Total Technology Online

Google Rolls Out Nexus One

2010-01-05T22:50:00.000-08:00

Google also said that it would sell the Nexus One, which it called a superphone, exclusively through a new online store. Google, which earns the vast majority of its revenue from advertising, said it was dipping its toes in the direct retailing business not to reap profits from the sale of phones but to broaden the availability of handsets running its Android software.
“There is an opportunity to make some margin on the unit sales, but that’s not the objective here,” Andy Rubin, a vice president of engineering in charge of the Android technology, said during a press conference at Google’s headquarters here. “Our primary business is advertising.”
Consumers will be able to buy the Nexus One for $529 unlocked or for $179 with a two-year calling plan from T-Mobile. Google said that the Nexus One would be available on Verizon Wireless in the United States and on Vodafonein Europe later this year. It said it hoped to add other devices and carriers to the direct-to-consumer program in the future.
Some analysts said they were impressed by the speed of the Nexus One and by some of its capabilities. Google has voice-enabled all text boxes in the device, so a user can, for example, compose an e-mail message by speaking into the phone rather than typing. But they expressed disappointment that Google had not done more to shake up the industry by, for example, subsidizing the phone through profits from advertising.
“It would have been nice to see them roll out something really unique,” said Danny Sullivan, the editor of SearchEngineLand and a longtime Google analyst. “It is more evolutionary than revolutionary.”
The Nexus One, which was built by HTC, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer, has a 3.7-inch screen and runs the latest version of Google’s Android operating system. At less than a half-inch thick and 4.6 ounces, it is slightly thinner and a tad lighter than the iPhone. It has a removable battery, a 5-megapixel camera with an LED flash and can shoot both still images and video.
Google executives called the Nexus One “exemplar” of what is possible with Android today. They said Google was pleased with the success of Android, which in little more than a year has grown from one device on one carrier to 20 devices with 59 carriers around the world. But they decided to work closely with HTC to design the best possible device based on its software.
The only person in the room who did not appear ready to concede that the Nexus One was the best Android device in the market was Sanjay Jha, the co-chief executive of Motorola, which recently introduced the Android-based Droid.
“I think the Nexus One is a good phone; I think the Droid is a good phone,” Mr. Jha said. But Mr. Jha appeared to embrace Google’s plan to market phones directly to consumers. “I see this potentially as an expansion of the marketplace,” he said.
Similarly, cellphone carriers appeared unperturbed by Google’s plan to sell unlocked phones directly to consumers. “We certainly welcome bringing more choices to the marketplace,” said John Taylor, a spokesman for Sprint. Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, said his company was aware of Google’s plans for a store when it signed a broad cooperation agreement with Google.
For now, the Nexus One phone works only on cellular networks using the G.S.M. standard, which in the United States is used by AT&T and T-Mobile. It can run on AT&T’s network if the unlocked-phone owner has an AT&T SIM card, but it will work only on the older and slower EDGE network, not the faster 3G network, Google said.
The Nexus One has a high-speed 1-gigahertz Snapdragon chip from Qualcomm, which keeps multiple applications running quickly. It has some 3-D display capabilities, and Google collaborated with Cooliris, a Silicon Valley start-up, to incorporate that company’s technology, which showcases photos along a scrolling wall of images. Google also introduced a version of Google Earth that runs on the Nexus One.
“It looks like a really cool phone,” said Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research. “But it is not a game changer.”
Peter Chou, the chief executive of HTC, refused to disclose sales forecasts for the Nexus One, but he said that the device “pushes the limits of what’s possible on a mobile phone today.”
While the Nexus One may be a rival to the iPhone, Google and Apple are approaching the cellphone market with very different strategies: Apple makes money by selling phones and Google makes money by selling ads. But there is little doubt that the two companies are on a collision course.
If the Nexus One or other devices sold through Google’s store succeed, they could eat into the appeal of the iPhone. Meanwhile Apple said Tuesday that it had acquired Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising start-up, indicating that it has plans to attack Google’s core advertising business.

LCD screen can recognise

2010-01-05T22:49:00.000-08:00

An everyday LCD screen has been modified to "see" the world in front of it in 3D. That means a viewer can control on-screen objects by waving their arms in the air without touching the screen, let alone a mouse or keyboard.

"This is a level of interaction that nobody's ever been able to do before," saysRamesh Raskar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, who created the prototype shown in the video above with colleagues Matthew Hirschand Henry Holtzman, as well as Douglas Lanman at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

The screen – dubbed BiDi, short for bi-directional – allows users to manipulate or interact with objects on the screen in three dimensions. It will also function as a 3D scanner, he adds. "If you spin an object in front of screen, the software will stitch together a 3D image."

