Tech Works

Myspace going down? a cat makes life fun

2010-11-08T21:15:00.000-08:00

Facebook keeps powering its way toward an initial public offering as the winner of the battle for dominance among social networks. I wonder how worried Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, is when he considers the ranks of his fallen rivals.

The most recent is MySpace, the music-dominated social network that was also growing rapidly when it was bought by News Corp for $580m in 2005. Things have changed - News Corp is now warning that MySpace faces a harsh fate if it does not do better soon.

MySpace is not, however, the only social network to have flourished for a time and then to have stalled as soon as its growth spurt ran out. Before that came Friendster and Bebo, among others - Networks have a distinct tendency to flame out after a promising start.

The big question, then, is whether the same will happen to Facebook. At the moment, there is no sign of it and Facebook is clearly adroitly run - it is now extending its dominance on computers to the mobile world, as Jemima Kiss records.

There are good arguments for why Facebook is now so embedded into people’s lives that it will have staying power even when growth slows. Its users have spent many hours building up friend lists and posting photos and other personal material to the site.

Yet in previous internet generations, services such as AOL and Yahoo had similar advantages. It did not stop their users abandoning ship when they passed their peak.

Source: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/954981/is_myspace_going_down.html?cat=15

Microsoft Copies Mac OSX

2010-11-08T20:58:00.000-08:00

Here we see Steve Jobs & Bertrand Serlet showing us (yet again) just how much Microsoft loves to copy Apple.

OLED Pocket Size Screen

2010-11-05T08:46:00.000-07:00

We’re putting things that used to be on paper on video devices, things usually associated with large video screens onto pocket-sized devices, and now Sony is putting video on a flexible OLED screen thin enough to be rolled around a pencil like a sheet of paper, without interrupting the video.

The 80-microns-thick (that’s 80 millionths of a meter, or about as thick as a human hair) full-color display can be rolled up and unfurled repeatedly without degrading picture quality. It was made possible by a breakthrough in OLED tech, in which Sony researchers created organic thin-film transistors with 8 times the performance of conventional OTFTs. Continue reading for video presentation of this OLED Technology.

Flexible Displays!

2010-11-04T16:40:00.000-07:00

The secret to building an inexpensive flexible computer display is not in the core components of the displays themselves. It's in the material those components are mounted on.
The fundamental elements of e-ink and OLED displays are small enough that they won't break if laid down on flexible backing. The problem, according to Janglin Chen of Taiwanese government-funded research lab ITRI, is the backing itself. The substrate the components are mounted onto has to have certain physical properties, especially during the manufacturing process. To date, the primary material on which displays have been layered has been glass, which meets the needs: it's rigid, transparent, and reliable. Continue reading for more of the latest in tech news!

ITRI has found a way, though, to create a display backing material that is all these things during manufacture, but becomes flexible when the building is finished. It's a polymer material that can be sprayed onto a glass backing and that maintains its properties (it doesn't discolor, for example) while the rest of the display is being deposited and built up on top of it. When the displays are done, they can be peeled right off the glass.
In addition to the polymer substrate, ITRI also had to develop a "release material" that's sprayed down on the glass before the polymer, so the final product can peel off without tearing or sticking. Think cooking oil and crepes.
The big advantage to this process, Chen says, is that existing fabrication plants can be used to make flexible panels. Aside from spraying on the chemicals to coat the glass with high-tech Pam and the polymer substrate, and the post-manufacture removal of the display from the glass, the process is the same as making a rigid display.
ITRI has signed at least one non-exclusive deal with a Taiwanese company that makes black-and-white e-readers, and Chen expects the first flexible panel using ITRI technology to be in a consumer product next year. Color displays based on OLED technology are likely after that. E-ink and OLEDs lend themselves well to working on flexible backing, Chen says. Traditional LCDs, which require separate lighting components and filters, do not. The sole existing color e-reader, the new Barnes and Noble Nook Color, uses traditional LCD technology. All current black-and-white e-readers, like the Amazon Kindle, use e-ink displays built up on traditional glass substrates.

