PureDepth Multi-Layer Display- The Arrow and bullseye appears above the primary image to capture the attention and provide additional information.

Founded in New Zealand in 1999 and now headquartered in Redwood City, Calif., the company achieves its unique visual effect by embedding LCD displays within each other. It calls the approach Multi-Layer Display (MLD). By running these embedded screens parallel, the screens enhance each other, essentially "deepening" what viewers see.

A story on PureDepth MLD from TechNow

The Technology, the Uses

"People who read more and more complex data, simply can't sort it on traditional displays anymore--regardless of the pixel dimensions. PureDepth exponentially increases viewing area not by going bigger, but by going deeper." So says the company's site, so say we all.

No mere parlor trick, the PureDepth approach -- with 45 approved patents in its court -- allows users to absorb multiple streams of data. Doctors doing surgery could see several different sets of vitals as they navigate a patient's innards -- all on one monitor. Businesspeople could view all their financial numbers in one go. Couch potatoes could take advantage of a flat-panel television with an advanced interactive interface for navigating channels, making purchases and casting online votes.

A video overview of PureDepth showing multiple applications for the technology

Workers could more effectively multi-task, decluttering workspace by bringing all information to one monitor without the need to spread work across multiple displays or even stacked windows within a display. Graphic artists could use the top transparent display for palettes and the back window for editing.

The company anticipates applications of its technology in these fields and others, including cell phones, cameras, in-car navigation, kiosks, portable electronics, security, avionics, air-traffic control.

Pure Depth auto navigation prototype where route information and points of interest float above the main map. Coming soon to a german luxury car near you...

The company's site does the tech-geek version of all this best: "MLD displays overcome issues of convergence, motion parallax, and restrictions in the viewing angle common to most 3D displays. Convergence (the combination of left and right eye images) on PureDepth monitors is flawless, allowing for long duration viewing without loss of orientation. Correct convergence also allows for crisp images to be displayed in the full range of colors. Motion parallax (the relative movement and position of one object in front of or behind another) has been achieved without the need for head-tracking devices or limitations in the viewing area.

Licensing

Already, the company -- on a licensing quest -- has announced a five-year agreement with military equipment provider DRS Technologies, a deal with Sanyo to build gaming machines, and a worldwide contract with International Game Technology to use the technology in the company's video poker, bingo and slot machines. The Sanyo PureDepth displays hit Pachinko parlors in Japan (where the company has an office) this quarter.

Pure depth for gaming where the pay lines appear over the main image to enhance interactivity

The potential for info-rich clarity this technology promises could very well make it a natural fit for telepresence suites as well.

The Challenge

The company -- tanned, rested and ready after four years of R&D to work out the bugs -- has made the bet that PureDepth's unique approach will help to set it apart in the LCD display field. The market for LCD TV sales along is expected to hit $85 billion by 2010, up from $25 billion in 2005, if the chicken bone throwing of iSppli are to be believed. PureDepth itself anticipates a $23 billion helping of that pie each year for the rest of the decade from sales of medium and small (all the way down to cell-phone-size) displays.

PureDepth for medical - medical informatics appear over the image of a surgery in real time

That is, if the company can get consumers to bear the greater cost of the product. The LCD portion of displays make up 70 percent of the unit's total cost. With two LCDs in action, consumers may have to pay 1.8 times the cost of a regular LCD monitor.

The technology perfects an old method of power transfer known as inductive coupling, where two neighboring coil devices are aligned with magnets so that one can transmit power to the other. Traditionally, these coil-energy transfers were subject to large energy loses that could exceed 30% of the total transfer because the devices only operated within very specific tolerances.

eCoupled took the transmitting coil (a power supply) and gave it the ability to adapt to changing loads and distances, eliminating previous limitations the technology faced. The result are energy transfers that rival the efficiency of traditional wall socket corded charges; they claim 1400W at 98% efficiency. Luckily, the device does not actually transfer electricity wirelessly through the air, saving us the task of dodging lightning bolts in our homes. Instead, the coils interface through magnetic contacts that can be universally applied to all electronic devices, effectively creating an 'open' power transmission standard that the current world of mismatching power bricks and cords sorely needs. As a welcome added bonus, this coil transfer technology can also accommodate radio frequency transmissions, meaning wireless internet or Bluetooth data transfers could also be performed through this device.

eCoupled has been quite a media darling of late, with many media channels picking up on the Reuters story that ran a week ago. The company's director of development, David Barman, recently appeared on ABC News Now: Ahead of the Curve (see the video below), explaining the technology in a rather bland interview.

