.

The next step in the three year Aquasar research program is to focus on the performance and characteristics of the cooling system in order to optimize it further.

Computer model predicts the spread of the BP oil spill after one year

2010-07-08T07:47:00.000-07:00

With oil from BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig continuing to spew into the Gulf of Mexico researchers from the School of Ocean and EarthScience and Technology (SOEST) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa have produced an animated computer simulation that shows the potential spread of the oil over a period of 360 days from when the spill started. To calculate the particle dispersal the researchers used ocean flow data from simulations conducted with the high-resolution Ocean General Circulation Model for the Earth Simulator (OFES).

The animation shows the calculated surface particle concentrations for grid boxes measuring roughly 10km by 10km in size and assumes an estimated flow of oil from the Deepwater Horizon of 50,000 barrels per day over a 150-day period. The simulation also assumes the spill is successfully capped by September 17, 2010.

The researchers say the computed surface concentrations may be overestimated as it doesn’t capture such real world effects as oil coagulation, formulation of tar balls or chemical and microbial degradation. However, they point out that the animation is not a detailed, specific prediction, but rather a scenario that could help guide research and mitigation efforts.

The animation shows the oil initially spreading in the Gulf of Mexico before entering the Loop Current and the narrow Florida Current, and finally the Gulf Stream.

“After one year, about 20% of the particles initially released at the Deepwater Horizon location have been transported through the Straits of Florida and into the open Atlantic,” explains Axel Timmermann from the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC).

The animation suggests that the coastlines near the Carolinas, Georgia, and Northern Florida could see the effects of the oil spill as early as October 2010 and that the main branch of the subtropical gyre (a ringlike system of ocean currents that rotate clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere) is likely to transport the oil film towards Europe, although strongly diluted.

The animation also shows that the narrow, deep Straits of Florida force the Florida Current into a narrow channel and create a tight bottleneck for the spreading of the oil into the Atlantic. This suggests the narrowest spot of the Florida Current could be an ideal place for a filtering system to mitigate the spreading of the oil film into the North Atlantic.

A football that powers cell phone!!!!

2010-07-07T02:32:00.000-07:00

A football that generates electricity to charge a cell phone or power a light from a short kick is set for trial at the 2010 FIFA World Cup host South Africa.

Four female undergraduate students, from Harvard University, who wanted to find a solution to the developing world's chronic power shortages, designed the ball named sOcckets.

The ball works by a 'shake to charge' torch, in which a magnetic ball rolls through a coil to generate an electric charge. The ball generates enough electricity to power an LED light for three hours in just 15 minutes of being kicked around. It can charge virtually any kind of mobile phone. "Soccer is something you will find in every African country," one of sOccket's inventors, Jessica Lin, said. "People play for hours days, so we thought, 'Why not try to get a little more out of that energy,'" she added.

Lin said that the main motive was to withhold the passion for football particularly among children in Africa's poorest communities to provide them with reading torches when the light fades.

Julia Silverman who also worked on the project brought the ball to South Africa's towns for trials to coincide with the World Cup. "The kids call it 'the magic ball'. Whenever you see a child plug in their ball for the first time and see the torch light up from the energy they've created, their eyes light up too it's a wonderful feeling," The Telegraph quoted Julia as saying. "If you think that the energy generated by a 15-minute kick around provides three hours of light, you can read a lot of pages from a textbook in that time," she added.

The sOccket ball may be available online by the end of 2010. The team intends to sell them to people in developed countries in a buy-one-give-one scheme in which the second ball will be sent to charities working in African towns. "Obviously, this won't be a regulation ball," Lin said. "But it's a big improvement over some of the makeshift balls the kids create from things like old plastic bags," she added.

How Google searches

2010-07-07T02:27:00.000-07:00

In the beginning the Internet was but a confusing mass of documents. Finding information, by searching the World Wide Web, was nearly impossible until the first search engines came along. Early search engines were like rudimentary life-forms (Remember Yahoo! Search and Alta Vista?).

They got the job done, but as more people gained access to the web, their limitations and dependence on the information that content creators put on so-called meta tags (strings of text that identified the content of the page in the source code) meant that such engines were liable to be abused.

Into this fast-expanding, yet messy space came Google. To cut a long story short, what Google did was organise information a lot better. Instead of depending on the text of a web page to determine the search results, it determined the page's influence using a variety of factors-including how many times a page had been viewed or linked to. From those early days, Google made searching the Internet reliable and over the past decade has grown into the behemoth it is today.

But there is more to the Internet than Google and more to search as well. Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer told BT five years ago that Google was just a flash in the pan, as Microsoft readied its (then) latest search engine. Microsoft did not get too far then, but laid the foundation for an effort that churned out Bing, its search engine launched last year. The engine uses a process similar to Google's 'PageRank' algorithm and gets a boost from technology tailored to throw up relevant results. The result: it has garnered one-fourth market share in the United States.

Google is not standing still. "In the early days, much of the Internet was static, your 'web crawlers' would go out every few days, sometimes even weeks to find information. Today, in the age of Twitter, the Internet happens in 'real time' and we have to reflect that," said Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, present at the company's recent Science of Search conference in Tokyo.

The way it delivers this is complex: New search technologies look for statistical patterns while determining the importance of one particular tweet message over thousands of others as well as the number of followers the person who wrote that tweet has. Juxtapose the volume of tweets - 2.7 million every hour-and the brute force of the new technology and servers that power it become apparent. That and Google's focus on search helps it stay top dog despite challenges in China (Baidu is No. 1) and Japan (Yahoo! is ahead in popularity).

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have spoken of their fears of being ousted by a newcomer. That challenge could come in the form of the likes of Wolfram Alpha, which queries a structured database for answers. So, ask it about the 16th President of the United States and it throws up not a link but a page of facts on Abraham Lincoln. The scope of the engine's results is limited given it is still a project in progress. Example: A search for "World Cup" assumes it is a gene and gives you a reference genetic sequence. Still, structured searches are being closely watched.

Elsewhere, to catch up with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are touting new contextual search services that give you search results based on the page you are on. For instance, if you are reading about Barack Obama's actions in the Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill, highlighting "Obama" will not do a generic search for Obama but for the US President and the oil spill. This is still a beta (test) service rolled out to a few users.

Google, meanwhile, is also taking search to mobile devices - a trend that its executives underscored at the Tokyo conference. Google's voice search is today enabled on most smartphones. Goggles allows users to take a picture from a mobile phone and gives you a result on the image. Google plans to make both mobile voice and image search faster and is throwing a lot of its engineering resources behind that.

And its needs to. Google's biggest rival here is not Microsoft but Apple whose iPhone is the dominant smartphone platform in terms of mindspace. Apple recently bought Siri, which makes a "mobile personal assistant" application that works through voice commands. Silicon Valley is betting that the "human-computer interface" will increasingly move away from text to voice and images.

The world's top search engine also has on hand projects that revel in the technology they use even if the revenue upsides are not evident. In Tokyo, Alan Eustace, Google's Head of Engineering, talked about a "Universal Communicator", an idea rip-off from the Star Trek series. Here, an application on a smartphone, with the help of machine translation, will be able to translate any language spoken into it and into any other selected. Singhal was even more bullish.

He spoke of a future where all Google services seamlessly integrate into one another, where route-planning using Google maps will take information from the web and warn you in advance of traffic jams or deals at a mall five minutes ahead of you and the like. Online search clearly has some way to go.

Reproduced from Business Today

Infosys @ 30: The Story so far

2010-07-02T08:39:00.000-07:00

It was a middle-class Indian’s dream and today after 30 years, Infosys has changed the way people look at India. Seven Indian men took the risk to think out of the box and it paid off. Thirty years on, Infosys is India’s most reputed company and is one of the best known brands in the global market.

On this day, NR Narayan Murthy and his six colleagues who worked with Patni Computer Systems, started Infosys Technologies in Pune with a meagre capital of Rs 10,000.

Infosys is synonymous with India’s IT growth. The main aim was to provide a world-class work environment and put India on the global map. The entrepreneurial dream of Narayan Murthy saw its first result in 1987, when the company signed a joint venture with Kurt Salmon Associates in US.

Major milestones in their 30-year-old journey:

2010

Infosys voted as the ‘Best Managed Company’ in India by Finance Asia

2009

Employee strength grew to over 1,00,000

2008

Revenues crossed USD 4.18 billion

2007

Reported Q2 revenue of over USD 1 billion. Annual revenues crossed USD 3 billion

2006

N. R. Narayana Murthy retired from the services of the company on turning 60.

Infosys celebrated 25 years. Revenues crossed USD 2 billion

Progeon was re-christened as Infosys BPO Ltd, effective 29 August 2006.

2005

Won the Global – Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) award

2004

Infosys Technologies became the first Indian listed software company to have a net profit of Rs 1,000 crore or more.

2003

Subsidiaries established in China and Australia

2002

Nandan M. Nilekani took over as CEO

2001

Offices opened in UAE and Argentina and a development centre in Japan

2000

Opened offices in France and Hong Kong, a global development center in Canada and UK and three development centers in the US

1999

Infosys was listed on NASDAQ

1993

Infosys got listed on BSE on June 14, 1993

1987

First international office at Boston, US

Infosys wanted to make an impact in the American market. The same year, the company opened its office in Boston. However in 1988, their KSA joint venture collapsed and Murthy and his associates were left in the lurch. During this period, one of their founding partners Ashok Arora, quit the company to join as a consultant in the US. But Murthy didn’t lose hope. His team continued with their struggle.

Their initial foray into US was through their first client Data Basics Corp. Then there was no looking back. The company went public in 1993 and introduced employee stock option. On the opening day itself, it was traded at Rs 115, though it was listed at Rs 95.

By then, it had started expanding its operations in US. Even today Infosys is the largest publicly traded IT services exporter in India, providing services to 315 large corporations, such as GE and Nortel, predominantly in the USA.

By the late 90s, it started expanding its operations in UK, Europe and Canada. In 1999, it became the first Indian company to be listed in Nasdaq. By this time, it started looking at options in the industry. It launched its business consulting services.

The Y2K fear had gripped the world by now. But Infosys was growing strong and its revenues touched $200mn in 2000 as India was now turning to be the IT hub.

Major acquisitions and partnerships

2010

Infosys Technologies chosen to manage Microsoft’s Internal IT Services

2009

Telstra selected Infosys as a key partner to support its five-year $450 million AUD application development and maintenance contracts.

2008

BBVA and Finacle from Infosys signed a Strategic Global Partnership.

2007

The company bought three of the service centers of Netherlands-based Royal Philips Electronics NV for $28 million.

2005

Infosys signed five-year global IT deal with ABN AMRO.

By then, Narayan Murthy had become a renowned entrepreneur and was listed among Time Magazine/CNN’s 25 most influential businessmen in the world.

Infosys became a household name and it was a dream for every youngster to be part of the global software giant. It was the most admired company in India – India’s pride.

In 2002, it was time for Murthy to step down as CEO and hand over the responsibility to Nandan Nilekani (one of the founding members). The team of seven was now reduced to five. But Murthy ensured he continued to be a mentor to his team.

Infosys knew it had to spread its wings and in 2003, it went on with its first major acquisition. It acquired Infosys Export Info services in Australia.

In 2005, it signed a landmark IT deal with ABN AMRO bank, which was considered as a key step to enter and expand its portfolio. It continued to expand its operations and ventured into BPO services and bought US firm McCamish systems. It also signed a major five-year deal with T-Mobile in UK.

In 2006, Nilekani stepped down to pave way to Kris Gopalakrishnan. Under Nilekani, the company aggressively went on acquiring or tying up with firms across the globe.

The government of India noticing his capabilities roped him to head the Unique Identity project. Due to this commitment, Nilekani sold all his shares and resigned from all the responsibilities he was handling in Infosys.

Today, the company stands tall with 1.13 lakh employees. That said, with founders still dominating the top rung, experts say it is time for the company to choose its successor to continue its success story.

Users spend 16 billion minutes on Facebook each day

2010-06-29T07:44:00.000-07:00

It’s been over six years since Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook – run on a single server – initially to Harvard students and eventually to the rest of the world. Since then, the incredible growth of the social network’s infrastructure means it now needs about 60,000 servers to support its 400 million users. And those users are sharing more than six billion pieces of content per week, uploading in excess of 3 billion photos each month and spending 16 billion minutes on Facebook every day.

These astounding figures were quoted by Tom Cook from Facebook's systems engineering group at the O"Reilly Velocity Conference last week.

Facebook's servers perform over 50 million operations per second, mainly between the caching tier and web servers. Over a million web sites have included features of Facebook Connect and currently users are viewing in excess of one million photos every second.

To cope with the growth, Facebook has started to build a data center in Prineville, Oregon that will be custom-built to support its server and storage infrastructure.

Also notable from Facebook's latest stats:

50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
an average user has 130 friends and creates 70 pieces of content each month
About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices, and these people are twice as active
More than one million websites have integrated with Facebook Platform

At Structure 2010, Facebook Vice President of Technical Operations, Jonathan Heiliger, conceded that the company did not plan its infrastructure effectively for the challenges it now faces, advising other start-ups that it’s never too early to think about scale.

SleepServer

2010-06-28T07:18:00.000-07:00

A particularly troubling aspect of enterprise computer deployment is the need for end user machines to remain switched on day and night. Fully on mind you, not in low power sleep mode. Computer scientists from the University of California, San Diego have developed a software solution which allows PCs to remain on the network even when placed in sleep mode at the end of a working day. The software creates a virtual representation of the computer on the server to handle many of the common overnight tasks, only waking up the physical machine at pre-programmed commands or when it encounters something that it can't deal with itself.

Dubbed "sleep-working" by the scientists who created the SleepServer software, the solution ensures that PCs remain connected and available on a network even after users have placed the machines in low-power mode. The software creates a lightweight virtual image of each computer in an enterprise environment. When a user places a machine in sleep mode at the end of a working day, the SleepServer software activates and the virtual PC image masquerades as the physical PC on the server, responding to network events on behalf of the dozing computer.

The virtual PC takes care of such things as Voice over IP commands, instant messaging and peer-to-peer services and caters for remote access to the PC via such protocols as VPN, SSH encrypted connection and Remote Desktop. It differs from existing solutions in that the physical machine's slumber is only interrupted when a network request is received which the lightweight image can't deal with. The solution is scalable and compatible with existing network infrastructures, it also enjoys cross platform support, although a MAC OSx version is still in development.

