NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Are Tablets Going to Kill the PC?

It would've been more appropriate to call this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas the Consumer Tablet Show.

In the wake of Apple’s iPad 2010 success with sales topping 10 million units, competing companies rolled out more than 80 tablet devices at the January electronics tradeshow. 

“At CES, it seemed like every major company introduced at least one new tablet to its line of products,” said Jonathan Strickland, technology expert who covered CES 2011 for HowStuffWorks.com and the TechStuff podcast.

Indeed, tablets ran the alphabetical gamut from the Acer Iconia to Vizio Tablet, with the Blackberry Playbook, Motorolla Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab and many others in between. The anticipated third-quarter release of Google’s new Android operating system, Honeycomb, also is expected to amp appeal for non-Apple devices. 

Wide Angle: E-Waste

Perhaps anticipating this tablet boom, Forrester Research readjusted its 2011 tablet sales projections from 8.4 million units to 24.1 million.

“One major assumption that changed in our model is the replacement rate, which we think will be closer to that of MP3 players or iPhones than to that of PCs,” Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps wrote in a blog post explaining the new metric. “Although they are certainly used for productivity, tablets are proving themselves to be 'lifestyle devices' at home and at work, and as such we think consumers will upgrade to newer models more rapidly than they would a more utilitarian device like a PC.”

Still undetermined: whether the rise of the tablet spells the demise of that "utilitarian" PC. Could the iPad and its host of competitors kill PC computing?

Although tablet sales projections are extremely promising, Strickland and other tech experts doubt the devices will completely eclipse PCs.

“Research firms like Gartner Inc. reported in 2010 that figures indicate tablet sales are eating into PC numbers,” Strickland said. “But from a technological perspective, I don’t think tablets can kill PCs simply because tablets aren’t designed to handle everything PCs do well. Tablets supplement PCs but don’t replace them.”

Forrester research has predicted that one in three Americans will own a tablet by 2015, translating to 44 million in annual sales. But according to Gartner data, global PC shipments reached around 350 million in 2010, which means booming tablet sales are still fairly puny in comparison.

“The PC won't go away anytime soon, but its importance will diminish, quite dramatically during this decade,” said Joe Wilcox, a tech writer for BetaNews.com. “The cloud-connected mobile device is the next major computing era.”

Coming Soon: A Foldable iPad?

Certainly, tablets beat out PCs for portability and entertainment value, but until they can match the content creation capabilities of laptops and desktops, they won’t quickly kill off PCs. And right now, the tablet maintains a middle position in the computing market, nestled between pocket-friendly smartphones and full-power PCs.

“A tablet is another extra-carry device, and other then screen size it overlaps with most functions already available on the smartphone carried on belt, in back pocket or purse,” said Wilcox, who ended up selling his iPad since he preferred his smartphone’s mobility.

So while 2011 could very well be the Year of the Tablet as many analysts have forecasted, its ringing success won’t simultaneously sound the death knell for the PC.

“No one should place any bets on the technology of the future,” Wilcox said. “We've entered one of those compacted periods of rapid change.”

Photo: Christopher Farina/Corbis

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Airbag Technology Coming to Ski Slopes

Almost anything that you can use to get around quickly comes with an airbag these days, even flying cars. So it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that airbags could be the newest accessory you see skiiers wearing the next time you hit the slopes.

Just for safety, it's not news that skiiers are wearing some form of protection as they race down the slopes. Olympic skiiers from the United States and Canada have been doing it for years. But an Italian company is trying to bring airbag technology that has until now been used on motorcycles to ski slopes, specifically the Alpines.

The company Dainese has signed a memorandum of understanding with the International Ski Federation to bring its D-Air wearable airbag technology to Alpine slopes.

According to Gizmag, Dainese is now in the early stages of testing, where the dynamics of ski racing are being monitored to tailor the existing motorcycle-specific technology to the needs of ski racers.

The company has several videos on its website to demonstrate how the airbag technology is designed to work for motorcycle riders, but none are available yet for skiers since Dainese is still so early in the testing process.

The project began last year, and is now in its first data collection phase. In the tests, skiers are fitted with a data-recording system based on an inertial platform that can record the dynamics involved in ski racing. Data collected during this phase will be used to determine the activation algorithm for the launch of the airbag, which is specially designed for Alpine Skiing.