Sharper focus

Raskar and Holtzman's team were inspired by the way manufacturers of LCD panels, including Sharp and Planar Systems, are experimenting with addingoptical sensors between a panel's pixels so that it can act as a touch-screen interface.

But such displays have poor vision, like a camera with no lens, says Lanman: they can clearly image objects that are in direct contact with the screen, but anything further away is blurred. The researchers set out to modify the concept to let the screen see the world in front of it more sharply.

Placing a tiny lens slightly in front of each sensor would do that, but the layer of lenses would adversely affect the images produced by the display. Instead, Raskar and Holtzman's team used a standard 20-inch screen to show how a basic feature of all LCD screens can perform the job of a lens array.

Pinhole pixels

The brightness of each of an LCD's pixels is controlled by a layer of liquid crystals, which can swivel to physically control how much light passes from the display's backlight. In BiDi the team use that function to control light passing in the other direction onto an array of sensors behind the display.

When the screen is "looking" around it, most of its pixels are shut off by the liquid crystals. But a regular grid of hundreds of pixels spread across the screen use their liquid crystals to create a tiny hole that acts as a pinhole camera lens, focusing an image of the scene in front onto a thin translucent film a few centimetres behind the LCD. Those images are detected by a camera inside BiDi, allowing the device to know what is happening before it.

The LCD screen's pixels must also do their usual job of presenting images to the user, though. They oscillate between their two tasks many times per second, too fast for the viewer to notice that while they are watching the screen, the screen is also watching them. "We take the normal LCD layer and put it to double duty," says Lanman.

Stereo imaging

Exploiting the different viewpoints of pinholes in different places on the screen makes it possible to reconstruct stereoscopic images, by taking a small amount of information from each of the pinhole images. Several stereoscopic image pairs are produced, each sharply focussed on objects a particular distance from the screen, from which the system can calculate how far away the object is.

"We produce multiple images, each focused on a different plane in front of the screen all the way to, say, 50 centimetres away from the screen," says Lanman. "For instance, your hand will be blurred except in the one image that's at the right depth."

A further processing step singles out the sharply focussed parts of each image in the stack, creating a sharp depth map of objects within the screen's field of view that can be used to track 3D gestures in the same way a standard touch screen captures touch gestures.

The whole process takes place in real time, and computer software interprets those gestures as an input to control the objects on the screen.

The BiDi screen will be presented at Siggraph Asia later this week.

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Television Begins a Push Into the 3rd Dimension

