The “Intel Inside” tag has marked the desktop PCs (74% acc. Q4 2008) since the 1990s. In 2020, Intel expects to stample “Intel Inside” on our foreheads.
According to PhysOrg, Computer chip maker Intel wants to implant a brain-sensing chip directly into the brains of its customers to allow them to operate computers and other devices without moving a muscle.
Research projects to connect animal brains to robots have been carried out for many years. Rats and monkeys have already been able to control robots with brain signals. It was a matter of time before some large company announces a product that will allow human brain to communicate with electronic devices around them. Who’s better than the world leader in silicon innovation and world’s largest semiconductor chip maker to take that challenge? Read More »

While the world is still struggling with financial crisis and swine flu, the people at NASA are always looking for new ways to send people to space. I heard some stories few years ago that a bus shuttle is being developed that would be able to take people on a ride to the moon.
While these stories might be just rumors, taking the elevator on the other hand might be a more realistic option.
In a Power Beaming Challenge competition arranged by NASA and Spaceward Foundation, a prize money of $900,000 went to LazerMotive, a Seattle company
that successfully demonstrated new wireless energy beaming technology which could one day be used to help power a “space elevator.”, according to the press release by NASA.
As usual, a video to illustrate the event is available below Read More »

Developments in mobile phones are generally targeted to the mass and to satisfy the needs of the normal user in the daily life. We have seen High definition camera, Mobile TV, Mini Projectors in Mobile Phones, internet browser and more or less a tiny computer, not to forget the wide range of applications in the smart phones (especially iPhones and android based handsets) that transform the phone to a GPS receiver, sophisticated game console and so on. But a microscope ??
While this is not a feature that a normal mobile user would need, but it certainly has an advantage for researchers out in the field away from the lab. Using about $10 off-the-shelf components and mobile phone, the researchers at UC Berkeley have created a microscope.
Check the video below to know more about this innovation. Read More »

Unusual and weird stories are always viral because it is simply the nature of human behavior to seek the unusual and odd in life. Many people have searched this morning for a town called “Argleton” on Google Maps and got a match to a small village just off the A59 near Ormskirk, Lancashire, United Kingdom. However, Argleton doesn’t actually exist.

Read More »

A very interesting presentation on Internet and the economy presented by Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker at Web 2.0 Summit on Tuesday.

BusinessInsider summarizes the presentation as follows

Mobile internet is bigger than you think.
iPhone is becoming THE mobile platform.
Social media, mobile devices are changing communications and commerce.
Mobile internet trends in Japan show how the future will be. (Hint: Not much mobile advertising)
Carriers will be crushed by demand.
The Walled Gardens collapse.
Apple wins, Google maybe wins, Research In Motion withers

The number of mobile subscriptions is actually expected to reach 50 billion subscription in 2020 (even bigger than what Mary thinks, 10+ billions is mentioned in her slides). Apple is no doubt a major driver, but Google services are not to be forgotten. Also the android platform is being pushed and adopted by many manufacturers. Despite the iPhone’s popularity, I think it is still possible for other handsets to make a breakthrough. To a large extent, I seem to agree with Meeker about mobile internet trends, except for mobile advertising.

Take a deeper look into Mary’s presentation here and let me know what you think Read More »

Few days ago, I wrote about the 10/GUI: the new concept of user interface to PCs.
Today, Apple launched the world’s first multi-touch mouse called “Magic Mouse”. The top shell of Magic Mouse is one seamless multi-touch sensor and inside is a chip which according to Apple tells exactly what you want to do. Whether you want to click, scroll, swipe or simply rest your hand. Magic Mouse does not mix up these actions.

The magic mouse points and clicks like a regular mouse however without the buttons and the scrolling wheel. You can practically click anywhere along the Multi-Touch surface. Brush one finger along the top surface to pan a full 360 degrees. Swipe a finger along the surface to scroll, just like on an iPhone or iPod touch. You can adjust the sensitivity from the System Preferences. And just like an iPhone or a MacBook trackpad, Magic Mouse detects the number of fingers you are using at any given time. This fits perfectly to advance through internet pages in Safari or browse albums in iTunes. Although this is not quite the 10/GUI concept, but Apple have certainly realized that the Multi-Touch technology introduced a breakthrough in the way people interact with the device, through gestures.

Watch the video below to see the magic mouse in action Read More »

It is confirmed that Microsoft reached a deal with Twitter and Facebook to add real-time updates into their search engine Bing. However, it only took few hours for Google to announce that they also got a similar deal with Twitter. No clear information is yet available regarding Facebook.

You can try the beta version of Bing Twitter implementation here, but don’t be surprised when you get the following message if your locale is not set united states.

TWITTER BETA

Sorry!
Bing Twitter Search is not available in this locale.

If you wish to access Bing Twitter Search, change your locale to United States.

Note: Changing your locale will affect all Bing pages. To change your locale in the future, click the United States link at the top right corner of any Bing page.

The feed from Facebook is said to work pretty much in the same way as with Twitter, however this is not available yet since Facebook has not opened its feed to public and they “need to be very careful about making sure the correct data is streamed.”, said Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg.
The weird thing in the story that Sandberg doesn’t mention any money involved in this deal, which of course I don’t really believe.

Number 7 used to be my lucky number or at least a number that I feel optimistic about until Microsoft decided to call its latest Windows release: Windows 7. I got this strange feeling about Windows 7 already when I was announced back in 2007.
I thought they might add some fancy icons and give it more glance and fresh look but underneath it will be the same old crap. Some people might say, well Windows XP was a stable operating system, probably the most stable operating system Microsoft ever made. How good is the performance of an operating system when it crashes hundreds of time everyday, eats up all the processor capacity and the memory available?

Many of you have probably heard the joke about having a “virus” on the computer called “Vista” !

The engineers at Intel scratch their heads everyday to improve their processors and the manufactures dumps more and more memory into the PCs, for Microsoft to run their latest Windows. Read More »

Google released their Q3 earnings report, which seems to be very good.

Here’s briefly some of the figures from the report

EPS $5.89 (better than analysts predictions)
Net revenue of $4.4 billion
Revenue up 7% sequentially
Google Sites revenue up 8%
Paid clicks up 14% sequential
Price per click drop a modest 6%
Free cash flow was $2.5 billion

If you are interested in more details , you can check the complete report here

However, what is really interesting to show is actually the graph from SiliconAllayer Insider showing Google’s free cash flow trend.

If this trend continue they will reach Microsoft in about a year.
Microsoft has been dominating the software market for personal computers with their windows and office packages. Their dominance is not going to last long and I have several reasons to prove it. Read More »

Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook gives an interesting presentation about “High performance at massive scale – lessons learned at Facebook” held at the center of networked systems at UC San Diego.

Some impressive facts presented

Facebook have 300M active users (no big secret)
They now have 30,000 server, adding new capacity daily.
They store 80 billion images (20 billion images in 4 sizes).
They serve 600,000 photos/second.
They generate more than 25 terabytes logging data per day
They have 230 engineers on staff, which means a ratio of more than 1 million active users per engineer…

Watch the webcast below Read More »