The eCoupled Interview [via ABC News]

While all the attention may make the technology appear to be the next big thing, keep in mind major obstacles still litter the path to success. Currently, no devices have the necessary embedded coils that can interface with their nifty magnetic charger, rendering the device useless. A company called Mobility Electronics has stepped in with an adapter that they claim will interface Apple and Motorola products with eCoupled's charger. Such a move seems a bit empty when you consider the kind of person that buys an iPod Nano or a RAZR phone probably isn't going to want a coil charging dongle slinking off the side of their consumer sex symbol. Yet little eCoupled has shown that they can get involved with industry heavyweights, inking recent deals with car OEM supplier Visteon and the office furniture manufacture Herman Miller - both of which want to integrate the charger into their respective product lines.

John Analysis:

This is an awesome technology that really could revolutionize the world of battery charging. Just tonight I was fumbling around with a digital camera battery charging brick that wouldn't fit in the wall socket because of its orientation. Quite a gripe when people are dying and starving around the world but the ease of use this product has the potential to offer would be an incredible step in the sometimes murky waters of improving productivity. The future of the technology seems to hinge on the ability of eCoupled to get these large gadget makers to integrate the charging coils directly into their products. Easier said than done, but that's just the reason we all read these articles about what is coming next anyhow.

If you want to learn even more about the technology, see eCoupled's Technology Executive Summary (.pdf)

When it comes to productivity, the question isn't how much work you can stand to do for how long, but when you do it best. Break away from the myth of 9 to 5 as the only time to do work you'll likely uncover golden hours in the early morning or late night when your mind really takes off. These moments free your head from all the distractions and mental baggage of the day, making you more wakeful, alert and able to get things done.

Hack #1 - Listen to your internal clock

We may think of ourselves as cool and mysterious night owls or as eager, nose-to-the-grindstone early birds, but that don't mean jack do our internal clocks. Put aside your self-image for a moment and take an honest assessment of whether you're more alert and productive in the morning or at night. Alternate getting up early a few mornings or staying awake longer a few nights and see what works best for you.

Hack #2 - Get up Earlier/Stay up Later

Once you've figured out if you're a morning or a night person, see how far you can take either time. Get up at 6:30 a.m., then 6 a.m., and eventually 5 a.m., or stay up until 12:30 a.m., then 1 a.m., and work towards 2 a.m. Your body will tell you if it's working out or not.

Hack #3 - Be Consistent

Some claim they only get by on a few hours of sleep a night. Others say getting up at the same time every morning works like a charm. Figure out what works for you and once you stick with it, your body will do the rest.

Hack #4 - Nap at your own risk

It may be tempting to nap during the day when you're adjusting to your new sleeping schedule, but be warned: doze more than 20 minutes and you may have trouble getting to sleep at night. Also, nap consistently enough and your body will grow to expect naps and drop energy like ballast from a balloon when it doesn't get them.

Next time: Hack Your Sleep Pt. II, exploring ways to manage yourself in a sleep-hacked state.

You have to understand a little about hard drives for that last statement to mean anything. Hard drives are a magnetic storage medium, meaning those 1s and 0s that define the digital age are stored in the form of microscopic magnets. This collection of magnets makes up the bass riff of your favorite MP3 hit right when you pump it through iTunes, your girlfriend's eyes sparkle in those digital pictures and store even more important applications like your bank account passwords. Everything you save turns into a magnetic signature stored on a hard drive.

All the magnets sit on what are known as platters and these platters range in size from 3.5" found in desktops to the 2.5" variety found in laptops and even 1.8" drives now found in some MP3 players. As you can see, the size of the platter determines the form factor of the hard drive, the amount of data you can store on the drive and consequently what type of device it can be put into. That's what makes these recent HD announcements such a huge productivity breakthrough - Toshiba pushed the amount of storage you can stuff onto a 2.5" laptop hard drive up almost 25% overnight. Their hard drive now flaunts a 178 GB per square inch storage density - one of the highest on any drive. Seagate's new drive, while not as large, promises to boot up Windows faster than any drive in history. How is all this craziness happening you might ask?