2010-01-05T22:46:00.001-08:00

It was more than half a century ago, in a 1955 episode of “The Honeymooners,” that Kramden, the parsimonious bus driver played byJackie Gleason, told his wife, Alice, that he had not yet bought a new television because “I’m waiting for 3-D.”
The wait will soon be over. A full-fledged 3-D television turf war is brewing in the United States, as manufacturers unveil sets capable of 3-D and cable programmers rush to create new channels for them.
Many people are skeptical that consumers will suddenly pull their LCD and plasma televisions off the wall. Beginning at around $2,000, the 3-D sets will, at first, cost more than even the current crop of high-end flat-screens, and buyers will need special glasses — techie goggles, really — to watch in 3-D.
But programmers and technology companies are betting that consumers are almost ready to fall in love with television in the third dimension. In part, it could be the “Avatar” effect: with 3-D films gaining traction at the box office — James Cameron’s “Avatar” surpassed the staggering $1 billion mark last weekend — companies are now determined to bring an equivalent experience to the living room.
Anticipating this coming wave, ESPN said Tuesday that it would show World Cup soccer matches and N.B.A. games in 3-D on a new network starting in June, and Discovery,Imax and Sony said they would jointly create a 3-D entertainment channel next year. The satellite service DirecTV is expected to announce its own 3-D channels at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where every major television manufacturer is planning to announce 3-D televisions and compatible Blu-ray DVD players on Wednesday.
“The stars are aligning to make 2010 the launch year of 3-D,” said John Taylor, a vice president for LG Electronics USA. “It’s still just in its infancy, but when there is a sufficient amount of content available — and lots of people are working on this — there will be a true tipping point for consumers.”
At that point, the question becomes whether consumers — many of whom have only recently upgraded to costly new high-definition sets — will want to watch in three dimensions enough to pay for the privilege. “I think 90 percent of the males in this country would be dying to watch theSuper Bowl and be immersed in it,” said Riddhi Patel, an analyst at the research firm iSuppli.
But will the experience translate to other entertainment? Ms. Patel said, “You don’t necessarily want the ladies of ‘The View’ sitting around you when you watch them.”
For most consumers, 3-D is still far in the distance. With the announcement this week, the media companies are trying to place themselves at the forefront of an emerging technology, much as they did for HDTV a decade ago.
It took high-definition television about a decade to catch on — to the point where it has become part of the entertainment mainstream, with an adequate stock of HD programming and the sets now cheap enough to entice middle-class buyers. Analysts expect 3-D television to go through the same curve, initially attracting first adopters for whom price is little or no object and gradually moving out to other affluent and then middle-class homes as sets become cheaper and programmers create enough 3-D fare.
Or, of course, the technology could be a total flop.
For decades 3-D was a gimmick for B-movies and occasionally on television (in bad quality with flimsy paper glasses), but newer technology has largely erased those memories. Peter M. Fannon, a vice president at Panasonic, called the new sets “totally different than what one had seen over the last 20 to 30 years.”
In 3-D, television makers see an opportunity to persuade households that have already bought HDTVs to return to the electronics store. Though television sales jumped 17 percent in 2009, the industry needs new innovations to keep the cash register ringing.
“Three-D is an effort by the industry to come up with something that will motivate consumers to trade up,” said Van Baker, an analyst at Gartner Research.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief of Dreamworks Animation, said producers were preparing “an enormous surge in 3-D content, with images that are truly beautiful on these new monitors.”
Leading the charge to television, the pioneering sports network ESPN said it would show at least 85 live events on a 3-D channel starting in June. “The sports genre is probably the best suited to exploit this technology,” said Sean Bratches, an executive vice president at ESPN. The company has held preliminary talks with Comcast and other operators about gaining distribution; the 3-D channel could come at an added cost to subscribers. It will go dark when not showing live events.
The joint venture among Discovery Communications, Sony Pictures Entertainment and the Imax Corporation will be a full-time channel featuring natural history, movies, sports, music and other programming.
New 3-D televisions, like the 3-D screens in theaters, work by dividing picture images into two sets, one for each eye. A viewer must wear special glasses, so each eye captures a different image, creating the illusion of depth. Filming entails two connected cameras, one for the left-eye image and the other for the right.
Manufacturers have developed two technologies for 3-D glasses in the home. In so-called polarized glasses, which can cost under a dollar, each lens blocks a set of images transmitted in certain types of light. “Active” glasses, which are better suited for LCD screens in particular, have battery-powered shutters that open and close rapidly, so each eye sees different views of each frame. These glasses can cost up to $100, but television makers are expected to package at least two pairs with each monitor.
On the horizon is technology that allows people to watch 3-D without glasses, but that has severe limitations, like forcing viewers to sit at a certain distance.
Mike Vorhaus, the managing director of new media for Frank N. Magid Associates, a media consulting firm, said 3-D was many years away from widespread adoption. For now, he said, it is “one more appetizer” for consumers who “already have a lot to digest.”
Indeed, a number of hurdles remain, including a lack of production equipment and dueling 3-D transmission standards. But backers like David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, say 3-D is bound to gain attention because consumers and producers are always striving for what looks “closest to real life.”

Computer-aided design for life itself

2010-01-05T22:45:00.000-08:00

FIRST it was planes, trains and automobiles that benefited from computer-aided design technology. Now, as synthetic biologists attempt to build artificial life forms, a CAD system has been developed to allow them to redesign the stuff of life much faster and more easily.

Deepak Chandran and colleagues at the University of Washington in Seattle developed Tinkercell to allow biologists to meddle with the components of, say, a bacterium, and simulate the effect the change has (Journal of Biomedical Engineering, vol 3, p 19).

The package has a library of the components of life, from which users can pick different cells, membrane proteins, fluorescent proteins, enzymes and genes to create their organism. Tinkercell can then simulate the life form to see if it functions as expected.

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Is the world would end in 2012?

2009-11-23T04:01:00.000-08:00

Sony Pictures created a site called the Sustainability Institute that predicts human catastrophe on earth happened three years from now.

Institute was declared "after two decades of research astronomer, mathematician, geologist, physicist, engineer, futurist, now we know that in 2012 a series of great power will wreak havoc on our planet".

Even the site explains, how the election after the 2102 world leader, offers a survival kit and ask people to sign up for a lottery to be saved.

But this website is a vehicle to promote disaster movie about the end of the world in 2012 based on the Mayan calendar prediction.

The movie starring John Cusack and directed by Roland Emmerich, who was behind the blockbuster movie Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. The film contains scenes of tsunami slammed into the mother ship White House and Los Angeles became the ocean.

