Techno-News Blog

September 30, 2011

The internet of things and yet another revolution

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by Russell M Davies, BBC

So what will the next revolution in technology be? If you talk to big companies and large institutions about it, they will tell you about the internet of things. The internet of things is a phrase you are going to hear a lot over the next few years, and the clue is in the name as to what it is. It is about connecting objects rather than people. According to one estimate, there will be 50 billion things online by 2020; another estimate suggests it will be a trillion – nobody really knows. But lots of people have vested interests in wiring all these things up and charging for the bandwidth to do it.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15018894

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Google+ opens social network to everyone

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by the BBC

Google+ is being opened up for anyone to join after two-and-a-half months in closed testing. The search firm’s latest foray into social networking was initially offered to journalists and people working in technology related fields. However, members’ ability to invite friends meant its user base quickly grew to tens of millions. Google+ has been praised for several innovative features including its multi person “hangouts” video chat.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14985494

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Smartphone to measure radiation

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by the BBC

Japanese mobile phone giant NTT DoCoMo is developing a smartphone that will measure radiation levels. The design was inspired by worries over the health implications of the radiation leak at the Fukushima nuclear plant. The phone will come with changeable “jackets” which will also be able to measure bad breath and body fat.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15023061

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September 29, 2011

Internet of things: Should you worry if your jeans go smart?

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By Katia Moskvitch, BBC

What if those new jeans you’ve just bought start tweeting about your location as you cross London Bridge? It sounds far-fetched, but it’s possible – if one of your garments is equipped with a tiny radio-frequency identification device (RFID), your location could be revealed without you knowing about it. RFIDs are chips that use radio waves to send data to a reader – which in turn can be connected to the web. This technology is just one of the current ways of allowing physical objects to go online – a concept dubbed the “internet of things”, which industry insiders have shortened to IoT.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15004063

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Artists use technology to remaster classics

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by the BBC

Among the classic works being re-interpreted as part of Intel’s Remastered exhibition is Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the sea of fog (1818) – the original does not depict a real scene, but a composite made up of mountains from Elbsandsteingebirge in Saxony and Bohemia (present day Germany and Czech Republic).  Check out this BBC site for some dramatic examples of re-mastering works of art.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15021350

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Now that Congress failed to reform software patents, will the Obama administration step up?

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by Christopher Mims, Technology Review

At this moment, on the White House’s official website for petitioning the government, the only thing as popular as legalizing marijuana and separating church from state is a petition to “Direct the Patent Office to Cease Issuing Software Patents.” There are lots of good reasons to end the practice of patenting software, including the fact that software patents are primarily a vehicle for transferring wealth from the innovators who create it to patent trolls whose sole “product” is litigation. (Software patents are also sometimes used by big companies to take their rivals down a peg or two, in what seems like an effort to pile up so many cross-licensing fees that they all cancel each other out.)

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27194/?p1=blogs

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September 28, 2011

Printing Parts

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By Stuart Nathan, Technology Review

The box is an additive-layer manufacturing machine, sometimes known as a 3-D printer, and it is making a small part for an Airbus A380 airliner. EADS, which owns Airbus, hopes the device can transform manufacturing. Among other things, it could produce parts that make airplanes lighter, so they use less fuel. 3-D printers can make complex shapes that can’t be manufactured with conventional techniques. Until recently, however, they couldn’t print strong, durable objects. The machine Turner is using can make intricate forms out of high-grade metal, an advance that has allowed researchers to apply the design possibilities of 3-D printing to mechanical parts. The printers use software that works out where the parts need to bear loads and places material just in those areas, halving the weight of the complete part without sacrificing strength.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/38352/?p1=Mag_story1

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Tiny, Cloud-Powered Desktops

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by Erica Naone, Technology Review

The profusion of mobile devices is driving advances in cloud-based productivity apps built for the small screen. The cloud is the natural central storage site not only for the data but for the productivity applications themselves, says Rick ­Treitman, entrepreneur in residence at Adobe and director of product marketing for its Acrobat.com cloud-based office applications. Zoho’s Vegesna notes that users expect custom apps tailored to the iPhone, the Android tablet, or whatever device they’re working on. Scott Johnston, group product manager for Google Docs and Sites, says that while the interfaces will look different on phones, tablets, and PCs, “I suspect we’re going full-featured on every device.” He believes that workers will eventually use tablets in place of laptops and demand productivity software that works just as well on them. Potential advances in touch-screen technology—such as ways to give users more tactile feedback—could also accelerate demand for such apps.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/38409/?p1=Mag_story0

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Google Invites Everyone to Be Friends—on Its Social Network

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By Tom Simonite, Technology Review

12 weeks of socializing in select circles, Google has announced that anyone can sign up for its fledgling social network, Google Plus. The wider adoption of the service now that it’s widely available will be crucial to the success of Google Plus, and to Google’s ability to compete with Facebook as a force in social networking and in selling more targeted ads. Google’s social network was launched in June to positive reviews and considerable interest, but activity has slowed in recent weeks.