The flexible technology isn't limited to displays. ITRI's technology can be used for touch panels (on top of displays, or separately) and for sensor technology. And, I assume, for solar cells, although that's a somewhat challenging market.
I talked with Chen a bit about the market for flexible panels. It's a science-fiction dream to have a foldable or rollable e-book or phone, but there's more to the market than a little flexibility. Chen notes that removing the glass back-plane from a display makes it safer, more durable, and lighter than a traditional display. This is good for low-end products and for devices that end up in the hands of children. And while the ITRI process is not yet less expensive than current display-building technologies, the raw materials do cost less, as the backing glass is reused after every screen is made, instead of getting shipped with it.
But the real flexibility is what this could allow gadget designers to think up. "We're trying to break the glass dimension and give it back to the designer," Chen says.

Source: For more on LED Tech news

Rapture: A Time Lapse Video Sure to Wow You

2010-11-03T21:36:00.000-07:00

Shot by photographer Tome Lowe, Rapture "is a paean to the American Southwest [and] loaded with gorgeous, sensuous astronomical skyscapes as well." Equipment used include Canon and Red MX cameras. Continue reading to see the stunning footage.

Source: blogs.discovermagazine.com

Find some more Timescapes at http://www.timescapes.org/

3D Holographic Display

2010-11-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

A new holographic display can transmit three-dimensional movies from one location to another almost in real time. If Princess Leia had to send her “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope” message from Earth today, it would now be technologically possible.

“We can take objects from one location and show them in another location in 3-D in near real time,” said optical scientist Nasser Peyghambarian, and project leader from the University of Arizona in a press conference Nov. 1. “It is no longer something that is science fiction, it is actually something that you can do today.”

Holographic movies have been a dream since at least 1966, when the first hologram was transmitted over a television system by Bell Labs. Updatable holographic displays have been around for decades as well; the first was developed by Stephen Benton at the MIT Media Lab in 1989.

The new device projects a color 3-D image onto a sheet of special plastic using a fast-flashing laser. The image can be updated once every two seconds, fast enough to give a sense of movement.

“In the past, other holograms you have seen are static images,” said Pierre-Alexandre Blanche of the University of Arizona, lead author of a study in the Nov. 4 Nature describing the device. “Now, with a 2-second lag, it starts to become something more tangible.”

The image can also be transmitted over the internet in less than a second, which would allow a near real-time window into distant events, something the authors call “holographic telepresence.”

Peyghambarian and colleagues set an array of 16 webcams in a semicircle around the objects they wished to project, which included a model airplane, a vase of flowers and the researchers’ heads. Each camera captured the object from a different perspective, making the ultimate image more lifelike.

“If you go to a 3-D movie like Avatar, you would see only two perspectives, one for one eye and one for the other eye,” Peyghambarian said. “In our case, we have demonstrated 16 perspectives, but the technology has the potential to show hundreds of perspectives. So it’s very close to what humans can see.”

The cameras sent the images to another room, where they were encoded into pulsed laser that flashes 50 times per second. Each laser pulse encodes one holographic pixel, or “hogel.”

Then the researchers trained the laser onto a newly developed plastic called a photoreactive polymer, which is coated with a material that converts light into electrical charges that create and store the image. The charges move around the plastic in such a way that when light bounces off the material, it reaches your eyes as if it had bounced off the toy plane or the researcher’s head.

“With this material, since you can move the charge around, you can erase the hologram and write another hologram on it,” Blanche said.

Two years ago, Peyghambarian’s team made a similar material that could only refresh the image every four minutes. The images in that material were also disturbed by vibrations and temperature changes, so the screen had to be kept in a highly controlled box.

The new material rewrites every two seconds, a 100-fold improvement, and isn’t bothered by changes to its environment, the researchers say.

Beyond entertainment and fighting the Empire, the display could have important medical and military applications, Peyghambarian says.

“Different doctors from different parts of the world can participate [in surgery] and see things just as if they were there,” he said. The device could even be used for telecommuting. “People from Europe don’t have to come to the U.S. to participate in a conference, it would be as if they were there.”