"Protecting people in sport is a corporate mission that has seen us engaged in a ceaseless process of research and innovation since 1972, said FIS President Gian Franco Kasper in a press release. "It is a process that started with motorcycling and brought us an immense wealth of knowledge that we are proud now to apply to Alpine Skiing."

 Photo: Dainese

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Revenge of the Alter Egos

Avatars might be more than virtual representations of ourselves in online worlds, they could alter who were are in the real world. Researchers at Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab have been testing the theory on undergraduates over the years, putting them in scenarios to see how their avatars influence behaviors and perceptions.

In one test, the lab's creator, Jeremy Bailenson, aged the faces of avatars by twenty years, and then tested the students on spending habits. The “older” undergrads saved more than their “younger” counterparts. Another test involved fitness: a student wearing a virtual-reality helmet watched her avatar slim down while she ran and then alternately gain weight while the student stood still. This test encouraged most students to exercise more during the following twenty-four hours, said Bailenson in this National Science Foundation news story. "So, the power comes from seeing yourself in the third person gaining and losing weight in accordance with your own physical behavior." And the correlate is, the more the avatar looks like the student, the more effective a tool it is for influencing his or her actions. I'll blame the starry eyes and plastic-y sheen of my Mii for not getting me to pick up a real tennis racket.

Saving money and getting in shape based on a virtual alter ego are perhaps tame, but what about changing political candidate support? In 2004 Bailenson and his colleagues asked students who they would vote for in the presidential race -- after subtly melding the face of either Bush or Kerry with that of the student's avatar. They found that people tended to support the candidate whose face was combined with their own. Bailenson explains the phenomena in the same NSF story as a real world affect, "People like things that are similar to them whether it's verbally, non-verbally or in appearance. We like people that look like us.”

Here's a video giving a rundown of the work:

Photo: Stanford University, Virtual Human Interaction Lab

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The Eyeball Camera Can Also Zoom

Thanks to the growing field of stretchable electronics, gadgets that were once flat can do so much more with just a little flexibility. Even phones can stretch now. A new camera that works like an eyeball is now able to zoom, thanks to a new design that uses curved sensors.

These curved sensors in the camera work like an eye ball because the angle of the curve is similar to the retina in the eye. Because the sensors are curved, the so-called "eyeball camera" has a few advantages over a camera with a flat sensor, like a wider view, greater simplicity, and also more compact.

Unlike other eyeball cameras with curved sensors that have come before it, the new one developed at MIT can change the shape of its lens and of its sensor in synchrony, producing a 3.5x zoom.

John Rogers is the professors of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign who led the development of the zooming eyeball camera. As he told Technology Review, "The result is a complete camera system, with tunable lens and tunable detector, capable of taking pictures."

So what will we actually be able to do with a zooming eyeball camera? It could be used for phones like this one, surveillance cameras that can do more than see around corners, or even tiny video cameras embedded in football helmets.

What are some cool things you could do with a camera that works like an eyeball? Let us know in the comments section.

Photo: Image courtesy of Northwestern University

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Fire Department Uses iPhone App for Emergency Response

A new cell phone app is changing the question “is there a doctor in the house?” to “is there a CPR-certified citizen in the area?” In California's San Ramon Valley, the fire department has begun using a mobile, GPS-based notification system to get people who are trained in performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation to the site of a heart attack more quickly than emergency services could on their own.

The iPhone app, which is available for free download, directs area residents to cardiac emergencies in publicly accessible locations, as well as to the nearest Automated External Defibrillator (AED). The fire department coordinates and communicates with over 700 members of the Community Emergency Response Team using the app, and in the last six months they've begun including the public -- more than 22,000 iPhone users -- with a limited version of it. Since San Ramon Valley is only 155 square miles, that's nearly 150 people per square mile who are connected and ready to jump into action when CPR is needed.

Additionally, the app lets users check in real time on the status of each reported incident, such as when a rescuer has gotten to the scene and when professional emergency services are expected to arrive. Local personnel designed it with help from students at Northern Kentucky University's College of Informatics. If you're not in the San Ramon Valley, you can still download the fire department app from the Apple iPhone app store and catch the action from afar. And maybe this dramatic commercial from the San Ramon Valley fire department's website will inspire you to learn CPR and bring a similar app to your town.

Fire Department App - PSA from Fire Department on Vimeo.