"One of the big benefits of SleepServer is configurable on-demand wakeup. SleepServer enables enterprise PCs to remain asleep for long periods of time while still maintaining the illusion of network connectivity and seamless availability," explained Yuvraj Agarwal, the UC San Diego Research Scientist in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering who developed SleepServer.

Another benefit is the projected energy savings, which have been shown to be anywhere between 27 and 86 per cent according to a recent survey. During a test run in September 2009, the power consumption of 30 PCs running SleepServer dropped by an average of 60 per cent, when compared to leaving the machines fully powered on day and night. The solution is said to offer an average yearly saving per PC of US$60 and deployment across department or office environments could therefore result in considerable energy savings.

There are currently over 50 computers using the solution at the University of California, San Diego's computer science building, Agarwal claiming that he has "seen an almost 70 per cent energy savings on my PC over the last six months." Plans are in place to expand the solution across the remaining thousand or so machines in the department by the end of the year, and then onto the entire campus network thereafter.

Agarwal said: "We are a very heterogeneous department. If SleepServer can support the diverse computing needs of the computer science department, it should be able to support anyone. Most enterprises don't have eight different versions of operating systems running at the same time."

Apple sells 1.7 million iPhone 4s in three days

2010-06-28T07:01:00.001-07:00

Despite a range of well publicized hardware problems, including yellow areas on screens, poor antenna design and an overly fragile shell, Apple moved a whopping 1.7 million units of the new iPhone 4 in just three days after its launch on June 24.

“This is the most successful product launch in Apple’s history,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Even so, we apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply.”

... and it's only available in a handful of countries so far. With over 50 million iDevices already in the wild, and each hardware refresh bringing a tidal wave of buzz and new customers, rival smartphone platforms like Google's Android will have an increasingly difficult time enticing developers away from Apple's ecosystem.

Millimeter-wave TV camera sees through smoke, fog and even walls

2010-06-21T04:31:00.000-07:00

The Science & Technology Research Laboratory (STRL) of Japan’s national public broadcaster, NHK, has developed a “millimeter-wave TV camera” that operates under the same principle as radar, taking images using radio waves instead of visible light. The technology allows objects hidden behind obstacles such as smoke, fog or even plywood to be captured as live, moving images.

The system emits millimeter waves in the 60-GHz band which bounce off the subjects and are captured by a receiver beam that scans up/down and left/right at a speed of 2.3 Hz to produce a 2D image. Because the system is sending out the waves it can selectively ignore information of an obscuring foreground object (such as a wall) based on the time it takes the waves to reflect back to the antenna, instead producing a picture based on the waves bouncing off a hidden object that take longer to reflect back.

At the moment the resultant image is more grainy mess than high resolution, but the shape and movement of a person – or in the case of the NHK demonstration, a mannequin – can easily be made out, as this video from DigInfo shows. The low resolution suggests the technology would be better suited for rescue applications rather than NHK’s original intentions for the technology of TV reports during disasters. The technology also has obvious applications for security and surveillance.

NHK demonstrated its millimeter-wave TV camera technology at a recent STRL Open House. The company plans to pursue research into the technology with the aim of increasing the image quality and frame frequency.

Release office tension with the USB Stress Ball

2010-06-21T04:25:00.000-07:00

Stress balls are a great way to relieve tension and help combat repetitive strain injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome. They’re also an easy answer for office workers looking for a gift when social convention states you need to get a little something for someone you work with, but don’t really know that well. Since no gift is complete nowadays unless it comes with a USB cable dangling from it, this tech-take on the stress ball could be the answer. The USB Stress Ball not only provides some physical stress relief, but some virtual stress relief as well.

Like any stock standard stress ball this USB equipped version can be squeezed and twisted to your heart’s content, but unlike its less technological cousins, it also translates the physical punishment being inflicted upon it to the images on your computer screen. Received an annoying email from Byron in accounting? Grab the USB Stress Ball and feel that frustration dissipate as said email is pulverized. Sure, the annoying email will still be there when you release the stress ball, but you’ll be in a much better state of mind to deal with it, and you’ll have managed to avoid putting your fist through the screen.

Available from ThinkGeek, the USB Stress Ball apparently “increases productivity and reduces office mortality rates.” Not bad for something that costs US$19.99. It is powered by USB and comes with four feet of cable.

100MW concentrated solar power plant to be built in the UAE

2010-06-14T02:20:00.000-07:00

The largest concentrated solar power (CSP) plant in the Middle East is to be built in Madinat Zayed, approximately 120 km (75 miles) southwest of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). When it becomes operational in 2012, the plant, dubbed Shams 1, will feature some 6,300,000 square-feet of solar parabolic collectors, cover 741 acres of desert and will produce enough electricity to power 62,000 households.

With a capacity of approximately 100MW and a solar field consisting of 768 parabolic trough collectors, Sham 1 represents one of the first steps in the region towards the introduction of sustainable energy sources in an energy market which until now has depended mostly on hydrocarbons. It is expected to displace approximately 175,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, equivalent to planting 1.5 million trees or removing 15,000 cars from Abu Dhabi’s roads.

The plant will generate solar thermal electricity through focused sunlight, concentrated by the plant’s parabolic trough collectors, heating a coolant which then generates high-pressure steam that drives a conventional steam turbine. The same technology is being implemented in large-scale commercial solar power thermal stations in spain northern Africa.

Shams (which is Arabic for sun) 1 will be built, owned and operated by a consortium including Masdar, an Abu Dhabi renewable energy company, Abengoa Solar, a technology company that will supply the parabolic trough collectors, and Total, one of the world’s major oil and gas groups. Masdar will own a 60 percent share of the plant, while an Abengoa Solar and Total joint venture will own the other 40 per cent.

The plant will directly contribute towards Abu Dhabi’s target of achieving seven percent renewable energy power generation capacity by 2020 and has been approved for a solar incentive premium in the form of a long term Green Power Agreement by the Abu Dhabi Government which will see electricity generated by the plant sold to the Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity Company (ADWEC) under a long-term electricity sales contract.

Construction of Shams 1 will commence in mid 2010, and it is due to go on line in 2012.

Users say Yahoo to Twitter and Facebook

2010-06-10T23:17:00.000-07:00

Even as Google and Apple are busy focusing on new mobile technologies, Yahoo, one of the oldest search engines and Internet giant, is trying hard to catch up with the changing technology by embedding social networking features into its existing popular services.

The company has tied up with popular social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, which will give Yahoo users an option to access their favourite Internet hangouts from their existing Yahoo e-mail accounts.

The new version of Yahoo Profile has been re-named Yahoo Pulse. After this tieup, now Yahoo users will receive updates from Facebook in their inbox, homepages and Yahoo Messenger. At the same time, they may also use Yahoo's mail, content, messenger and other services like Flickr, to share messages with their friends on Facebook.

"This new tie-up is just about giving users what they want. Adding this feature will give Yahoo users a new way to find contents and at the same time keep them updated with their friends," Cody Simms, senior director of social platform, Yahoo! Developer Network, told reporters via video conference.

However, he maintained that the company will still be focusing on its key strength area, which is its content. Simms added while Yahoo Mail still has a large user base, these social-networking sites will make people stick longer to the Yahoo webpage. It will also provide an opportunity to post Yahoo's content on Facebook to attract the latter's users as well as advertisers to their sites.

This will increase the web traffic and add more revenue to the company. "We recognise the future technologies. We have designed it in a way that it will be more mobile-friendly. And people can share and use Yahoo content and updates via mobile," Simms added.

The Facebook feed is already available from Tuesday and the Twitter feed will be available in the coming summer, Yahoo said. However, in view of the content security issue, Yahoo said it has already overhauled its privacy control system. The new privacy control option allows its users to control who gets to see their updates or view the media they put on the web.

Apart from Facebook and Twitter, Yahoo has tied up with social game giant Zynga, which will see hugely popular titles, such as Farmville and Mafia Wars work with its network. The games will be available in late 2010. The company has recently tied up with Citizen Sports to bring other sports from Facebook and mobile devices through innovative applications.

In order to make the new Yahoo version more interesting and popular, Yahoo has signed a multi-million dollar deal with British soccer star David Beckham to tap the FIFA World Cup fever, a move which it says will add many soccer fans to its user base. "The World Cup is an opportunity to drive more people to search, use and talk using Yahoo content so that people can share this fever with their fans," Simms said.

CATCHING UP WITH GENEXT

Now Yahoo users will receive updates from Facebook in their inbox, homepages and Yahoo Messenger

Simultaneously, they may use Yahoomail, content, messenger & other ops like Flickr

People can share and use Yahoo content and updates via mobile

New Yahoo privacy system helps users control who views their contents

It has tied up with social game giant Zynga & will offer 'Mafia Wars' later this year

Yahoo ties up with Citizen Sports to bring other sports from Facebook & mobile devices

Small miracle as Australian experts make atom-sized switch

2010-05-24T02:40:00.000-07:00

Sydney: Australian scientists Monday unveiled the world's smallest electronic switch measuring just a few atoms, which will shrink microchips and revolutionise computing speeds.

The seven-atom transistor, measuring four-billionths of a metre and embedded in a single silicone crystal, is the first step in a "quantum computer" which will make calculations millions of times faster than existing devices.

Lead researcher Michelle Simmons said the technology has major implications for code-breaking, financial transactions and weather forecasting, which involve testing enormous numbers of possible scenarios.

"You'll be able to solve problems that would take longer than the life of the universe with a classical computer," she told AFP.

The University of New South Wales' Centre for Quantum Computer Technology (CQCT) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison created the transistor by manipulating atoms using a special microscope.

The breakthrough promises to reduce the size of microchips, which contain billions of transistors, by up to 100 times, simultaneously accelerating processing speeds "exponentially."

"Australia's first computer was commissioned in 1949. It took up an entire room and you could hold its components in your hands," Simmons said.

"Today you can carry a computer around in your hand and many of its components are more than 1000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

"Now we have just demonstrated the world's first electronic device in silicon systematically created on the scale of individual atoms."

Simmons said commercial applications for the technology were about five years away. Her team is now working towards the first ultra-fast quantum computer, predicted to be the size of a current silicone chip.

Mitsubishi Electric installs elevators to carry 80, possibly the world's largest

2010-05-20T22:07:00.000-07:00

If you've ever been annoyed by the impatiently waiting for an office building elevator, this might just be the perfect building for you. Each of the new elevators by Mitsubishi Electric in Umeda Hankyu Building’s new office area in Osaka, Japan measures 11.2 x 9.2 feet in area by 8.5 feet high (3.4m wide, 2.8m long and 2.6m high). This allows for a whopping 80 person capacity, or over 11,500 pounds (specifically a 5,250kg load according to the company). Do some quick math, and that means that these five elevators alone can move up to 400 people at once.

And if you think that being crammed into an elevator with 79 other people sounds a little uncomfortable, take solace in the fact that the car does have glass windows, allowing you to enjoy the view as you're going up. The elevator connects the lower department store portion of the building, on floors B2 through 13, and the upper offices, from floors 15 through 41.

When I asked a Mitsubishi representative if this was indeed the world's largest elevator, he could only confirm that "these are the largest capacity passenger elevators to date in Japan". In my own personal research, I have yet to find a bigger one worldwide.

Double bubble aircraft design would use 70 percent less fuel

2010-05-20T21:59:00.000-07:00

The contribution of aircraft to greenhouse gas emissions has been well documented - a 2009 study Friends of the Earth found that air travel is the world’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, generating nearly as much CO2 annually as that from all human activities in Africa. in an effort to combat the issue, but with air traffic expected to double by 2035 it would seem that a fundamental shift in technology is needed to make real progress. That's the starting point for the D “double bubble” – a design concept presented to NASA by an MIT led research team which promises a 70 percent improvement in fuel economy, reduced noise, lower nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions and the ability to use shorter runways.

The D double bubble design uses long, skinny wings, a small tail and - hence the name - replaces the traditional cylindrical fuselage with a two partial cylinders placed side-by-side. The engines sit at the rear of the fuselage rather than on the wing to make use of a technique called Boundary Layer Ingestion (BLI). This approach sees slower moving air from the wake of the fuselage enter the engines, resulting in less fuel consumption for the same amount of thrust. The downside is slower speeds and more stress on the engine.

The result is a plane that travels 10 percent slower than the Boeing 737 it is designed to replace, but according to lead designer of the D series Mark Drela, the longer flight times would be partially mitigated by the ability to load and unload the plane faster. Another advantage is that it could also be used with current airport infrastructure.

Along with the 180-passenger D series, the research team has also produced a blueprint for a much larger (350 seat) H series that would be equivalent to a Boeing 777. This design uses the BLI technique and a wider fuselage with an aerodynamic triangular-shaped hybrid wing body.

A second version of the D series has also been put forward. This design doesn't save as much fuel (around 50 percent) but is a more viable near term alternative because it that could be built using current jet technology and materials.

The MIT led project is the result of a $2.1 million contract awarded by NASA in 2008 as part of an aeronautics research program aimed at putting greener planes in the sky by 2035. Boeing, GE Aviation and Northrop Grumman are also taking part in the program.

The team from the MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics was headed by principal investigator Ed Greitzer and Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation and Pratt & Whitney also contributed.

NASA is expected to announce a second phase of the program in coming months.

iPad on global sale from May 28

2010-05-08T08:27:00.000-07:00

PARIS- Apple announced Friday that its mass market iPad touchscreen portable tablet computer will go on sale outside the United States in nine major countries for the first time on May 28.

The much-anticipated consumer gadget was launched on the US domestic market on April 3, but such was demand that the Californian firm was forced to delay deliveries to international consumers.

Now, fans in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and Switzerland can look forward to seeing them in the shops before the end of the month, Apple’s statement said.

“Customers can pre-order all iPad models from Apple’s online store in all nine countries beginning on Monday, May 10,” it said.

The firm plans to launch the iPad in Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore in July.

Apple gave no details on prices in the new markets, but versions of the device with different storage capacities and connection options are available in the United States for between 499 and 829 dollars (392 and 688 euros).

Although not yet officially available through Apple-licensed vendors outside the United States, impatient consumers in many areas have been buying imported models from the so-called “grey market”.

The firm boasts that it has already sold more than one million iPads in the United States and that customers have downloaded over 12 million software applications from its online store.