“This is mostly a materials advance,” said optical scientist Michael Bove of the MIT Media Lab, who was not involved in the new research but is collaborating with Peyghambarian on another project. “The material is faster and more sensitive than what had previously been reported.”

Given the small size of the screen and the two-second lag time, “some people in the field object to the term ‘telepresence,’” Bove said.

Blanche agrees that the hologram’s lag time is too long. “Quite frankly, it’s a bit annoying, and we know that,” he said.

For truly real-time video, the image would need to refresh 30 times a second. That would take either a much more sensitive material or a “very big, very nasty” laser, Blanche said. The team hopes to push the material to produce video quality holographs in the next two years, and the technology could be ready for your living room within the decade.

“In two years we improved the speed by a factor of 100. If we can improve the speed by the same factor, we will be over video rate,” Blanche said. “It will be done.”

Source: http://www.wired.com

WiFi 3 Time Faster Than Current Technology?

2010-11-03T18:01:00.000-07:00

Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization tomorrow plans to unveil a breakthrough in wireless technology that will allow multiple users to upload content at the same time while maintaining a data transfer rate of 12 megabits per second (Mbps), all over their old analog TV aerial.

The technology, named Ngara, allows up to six users to occupy the equivalent spectrum space of one television channel (7 megahertz) and has a spectral efficiency of 20 bits per second per hertz. Ngara can handle up to three times that of similar technology and maintains a data rate more than 10 times the industry

minimum standard, CSIRO ICT center director Ian Opperman revealed.

"Someone who doesn't live near the fiber network [the Australian government's planned National Broadband Network] could get to it using our new wireless system," Oppermann said in a statement. "They'd be able to upload a clip to YouTube in real time and their data rate wouldn't change even if five of their neighbors also started uploading videos."

Source: zdnet.com.au

Google Competition?

2010-11-02T21:24:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, a new search engine pops up that attempts to provide better search results than Google, Bing or Yahoo. Can you name any of them?

Yeah, I didn't think so. And there's a reason for that.

Most challengers don't provide much value beyond what the leading search sites offer. Google is very good at what it does. So are Bing and Yahoo (which now uses Bing for searches). Search is a habit-based behavior on the Web, reinforced by the fact that you lock-in your favorite search engine in the browsers you use. Changing those habits is hard.

Still, the challengers keep coming. Blekko is the latest, and it arrives at the party with a twist. It lets you refine your searches in intuitive, simple ways. You can create refined searches, save them and share them with friends. And, perhaps most intriguing, Blekko seeks to filter all search spam out of results - either through its own efforts, or by you designating a site as spam.

As with Google, Blekko presents

a very clean, simple face to the world.

You can enter traditional searches, just as you would on Google. Or, you can use a forward slash, followed by a qualifier. Blekko calls these qualifiers slashtags, and they work well . . . sometimes.

Blekko offers certain examples in its marketing materials that work well. You can search onglobal warming to get general results, and then add slashtags to filter. If you only want to see what liberal sites are saying about the subject, you'd append global warming with /liberal. Only want conservative source? Use /conservative.

However, Blekko doesn't always give you the results you're really looking for. I entered a search for election, figuring it would give me sites related to Tuesday's midterm contests. What I got instead was a hodgepodge of results - from the IMdB page for the film Election, to CNN's election results page for 2008, to the site for the North Carolina Elections Commission. Only a handful of results on the page related to elections in 2010 - and a couple of those were in the U.K.

If I do the same search in Google, I still get some of these irrelevant-to-my-search results - including the Election movie listing - but there are more news-oriented results.

In addition, the slashtags aren't always what are required to get the results you want. If you search on pizza /houston, you won't get pizza restaurants here in town. To get that, you must use pizza near Houston, TX, followed by a qualifier, such as /map or /yelp.

And Blekko isn't quite as good at filtering out the spam as you'd like. I saw several spam results as I experimented. Fortunately, there's a spam link under each result, and when you click it, that site is removed from your view. You won't see it in future searches.