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/38645/?p1=A2

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September 27, 2011

Nanotube Cables Hit a Milestone: As Good as Copper

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By Katherine Bourzac, Technology Review

For the first time, researchers have made carbon-nanotube electrical cables that can carry as much current as copper wires. These nanotube cables could help carry more renewable power farther in the electrical grid, provide lightweight wiring for more-fuel-efficient vehicles and planes, and make connections in low-power computer chips. Researchers at Rice University have now demonstrated carbon-nanotube cables in a practical system and are designing a manufacturing line for commercial production. Making lightweight, efficient carbon nanotube wiring as conductive as copper has been a goal of nanotechnologists since the 1980s. Individual carbon nanotubes—hollow nanoscale tubes of pure carbon—are mechanically strong and an order of magnitude more conductive than copper. But unless carbon nanotubes are put together just so, larger structures made from them don’t have the superlative properties of the individual tubes.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/38615/?p1=MstRcnt

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Will Super Wi-Fi Live Up To Its Name?

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By Scott Woolley, Technology Review

Under government rules designed to protect local TV stations from harmful interference, high-power Super Wi-Fi signals (up to 4 watts), which can travel for miles, must give TV channels a wide berth. Low-power Super Wi-Fi signals (less than 40 milliwatts) face fewer restrictions. The result is that while there are 48 channels potentially available for long-range Super Wi-Fi, zero or one channel will be available for long-range use in the places most Americans live—so Super Wi-Fi networks significantly bigger than today’s home Wi-Fi networks won’t be practical. In rural areas, the longer-range systems could prove a boon, although even there, most of the spectrum will still be off-limits. The short-range devices will supplement existing Wi-Fi systems, which can sometimes run out of capacity when lots of people in one vicinity try to use them. Super Wi-Fi will benefit from using lower-frequency waves that travel farther and penetrate walls more easily, but those advantages will be reduced, if not completely offset, by the 40 milliwatt power limit. (Regular Wi-Fi can use up to 1 watt of power.) Ultimately, Congress could decide to loosen the limits on Super Wi-Fi—over the objections of TV broadcasters. According to the broadcasting industry, not even current limitations are stringent enough, which is why it has been fighting to block the white-space rules.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/38635/?p1=MstRcnt

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Will E-Books Destroy the Democratizing Effects of Reading?

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by Christopher Mims, Technology Review

Could Abraham Lincoln have become president of the United States in a world in which poor children lack access to physical books?Today Amazon announced that it is finally rolling out Kindle-compatible ebooks to public libraries in the U.S., a much-needed evolution of the dominant e-reading platform. But there’s a larger problem that this development fails to address, and it’s an issue exacerbated by every part of Amazon’s business model. Except under limited circumstances, eBooks cannot be loaned or resold. They cannot be gifted, nor discovered on a trip through the shelves of a friend or the local library. They cannot be re-bound and, unlike all the rediscovered works that literally gave birth to the Renaissance, they will not last for centuries. Indeed, publishers are already limiting the number of times a library can loan out an eBook to 26.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27185/?p1=blogs

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September 26, 2011

Brain Imaging Reveals Moving Images

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By Erica Westly, Technology Review

Scientists are a step closer to constructing a digital version of the human visual system. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed an algorithm that can be applied to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) imagery to show a moving image a person is seeing. Neuroscientists have been using fMRI to study the human visual system for years, which involves measuring changes in blood oxygen levels in the brain. This works fine for studying how we see static images, but it falls short when it comes to moving imagery. Individual neuronal activity occurs over a much faster time scale, so a few years ago the researchers behind the current study set out to devise a computer model to measure this instead. The study shows that this new approach is not only successful but remarkably accurate.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/38655/?p1=A2

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Taking Touch beyond the Touch Screen

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By Duncan Graham-Rowe, Technology Review

A tablet computer developed collaboratively by researchers at Intel, Microsoft, and the University of Washington can be controlled not only by swiping and pinching at the screen, but by touching any surface on which it is placed. Finding new ways to interact with computers has become an important area of research among computer scientists, especially now that touch-screen smart phones and tablets have grown so popular. The project that produced the new device, called Portico, could eventually result in smart phones or tablets that take touch beyond the physical confines of the device.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/38662/?p1=A1

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Fear of Repression Spurs Scholars and Activists to Build Alternate Internets

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By Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education

Computer networks proved their organizing power during the recent uprisings in the Middle East, in which Facebook pages amplified street protests that toppled dictators. But those same networks showed their weaknesses as well, such as when the Egyptian government walled off most of its citizens from the Internet in an attempt to silence protesters. That has led scholars and activists increasingly to consider the Internet’s wiring as a disputed political frontier.