Smartphone market gets an old new player as HP buys Palm

2010-05-04T07:18:00.000-07:00

The smartphone market was given a massive boost today as the news broke that HP will acquire smartphone pioneer Palm and perhaps most significantly, the Palm webOS mobile operating system. HP's international infrastructure, fiscal strength and influence will ensure Palm now has not only a future, but will now become an even more serious competitor to Apple, Google's Android, RIM, Microsoft et al in US$100 billion smartphone and connected mobile device marketplace.

HP's offerings in the mobile space, the iPaq smartphones based on Windows Mobile OS, have been solid but lack in comparison to the focused mobile innovation of the above-mentioned competitors. As Palm’s Todd Bradley points out in the press release below, the Palm webOS mobile operating system "provides an ideal platform to expand HP’s mobility strategy and create a unique HP experience spanning multiple mobile connected devices.”

It will now be interesting to see if the HP Windows-tablet rumoured a few weeks back sees the light of day. Our guess is NO, it won't.

And let's all breathe a sigh of relief. If HP hadn't picked up Palm, it might have become history and it deserves better. Now its presence and funding will reinvigorate this exciting mobile marketplace.

The press release announcing the purchase reads as follows:

HP to Acquire Palm for $1.2 Billion

Combination will accelerate HP’s growth within the more than $100 billion connected mobile device market

PALO ALTO and SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 28, 2010 HP and Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which HP will purchase Palm, a provider of smartphones powered by the Palm webOS mobile operating system, at a price of $5.70 per share of Palm common stock in cash or an enterprise value of approximately $1.2 billion. The transaction has been approved by the HP and Palm boards of directors.

The combination of HP’s global scale and financial strength with Palm’s unparalleled webOS platform will enhance HP’s ability to participate more aggressively in the fast-growing, highly profitable smartphone and connected mobile device markets. Palm’s unique webOS will allow HP to take advantage of features such as true multitasking and always up-to-date information sharing across applications.

“Palm’s innovative operating system provides an ideal platform to expand HP’s mobility strategy and create a unique HP experience spanning multiple mobile connected devices,” said Todd Bradley, executive vice president, Personal Systems Group, HP. “And, Palm possesses significant IP assets and has a highly skilled team. The smartphone market is large, profitable and rapidly growing, and companies that can provide an integrated device and experience command a higher share. Advances in mobility are offering significant opportunities, and HP intends to be a leader in this market.”

“We’re thrilled by HP’s vote of confidence in Palm’s technological leadership, which delivered Palm webOS and iconic products such as the Palm Pre. HP’s longstanding culture of innovation, scale and global operating resources make it the perfect partner to rapidly accelerate the growth of webOS,” said Jon Rubinstein, chairman and chief executive officer, Palm. ”We look forward to working with HP to continue to deliver industry-leading mobile experiences to our customers and business partners.”

Under the terms of the merger agreement, Palm stockholders will receive $5.70 in cash for each share of Palm common stock that they hold at the closing of the merger. The merger consideration takes into account the updated guidance and other financial information being released by Palm this afternoon. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including the receipt of domestic and foreign regulatory approvals and the approval of Palm’s stockholders. The transaction is expected to close during HP’s third fiscal quarter ending July 31, 2010.

Palm’s current chairman and CEO, Jon Rubinstein, is expected to remain with the company.

TrueTouch technology gets Hover Detection

2010-05-04T07:06:00.000-07:00

Cypress Semiconductor has enhanced its TrueTouch touchscreen solution so that hovering a finger over a capacitive display mimics mouseover functionality. The new technology could be used to magnify sections of a small touchscreen prior to activation by touch.

Since TrueTouch from Cypress Semiconductor introduced in 2008, the flexible touchscreen architecture - which allows designers "to implement differentiated features and make last-minute design iterations without board changes" - has been in mass production and continual development. The latest innovation to be added is hover support.

As a user's finger approaches the capacitive touchscreen display, the hover detection system not only recognizes its approach but also gauges the distance from the screen and differentiates between hover and touch activation. A practical upshot is that a section of a page on the relatively small screen of a mobile device (such as a phone, GPS or media player) can be magnified without touching the screen, making searching for and activating links or screen icons a might easier.

Dhwani Vyas from Cypress said: "Delivering a mouseover-like capability to the mobile phone space shows that Cypress continues to focus on creative features aligned with market demand. With so much emphasis on web content to the mobile handset, innovative navigation techniques are necessary to bring a familiar web-browsing experience to the user."

Cypress Software reports that it is aiming to make its new hover support available to customers in the coming months.

iPad Review

2010-04-27T08:19:00.000-07:00

By Gareth Van Zyl

Published April 13, 2010

I’m amazed by a report on Arabian Business that there are people in Dubai who paid over US $1200 for an iPad.

The iPad has not been officially launched in the Middle East yet, and as this particular retailer managed to get hold of a few iPads; they had carte blanche on pushing up the price to whatever they wanted to charge.

Even after Apple officially unveils the iPad in the Middle East (and people pay the actual price of around US $400 for it); I still think it’ll be a good idea to wait a while before getting this latest gadget craze. I know it’s getting rave reviews and there’s an incredible amount of hype surrounding it, but there will be competitive alternatives in terms of both price and features.

You might have already heard about Microsoft and its Courier tablet. The Courier is looking like it’s being built on the basis of being a digital journal with a stylus, and this combination will be particularly geared towards, for example, graphic designers and even those who just want to make digital notes.

According to reports circulating the internet, the Courier is built on Tegra 2 and runs on the same OS as the Zune HD, Pink and Windows Mobile 7Series, which is apparently taken to mean Windows CE 6.

Other vendors such as HP have also developed a tablet, the Slate, which supports Adobe’s flash. According to Engadget, it will cost US $549 in its base configuration. Engadget further say that it will have a 8.9-inch 1024 x 600 capacitive multitouch display, a 1.6GHz Atom Z530 processor with UMA graphics and an accelerator for 1080p video playback, 32GB of flash storage and 1GB of non-upgradeable RAM.

There's also conjecture that there will be a $599 version with 64GB of storage, and both models will have a five-hour battery life, an SDHC slot, a USB port, a SIM card slot for the optional 3G modem, and a dock connector for power, audio, and HDMI out.

The thing that I find most interesting about all this is how this seems to be different to what I think is the current saturation point in the mobile phone market, where every touch screen phone looks just about exactly the same. At least there seems to be some sort of differentiation emerging in the tablet market space.

I will also be waiting for the market place to become more flooded with these devices and then get my hands on a tablet that offers the best features. I also really hope that I won’t read anymore stories about consumers allowing themselves to get ripped off by those who have limited stock of these devices.

Nokia introduces N8 smartphone

2010-04-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

BEIJING, April 27 (Xinhuanet) -- Nokia has confirmed the existence of the Symbian smartphone - the N8, whose specs were leaked a day ago, media reported Tuesday.

The N8 will be the first phone from Nokia to come with a 12 megapixel camera, and the first from the company to support HD video recording.

Unlike the last Symbian based flagship, the N97, the N8 runs the latest version of the Symbian OS - Symbian 3.

The phone has a full touch screen, comes with 16GB of storage space but has the ability to be upgraded to 48GB.

The N8 is fully social networking ready. Users can update their status, share location and photos, and view live feeds from Facebook and Twitter in a single app directly on the home screen.

It will retail for around 320 euros when it's released overseas later this year. That's around 500 U.S. dollars, and makes it one of Nokia's most expensive handsets.

The N8 is set to debut in retail during the third quarter. It's likely to be the first device to use Symbian 3, which was recently delayed to Q3.

Volcanic Flight Chaos:Can we fly safely through volcanic ash

2010-04-20T21:00:00.000-07:00

Airlines and aircraft makers did not understand the economic case for Fred Prata's invention a week ago, they will now.

Since 1991 the atmospheric physicist has been developing a sensor to warn pilots about volcanic ash clouds up to 100 kilometres ahead of their plane so they can thread a safe path around it. But despite successful ground tests (see image), he has not been able to secure the funding to test it in the air.

With an estimated 6.8 million passengers grounded by airborne ash cloud from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano, and millions of pounds at stake, serious questions are being asked about the technological shortcomings of the current approach to protecting flights.

Known unknowns

Ever since a Boeing 747 temporarily lost all four engines in an ash cloud in 1982, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has stipulated that skies must be closed as soon as ash concentration rises above zero. The ICAO's International Airways Volcano Watch uses weather forecasting to predict ash cloud movements, and if any projections intersect a flight path, the route is closed.

But although it is certain that volcanic ash like that hanging over northern Europe can melt inside a jet engine and block airflow, nobody has the least idea about just how much is too much. After a week of losing millions every day, airlines are starting to ask why we can't do better.

It need not be this way, concedes Jonathan Nicholson at the UK's aviation regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority. "There may be a non-zero safe ash level for commercial jets, of so many particles of a certain size per minute," he toldNew Scientist, "but we just don't know."

Denis Chagnon, spokesman for the ICAO, agrees, but says that isn't regulators' fault. "This has to be established by the engine makers themselves, because they produce the affected equipment. And that has not been done," he says.

Two of the biggest aero engine makers – Rolls-Royce in the UK and General Electric in the US – did not return phone calls or emails asking for comment on if, how and when they plan to establish safe thresholds. When the ash settles, it seems likely that they will be asked to think seriously about doing so.

Model makers

The wisdom of allowing computer models alone to ground flights is also being questioned. Frustrated companies including KLM, Lufthansa, BA, and aircraft maker Airbus have launched their own aircraft to explore how the reality in the air matched the models keeping them on the ground.

None suffered any damage, and some carried sampling instruments that found no ash in places where models predicted it, sparking strong complaints from the airline trade body IATA. Yet in a reminder of the risks, some military jets did encounter ash last week and sustained engine damage.

Prata says sensors like those he is developing at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research (NILU) in Kjeller could keep planes flying by letting them finesse the educated guesses of models to reveal ash-free patches and routes.

A spokeswoman for the British air-traffic control agency NATS said she was not aware of Prata's work, but said the idea of in-flight detection sounded "handy". However, Nicholson suggested that it could cause traffic problems if many flights ended up switching course to sidestep ash.

Whatever happens, one fallout from the ash cloud that has grounded Europe looks likely to be a fresh look at just how dangerous volcanic ash is, and whether planes can be given the smarts to dodge around it.

Touch floors could be next step in computer interfaces

2010-04-14T01:34:00.000-07:00

IMAGINE entering your living room and sliding your foot purposefully over a particular stretch of floor. Your hi-fi system springs to life, pumping out the sounds of your current favourite CD.

While touchscreens are close to ubiquitous in portable electronic gadgets, touch sensitive floors have barely got off the ground. That could be about to change thanks to the development of a "touch floor" by Patrick Baudisch and colleagues at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.

The group's prototype, named Multi-toe, is made up of a 0.5-millimetre-thick sheet of silicone lying on an 8-millimetre-thick layer of clear acrylic, both of which sit on a thick glass sheet to provide rigidity.

Light beams shone into the acrylic bounce around inside until pressure from a foot, say, allows them to escape. A camera below captures the light and registers an image of whatever has pressed down on the floor.

Forms of this technique, known as frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR), are already in use in some touchscreens, but Baudisch's version expands the idea by allowing the identification of individual users from the pattern on the tread of their shoes.

"What is also cool is that FTIR allows for pressure sensing," says Baudisch. "The harder you press the silicone against the acrylic, the more light comes out."

Baudisch has already adapted Multi-toe for the video game Unreal Tournament, with the screen projected on the ground and players able to move a character by leaning forwards, backwards and from side to side. They can shoot by tapping their toes. Tests have also shown users can use their feet to press keys measuring around 5 by 6 centimetres on a virtual keyboard.

The potential for the system to be used as a gaming interface has been demonstrated by the hugely successful Wii Fit video game, which uses Nintendo's pressure-sensitive Wii Balance Board, on which users stand .

Despite the success of Wii Fit, "interaction via the feet has been greatly neglected," says Yon Visell at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He adds that Multi-toe is impressive but that the system cannot easily be used on existing floors because of the need for underfloor cavities to house the cameras. Baudisch says future versions will address this issue.

Multi-toe was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery 2010 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Atlanta, Georgia, this week.

Lane- Program [New program to take wheel from drifting drivers]

2010-04-08T05:15:00.000-07:00

Wayward drivers could soon be getting a nudge in the right direction thanks to a computer program created by researchers from North Carolina State University. The program allows a computer to understand what a camera is looking at and makes decisions based on what it sees. If a car strays from its lane the program will detect the lane change and set the car back on course without human control.

The program uses algorithms to sort visual data and make decisions related to finding the lanes on a road, detecting how those lanes change as a car is moving, and controlling the car to stay in the correct lane. The researchers admit that there are already some vision systems out there that can do lane finding, but say the program is able to maintain an awareness of multiple lanes and traffic in those lanes as well.

“We develop computer vision programs, which allow a computer to understand what a video camera is looking at – whether it is a stop sign or a pedestrian. For example, this particular program is designed to allow a computer to keep a car within a lane on a highway, because we plan to use the program to drive a car,” says Dr. Wesley Snyder, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research.

While not quite yet at the level of the fully autonomous vehicles being pursued by the likes of Audi and Oshkosh, the team says its computer vision research has many potential uses, such as the development of military applications related to surveillance, reconnaissance and transportation of materials.

It could also enable the development of new automobile safety features, including systems that can allow cars to stay in their lane, avoid traffic and react to emergency situations – such as those where a driver has fallen asleep at the wheel, had a heart attack or gone into diabetic shock.

A paper describing the research entitled, “Concurrent visual multiple lane detection for autonomous vehicles,” will be presented at the IEEE international Conference on Robotics and Automation in Anchorage, Alaska in May

Burj Khalifa sets energy landmark

2010-04-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

The Burj Khalifa will use solar power to meet the bulk of the water heating requirements of its residents.

Solar panels can heat 140,000 litres of water per day, and this will be distributed to homes and commercial establishments in the world's tallest building. The solar-powered water system will produce energy savings equivalent to 3,200 kilowatts per day and 690MWh of energy per year.

"The thermal energy initiative at the Burj Khalifa highlights Emaar's commitment to partner the government's sustainable development goals," said Ahmad Al Matrooshi, Managing Director of the developer. "Energy efficient measures, especially through the use of renewable sources, are not an option but an imperative for sustainable growth.

"By leveraging solar power, the Burj is setting an example as well as creating a reference mark on how urban developments can effectively integrate energy-friendly initiatives," he said.

The system has been installed and will be operated by Sole UAE Solar Systems, whose spokesman John Owen said: "The Burj Khalifa presented us with a remarkable opportunity to use solar energy to meet the water heating needs of residents in the tower.