Blekko also lets you see the ranking information it has for any of the sites in its index. Just click the SEO link under a search result.

Blekko's intriguing, but so far its results aren't good enough to make me stop using Google. I might come back to Blekko for specific types of searches, but so far it's a niche search provider.

Source: blogs.chron.com

Labratory Grown Human Livers

2010-11-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

In the quest to grow replacement human organs in the lab, livers are no doubt at the top of many a barfly’s wish list. With its wide range of functions that support almost every organ in the body and no way to compensate for the absence of liver function, the ability to grow a replacement is also the focus of many research efforts. Now, for the first time, researchers have been able to successfully engineer miniature livers in the lab using human liver cells.

The ultimate aim of the research carried out at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center is to provide a solution to the shortage of donor livers available for patients who need transplants. Additionally, the laboratory-engineered livers could also be used to test the safety of new drugs.
The livers engineered by the researchers are about an inch in diameter and weigh about 0.2 ounces (5.7 g). Even though the average weight of an adult human liver is around 4.4 pounds (2 kg), to meet to minimum needs of the human body the scientists say an engineered liver would need to weigh about one pound (454 g) because research has shown that human livers functioning at 30 percent of capacity are able to sustain the human body.
“We are excited about the possibilities this research represents, but must stress that we’re at an early stage and many technical hurdles must be overcome before it could benefit patients,” said Shay Soker, Ph.D., professor of regenerative medicine and project director. “Not only must we learn how to grow billions of liver cells at one time in order to engineer livers large enough for patients, but we must determine whether these organs are safe to use in patients.”

How the livers were engineered

To engineer the organs, the scientists took animal livers and treated them with a mild detergent to remove all cells in a process called decellularization. This left only the collagen “skeleton” or support structure which allowed the scientists to replace the original cells with two types of human cells: immature liver cells known as progenitors, and endothelial cells that line blood vessels.
Because the network of vessels remains intact after the decellularization process the researchers were able to introduce the cells into the liver skeleton through a large vessel that feeds a system of smaller vessels in the liver. The liver was then placed in a bioreactor, special equipment that provides a constant flow of nutrients and oxygen throughout the organ.

After a week in the bioreactor system, the scientists observed widespread cell growth inside the bioengineered organ and documented the progressive formation of human liver tissue, as well as liver-associated function.
Although the ability to engineer a liver with animal cells had been demonstrated previously, this is the first time human liver cells had been used to successfully generate a functioning human liver.
Pedro Baptista, PharmD, Ph.D., lead author on the study, said “our hope is that once these organs are transplanted, they will maintain and gain function as they continue to develop,” he said. He added that bioengineered livers could also be useful for evaluating the safety of new drugs. “This would more closely mimic drug metabolism in the human liver, something that can be difficult to reproduce in animal models," he said.
The researchers said the current study suggests a new approach to whole-organ bioengineering that might prove to be critical not only for treating liver disease, but for growing organs such as the kidney and pancreas. Scientists at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine are working on these projects, as well as many other tissues and organs, and also working to develop cell therapies to restore organ function.

Source: Gizmag.com

Logitech Keyboard Powered by Indoor Lights and Solar Rays

2010-11-02T14:25:00.000-07:00

Wireless keyboards are incredibly convenient when it comes to tapping away free of constricting USB cables -- until their batteries go dead. But a new solar-powered keyboard from Logitech promises to keep you typing long after traditional batteries have run out.
Available this month for $80, Logitech's K750 Wireless Solar Keyboard looks pretty much like your standard-issue keyboard. It is jet black; boasts a full complement of concave QWERTY keys, numeric keypad and function buttons; and measures just a third of an inch thick.

   Look closer, though, and you'll see twin solar panels flanking the Logitech logo above the main keypad. The panels soak up light from the sun and even indoor light, according to Logitech—meaning, theoretically, that the keyboard could work indefinitely in a well-lit office.
            Logitech stopped short of claiming that the K750 will keep you typing forever given enough light, but it did say that the fully charged keyboard will work up to three months in complete darkness. (Cool. But I can't imagine there'd be too many people willing to test that particular specification.)
            You'll be able to keep track of the keyboard's charge with help from an integrated light, and a downloadable desktop app will tell you if there's enough ambient light to keep the keyboard powered up.