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Synthetic Gasoline For $1.50/Gallon and No Emissions

Administrations dating back to the Nixon years have touted a "get off foreign oil" policy that, to date, has really gone no where. We're still on foreign oil. But now we might have a chance to get on foreign synthetic gasoline. A research collaboration in England has resulted in a synthetic, hydrogen-based fuel that would be more stable in price than oil and would produce no carbon emissions when burned in a combustion engine.

The fuel was developed by scientists from Cella Energy -- a spin-out company from Rutherford Appleton Laboratory -- University College London and Oxford University. It's based on a complex chemical compound called a hydride that contains hydrogen. Hydrides are used in batteries, such as nickel-metal batteries, to store energy, and have been looked at for storing hydrogen in fuel cell-powered electric cars.

Air, Sugar Power New Human Fuel Cell

The problem, according to Cella Energy, is that conventional means for containing hydrides are not great. According to the website:

"Storing hydrogen up to now has required either high-pressure storage cylinders at up to 700 times atmospheric pressure or super-cooled liquids at -253°C (-423°F). Neither is practical on a large scale as these hydrogen storage methods both require large amounts of energy to either pressurise or cool the hydrogen, and present significant safety risks."

 

New Kind of Uranium Could Power Your Car

Cella Energy has a found a low-cost way to trap the hydride compound inside a nano-porous polymer micro bead. They say:

The hydrogen storage materials are stored at ambient temperatures and pressures, this means that the Cella Energy hydrogen storage materials can be packaged in a regular shaped fuel tank. They do not require the large heavy cylinders designed to withstand high pressures normally associated with hydrogen storage.

 

The micro-beads make hydride more efficient as a fuel, they help filter out the damaging chemicals and protect the hydrides from oxygen and water, so that they don't react and can be handled in air. The final product looks like white tissue paper or a powder.

And because the micro-beads move as a fluid, they can be used in the following way:

• as a way of storing and delivering hydrogen safely for use in an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell
• as a fuel additive to reduce the carbon emissions from a hydrocarbon fuel such as gasoline, diesel, JP-8, jet-fuel or kerosene

“Early indications are that the micro-beads can be used in existing vehicles without engine modification,” said Cella Energy CEO Stephen Voller in this article on Gizmag.

This kind of development could really upend gasoline economies. I'm curious to see where this innovation goes.

Photo: Juice Images/Corbis

Robot Weight-Loss Coach Helps You Diet

Conveniently forgetting the food diary while out to dinner, crumpling up the exercise plan taped to the fridge or even hitting delete on the whole health resolution: easy. Looking into the eyes of a sweet little robot dedicated to helping you lose weight and announcing that you're throwing in the towel: not so much. At least that's the goal of the designers of Autom, a robotic weight-loss coach who checks in every day with a friendly and encouraging conversation about her owner's health goals.

Autom's designers hope that people will become attached to the robot, who looks something like Eva from Disney/Pixar's WALL-E, and that the relationship will strengthen a person's commitment to better health. A camera in the robot's head keeps her blinking eyes turned towards a human while she's talking to him (“My eye movements can be a little strange, as you've probably noticed. The engineers are still working on getting it right,” she says in the video below). Though Autom does not yet operate with speech-recognition, she speaks in a not-so-bad fem-bot voice, while her words appear on a front side touchscreen, which the human uses to respond.

This YouTube video from this year's CES, the world's largest consumer technology show, features one of the robot's creators, Cory Kidd, explain and demonstrate how she works.

Intuitive Automata, the company which plans to start selling Autom to large health employers in the United States in the next few months for about $500-600, proves the robot's abilities with a case study. According to their website:

A randomized, controlled medical study showed that individuals using Autom to help keep with their diet were much more successful than those who used more traditional methods, like a paper log or a computer program.

In part, this might be because Autom is so nice– she never scolds a human for slipping up, just offers positive encouragement and suggestions to be more successful. And if you already have the cell phone app that acts like a girlfriend, does that make a cabinet full of batteries the real secret to happiness?

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Krafty Kiosk Knows What You Want to Eat

In the world of smart storefronts and personalized advertisements, Kraft’s new face-scanning store kiosks fits right in. Its digital sign recommends dinner options– all Kraft foods, of course — based on an “analysis” of the shopper.