http://chronicle.com/article/Fear-of-Repression-Spurs/129049/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

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September 25, 2011

Google+ Now Lets Users Share Google Maps Directions

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By: Clint Boulton, eWeek

Google hasn’t been shy about integrating Google+ with some of its key Web services. Since its launch to limited field testing June 28, Google+ has integrated with Google.com search, YouTube and Gmail. Now the company has added Google Maps to that storied short list. The search engine provider is letting users share Google Maps they find interesting, or even directions on the online mapping service. Users can call up a Google Map, or search for directions they require, then just click the share button in their Google+ toolbar to blast out the content to their Circles on Google+.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/Google-Now-Lets-Users-Share-Google-Maps-Directions-558621/?kc=rss

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MasterCard Pushing Into NFC, Mobile Payments

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By Nicholas Kolakowski, eWeek

MasterCard wants more people using their smartphones to pay for goods and services. Certainly more smartphones rolling out over the next few quarters will come preloaded with NFC (near-field communication) hardware, which converts a device into a de facto wallet: Tap it against the proper receiver, and conduct an electronic transaction. More NFC-capable smartphones means more people with the ability to make electronic payments means more money and market presence for MasterCard if it can push a platform of apps that facilitate mobile purchases. Some 85 percent of the world’s financial transactions are conducted with physical cash or checks, and it dearly wants electronic payments to take a bigger piece of that pie, according to the company. In order to promote its efforts, MasterCard recently invited a considerable media contingent to an event in midtown Manhattan, where it showed off some of the mobile-payment apps and projects currently under development.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/MasterCard-Pushing-Into-NFC-Mobile-Payments-497047/?kc=rss

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Google Books Talks Show ‘Substantial Progress,’ No Deal

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By: Clint Boulton, eWeek

Google and the authors and publishers contingent who sued it for copyright infringement in 2005 reported making “substantial progress” toward reaching a reasonable agreement, the third time the parties have attempted to come to terms in the last two years. New York District Court Judge Denny Chin acknowledged at a status conference Sept. 15 that he was “still hopeful” that a resolution could be reached, according to Bloomberg. However, the deal is at least a year away after Chin signed off on a schedule of events running through July 31, 2012, according to James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York Law School.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Google-Books-Talks-Show-Substantial-Progress-No-Deal-818448/?kc=rss

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September 24, 2011

From No Doctor to E-Doctors in Rural India

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By Emily Singer, Technology Review

There aren’t too many doctors in the village of Hari Ke Kalan, in the Punjab region of northern India. But for $1, residents who bicycle to a new health clinic can get an appointment with a physician appearing on a large-screen television and beamed in over broadband Internet. The clinic, built by a startup called Healthpoint Services, is one of a network of eight “e-health points” that the for-profit company has built in India as part of a growing effort by entrepreneurs to capitalize on the rapid expansion of cellular and broadband access in the poorest parts of the world. With successes such as text-message-based mobile payments taking off in some countries, many experts see medicine as the next major application of technology in poor nations.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/38482/?p1=BI

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How do you navigate a billion pixels? With a Kinect, a gigantic screen, and this student-made gesture system

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The Universe in Your Hands

by David Zax, Technology Review

Sometimes, there’s no such thing as too much visual information. An astronomer, for instance, parsing images of distant galaxies, will never complain about a picture that is too high-resolution. Neither will a microbiologist, who may need to zoom into the microscopic universe to learn more about what makes a cell work, or fail. We have the technology to take massively high resolution images today–so-called gigapixel images, those containing a billion or more pixels–but what we’ve lacked, until now, was a suitable and intuitive way to navigate those images. Samuel Cox, a masters student in digital imaging at Lincoln University, offers what may be a solution, reports The Engineer. Cox isn’t an astronomer or a biomedical student, but the system he devised might someday apply to those fields.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/helloworld/27167/?p1=blogs

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Here Come the Google+ Client Applications

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by Christopher Mims, Technology Review

It is inconceivable that Twitter would be as popular as it is today without its robust Application Programming Interface, which allows client applications like TweetDeck and the original Tweetie (since bought by Twitter and re-branded as its official client app) to both display a user’s stream of tweets and manipulate his or her account in all the ways he or she would on Twitter.com itself. So depending on your perspective, it’s either surprising that Google+ did not launch with a developer API, or it’s surprising that they have come out with one relatively quickly, given the amount of testing and tweaking an entirely new social network no doubt involves. Either way, Google+ finally has an API, although it’s read-only, and it only shows the Google+ posts that a user has made public. In the coming days and weeks, we’re going to see a handful of uses of this API, which, in the abstract, at this point is little more than an RSS or XML feed for a user’s public posts.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27170/?p1=blogs

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