But Bluetooth fans will be disappointed to learn that the K750 connects to your desktop or laptop using a USB dongle over a 2.4GHz RF connection—so no, you won't be able to type on your iPhone with this solar keyboard. Bummer.
At least you'll be able to type away secure in the knowledge that your keystrokes are protected by 128-bit AES encryption.

Iphone Coming to Verizon?

2010-11-02T13:55:00.000-07:00

Yet another major publication is coming forward claiming confirmation that the long-rumored Verizon iPhone is real. But don't get your hopes up for an iPhone 4 that's compatible with the carrier's soon-to-be-launched 4G network.
In its lengthy profile of Verizon Communications CEO Ivan Seidenberg, Fortune says it has confirmed that Verizon will get the iPhone in early 2011—indeed, it's a "fait accompli," claims the magazine, although neither Apple nor Verizon will go on the record and say so.
Fortune says that Verizon

will get its "own version" of the iPhone 4 (sorry, no surprise iPhone 5 quite yet) and that it'll run on the carrier's existing 3G network—disappointing news for anyone hoping that the new iPhone would support Verizon's budding 4G LTE data network, which is set to go live in a few dozen U.S. markets before the year is out.

Don't expect a dual-mode GSM/CDMA "world phone" either, Fortune adds, although the story suggests that Verizon FiOS subscribers might get their own iPhone app for live TV streaming.
Rumors about an iPhone on Verizon are nothing new, but the flames have been fanned in recent weeks by articles in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
And then there's the fact that Verizon Wireless just began selling the iPad (bundled with the MiFi Wi-Fi hotspot) in its retail stores, a clear sign that relations between Apple and Verizon have been warming up.
Indeed, Verizon has apparently been courting Apple since before the iPhone even launched. Fortune says Verizon's Seidenberg pleaded his case before Steve Jobs as early as the spring of 2007, a few months before the original iPhone went on sale, asking Jobs why Verizon was "in your doghouse" as far as the iPhone was concerned. The answer: because an iPhone compatible with Verizon's CDMA network wouldn't function on worldwide GSM carriers. (AT&T runs a GSM cellular network.)
Well, uh ... isn't that still the case? Yep, it is, but apparently Jobs had second thoughts about Apple's "one phone for the world" strategy after AT&T's network began buckling under the pressure of all those data-hungry iPhones. He told Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam in a follow-up call that Apple had "missed something" in its earlier discussions with the carrier, Fortune reports.
So, are you convinced by the latest reports of a Verizon iPhone, or will you believe it when you see it? And if Verizon does get the iPhone, will you switch to the "can you hear me now" network?

Source: Yahoo.com

Motorola Android Phone Featured 2Ghz Processor?

2010-11-02T13:14:00.000-07:00

Motorola has confirmed to PhoneScoop that the company plans to ship a smartphone this year with a 2-GHz microprocessor inside of it.
This is news, not of least of which because none of the embedded microprocessor manufacturers have announced a 2-GHz microprocessor as yet. Qualcomm has announced plans to manufacture a dual-core Snapdragon chip, eventually taking the existing single-core platform to 1.5-GHz speeds.
What’s unclear, however, is what this will do for the phone’s battery life. While some older Android phones appear sluggish compared to the latest smartphones like the EVO 4G, the knock on those high-end phones is that the additional horsepower and larger displays have severely crimped battery life. (I still think those concerns can be mitigated by turning off some of the location-based services for normal use, but I think I’m in the minority.)
In any event, however, I’d say that the direction smartphones need to go is to establish a robust one-day minimum uptime with all features turned on, and then worry about additional horsepower. If Motorola has indeed met these minimums, then this unannounced 2-GHz platform may be one to watch.

Source: mobibu.com