"The significant benefits include cost savings on energy uses – not only for the tower but the government utility provider too – as well as reduced pollution levels, leading to a healthier environment," he said.

The panels serve as solar energy collectors as against photovoltaic electricity generation technology. The 378 collector panels, each measuring 2.7 sq m, are located on the roof of the Burj's Offices annexe and can heat 140,000 litres of water in seven hours.

Among other sustainable energy and water use measures, the condensate from all the air-conditioning equipment in Burj Khalifa will be reclaimed to cool the potable water supplied by the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority. The condensate will then be collected in an on-site irrigation tank and used for the tower's landscaping. When operational, this system will provide 15 million gallons of supplemental water per year.

To ensure energy efficiency, fresh air handling units have been fitted with thermal wheels and, wherever possible, economy modes. There is extensive use of variable-speed drives on the air-handling and water-circulating equipment to boost energy efficiency further. The air-conditioning and water systems incorporate energy saving control systems to reduce consumption.

The Burj also features several measures to reduce water consumption including water flow restrictors.

And the tower's cladding has been manufactured to a high standard with a high shading co-efficient and a low U-value to reduce the transfer of external heat gains. Other energy efficiency measures include automated solar shading at the entrance pavilions.

Robot 'gliders' swim the undersea world

2010-04-01T08:47:00.000-07:00

THE way we study oceans could be transformed by a high-tech "surfboard" that generates its own power from sunlight and water waves. The device is capable of navigating at sea for months at a time and recently completed a 4000-kilometre trip from Hawaii to San Diego, California.

Gathering data on the oceans has always been difficult: survey ships are costly to deploy and buoys take data only at single sites. So engineers at Liquid Robotics, a company based in Kamuela, Hawaii, decided to build an autonomous vehicle that would be cheaper and more flexible than either of these options. They knew that winged robot "gliders" had been patrolling the ocean depths for a decade. These craft have a bladder which can be inflated or deflated to make them rise or sink. Tilting their wings appropriately allows this vertical movement to be converted into forward thrust.

But how to create a self-powered surface vehicle? Liquid Robotics's answer is Wave Glider, a surfboard-like float attached by a cable to a set of wings several metres underwater. "The glider is propelled entirely by wave power," says Justin Manley, the company's science director. When a wave lifts the board, it pulls on the wings and tilts them from the horizontal, generating forward thrust. A trough lets the wings tilt the other way, also producing forward thrust (see diagram). The craft's top speed is about 2.25 knots (1.2 metres per second).

The float has solar panels that recharge its onboard batteries and provide up to 10 watts of power for communications, GPS and other sensors. The craft's course, which is independent of the direction of the waves, is set by a radio-controlled rudder. "You simply log in from your laptop and tell it where to go. And since we have the luxury of GPS all the time, navigation can be very accurate," says Manley.

Wave Glider could have several applications beyond simply measuring the state of the ocean along its route. It could act as a communications relay for robotic submarines so they would never need to surface, and it is so quiet that it is ideal for passive sonar systems, which detect underwater sounds. It could also help track marine animals which have been fitted with radio tags.

Another possibility is that the craft could serve as a replacement for monitoring buoys. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a global network of moored buoys that relay data from sensors measuring pressure on the ocean floor, looking for telltale signs of a tsunami.

The trouble is that the buoys often lose their moorings, and must be replaced by ship. "We can put a Wave Glider on an aircraft and deploy it using a locally hired fishing boat almost anywhere in the world in under 48 hours," says Manley. By moving in small circles Wave Glider can stay in one spot, emulating a buoy.

Eddie Bernard, director of the NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, is evaluating the Wave Glider and other robotic vehicles, which he says are revolutionising data collection.

"Chartering an oceanographic vessel costs $20,000 a day," he says. "So we need a way to get more data more cheaply and we need as many options for getting it as possible."

Thieves target Facebook, Twitter users

2010-03-27T07:33:00.000-07:00

Insurers are urging their clients not to leak out their holiday details on Facebook and Twitter, for burglars use such sites to target homes.

The irresponsible behaviour of Internet users on social networking websites makes them prone to burglaries, according to insurers.

"Under the terms of most insurance policies, people have a duty to make their home secure," the Daily Star quoted an industry source as saying.

"If they have told the world they are out and not coming back for a while, they might as well put a sign outside saying: 'Burgle Me.' You can't blame the insurance industry for refusing to pay the bill for such irresponsibility," added the source.

Malcolm Cooper of Legal & General said: "Information on social networking sites coupled with increasingly sophisticated location-based tools such as Google Street View can potentially be used by burglars to build a list of targets."

Insurance firm Hiscox, which will not insure celebrities who allow details of their holidays to be published in magazines, said it would penalise customers who state their where-abouts on public sites.

The AA said putting details of when you are away on the Internet could be taken as "a breach of your duty of care and would be seriously considered by an insurer".

Darren Black, head of home insurance at confused.com said the cost of insuring a home could be high for people who regularly use these sites.

"Criminals are becoming increasingly sophisticated, using Google Earth and Street View to plan their burglaries with military precision. Insurance providers are starting to take this into account when they are assessing claims," he said.

Privacy campaigners were outraged at a Dutch site launched last month, which gives updates on people who have just left their house.

Pleaserobme.com said it was highlighting the dangers of websites not helping burglars.

Nokia invites Community to phone design Party

2010-03-22T08:04:00.001-07:00

Not happy with the design of your mobile phone? Nokia is looking for feedback from phone savvy consumers with its "Design by Community" smartphone project. Over seven weeks visitors to the company’s official blog, Nokia Conversations, will be asked to make a series of choices on the specs of their ideal smartphone. Once the results have been tallied Nokia’s design team will then come up with a series of concept sketches which will go to a public vote.

The first list of features and functions up for consideration relate to Display and User Interface. Users can mix and match their preferred features using a simple slider for each of five display and user interface options: screen size, screen type, keypad, secondary buttons and screen ratio. Upcoming weeks will be devoted to Size and Shape, Materials, Operating System, Connectivity, Camera and finally, Enhancements.

But users must choose carefully as simply opting for the maximum bells and whistles will result in a list of features the site will deem as “too way out there”. Conversely, treading too carefully will result in features that are “not ambitious enough”. Get the balance right and you’ll receive a “Perfect mix” of features that can be submitted and count towards the tally of specs that will be displayed on a Data Sheet each week.

Along with the tally of votes, each week the site will provide interviews with Nokia designers, opinions from key bloggers and some insight into what goes into creating a product from scratch.

Nokia says the goal of the smartphone by committee isn’t to actually produce the winning concept, but is simply an “exercise in collaboration sprinkled with some future thinking” that will result in the creation of a concept smartphone. Of course, as market research it probably has some benefits too.

If you want to cast your vote for your ideal features and functions get along to theNokia Conversations blog

Now, a computer that can read your mind!!!

2010-03-18T22:09:00.000-07:00

British scientists have developed a computer that can read human minds, a key breakthrough which they claim takes telepathy a step closer to reality.

According to them, the computer is able to decipher thought patterns and tell what people are thinking simply by scanning the brain -- in fact, it can delve into memories and differentiate between different recollections. In fact, this breakthrough follows research last year by the same scientists who used the same technique to track a person’s movements around a computer-simulated room.

For the current research, which focussed on the hippocampus, an area at the centre of the brain that plays a crucial role in short term memory, the scientists carried out an experiment involving 10 volunteers. The subjects were shown three seven-second films featuring different women carrying out an everyday task in a typical urban street such as posting a letter or drinking a cup of coffee from a paper cup.

The volunteers were asked to memorise what they saw and then recall each one in turn whilst inside a magnetic resonance imaging scanner which records the brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow within the brain. The computer algorithm then studied the electrical patterns and could tell which film the volunteer was recalling with an accuracy of about 50 per cent -- which was well above chance, ’The Daily Telegraph’ reported.

Lead scientist Prof eleanor maguire of university College London said: "In our previous experiment we’re looking at basic memories, at someone’s location in an environment. "What is more interesting is to look at ’episodic’ memories -- the complex, everyday memories that include much more information on where we are, what we are doing and how we feel.

"We’ve been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory -- to look at actual memory traces. We found our memories are definitely represented in the hippocampus. "Now that we’ve seen where they are, we have an opportunity to understand how memories are stored and how they may change through time." The findings have been published in the latest edition of the ’Current Biology’ journal.

"Facebook beats Google for visitors"

2010-03-18T21:43:00.000-07:00

Social-networking star Facebook surpassed Google to become the most visited website in the United States for the first time last week, industry analysts showed.

Facebook’s homepage finished the week ending March 13 as the most visited site in the country, according to industry tracker Hitwise.

The "important milestone," as described by Hitwise director of research Heather Dougherty, came as Facebook enjoyed a massive 185 per cent increase in visits in the same period, compared to the same week in 2009.

By comparison, visits to search engine home Google.com increased only nine per cent in the same time -- although the tracker does not include Google property sites such as the popular Gmail email service, YouTube and Google Maps. Taken together, Facebook.com and Google.com amounted to 14 per cent of the entire US Internet visits last week, Dougherty said.

Google has been positioning challenges in recent months to Facebook and the micro-blogging site Twitter by adding the social-networking feature Buzz to its Gmail service.

In what could signal an escalating battle between Facebook and Google, the leading social-networking service celebrated its sixth birthday earlier this year with changes including a new message inbox that echoes Gmail’s format. Facebook boasts some 400 million users while Gmail had 176 million unique visitors in December, according to tracking firm comScore.

Google and Sony to build Android-based televisions

2010-03-18T08:59:00.000-07:00

Google, Intel and Sony developing Google TV platform to bring web to the living room, according to reports

Google has joined forces with Sony and chip maker Intel to develop the next generation of internet-enabled televisions that will allow viewers to access the whole internet through their TV, reports the New York Times.

The partnership will make it easy for viewers to access the best video on-demand content from the web, as well as access photo-sharing sites, such as Picasa, and social-networking sites such as Twitter. The aim, says the New York Times, is to make it as easy for viewers to access the web as it is to change the channel.

Although some television manufacturers, such as Samsung, sell internet-enabled televisions, online access is confined to predefined "widgets" such as weather reports, Skype or news headlines. Technology companies, keen to replicate their desktop computing success across new platforms, would like to see the whole web put at the fingertips of viewers.

None of the companies allegedly involved in the project have commented on the latest reports. But Intel has advertised for senior application engineers with Android programming experience capable of taking Intel "from PC screen to mobile screen and TV screen". And Google is also believed to be involved in trials with Dish Network, the second biggest satellite television provider in the United States, to create a new range of Android-powered set-top boxes that will to bring together traditional broadcast television with the increasing number of online video services.

The New York Times reports that Google will release a "toolkit" to developers in the coming months, enabling them to build programs that work on the new system. Products based on the new software could appear this summer, the report continues. The system will be based on Google's Android operating system, and run on Intel's Atom processors. Initially, it is likely the software will run on a separate set-top box, but in time, the technology could be built directly in to televisions.

The web-enabled set-top box space is becoming increasingly crowded. Apple already sells Apple TV, which allows users to directly download movies and TV shows to their television, as well as access Flickr and YouTube, but it has been dismissed as a "hobby" project by the company.

TiVo will be re-entering the UK television market this year, in partnership with Virgin Media, and will launch a set-top box that blends the best of broadcast and online video content, and allows users to create a personalized viewing experience. In the United States, smaller companies, such as Roku and Boxee, are also making a name for themselves in the web TV space.

The Inflatable Sleeping Coat - a bed you wear

2010-03-01T08:28:00.000-08:00

We know how much you love spending time in the great outdoors but it can get tiring (and a little annoying) when you have to lug all your sleeping and camping gear with you. What if you could carry all your sleeping gear in one handy package? That's the thinking behind the Inflatable Sleeping Coat. The design concept by Lin Tsui-Wei not only keeps you dry and warm during the day – it inflates to provide a comfortable sleeping bag for when it’s time for bed.

You probably wouldn’t win any fashion awards in this sleeping coat – but who’s going to see you in the middle of the woods anyway? Besides, this design is all about comfort and function - not looks. Not only does it protect you from harsh winds, it is also waterproof and lightweight enough to wear during the day if required. There are also multiple pockets to store and protect all your personal items.

If you've camped in a particularly rocky spot, you can detach the lower part of the coat to make a mini-mattress - just the right size for sitting on during the evening meal. When it’s time for bed, the coat can be inflated to make a warm, snug and comfortable sleeping bag.

If the weather looks unpredictable, you can attach the bottom half of the jacket to protect your legs from wind and rain. Plus, the convenience of a dual purpose piece of equipment, makes it perfect if you don’t have a lot of space to spare.

The Sleeping Coat was an entrant in the 2009 red dot awards won a Design Concept Red Dot Award in the Protection category.

Great idea - we'd love to see it in production.

The Baby Emotion Detector:- can a computer program analyze a baby's cry???

2010-02-27T06:38:00.000-08:00

New parents discover quite quickly how loudly their newborn can scream when they’re not happy. But working out the cause of the problem is unfortunately pretty much a guessing game. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a device that could tell you exactly what was wrong with your baby? It might not be as preposterous as it sounds - Japanese scientists claim they have developed a statistical computer program that can analyze the differences in a baby's cries. So, future baby monitors could be capable of alerting parents that their child is tired, hungry, needs a diaper change, or is in pain.

In the past, baby emotion analyzers such as the Why Cry Baby Analyzer have been looked at with a degree of skepticism. So what makes this emotion analyzing program any different to those in devices that are currently available? Well, instead of just using information from one source, for example - the crying pattern, the Japanese researchers used three sources of information in order to classify various infant cries - sound-pattern recognition, audio spectra and the parents’ confirmation of the baby’s emotional state.

The researchers used a sound pattern method that provided them with statistical information about the frequency of the cries and the power function of the audio spectrum. They then used the differences in the various recordings of the audio spectra and correlated them with the parents’ opinion of the baby’s state of mind.

The Japanese research has recently been published in the International Journal of Biometrics. The research approach was based on kansei engineering which aims to "measure" feelings and emotions. It was invented in the 1970s by Professor Mitsuo Nagamachi, Dean of Hiroshima International University. The researchers acknowledge that the main problem with determining and classifying the emotional state of a baby is that the child can not verbalize why they are crying.

Do you think a computer program can recognize what is wrong with your baby or will you stick to the tried and true method of elimination – if they’re not tired or hungry, it’s time to change a diaper?