According to the website that the scientists have managed to track down Planet X by a previously unknown, and is located on the edge of the solar system and on track to hit Earth.

Dr David Morrison, senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute said he has received more than 1,000 questions from community members concerned.

There's even a teenager who said they would rather kill myself than watch the end of the world. Dr Morrison said the site was "ethically wrong".

The New Technology

2009-11-20T20:08:00.000-08:00

The New Technology That Will Change Our Lives

1. Hydrogen Economy

Instead of greedily drank the oil to be imported, so we controlled by the supplier of oil, why do not we turn the water back into hydrogen and burn it (or use a fuel cell charger). In the meantime, the only result of the combustion of hydrogen is ... more water! A profitable circulation. However, hydrogen storage becomes an issue that sharply, because of low density, and hydrogen may be economic to replace the existing oil.

2. Medical therapy with cloning

Forget the stories about the coffee production / copy of the sheep or humans. On the whole idea behind the growth pengklonan organ replacement body parts or tissues in which the body would see no reason to reject the organ / tissue new. Organs damaged or attacked by cancer can be replaced with a new organ, so that the new section is free of the illness the parent cell.

3. Moore's law enforcement

Moore's Law, which is expressed by the co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore in 1965, implying that the complexity of a microprocessor - an increasing number of transistors on the chip using IC (Integrated Circuit) - will be doubled every 18 months.

But at least the last twenty years the experts have hukumtersebut remove obstacles, and the chip industry are destroying the barriers that. Today's technological developments make Moore's law increasingly irrelevant. This is more evident after Intel officially started with the code architecture Nehalem processors. This processor will start applying nanotechnology techniques in the manufacture of the processor, so do not take time during the 18 months to see an increase in complexity but will be shorter.

Currently these experts do not agree that Moore's Law to make tens of years passed away. However, if the reliability levels associated with the current computerized technology, it seems obvious that we've seen a lot of things.

4. Tool 3-dimensional desktop printing

Instead you have to go to the store to buy the necessary tools, you better download a design tool of our choice and then make it happen in a desktop tool 3-dimensional printing. The next step is designing your own tools, post these designs, sells and so on. Household enterprises in the field of manufacturing children's toys, kitchen utensils, and home decorating crafts, which are often taken for granted, it will be king!

5. Computerization based on locations on the earth

Mengelik than one icon in the browser screen, you better walk out of the house, directing your phone to one of the three-dimensional shapes (such as a business center building), click on the phone, and you instantly get information about any of the places targeted by your phone by doing jump through several web sites. As well as servers with Internet address (IP = Internet Protocol Address), then there is also the servers with the coordinates of the earth's surface as a replacement for IP Address.

THE FACEBOOK'S SOFTWARE

2009-11-19T00:42:00.000-08:00

For those who like to facebook, now there are quite a lot of software that can be used facebook. Free software you can use for activities in facebook without having to login on facebook famous heavy enough.

Facebook Using this software, you can still berfacebookan. But before you download these widgets, you need to install the Yahoo Widget Engine first. Once installed, you can install software widgets to manage your facebook below:

1. Facebook Chat 1.0
This application for chatting on facebook.
Size: 1:38 MB | Download here

2. Facebook Video 2.1.7
Software to Download or convert videos and put video Facebook outside of Facebook.
Size: 9 KB | Download here

3. Unblock Facebook Proxy 2.0
To unblock facebook access.
Size: 1.28 MB | Download here

4. Facebook Toolbar 1.3
Brothersoft integration between the browser.
Size: 141 KB | Download here

5. Facebook Desktop 1.0b
Software to view the various events that occurred in facebook.
Size: 464 KB | Download here

6. Facebook Gadget 1.0.0.0
Get notified of facebook on your desktop
Size: 56 KB | Download here

7. Facebook Notifier 1.0
Get notified of facebook on your desktop, change status, etc.
Size: 10 KB | Download here

8. Boost for Facebook 9.0.18
Customize facebook to 300 + facebook skins.
Size: 66 KB | Download here

9. Facebook Exporter for iPhoto 1.0.5
Export photos directly from your facebook
Size: 191 KB | Download here

10. Facebook Chat Notifications 1.3.1
Notifications also, but infonya will emerge from the bottom right corner of your window
Size: 2 KB | Download here

11. Facebook (er) 1.3
Access all your facebook information from the desktop
Size: 250 KB | Download here

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NASA

2009-11-19T00:16:00.001-08:00

Microsoft want you to help research Mars

NASA wants you to do its busywork. But NASA's busywork is just about the coolest out there.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Microsoft partnered up to create a Web site that, through crowdsourcing, will help NASA research Mars. On the "Be a Martian" site, anyone can play two simple games to give NASA valuable data about Mars' landscape.
Plus, there's a ton of fascinating videos, photos, forums and other information about Mars and the satellites, probes and rovers NASA has sent there.
"We really need the next generation of explorers," Michelle Viotti, director of Mars Public Outreach at the JPL, said in a Microsoft announcement. "And we're also accomplishing something important for NASA. There's so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important."
Crowdsourcing is a relatively new phenomenon that harnesses the power of the Web to collect data via the masses. It's already at work in Google Maps, for example – GPS-enabled devices can sense how fast a person is driving and send that data to Google, which synthesizes it and data from thousands of other devices into real-time traffic information.