Both these drives and soon all HDs will use a relatively old technology called perpendicular recording. Normal hard drives of the past placed magnets on their sides, meaning they lined up in these gigantic concentric circles around the hard drive platters. Perpendicular recording stands all those magnets up vertically, allowing for far more magnets to be squeezed onto the drive. Both the new Toshiba 200GB 2.5" and the Seagate 160GB 2.5" drive use this technology. Toshiba is a bit later to the game, considering Seagate released the first portable drive with the perpendicular HD technology this year in January.

Seagate's new drive, albeit smaller, may be even more impressive because of its use of hybrid hard drive technology. Taking its name and function from hybrid cars, the hybrid hard drive uses these newer perpendicular recording platters and marries that technology with a flash RAM cache on the hard drive. The technology was first developed in a joint venture between Samsung and Microsoft back in 2005 but this Seagate drive represents the first one to market. What makes this technology so great is that it will effectively eliminate the annoying amount of time it takes your computer to boot up. Windows can be stored on the super fast flash part of the hybrid hard drive, meaning the computer can instantly wake up when you turn it on. These drives also save power because when you aren't doing much with your computer, they can stop spinning those platters and work from the flash cache.

Amazingly, these major developments are already being usurped by even smaller hard drives. 1.8" HD's once found only in fringe technologies and MP3 players are now in ultra-compact laptops. Newer HD form factors of 1" and even .85" HD that can hold 10 GB are now becoming a reality.

What does all this mean to you? Your laptop will boot in seconds instead of minutes. You now have ability to manipulate larger amounts of information more quickly on the go in ways you can't even think of yet. You can now store more information on your laptop than could be kept on a mainframe not even 15 years ago. These developments and miniaturization of these technologies will help usher in a new era of mobile computing and will impact the way you work, pushing the productivity envelop even higher.

May 4 (Bloomberg) -- Productivity gains in the U.S. failed to keep pace with a jump in wages in the first quarter, pointing to a greater risk of accelerating inflation.

Labor costs climbed 2.5 percent, more than twice analysts' forecasts, and compensation for each hour worked jumped to an annual rate of 5.7 percent, the Labor Department said in Washington. The increase in wages exceeded a gain in productivity, which rose at an annual rate of 3.2 percent.

Companies may be squeezing as much as they can out of employees and equipment, economists said. To meet demand, they're hiring more workers and boosting compensation, risking faster inflation that may require the Federal Reserve to keep raising interest rates.

``Labor costs are starting to rise as tight labor markets have workers clamoring for better wages,'' said Chris Rupkey, senior financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York. ``This is the first hint that the wage-price spiral has begun, and it is sure to be worrying Fed officials.''

Labor costs were predicted to rise 1.2 percent, according to the median estimate of economists polled by Bloomberg News. Productivity, a measure of how much an employee produces for each hour of work, was expected to grow 3 percent.

``Worker compensation is picking up, labor markets are tightening and unemployment will grind lower,'' said John Herrmann, director of economic commentary at Cantor Fitzgerald LP in New York. ``In turn, the Fed has to be a little wary about rising wages and the threat of pass-through'' into inflation.

Treasury Yields

Yields on 10-year Treasury notes held near their highest levels since 2002 after the report. The yield was 5.15 percent at 12:15 p.m. in New York and rose as high as 5.16 percent earlier today.

Many investors and traders are more focused on tomorrow's jobs report for April. The government is likely to say employers hired 200,000 workers last month, with the unemployment rate matching the lowest since July 2001, according to a Bloomberg survey.

A separate report today from the Labor Department showed first-time claims for unemployment benefits rose to 322,000 last week from 317,000. Claims were expected to fall to 310,000 from 315,000 initially reported, based on the median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists.

The timing of spring break at schools across the country and its effect on the employment of temporary workers made it difficult for the government to seasonally adjust the statistics, a Labor Department official said.

``These data do little to dispel the notion that the labor market is continuing to tighten,'' said Omair Sharif, an economist at RBS Greenwich Capital in Greenwich, Connecticut. ``The solid pace of payroll advances so far this year points to strength in underlying labor demand.''

Hours Worked

Hours worked increased at a 2.5 percent pace in the first quarter compared with a 1.8 percent increase in the previous three months, today's productivity report showed. Output jumped at a 5.8 percent rate compared with a 1.5 percent fourth-quarter gain.