UN urges action on e-waste

2010-02-27T06:34:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder what happens to discarded televisions and obsolete home computers, or do you prefer not to think about it? According to a United Nations study on recycling, the volume of disused electronic products, or “e-waste” as it is known, has risen dramatically in-line with growth in sales in developing countries such as China, India, Africa and Latin America. By 2020, the alarming rate at which e-waste will have accumulated will have grown by as much as 500 per cent in some nations. To minimize the impact such a statistic will have on public health and the environment, the study calls for new recycling technologies and regulations to be implemented to safeguard against the hazardous by products of e-waste.

Outdated computers, mobile phones, printers, pagers, digital photo and music devices, refrigerators, toys and televisions are just several of the items at the top of the e-waste heap. The issue has long been recognized in developing countries as various programs to combat it would suggest.

According to the report, “Recycling—from E-waste to Resources,” issued by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and presented at a meeting between hazardous wastes experts in Bali, Indonesia, e-waste from old computers will have increased by 500 per cent over a ten-year period from 2007 in India, and by 200 to 400 per cent in South Africa and China. E-waste created by mobile phones will be seven times greater in China and 18 times greater in India.

China produces about 2.3 million tonnes of domestic e-waste each year. It seems to be considered a dumping ground for developed countries and has banned e-waste imports. This statistic is second only to the United States, which produces about 3 million tonnes.

Further compounding the issue is the manner in which current disposal practices are handled. In China, informal cost-effective practices allow inexpert recyclers to incinerate e-waste to recover valuable metals including gold, silver, palladium, copper and indium. The result is the steady release of toxic pollution and a very low metal recovery yield compared to more regulated processes employed by state-of-the-art industrial facilities.

UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner argues that, “China is not alone in facing a serious challenge…India, Brazil, Mexico and others may also face rising environmental damage and health problems if e-waste recycling is left to the vagaries of the informal sector.”

The report indicates that, despite the daunting prospects posed by e-waste over the next decade, there is a “new urgency to establishing ambitious, formal and regulated processes for collecting and managing e-waste.” It recommends that countries establish e-waste management centers of excellence, noting a successful pilot in Bangalore, India, to transform informal e-waste collection and management. Nations such as Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Morocco and South Africa are cited as places with great potential to introduce e-waste recycling technologies, such as manual dismantling of e-waste, because the informal e-waste sector is relatively small. Other countries such as Kenya, Peru, Senegal and Uganda where e-waste is relative low but likely to rise would benefit from capacity building.

Steiner also argues that with immediate action and forward planning improved e-waste recycling technologies in developing countries can “generate decent employment, cut greenhouse gas emissions and recover a wide range of valuable materials…[turning] an e-challenge into an e-opportunity.”

As the saying goes, one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Konrad Osterwalder, Rector of the UN University (UNU) echoes the sentiment, stating that, “smart new technologies…combined with national and international policies, can transform waste into assets, creating new businesses with decent green jobs.”

Yahoo, Twitter to boost up social features

2010-02-27T01:35:00.000-08:00

San Francisco: Seeking to augment the appeal of its online properties with popular social networking features, Yahoo plans to integrate Twitter into its collection of websites. The partnership will allow web surfers to view the short, 140-character messages created by Twitter users, dubbed Tweets, directly within Yahoo sites as well as to publish their own Twitter messages without leaving Yahoo, reports Alexei Oreskovic from Reuters..
Yahoo also plans to display a live stream of Tweets within other online properties including its email service and sites devoted to sports, entertainment and finance later this year. The move, which Yahoo announced late on Tuesday, comes a couple of months after Yahoo announced a similar deal with Facebook, the world's No.1 social networking site.

In January, Facebook overtook Yahoo to become the second most visited website in the United States, according to a recent report by web analytics firm Compete. A separate study by comScore showed Yahoo maintaining its No.2 rank with roughly 164 million unique U.S. visitors, while Facebook was the No.4 site with 112 visitors, behind third-ranked Microsoft.

Yahoo said its Internet search engine results will display up-to-the-second Tweets about various topics, matching the so-called "real time search" capabilities that Google and Microsoft announced in their own respective deals with Twitter last year.

Yahoo executives said that the company was looking at ways to make Twitter messages relevant to each property, such as by customizing the selection of messages that appear alongside an article about a particular sporting event, for example. "We believe that the content and context side of things is very unique," Yahoo Vice President of Communities Jim Stoneham told Reuters.

However, Yahoo would not comment on any financial terms involved in the deal with Twitter.

iPad demand better than early iPhone demand

2010-02-25T23:36:00.000-08:00

Bangalore: As consumers await Apple's iPad, a new study from market analyst RBC and ChangeWave Research has revealed that the demand for Apple's tablet currently outpaces the original demand for its iPhone, reports MacRumors.

As per the survey, 13 percent of the 3,200 folks surveyed said that they were likely to buy an iPad when it's released. According to ChangeWave, initial iPhone demand was at nine percent prior to the launch of the original iPhone. Further, just eight percent of respondents bristled at iPad pricing, compared to the whopping 28 percent that scoffed at the iPhone's original pricing.
The survey found that 19 percent of respondents who said that they might buy an iPad would pick up the entry level, $499 model. Another 19 percent of respondents said they would buy the top of the line $829 version. The other versions of the iPad had less interest.

Another interesting fact, 68 percent of respondents said that they plan to use the iPad to surf the Web, while 44 percent will check e-mail, and 37 percent will read e-books.

Now, Control Your Mobile With Your Eyes

2010-02-25T22:02:00.000-08:00

In your wildest imagination, have you ever thought of making calls on your mobile phone using your eyes? Or may be controlling a music player just by moving your eyes? Sounds fantastic? If the prototype of a new mobile phone unveiled by NTT DoCoMo makes it into mainstream mobile technology, your fantasy may soon be turned into reality. During the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Japanese mobile phone operator NTT DoCoMo demonstrated a prototype mobile phone which detects eye movement and translates it into on-screen interactions.
"The prototype device has special electrodes -- that can pick up the movement of the eye -- attached to the earphones. Eyes have "electrical potential" - positive at the cornea and negative at the retina - which changes depending on the movement of the eyeball. The earphone electrodes are able to read these changing currents - known as an electrooculogram - and the mobile phone is pre-programmed to translate the information into a command," reports PTI.

Hence, you can use your eye movements to make or receive a call on your mobile. You can control your phone even when your eyes are closed.

NTT DoCoMo says, "The system is only a prototype, but it provides an insight into the way we might be using our phones in years to come. In future, phones will be worn like accessories. We're keen to find new natural-gesture interfaces and clever ways of interacting with these devices to suit this anticipated future use."

"Power Plant in Box"

2010-02-25T20:58:00.000-08:00

A much awaited energy venture, known as “power plant in a box” was unveiled by its In, Indian- American initiator on Thursday, promising to provide clean electricity to homes, office buildings and even whole villages in developing world. Bloom Energy, one of Silicon valleys’s most secretive start-ups, unveiled its ground breaking technology ‘Bloom Box’ invented by rocket scientist K.R Sridhar. “Bloom Energy is dedicated to making clean, reliable energy affordable for everyone in the world”, said Dr.Sridhar, principal, co-founder and CEO of Bloom Energy.“Like cell phones circumvented landlines to proliferate telephony, Bloom Energy will enable the adoption of distributed power as a smarter, localized energy source”, he said.

The key to bloom box is the fuel cell device, which consist of a stack of ceramic disks coated with secret green and black “inks”. These disks are separated by cheap metal plates. The bloom energy server a smooth metal box the size of a pickup truck, can generate electricity from multiple fuels while producing relatively few greenhouse gas emissions . Bloom Energy already has some of the top world companies as its customers, including Coca Cola, eBay, Google, Staples and Wal-Mart.

Bloom Energy provides distributed power generation allowing customers to efficiently create their own electricity on cite. Built using abundant and affordable materials, Bloom’s fuel cell technology is fundamentally different from the legacy hydrogen fuel cells. The server is distinct in four primary ways as its uses lower cost materials, provides unmatched efficiency in converting fuel to electricity, has its ability to run on a wide range of renewable or traditional fuels and is more easy deployed and maintained. Even running on a fossil fuel the systems are approximately 67% cleaner than a typical coal-fired power plant. When powered by a renewable fuel, they can be 100% cleaner.

Amazon and Microsoft sign patent deal

2010-02-23T07:49:00.000-08:00

Bangalore: Microsoft and Amazon have entered into a patent cross-licensing deal, as part of which, Amazon will pay Microsoft an undisclosed amount of money, reports CNET news.

The deal covers both Amazon's Kindle product as well as the company's use of Linux-based servers. Microsoft has maintained that many implementations of Linux infringe on its patents and has signed numerous licensing deals that cover Linux with both companies that sell Linux based software and those that use the operating system in their hardware.

According to CNET, Microsoft, which started an intellectual property licensing push in late 2003, has deals with scores of companies ranging from Novell to Samsung and Fuji Xerox. "We are pleased to have entered into this patent license agreement with Amazon.com," said Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Horacio Gutierrez. "Microsoft's patent portfolio is the largest and strongest in the software industry, and this agreement demonstrates our mutual respect for intellectual property as well as our ability to reach pragmatic solutions to IP issues regardless of whether proprietary or open source software is involved."

Developing countries may face e-waste crisis: UN

2010-02-23T07:43:00.000-08:00

Bangalore: If proper electronic-waste recycling is not established in developing countries, they will face serious environmental and public health consequences, says a report by United Nations. According to UN, the urgency in addressing e-waste disposal is driven by the sharp rise in sales of electronic products expected over the next decade in emerging countries like China and India, across continents such as Africa, and over large regions including Latin America

Such imports are expected to add millions of tons of e-waste in regions where recycling efforts are inadequate to handle even current e-waste levels, reports InformationWeek. While inadequate recycling efforts are not being properly addressed, the quantity of e-waste that exists today is growing.

For example, e-waste from old computers is expected to jump from 2007 levels by 200 percent to 400 percent in South Africa and China and by 500 percent in India. E-waste from discarded mobile phones will be about seven times higher than 2007 levels in China and 18 times higher in India, the report released Monday from the UN Environment Programme said. E-waste from televisions will be 1.5 to two times higher in China and India. This year, China is expected to produce about 2.3 million tons of e-waste domestically, second only to the U.S. with about three million tons.

Among the recommendations in the report is for countries to establish e-waste management centers of excellence that build on existing organizations working in the area of recycling and waste management.

Data thefts cost firms $2 Million a year

2010-02-23T07:34:00.000-08:00

San Francisco: Trade secrets and customer information thefts costed firms an average of $2 million each last year, according to research conducted by security software maker Symantec, reports Bloomberg.

In a survey of 2,100 IT executives worldwide, 75 percent of respondents reported cyber attacks last year. Most intrusions were aimed at stealing a firm's intellectual property, such as product designs. "We can expect to see companies going out of business because their intellectual property is stolen," Maureen Kelly, a senior Director of Product Marketing, said in an interview to Bloomberg. "For some, this is a matter of life or death.”

Businesses coped with the recession by trimming staff to handle security, while hackers have become more skillful. Last month, Google said, it and at least 20 other companies had suffered a series of 'highly sophisticated' online attacks originating in China.

In many cases, hackers have switched their attentions to stealing trade secrets, according to Symantec. "While hackers are still looking for customer data, such as credit card information, they are now going more for industrial espionage and counterfeiting," Kelly said in an interview.

"They are also more specialized - with one person to break in, another to get the data, a third to install the software to steal information, and a fourth to encrypt it and distribute it,"

CPU Inside Keyboard

2010-02-22T21:26:00.000-08:00

A typical computer usually have Monitor, CPU, Keyboard, Speakers .But technology have evolved to such a level that you might have just a keyboard which will replace your CPU, Speakers. Don’t believe me then see the CPU inside Keyborad.

Removable HDD

USB, Lan Port, Printer Port, Mouse Port

DVD Drive

A complete CPU layout inside keyboard

LED's

Card Slots

Product Benifits

Space Saving
50% Less Power Requirement
Lower Maintenance Cost

Easy to Upgrade
Easy to Service
Easy Deployment

Mini projector turns any surface into touch screen computer

2010-02-15T10:51:00.000-08:00

The gadget, Light Touch, uses holographic laser-projection technology to beam a 10in virtual touch-screen on to any surface. Infrared sensors detect the finger taps of the user, and allow them to type words, or open and close programs and applications. It runs Windows CE, a basic version of Microsoft’s popular operating system, and users can use it to write a letter or watch a video. Sweeping a hand across the surface enables users to flick between photos or programs.

Light Blue Optics, the Cambridge-based company behind the projector, is showcasing the device at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. But the Light Touch is not being sold directly to consumers; instead, the company hopes to license the technology to other major electronics manufacturers to use in their products.
"The opportunities for Light Touch extend beyond consumer electronics," said Chris Harris, chief executive of Light Blue Optics. "It could profoundly change the way people interact with multimedia content and the built environment."

Firms such as Adobe, Microsoft and Toshiba are rumored to be interested in the technology.

"We believe that today's consumer is no longer a passive viewer of multimedia content," said Harris. "People expect to engage, interact and share content, and our prototype enables them to do that in new and exciting ways."

Nvidia Unveils Optimus Graphics Technology

2010-02-12T06:06:00.000-08:00

Finally, Nvidia has unveiled the Optimus Graphics technology for the mobile platform. As reported earlier, the Optimus technology automatically chooses and switches the best fit graphics chip between integrated graphics and discrete graphics. Besides that, this technology also switches back to the graphics which will help conserve battery life.

Nvidia cites the example of Hybrid car that chooses best system between electric car engine and gas-powered system on-the-fly, Optimus does the same for graphics processors on notebooks. Optimus technology for notebooks is seamless, instantaneous and most importantly - automatic. Users won't have to fiddle around any settings or buttons. Basically, this technology makes an automatic choice of using either discrete graphics or integrated graphics for running a program and also ensures better performance along with longer battery life.

Nvidia claims that battery charge on Optimus equipped notebooks can last up to two times longer than the notebooks without Optimus technology and discrete GPU.

Deep-sea snail shell could inspire next-generation armour

2010-02-02T21:42:00.000-08:00

A deep-sea snail shell's ability to withstand heavy blows could inspire new generation of body armour.

Crysomallon squamiferum, commonly known as the scaly-foot gastropod, was discovered in 1999 in the Kairei "black smoker" field on the Central Indian Ridge, at a depth of 2420 meters.