The kiosk uses anonymous video analytics (AVA) that determines when a face is looking at it, then categorizes the customer into gender and demographic groups in order to make suggestion. For example, a hungry twenty-year-old boy might be suggested Mac ‘N Cheese while the kiosk might tell a weary mother with kids in tow to get a family pasta dinner. This isn't as creepy as it sounds; AVA cannot recognize an individual and does not store information about individuals anywhere (hence the “anonymous”). Rather, AVA simply looks for known patterns of shape and light/dark to determine what's an eye, a nose, etc.

The kiosk is part of Intel's new Connected Store concept, which is being marketed to other retail heavyweights including Proctor and Gamble. A demo “Meal Planning Solution” kiosk made its debut at the 2011 National Retail Federation show earlier this month.

I assume this method of meal guidance must rely on stereotypes and guesstimation, but the idea is still intriguing. Apparently the average American only has ten go-to recipes in his or her repertoire. If this factoid, found here and attributed to Kraft's VP of retail experience, is true then I'd think any suggestion that would expand people's eating horizons is probably a good idea. And Kraft at least claims their dinner ideas are healthy options, even though the kiosk spits out a “sample” after customers interact which, in this video demonstration, was a mini pack of Oreos. Haven't they heard: if you give a customer a cookie... Well, maybe then he will want some zucchini fries with lemon aioli.

Photo: Corbis

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Nuclear Reactors Move to the Ocean Floor

Nuclear power may not be clean enough to be included in some studies about the feasibility of renewable energy, but some countries are so determined to get off fossil fuels in favor of nuclear power that they are studying how they can place nuclear reactors on the ocean floor.

Get More on Nuclear Energy Tech: Wide Angle

Each nuclear reactor that would go on the ocean bed is pretty small, generating as little as 50 megawatts, enough energy to power about 37,000 American homes.

The nuclear reactors are being developed by the French naval defense company DCNS, which have dubbed their innovation the Flexblue. Preliminary studies that lasted two years showed that it is possible for Flexblue to produce anywhere from 50 to 250 megawatts of nuclear energy on the ocean floor.

According to a press release on DCNS's website, the Flexblue was designed for use in any nation that borders the sea, probably because it would be hard for landlocked country to find a large enough body of water to store the under-sea nuclear reactors.

Slideshow: Top 10 Countries on Nuclear Energy

The Flexblue may look like a huge submarine in the video on DCNS's website, but compared to traditional land-based nuclear power plants that can be many square miles wide, the Flexblue is tiny. It's only 300 feet long, and less than 50 feet wide.

Each Flexblue includes a small nuclear reactor, steam turbine-alternator set, plus electrical equipment that allows the electricity to be carried to the coast. Added up, each one weighs about 12,000 tons. Unlike the wind turbines that some people don't like to see out of their windows, the Flexblue nuclear plants would be under water several miles out to sea. How far out each one can be placed is unclear, but they are designed to be under 180-300 feet of water.

So, is it a good idea to be placing nuclear plants under the ocean surface, or should we keep them on land?

 

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What Do You Want Obama To Say?

Tonight, President Obama will report on the condition of the Nation, and also outline his legislative agenda and priorities. Everyone and their uncle is wondering what the President will say in the State of the Union Address. It's not too much of a mystery. In a four-minute preview video published on the Organizing for America website, Obama said, "My principle focus ... is going to be making sure we are competitive, that we are growing and creating jobs -- not just now but well into the future."

Obama Aims Space Program at Mars

He asks the question that anyone watching the video would ask: How? "How are we going to make sure that we have to most innovative, dynamic economy in the world?"

The answer, he says, is "...we're going to have to out-innovate and out-build and out-compete and out-educate other countries."

I like the way that sounds, but what does it mean to you?

To me, out-innovate means we need to go back to our turn of the 20th-Century roots when Americans were cranking out world-changing inventions like electrification, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, computers and the Internet. Those inventions improved the lives of millions of people and brought about jobs. We need new ideas that will do the same and that takes investment.

5 New Tech Initiatives from Obama

I don't know what "out-build" means. Build what? Infrastructure? Cars? Buildings? Lots of things that were built here are now manufactured elsewhere for much less money. So what can we build here that would make us "out-compete?"

In terms of out-educating, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, seven countries consistently outperform the United States in science: Chinese Taipei, the Czech Republic, England, Hungary, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. We're also outperformed by other countries in reading and in math. Not only does having an education give a person the opportunity to earn more money (see this graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics), it also keeps him/her employed.

So what do you think? Yes, the country needs job and it needs to cut the deficit. But how does it do that and still stay competive in the world market? Post your feedback and tell us what you think.

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