Among manufacturers, productivity rose at a 4.2 percent pace after rising at a 4.7 percent rate in the fourth quarter. Productivity at U.S. non-financial corporations, a measure watched by the Fed, rose at a 2.5 percent rate in the fourth quarter. Those data are reported with a one-quarter lag.

Productivity growth has averaged about a 3.5 percent rate each quarter during the expansion that started in November 2001, compared with 2.1 percent in the record 10-year expansion that ended March 2001.

Current Expansion

Increases in unit labor costs during the current expansion have averaged 1 percent a quarter, down from 2 percent a quarter during the prior expansion.

An April 28 report from the Commerce Department showed gross domestic product, the value of all goods and services produced in the U.S., rose at an annual rate of 4.8 percent in the first quarter, up from 1.7 percent in the fourth quarter...

From: About the Human Productivity Lab

In high-growth and/or rapidly changing knowledge-centric organizations you can achieve faster growth (as measured by sales, market share, and shareholder value) by investing in and improving the productivity and business communication capabilities of your existing human capital.

Increasing the return on human capital is possible by leveraging technology to improve your sales and knowledge workers ability to find, access, understand, evaluate, act on, communicate, disseminate, and archive information.

The most important and most often neglected factor in successfully implementing technology is the "Human Factor" and failing to take it into account leads to wasted time, opportunity, and treasure.

If you have a PalmOne Treo, PDA, or other SD Card equipt camera or gizmo then the 1 GB Sandisk Ultra 2 SD memory card/USB Jump Drive is a perfect companion. It's a 1 GB SD Memory Card that fits in the standard SD slot in the Treo (or other SD device) that doubles as a 1GB USB Jump Drive. Snap the card in half to expose an USB connection which then becomes another drive when plugged into your PC.

When I am in the office I keep the USB jumpdrive in my laptop where I use it to back up the authoratative copy of my work. I back the card/jump drive up to my laptop a couple of times a week and then back up the laptop to an external hard drive once a week.

Pros: Handy! If you are using this card in a SmartPhone/Digital Camera then you have an easy way to off-load those photos without having an SD card reader. If you routinely carry an SD Card equipped SmartPhone or Digital Camera with and a USB jump drive with you then you can consolidate the jump drive into your phone/camera and only have to keep track of one device.

When I travel I keep the card in my Treo SmartPhone where the 1 GB card becomes extra memory for pictures, MP3s, etc. AND I always have my important files with me in the one device that I am most likely to have on me. While the card appears rather flimsy it has taken some hits while hanging off the side of my laptop and hasn't broken yet.

Cons: Relatively expensive vs. other jump drive or SD card options, important unencrypted files potentially lost with the card should you loose the phone/camera/PDA that the card is in. Available memory limited to 1GB for now (2GB models shipping in October). No biometric security.

By now you have probably heard of RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and allows websites to beam their content out to readers without the reader having to actually go to the site itself. RSS aggregators like RSSBandit, FeedReader or Bloglines will grab all the stories from any given source you assign to them and they are downloaded onto your computer for your perusal. This is a great technolog...but if you subscribe to lots of feeds like me, pretty soon your aggregator is dropping hundreds if not thousands of stories on you every day defeating its productive purpose.

Luckily our friends over at the open source project of the century, Firefox, have been kind enough to take this technology a step further. (If you don't know what Firefox is, first I offer you my apologies and second I command you to go download it and start using this class leading browser immediately.) These folks have introduced the concept of Live Bookmarks which take RSS feeds a step further.

Adding Live Bookmarks works just adding normal bookmarks to your browser with a little twist. Firefox dynamically recognizes which sites have RSS feeds and generates a little orange RSS icon inside the address bar of the browser itself.

As time passes and you get more comfortable with this technology you will see how powerful it can be. Take a look at how I have customized my browser...

Don't think of the information in this Blog as tips, but as fuel. No engine goes without gas, and your life hacking engine is no exception. It needs regular doses of the right habits and behaviors to run as smoothly and efficiently as possible.

The only way to get things done and continue to get things done is to develop the habits that let you complete things. Drill these behaviors into your head until they come as easily to you as breathing.

Take these tips and incorporate them into your life. If they work, keep them. If they don't, modify them. If they still don't work, drop them and move on. There's nothing less efficient than wasting time trying in vain to get more efficient.