Christine Ortiz at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her colleagues studied the snail's three-layered shell to find out how it defends itself from crab attacks.

To assess the shell's strength and stiffness, they penetrated it with diamond-tipped probe – applying the same amount of force that an attacking crab's claws might use. They then used the data to model the shell's layers and launched a virtual crab attack on it.

Iron hard

It turns out that the snail employs some unique tricks to protect itself. For example, the shell's outermost layer consists of strong particles of iron sulphide created in the hydrothermal vents, each around 20 nanometers across, embedded in a soft organic matrix secreted by the snail. This structure is designed to crack when hit, but in a way that absorbs energy.

Cracks spread only by fanning out around the iron sulphide particles. This "micro cracking" not only absorbs energy, it also ensures that larger cracks do not form. What's more, the particles of iron sulphide may blunt and deform intruding claws, the study suggests.

A thick, spongy middle layer acts as padding to dissipate further the energy of the blow. This makes it less likely that the mollusk’s brittle inner shell, which is made of calcium carbonate, will crack.

The middle layer may be an important adaptation to life at a deep-sea hydrothermal vent, suggests Cortiz: the acidic water near black smokers dissolves calcium carbonate and so can quickly enlarge fractures.

The three-layer design could be used to improve body armour "without the addition of excessive weight", says Ortiz.

Crack to survive

The idea of coating armour in iron-based nanoparticles that dissipate the energy of a blow by generating micro cracks is "largely unexplored in synthetic systems" and particularly promising, says Cortiz.

Helmets, motorbikes and Arctic pipelines that collide with icebergs, leading to costly oil spills, could also benefit, says Cortiz, who is also exploring the armour systems deployed by the marine mollusks known as chitons, sea urchins, beetles and a fish known as the Senegal bichir.

Fishy sensors could keep submersibles out of trouble

2010-02-02T21:34:00.000-08:00

A PRESSURE sensor that mimics the way a fish's lateral line works could help submersible craft navigate.

The technology could improve underwater robots' ability to detect hazards, such as deep sea vents and shipwrecks, when the water is too murky for a camera to work effectively, or the object is too close for sonar, says Douglas Jones at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The lateral line is a sense organ that runs along the sides of most fish and enables them to detect changes in water pressure. This allows fish to sense depth and the direction of the current, and also means they can swim in synchronized schools even in darkness. The line is peppered with hair cells called neuromasts that fire in response to pressure waves. The pattern of signals generated along the line allows the fish to pick out the tiniest flick of a nearby tail.

Jones, alongside Chang Liu at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, made an artificial neuromast by adding boron to a 500-micrometre-long silicon hair to create a stress-sensitive resistor. As the hair bends in response to water motion, its resistance changes, allowing the force of the water's movement to be calculated.

The researchers tested the sensor by fixing an array around a plastic pipe and measuring the response to various objects placed in the water, including a live crayfish. The animal's wiggling legs generated a pattern of pressure signals that enabled the team to calculate its precise location in relation to the pipe. Because the hairs in the array are oriented at right angles to each other, the direction of the water motion can be easily determined (see diagram).

Finally, the distance to the object can be worked out in the same way a fish would, by moving water in the direction of the object and timing how long it takes to receive an echo

Smart mud could be the new plastic

2010-01-26T02:38:00.000-08:00

Could a mixture of water and clay replace plastics? The desire to wean the world off oil has sparked all manner of research into novel transportation fuels, but manufacturing plastics uses large amounts of oil too. Researchers at the University of Tokyo, Japan, think their material could be up to the task.

A hydrogel made from water, clay and a "molecular glue" is strong enough to support its own weight. Future, stronger versions could replace plastics

Takuzo Aida and his team mixed a few grams of clay with 100 grams of water in the presence of tiny quantities of a thickening agent called sodium polyacrylate and an organic "molecular glue". The thickening agent teases apart the clay into thin sheets, increasing its surface area and allowing the glue to get a better hold on it.

This means that, while the mixture is almost 98 per cent water, it forms a transparent and elastic hydrogel with sufficient mechanical strength to make a 3.5-centimetre-wide self-standing bridge.

Self-repairing hydrogel

The strength of the material depends on the sum of the forces acting between the molecules in the clay nanosheets and the glue, says Aida. These so-called supramolecular forces, such as hydrogen bonds, also help to trap water molecules between the clay sheets.

Some other hydrogels rely on covalent chemical bonds rather than supramolecular forces for their strength. One disadvantage of this is that when the covalent bonds break, the material irreversibly loses its strength, says Aida. Supramolecular forces, on the other hand, can easily reform, so if the material fails under stress it can quickly regain its strength.

The gel takes just 3 minutes to form, and making it requires no understanding of the chemical process involved, Aida says, – a fact that impresses Craig Hawker at the University of California in Santa Barbara, who was not involved with the study. "One of the primary breakthroughs is the overall simplicity of the procedure coupled with the exceptional physical properties of the final assemblies," he says.

New class of materials

"Toughness, self-healing and robustness are just some of the initial physical properties that will be found for this new class of materials," Hawker says. "I predict that this approach will lead to the design of even more impressive materials in the near future."

Polymer scientist Jian Ping Gong at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan, says the work is "beautiful" but points out that the material's mechanical strength falls short of what is possible for plastics and chemically cross-linked gels.

Aida says that strengthening the material is as simple as increasing the quantities of clay, sodium polyacrylate and glue, provided transparency is not important.

Spasers set to sum: A new dawn for optical computing

2010-01-26T01:39:00.000-08:00

IT'S a laser, but not as we know it. For a start, you need a microscope to see it. Gleaming eerily green, it is a single spherical particle just a few tens of nanometres across.

Tiny it might be, but its creators have big plans for it. With further advances, it could help to fulfil a long-held dream: to build a super-fast computer that computes with light.

Dubbed a "spaser", this minuscule lasing object is the latest by-product of a buzzing field known as nanoplasmonics. Just as microelectronics exploits the behaviour of electrons in metals and semiconductors on micrometre scales, so nanoplasmonics is concerned with the nanoscale comings and goings of entities known as plasmons that lurk on and below the surfaces of metals.

To envisage what as plasmon is, imagine a metal as a great sea of freely moving electrons. When light of the right frequency strikes the surface of the metal, it can set up a wavelike oscillation in this electron sea, just as the wind whips up waves on the ocean. These collective electron waves - plasmons - act to all intents and purposes as light waves trapped in the metal's surface. Their wavelengths depend on the metal, but are generally measured in nanometres. Their frequencies span the terahertz range - equivalent to the frequency range of light from the ultraviolet right through the visible to the infrared.

In 2003, their studies of plasmons led theorists Mark Stockman at Georgia State University in Atlanta and David Bergman at Tel Aviv University in Israel to an unusual thought. Plasmons behaved rather like light, so could they be amplified like light, too? What the duo had in mind was a laser-like device that multiplied single plasmons to turn them into powerful arrays of plasmons all oscillating in the same way (see "From laser to spaser").

The mathematics of it seemed to work. By analogy with the acronym that produces the word laser, they dubbed their brainchild "surface plasmon amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation" - spaser - and published a paper about it.

The spaser might have remained just a theoretical curiosity. Around the same time, however, physicists were waking up to the potential of plasmonics for everything from perfect lenses to sensitive biosensors (see "What have plasmons ever done for us?"). The spaser idea was intriguing enough that Mikhail, an electrical engineer at Norfolk State University in Virginia, and some of his colleagues set out to build one.

It was not an easy task. Light is long-lived, so it is relatively easy to bounce it around in a mirrored chamber and amplify it, as happens inside a laser. Plasmons, by contrast, are transient entities: they typically live for mere attoseconds, and cannot travel more than a few plasmon wavelengths in a metal before their energy is absorbed by the ocean of non-oscillating electrons around them. It was not at all clear how we might get enough of a handle on plasmons to amplify them at all.

In August 2009, Noginov and his colleagues showed how. Their ingenious solution takes the form of a circular particle just 44 nanometres across. It consists of a gold core contained within a shell of silica, speckled with dye molecules that, excited initially by an external laser, produce green light. Some of that light leaks out to give the nanoparticles their characteristic green glow; the rest stimulates the generation of plasmons at the surface of the gold core.

In the normal way of things, these plasmons are absorbed by the metal almost as soon as they are produced. But their tickling influence also stimulates the dye molecules in the silica shell to emit more light, which in turn generates more plasmons, which excites more light and so on. With a sufficient supply of dye, enough plasmons can exist at the same time that they start to reinforce each other. The signature of a laser-like multiplication of plasmons within the device is a dramatic increase in green laser light emitted from the nanoparticle after only a small increase in the energy supplied from the external laser - the signature Noginov and his colleagues reported last year .

And they were not the only ones. In October 2009, Xiang Zhang, a mechanical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues unveiled a similarly tiny device that exploits plasmons to produce laser light .

These innovations generated headlines at the time as an entirely new type of lasing device more compact than any yet seen and which, in theory, required a lot less power than a conventional device. That's an exciting development in its own right, but just one in a list of promising advances in the bustling business of laser technology.

Crucially, though, the development of spasers has sparked the hope that one of the great scientific disappointments of the past decades - the unfulfilled promise of optical computing - may yet be turned into triumph.

On the face of it, optical computers, which use light rather than currents of electrons to process information, are a great idea. Electrons are easy to manipulate and process, but they tend to get bogged down as they pass through metals and semiconductors, colliding with atoms and bouncing off them in ways that limit the speed and fidelity of information transmission. Photons, by contrast, can withstand interference, and are above all fast, in theory zipping around a chip at close to the cosmic speed limit.

In the 1990s, various groups claimed to be getting close to making the dream of optical computing a reality. That included a concerted effort at the world-famous Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where the building block of microelectronic circuits, the transistor, was invented in 1947. Researchers there and elsewhere hit a snag, however. The very fleet-footedness that made photons perfect for high-speed communications made them almost impossible to pin down and use for sensible processing of data.

"Optical computing has a chequered history, particularly the boondoggle at Bell Labs," says Harry Atwater, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. All the efforts foundered when it came to producing anything like a transistor: a tiny, low-power device that could be used to toggle light signals on and off reliably.

In theory, a controllable laser would do this trick, if not for one problem - lasers devour power. Even worse, they are huge, relatively speaking: they work by bouncing photons around a mirrored cavity, so the very smallest they can be is about half the wavelength of the light they produce. For green light, with a wavelength of 530 nanometres, that means little change from 300 nanometres. Electrical transistors, meanwhile, are approaching one-tenth that size.

You see where this is leading. Spasers are a tiny source of light that can be switched on and off at will. At a few tens of nanometres in size, they are just slightly bigger than the smallest electrical transistors. The spaser is to nanoplasmonics what the transistor is to microelectronics, says Stockman: it is the building block that should make optical information-processing possible. Inevitably, there will be many hurdles to overcome. For a start, Noginov's prototype spaser is switched on and off using another laser, rather than being switched electrically. That is cumbersome and means it cannot capitalise on the technology's low-power potential. It is also unclear, when it comes to connecting many spasers together to make a logic gate, how input and output signals can be cleanly separated with the resonant spherical spasers that have so far been constructed.

Mutual benefit

The most intriguing aspect of spasers, however, is the one that could make or break them as the basis of a future computing technology: they are made of metal. In one sense, that is a bad thing, because making a plasmonic chip would require a wholly different infrastructure to that used to make silicon chips - an industry into which billions in research money has been poured.

Silicon's predominance has not necessarily been a bar to other technologies establishing themselves: the radio signals used for cellphone communication, for example, are of a frequency too high for silicon chips to cope with, so an entirely separate manufacturing process grew up to make the Gallium Arsenide chips that can. To justify the initial investment costs, another upstart chip-architecture needs a similar "killer application": something it can do that silicon cannot.

Stockman reckons the extra processing speed promised by plasmonic devices will generate such applications in areas like cryptography. "Having faster processors than everyone else will be a question of national security," he says. And he points to another reason why the spooks might be interested. One problem with semiconductors is that their delicate conduction capabilities are vulnerable to ionising radiation. Such rays can send avalanches of electrons streaming through delicate electronic components. At best, this corrupts data and halts calculations. At worst, it fries transistors, permanently disabling them.

This is where the metallic nature of a plasmonic chip would come into its own. The extra electrons that ionising radiation can produce are mere drops in the ocean of free electrons from which plasmons are generated in a metal. A plasmonic device would be able to process and store information in the harshest radioactive environments: in orbiting satellites, in nuclear reactors, during nuclear conflict.

Perhaps the most likely outcome, though, is that rather than the one superseding the other, plasmonics and electronics come to coexist to mutual advantage in a single chip. As the transistors in chips become smaller, the wires that connect them over distances of just a few nanometres become a significant bottleneck for data. That is one reason why chips are currently spinning their wheels at speeds of about 3 gigahertz. "Wires limit the speed at which electrons can deliver information," says Atwater. "So an obvious solution is to replace them with photonic connections."

The problem with such connections to date has been converting electronic signals into photonic ones and back again with a speed and efficiency that makes it worthwhile. Plasmons, which owe their existence to the easy exchange of energy between light and electrons, could be just the things for the job, making a hybrid electrical-optical chip a genuine possibility.

As well as that, says Atwater, we should work out how to manipulate plasmons using devices that can be made in the same way, and on the same fabrication lines, as ordinary silicon chips. Early last year, he and his colleagues at Caltech revealed an electrically controlled device dubbed the plasmostor that can vary the intensity of plasmons as they pass through it, and which has an architecture very similar to that of conventional transistors . Just this month, a Dutch group has announced that they have produced an electrically powered source of plasmons fully compatible with existing silicon chip fabrication technology .

It's very early days, so such innovations have yet to match the performance of purely electronic components. The plasmostor, for instance, flips between its on and off states more slowly than a conventional transistor, and the signals have an annoying tendency to leak out of the device and get lost. There is still a long way to go to a computer that runs on anything other than electrons. But it is a start, says Atwater. "You're challenging a hugely successful technology. It's audacious to think that you can just replace it."

But if a tiny round green light isn't a signal to go ahead and give it a try, what is?

From laser to spaser

This year marks the golden jubilee of a ruby trailblazer: it was on 16 May 1960 that Theodore Maiman of Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California, coaxed a synthetic ruby to produce the first ever laser light. The first laser to produce light from gas - a mixture of helium and neon - followed later that same year.