Courtesy of Microsoft

The "Count Craters" game gathers user-inputted data for NASA about approximate crater size and location on Mars. Click to enlarge

Microsoft pointed to a successful crowdsourcing project from Oxford University, which used public input to build a database called "Galaxy Zoo." Because of crowdsourcing, Oxford researchers were able to cut a job that normally takes two years down to four months.
On the NASA site, crowdsourcing is part of two games. One asks people to count craters in photos of Mars; the other asks people to match small, high-res photos of the Martian surface with their corresponding locations on a low-res photo taken from a higher altitude.
To liven things up, NASA and Microsoft included a points and rewards system.
The "Be a Martian" site incorporates Microsoft Silverlight technology for the games and high-definition video. There are videos about some of NASA's more exciting Mars missions and mini-documentaries about Mars.
There's also a forum at which people can ask questions about Mars, vote for their favorite questions, and eventually receive responses (to the best questions) from NASA experts. The site also features a Mars atlas that is simpler but less impressive than the Mars section of Google Earth, but includes a bunch of information from NASA.

Under the site's hood is Windows Azure, the Web-based cloud-computing platform Microsoft discussed at length Tuesday at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles (video).

Instead of running on internal NASA computer servers, everything is hosted at Microsoft data centers – the application, storage, databases, et cetera. By using the Azure platform, the site can keep up during periods of high traffic by increasing the computing power it needs, and scale down during periods of low traffic. That way, NASA doesn't have to pay for the hardware required for high-traffic periods when much of the time it isn't needed.
"Running applications based on the Windows Azure platform through cloud services provides the ability to scale to any level," said Marc Mercuri, director of business innovation for Microsoft's Developer Platform Evangelism group. "The system dedicates an appropriate amount of processors to the application, whether it's being used by 250, 250,000 or 2,500,000 people at the same time."

Courtesy of Microsoft

The "Map Mars" game asks people to match small, high-res photos of the Martian surface with their corresponding locations on a low-res photo taken from a higher altitude. Click to enlarge

All of the Mars images – hundreds of thousands of them – are hosted in a public Microsoft dataset server codenamed "Dallas," which the company revealed Tuesday at PDC. Part of Microsoft Pinpoint, Dallas gives people access to data they can use for experiments or in innovative applications.
More information on Dallas is here, and more information on Azure is here.
Using this "citizen science," NASA hopes to learn – and hopes the public learns – a wealth of new information about the Red Planet. After all, it worked beautifully in Oxford's Galaxy Zoo; with it, users found a previously undiscovered celestial body.
"We know there were photographs snapped of a landslide in progress on Mars that scientists discovered serendipitously," said Tim Harris, product manager for Microsoft's DPE group. "We hope many more people can be involved in that kind of exciting discovery."

Wi-Fi n & Radio FM found in the New iPod Touch!

2009-11-19T00:08:00.000-08:00

In the latest iPod Touch from Apple there was Wi-Fi hardware n classes, a tool such as the FM receiver, and a room for the camera. As stated by iFixit when 'dissect' the new device, called the 'unexpected discoveries'. The discovery of the most noteworthy is a Broadcom BCM4329 chip that supports the 802.11n standard. This major discovery, since until now the iPhone even wore only 3GS Broadcom BCM4325 chip that supports Wi-Fi a / b / g only.

It is not known whether this chip will be supported by software in the iPod Touch, but at least there is the hardware there. In addition, this Broadcom chip also supports the transmission of FM and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR (enhanced data rate), which suggests that the iPod touch screen has the potential to stream music to your car audio equipment. Still, many things need to be prepared so that it can function.

iFixit also stated that the internal layout of the iPod seem to be prepared for the camera at the top. Although not considered too deep for an autofocus camera, but it seemed the room was enough for the camera as mounted on a fifth-generation iPod Nano. So, we just wait if the next generation of iPod Touch will have these things. (Ifixit/kassa9/hep)

Norah Jones