Half a century later, and there's hardly an area of human endeavour that doesn't depend on lasers in some way or another: CD and DVD players, metal cutting and welding, barcode scanners and corrective eye surgery to name but a few.

Early lasers were essentially made up of a mirrored box containing a "gain medium" such as a crystal or gas. Zapped with light or an electric current, electrons in this medium absorb energy, releasing it again as photons. These photons bounce around the box and stimulate further electrons to emit more photons. This self-reinforcing increase in light energy is "light amplification by the stimulated emission of radiation" - laser action, for short.

Spasers use the same principle, except rather than amplifying light directly, they amplify surface plasmons - the wavelike movements of free electrons on and near the surfaces of metals - using that in turn to emit light.

What have plasmons ever done for us?

Plasmons might sound esoteric, but it is not just with spasers (see main story) that they are seeing practical application.

Take molecular sensing. The amount and colour of light absorbed by a plasmonic nanoparticle is extremely sensitive to the surrounding molecular environment. This property has been exploited to build sensing devices that detect levels of anything from the protein casein, an indicator of the quality of milk products, to glucose in the blood.

What's significant about these plasmonic sensors is that they can make continuous measurements, unlike chemical tests which usually give a single snapshot. A plasmonic implant could one day help diabetics to monitor and control their blood glucose levels in real time.

Plasmons should also be useful for increasing the efficiency of certain kinds of flat-screen displays. In June 2009, Ki Youl Yang and his colleagues at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Daejeon showed how silver nanoparticles deposited onto organic light-emitting diodes used in some displays increases the amount of light they emit.

More impressive yet, plasmonic devices might also help to tackle cancer, if tests in mice are anything to go by. Plasmonic nanoparticles laced with antibodies can be made to latch onto tumours. When blasted with a focused beam of infrared light precisely tuned to the plasmon frequency, the nanoparticles heat up, killing the attached cancer cells while leaving the surrounding healthy tissue unharmed.

Game changing hardware coming in 2010

2010-01-25T00:14:00.000-08:00

While it's not likely that any new gaming consoles will be released in 2010, there's plenty of new hardware that will change the way we play.

2010 is the year that everyone catches up to Wii: Both Microsoft and Sony will introduce their own unique takes on motion controllers. Meanwhile, Nintendo will attempt to move things in a different direction with the Wii Vitality Sensor. But perhaps the biggest game-changer could come from Apple. And in a post-iPhone world, that doesn't sound so far-fetched.

Project Natal

This revolutionary interface for Xbox 360 ditches joysticks for an array of cameras and microphones that track your movements, recognize your face and respond to your voice. Microsoft says it'll be available this holiday season.

Natal really does track minute movements of your body, allowing you to swing your arms to whack things onscreen or grip an imaginary steering wheel to drive a virtual car.

Even just fiddling around with simple prototype proof-of-concept software generated the sort of excitement and wonder that Wii Sports did the first time I played it.

Wii Vitality Sensor

Nintendo is known for innovative accessories, but the Vitality Sensor is old tech: A similar device was released in Japan for the Nintendo 64 well over a decade ago.Since the notion of a videogame controller that reads your pulse from your fingertip isn't new, Nintendo must come up with interesting pieces of software if it's going to sell this thing to the Wii Fit crowd. The company says the pulse-monitoring feature could be used for a game that helps you relax, but hasn't actually shown any such thing yet.

Nintendo's president recently named the Vitality Sensor one of the company's big products for 2010, saying that software would be announced in July. Our hearts aren't racing just yet.

Sony Motion Controller

To make a long story short, Sony's new device is like a Wiimote that can be tracked by an EyeToy camera. The PlayStation 3 will know where the controller is moving, but it will also be able to (for example) project your image onto the TV screen, then replace the controller in your hand with a virtual sword.

The combination of motion sensing and position tracking should make Sony's controller much more accurate than Nintendo's. But we haven't seen much more than tech demos yet, even though Sony says the motion controller will launch in the spring. "Ape Escape" and "Resident Evil" titles that use the controller are in the works.

Apple Tablet

The iPhone was a game-changer for mobile gaming. Since the phone debuted in 2007, the App Store has been deluged with games, more than a few of which are awesome. Apple's rumored tablet, a multimedia touchscreen device meant to compete with (read: crush) similar but lesser-featured gadgets like Nook and Kindle, can only mean interesting things for games.

Rumors suggest that Apple's machine will be less a computer and more an overgrown iPhone. So you probably won't be playing World of Warcraft on the thing more likely, you'll be playing stuff like Defense Grid on a big, roomy screen.

One potential downside is that developers might not have the money, resources or motivation to release upgrades of their iPhone games to suit the tablet's larger screen. What if the game boom on the iPhone was a one-time deal?

Nintendo DSi XL

While it's certainly possible that either Nintendo or Sony could release a new handheld gaming platform this Christmas, we know for sure that another version of the DSi is on the way first. Already available in Japan, the DSi XL is scheduled to be released in the first quarter of 2010 in the United States and Europe.

You mean we all have to buy a fourth Nintendo DS? Yes, even though the only difference is that the DSi XL has giant screens. Portability takes a backseat to visibility in this new model the 4.2-inch screens make your games pop with big, bold images, but make the unit itself much larger.

You might not think you want this, but when you experience how much easier it is to play with bigger screens, you'll probably be hooked.

All-electric buses to debut on Sir Bani Yas Island in UAE

2010-01-19T22:27:00.000-08:00

Abu Dhabi: The world's first two zero-emission all-electric buses will be making their debut runs on the western region's Sir Bani Yas Island, it was announced on Tuesday by the Tourism Development & Investment Company (TDIC).

Visitors examine a model of a Wind Turbine Aerogenerador at the Sonkyoenergy stall. Image Credit: Ahmed Kutty/Gulf News

These vehicles will be introduced from March to Desert Islands in line with TDIC's environmental policies which adhere to global sustainability standards.
This makes Sir Bani Yas Island, the 87-square kilometre natural island, the first destination in the world to have a public transportation system run purely on all-electric buses.

The island is a wildlife and bird sanctuary housing many species common to the Arabian Peninsula as well as Africa.

Produced by US-based bus manufacturer DesignLine Corporation specifically to suit the Middle East climatic conditions, the technologically-advanced, environmentally-friendly vehicles offer the perfect transport solution for Sir Ban Yas. They are low noise, low vibration, have low maintenance costs and zero carbon emissions.

Pioneers

Lee Tabler, CEO of TDIC, said in a press release: "Bringing the world's first zero-emission buses to operate on Sir Ban Yas Island is a perfect example of what an environmentally conscious tourism industry should be like. We are proud to be world pioneers in such highly regarded environmental initiatives that are taking place in Abu Dhabi."

TDIC has showcased at the summit the company's achievements in the reduction of energy consumption, sustainable architecture designs, waste management and natural preservation.

World's Thinnest,Smallest,Lightest High Definition Dual Camera

2010-01-16T04:13:00.000-08:00

Product development for the Xacti series has been carried out with an emphasis on a compact design that can be taken anywhere and anytime, using the concept of a handy device for recording the moments of daily life.

In order to make the new Xacti even more compact than previous models, SANYO has developed a slim sensor module and a new super slim lens.

With its compact size (approx. 126 cc in volume), lightweight design (approx. 142 g), and slim body (27 mm in thickness) for superior portability, the VPC-CS1 is a new style of video camera that will radically expand the situations where it can be used.

Not only it features a super slim and compact body, but also the VPC-CS1 can capture Full HD videos with a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels.
The original vertical ergonomic style enables slim body with usability^*

The video format used for this model is “MPEG-4 AVC / H.264,” which is easy to use on PC and Internet environments, as it is a single file format, similar to the one used for still photos. This format is fully supported by the latest Windows® OS, “Windows 7, which was launched in October 2009.
Consequently, video files are displayed in the same thumbnail format as still picture files, and they can also be played back directly with Windows Media Player, and editable with Windows Live Movie Maker, and are Device Stage compatible. This makes the files even more convenient for use on computers.

Sound is an important element for increasing the realism of videos. The VPC-CS1 has three microphone modes for recording clear sounds according to the scene and purpose.

Produces high-resolution 8-megapixel images.
Wide capture range from an advanced 10x zoom to a 38-mm wide angle lens.
“Digital Image Stabilizer" and “Face Chaser Function” for videos
“The new Digital Image Stabilizer,” “Face Chaser Function” and “Target a Color Function” for photos
“Sequential Shot” ensures capturing the perfect images.
”Eye-Fi card compatibility” enables automatic uploading of images to a computer.
Mini HDMI terminal for viewing high quality and clear images on TVs.
Compatible with large-capacity recording media, SDXC memory card.

Nuclear Battery For New Technology

2010-01-16T03:46:00.000-08:00

Are you tired of your short laptop battery life with only a few hours? Would you like the charge of your mobile phone to last a couple of months? Well, the answer to your “prayers” might be the nuclear batteries, which are been developed at the University of Missouri. They are designed especially for providing a lasting source of energy. And some people think these batteries could replace the current ones, including those used by the electrical cars. According to the creators, a nuclear battery has a very enormous capacity to generate electricity when compared to a regular one.

The batteries have always been the Achilles’ heel of the mobile devices. Usually, the designers of electronic devices for mass consumption (like laptops or media players) use small displays or screens that are not very bright in order to save the scarce energy resources that are provided from the regular batteries. But the new nuclear battery would bring a solution based on a liquid semiconductor (rather than a solid semiconductor) that will produce a much longer lifetime for the battery. The reason is the solid semiconductors are attacked constantly by some radioactive elements used by other types of batteries, while the liquid semiconductor is quite resistant to these attacks. Although the term “nuclear” can be a little perturbing, the fact is that these batteries are not very different from those batteries used in, for example, medical pacemakers.

The new radioisotope battery has the size of a penny and provides much more power than the traditional ones because, according to the researches, its capacity is very superior. Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri, said that the radioisotope battery “can provide power density that is six orders of magnitude higher than chemical batteries”. That is to say, it provides no less than a million times more charge than any “normal” battery.

Kwon and his research team have spent enough time working to solve many problems that they have encountered when developing this type of battery. One important thing is the batteries need to be small and thin in order to be practical and useful; this way, they could be used to power watches and small electronic devices. As mentioned before, the prototype (which you can see in the picture below) has the size and thickness of a penny, but the researchers think they can achieve a thinner battery. In order to do this, Kwon has required the collaboration of another professor: J. David Robertson (chemistry professor and associate director of the MU Research Reactor). Together, they hope to maximize the power of the nuclear batteries as well as reduce the size and test other materials to make additional improvements. Kwon thinks that the final battery, which would be used in commercial gadgets, could be thinner than a human hair. For the moment, the research team have required a provisional patent in order to protect the exclusive right to use this invention.

NanoRadio

2010-01-09T04:09:00.000-08:00

If you own a sleek iPod Nano, you've got nothing on Alex Zettl. The physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have come up with a nanoscale radio, in which the key circuitry consists of a single carbon nanotube.

Any wireless device, from cell phones to environmental sensors, could benefit from nanoradios. Smaller electronic components, such as tuners, would reduce power consumption and extend battery life. Nanoradios could also steer wireless communications into entirely new realms, including tiny devices that navigate the bloodstream to release drugs on command.

Miniaturizing radios has been a goal ever since RCA began marketing its pocket-sized transistor radios in 1955. More recently, electronics manufacturers have made microscale radios, creating new products such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. About five years ago, Zettl's group decided to try to make radios even smaller, working at the molecular scale as part of an effort to create cheap wireless environmental sensors.

Zettl's team set out to miniaturize individual components of a radio receiver, such as the antenna and the tuner, which selects one frequency to convert into a stream of electrical pulses that get sent to a speaker. But integrating separate nanoscale components proved difficult. About a year ago, however, Zettl and his students had a eureka moment. "We realized that, by golly, one nanotube can do it all," Zettl says. "Within a matter of days, we had a functioning radio." The first two transmissions it received were "Layla" by Derek and the Dominos and "Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys.

The Beach Boys song was an apt choice. Zettl's nano receiver works by translating the electromagnetic oscillations of a radio wave into the mechanical vibrations of a nanotube, which are in turn converted into a stream of electrical pulses that reproduce the original radio signal. Zettl's team anchored a nanotube to a metal electrode, which is wired to a battery. Just beyond the nanotube's free end is a second metal electrode. When a voltage is applied between the electrodes, electrons flow from the battery through the first electrode and the nanotube and then jump from the nanotube's tip across the tiny gap to the second electrode. The nanotube--now negatively charged--is able to "feel" the oscillations of a passing radio wave, which (like all electromagnetic waves) has both an electrical and a magnetic component.

Those oscillations successively attract and repel the tip of the tube, making the tube vibrate in sync with the radio wave. As the tube is vibrating, electrons continue to spray out of its tip. When the tip is farther from the second electrode, as when the tube bends to one side, fewer electrons make the jump across the gap. The fluctuating electrical signal that results reproduces the audio information encoded onto the radio wave, and it can be sent to a speaker.

The next step for Zettl and his colleagues is to make their nanoradios send out information in addition to receiving it. But Zettl says that won't be hard, since a transmitter is essentially a receiver run in reverse.

Nano transmitters could open the door to other applications as well. For instance, Zettl suggests that nanoradios attached to tiny chemical sensors could be implanted in the blood vessels of patients with diabetes or other diseases. If the sensors detect an abnormal level of insulin or some other target compound, the transmitter could then relay the information to a detector, or perhaps even to an implanted drug reservoir that could release insulin or another therapeutic on cue. In fact, Zettl says that since his paper on the nanotube radio came out in the journal Nano Letters, he's received several calls from researchers working on radio-based drug delivery vehicles. "It's not just fantasy," he says. "It's active research going on right now."

Cloud Computing

2010-01-09T03:55:00.000-08:00

Let's say you're an executive at a large corporation. Your particular responsibilities include making sure that all of your employees have the right hardware and software they need to do their jobs. Buying computers for everyone isn't enough -- you also have to purchase software or software licenses to give employees the tools they require. Whenever you have a new hire, you have to buy more software or make sure your current software license allows another user. It's so stressful that you find it difficult to go to sleep on your huge pile of money every night.

Soon, there may be an alternative for executives like you. Instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, you'd only have to load one application. That application would allow workers to log into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs the user would need for his or her job. Remote machines owned by another company would run everything from e-mail to word processing to complex data analysis programs. It's called cloud computing, and it could change the entire computer industry.

In a cloud computing system, there's a significant workload shift. Local computers no longer have to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to running applications. The network of computers that make up the cloud handles them instead. Hardware and software demands on the user's side decrease. The only thing the user's computer needs to be able to run is the cloud computing system's interface software, which can be as simple as a Web browser, and the cloud's network takes care of the rest.

There's a good chance you've already used some form of cloud computing. If you have an e-mail account with a Web-based e-mail service like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or Gmail, then you've had some experience with cloud computing. Instead of running an e-mail program on your computer, you log in to a Web e-mail account remotely. The software and storage for your account doesn't exist on your computer -- it's on the service's computer cloud.

Cloud Computing Architecture

When talking about a cloud computing system, it's helpful to divide it into two sections: the front end and the back end. They connect to each other through a network, usually the Internet. The front end is the side the computer user, or client, sees. The back end is the "cloud" section of the system.

The front end includes the client's computer (or computer network) and the application required to access the cloud computing system. Not all cloud computing systems have the same user interface. Services like Web-based e-mail programs leverage existing Web browsers like Internet Explorer or Firefox. Other systems have unique applications that provide network access to clients.

On the back end of the system are the various computers, servers and data storage systems that create the "cloud" of computing services. In theory, a cloud computing system could include practically any computer program you can imagine, from data processing to video games. Usually, each application will have its own dedicated server.

A central server administers the system, monitoring traffic and client demands to ensure everything runs smoothly. It follows a set of rules called protocols and uses a special kind of software called middleware. Middleware allows networked computers to communicate with each other.

If a cloud computing company has a lot of clients, there's likely to be a high demand for a lot of storage space. Some companies require hundreds of digital storage devices. Cloud computing systems need at least twice the number of storage devices it requires to keep all its clients' information stored. That's because these devices, like all computers, occasionally break down. A cloud computing system must make a copy of all its clients' information and store it on other devices. The copies enable the central server to access backup machines to retrieve data that otherwise would be unreachable. Making copies of data as a backup is called redundancy.

Cloud Computing Applications

The applications of cloud computing are practically limitless. With the right middleware, a cloud computing system could execute all the programs a normal computer could run. Potentially, everything from generic word processing software to customized computer programs designed for a specific company could work on a cloud computing system.

Why would anyone want to rely on another computer system to run programs and store data? Here are just a few reasons:

Clients would be able to access their applications and data from anywhere at any time. They could access the cloud computing system using any computer linked to the Internet. Data wouldn't be confined to a hard drive on one user's computer or even a corporation's internal network.

It could bring hardware costs down. Cloud computing systems would reduce the need for advanced hardware on the client side. You wouldn't need to buy the fastest computer with the most memory, because the cloud system would take care of those needs for you. Instead, you could buy an inexpensive computer terminal. The terminal could include a monitor, input devices like a keyboard and mouse and just enough processing power to run the middleware necessary to connect to the cloud system. You wouldn't need a large hard drive because you'd store all your information on a remote computer.

Corporations that rely on computers have to make sure they have the right software in place to achieve goals. Cloud computing systems give these organizations company-wide access to computer applications. The companies don't have to buy a set of software or software licenses for every employee. Instead, the company could pay a metered fee to a cloud computing company.

Servers and digital storage devices take up space. Some companies rent physical space to store servers and databases because they don't have it available on site. Cloud computing gives these companies the option of storing data on someone else's hardware, removing the need for physical space on the front end.

Corporations might save money on IT support. Streamlined hardware would, in theory, have fewer problems than a network of heterogeneous machines and operating systems.

If the cloud computing system's back end is a grid computing system, then the client could take advantage of the entire network's processing power. Often, scientists and researchers work with calculations so complex that it would take years for individual computers to complete them. On a grid computing system, the client could send the calculation to the cloud for processing. The cloud system would tap into the processing power of all available computers on the back end, significantly speeding up the calculation.

Cloud Computing Concerns

Perhaps the biggest concerns about cloud computing are security and privacy. The idea of handing over important data to another company worries some people. Corporate executives might hesitate to take advantage of a cloud computing system because they can't keep their company's information under lock and key.

The counterargument to this position is that the companies offering cloud computing services live and die by their reputations. It benefits these companies to have reliable security measures in place. Otherwise, the service would lose all its clients. It's in their interest to employ the most advanced techniques to protect their clients' data.

Privacy is another matter. If a client can log in from any location to access data and applications, it's possible the client's privacy could be compromised. Cloud computing companies will need to find ways to protect client privacy. One way is to use authentication techniques such as user names and passwords. Another is to employ an authorization format -- each user can access only the data and applications relevant to his or her job.

Some questions regarding cloud computing are more philosophical. Does the user or company subscribing to the cloud computing service own the data? Does the cloud computing system, which provides the actual storage space, own it? Is it possible for a cloud computing company to deny a client access to that client's data? Several companies, law firms and universities are debating these and other questions about the nature of cloud computing.

How will cloud computing affect other industries? There's a growing concern in the IT industry about how cloud computing could impact the business of computer maintenance and repair. If companies switch to using streamlined computer systems, they'll have fewer IT needs. Some industry experts believe that the need for IT jobs will migrate to the back end of the cloud computing system.

Biological Machines

2010-01-09T00:05:00.000-08:00

A giant flower beetle flies about, veering up and down, left and right. But the insect isn't a pest, and it isn't steering its own path. An implanted receiver, microcontroller, microbattery, and six carefully placed electrodes--a payload smaller than a dime and weighing less than a stick of gum--allow an engineer to control the bug wirelessly. By remotely delivering jolts of electricity to its brain and wing muscles, the engineer can make the cyborg beetle take off, turn, or stop midflight.

Cyborg beetle: By equipping a giant flower beetle with a processor and implanting electrodes that deliver electrical jolts to its brain and to its wing muscles, scientists have created a living machine whose flight can be wirelessly controlled.

The beetle's creator, Michel Maharbiz, hopes that his bugs will one day carry sensors or other devices to locations not easily accessible to humans or the terrestrial robots used in search-and-rescue missions. The devices are cheap: materials cost as little as five dollars, and the electronics are easy to build with mostly off-the-shelf components. "They can fly into tiny cracks and could be fitted with heat sensors designed to find injured survivors," says Maharbiz, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. "You cannot do that now with completely synthetic systems."

Maharbiz's specialty is designing interfaces between machines and living systems, from individual cells to entire organisms. His goal is to create novel "biological machines" that take advantage of living cells' capacity for extremely low-energy yet exquisitely precise movement, communication, and computation. Maharbi z envisions devices that can collect, manipulate, store, and act on information from their environments. Tissue for replacing damaged organs might be an example, or tables that can repair themselves or reconfigure their shapes on the basis of environmental cues. In 100 years, Maharbiz says, "I bet this kind of machine will be everywhere, derived from cells but completely engineered."

Nanopiezoelectronics

2010-01-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

Nanoscale sensors are exquisitely sensitive, very frugal with power, and, of course, tiny. They could be useful in detecting molecular signs of disease in the blood, minute amounts of poisonous gases in the air, and trace contaminants in food. But the batteries and integrated circuits necessary to drive these devices make them difficult to fully miniaturize. The goal of Zhong Lin Wang, a materials scientist at Georgia Tech, is to bring power to the nano world with minuscule generators that take advantage of piezoelectricity. If he succeeds, biological and chemical nano sensors will be able to power themselves.

The piezoelectric effect--in which crystalline materials under mechanical stress produce an electrical potential--has been known of for more than a century. But in 2005, Wang was the first to demonstrate it at the nanoscale by bending zinc oxide nanowires with the probe of an atomic-force microscope. As the wires flex and return to their original shape, the potential produced by the zinc and oxide ions drives an electrical current. The current that Wang coaxed from the wires in his initial experiments was tiny; the electrical potential peaked at a few millivolts. But Wang rightly suspected that with enough engineering, he could design a practical nanoscale power source by harnessing the tiny vibrations all around us--sound waves, the wind, even the turbulence of blood flow over an implanted device. These subtle movements would bend nanowires, generating electricity.

Piezoelectric wires: The mechanical stress produced by bending a zinc oxide nanowire creates an electrical potential across the wire. This drives current through a circuit. The conversion of mechanical energy to electrical energy is called the piezoelectric effect. It's harnessed in the devices on the next page, which might be made from the nanowires.

Last November, Wang embedded zinc oxide nanowires in a layer of polymer; the resulting sheets put out 50 millivolts when flexed. This is a major step forward in powering tiny sensors.

And Wang hopes that these generators could eventually be woven into fabric; the rustling of a shirt could generate enough power to charge the batteries of devices like iPods. For now, the nanogenerator's output is too low for that. "We need to get to 200 millivolts or more," says Wang. He'll get there by layering the wires, he says, though it might take five to ten more years of careful engineering.

Meanwhile, Wang has demonstrated the first components for a new class of nanoscale sensors. Nanopiezotronics, as he calls this technology, exploit the fact that zinc oxide nanowires not only exhibit the piezoelectric effect but are semiconductors. The first property lets them act as mechanical sensors, because they produce an electrical response to mechanical stress. The second means that they can be used to make the basic components of integrated circuits, including transistors and diodes. Unlike traditional electronic components, nanopiezotronics don't need an external source of electricity. They generate their own when exposed to the same kinds of mechanical stresses that power nanogenerators.

Nanogenerator: (Left, clockwise) Arrays of zinc oxide nanowires packaged in a thin polymer film generate electrical current when flexed. The nanogenerator could be embedded in clothing and used to convert the rustling of fabric into current to power portable devices such as cell phones.
Hearing aid: An array of vertically aligned piezoelectric nanowires could serve as a hearing aid. When sound waves hit them, the wires bend, generating an electrical potential. The electrical signal can then be amplified and sent directly to the auditory nerve.
Signature verification: A grid of piezoelectric wires underneath a signature pad would record the pattern of pressure applied .

Freeing nanoelectronics from outside power sources opens up all sorts of possibilities. A nanopiezotronic hearing aid integrated with a nanogenerator might use an array of nanowires, each tuned to vibrate at a different frequency over a large range of sounds. The nanowires would convert sounds into electrical signals and process them so that they could be conveyed directly to neurons in the brain. Not only would such implanted neural prosthetics be more compact and more sensitive than traditional hearing aids, but they wouldn't need to be removed so their batteries could be changed. Nanopiezotronic sensors might also be used to detect mechanical stresses in an airplane engine; just a few nanowire components could monitor stress, process the information, and then communicate the relevant data to an airplane's computer. Whether in the body or in the air, nano devices would at last be set loose in the world all around us.

Liquid Battery

2010-01-08T23:54:00.000-08:00

Without a good way to store electricity on a large scale, solar power is useless at night. One promising storage option is a new kind of battery made with all-liquid active materials. Prototypes suggest that these liquid batteries will cost less than a third as much as today's best batteries and could last significantly longer.

The battery is unlike any other. The electrodes are molten metals, and the electrolyte that conducts current between them is a molten salt. This results in an unusually resilient device that can quickly absorb large amounts of electricity. The electrodes can operate at electrical currents "tens of times higher than any [battery] that's ever been measured," says Donald Sadow ay, a materials chemistry professor at MIT and one of the battery's inventors. What's more, the materials are cheap, and the design allows for simple manufacturing.

The first prototype consists of a container surrounded by insulating material. The researchers add molten raw materials: antimony on the bottom, an electrolyte such as sodium sulfide in the middle, and magnesium at the top. Since each material has a different density, they naturally remain in distinct layers, which simplifies manufacturing. The container doubles as a current collector, delivering electrons from a power supply, such as solar panels, or carrying them away to the electrical grid to supply electricity to homes and businesses.

Racetrack Memory

2010-01-08T23:51:00.000-08:00

When IBM sold its hard-drive business to Hitachi in April 2002, IBM fellow Stuart Parkin wondered what to do next. He had spent his career studying the fundamental physics of magnetic materials, making a series of discoveries that gave hard-disk drives thousands of times more storage capacity. So Parkin set out to develop an entirely new way to store information: a memory chip with the huge storage capacity of a magnetic hard drive, the durability of electronic flash memory, and speed superior to both. He dubbed the new technology "racetrack memory."

Both magnetic disk drives and existing solid-state memory technologies are essentially two-dimensional, Parkin says, relying on a single layer of either magnetic bits or transistors. "Both of these technologies have evolved over the last 50 years, but they've done it by scaling the devices smaller and smaller or developing new means of accessing bits," he says. Parki n sees both technologies reaching their size limits in the coming decades. "Our idea is totally different from any memory that's ever been made," he says, "because it's three-dimensional."

The key is an array of U-shaped magnetic nanowires, arranged vertically like trees in a forest. The nanowires have regions with different magnetic polarities, and the boundaries between the regions represent 1s or 0s, depending on the polarities of the regions on either side. When a spin-polarized current (one in which the electrons' quantum-mechanica l "spin" is oriented in a specific direction) passes through the nanowire, the whole magnetic pattern is effectively pushed along, like cars speeding down a racetrack. At the base of the U, the magnetic boundaries encounter a pair of tiny devices that read and write the data.

Speeding bits: In one implementation of racetrack memory, information is stored on a U-shaped nanowire as a pattern of magnetic regions with different polarities. Applying a spin-polarized current causes the magnetic pattern to speed along the nanowire; the data can be moved in either direction, depending on the direction of the current. A separate nanowire perpendicular to the U-shaped "racetrack" writes data by changing the polarity of the magnetic regions. A second device at the base of the track reads the data. Data can be written and read in less than a nanosecond. Racetrack memory using hundreds of millions of nanowires would have the potential to store vast amounts of data.

Kolimat Roadscan DTW 1.0 dual lens camera - watches you as well as the road

2010-01-08T23:37:00.000-08:00

Kolimat Roadscan DTW 1.0 Camera system features a dual lens in-car camera that is capable of recording audio and video of a full days driving onto SD card, and as well as taking stills at regular intervals, displays the speed of the vehicle on the software screen. It is equipped with full GPS that overlays Google Earth satellite images and features Wi-Fi capabilities and can communicate through other onboard equipment like cellular and satellite.

The system not only enables drivers in an accident to present court admissible evidence to prove their case but also lets fleet managers keep an eye on their drivers, as well as assisting with safer driving habits. The system is highly tamper proof with all data encrypted, and any “catastrophic events” over a certain “G” force level cannot be erased. Also featured is a USB port for data transmission, an infra-red LED for interior night vision and remote panic button.

The Kolimat Roadscan DTW 1.0 Camera system is priced starting at US$379.