Items tagged for circulation in the tech digest.
It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted here, as I’ve been sacrificing public output in favour of off-line advice to TechInvest and organising the coming year in India and China.
In the meantime, I’ve scanned and uploaded a low-res video of a speech I gave on being a Serial Entrepreneur in Sydney at the June [...]
CT2 points out that in the near future someone with a gazillion cycles of computing power is going to use all the tourist photos on Flickr to synthesize a 3D model of every large photogenic city.
There are more than 2 million photos on Flickr tagged with Rome. They capture almost every nook and [...]
Augmented reality is getting more attention, and the Google phones seem to be the platform of choice. Christchurch’s HITLab has done a lot of work like this.
People in Amsterdam who download a free application called Layar on their cellphones can look through the camera and see information about nearby restaurants, A.T.M.’s, and available [...]
Very clever work by Byung-Gon Chun, a research scientist at Intel Research Berkeley, which shares processing between your Android mobile and a cloned version in the cloud. This will happen and become the norm.
CloneCloud, invented by Chun and his colleague Petros Maniatis, uses a smart phone’s high-speed connection to the Internet to communicate [...]
I’m not sure how I missed this, but better late than never. Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
Google is experimenting with ad-supported music in China, in a bid to catch up with local market leader Baidu.
The Google service allows Chinese consumers to search for music, link to the Web site of a Beijing company called Top100.cn and download licensed music from that Chinese site, which has signed contracts with the [...]
Years ago I read an engineering white paper (recent version, see Appendix 2) on the feasibility of collecting solar energy in space and beaming it via microwaves to collectors where it was needed. The numbers worked out to a clean, perpetual power source for 9bn people at American per capita consumption levels for for $2 [...]
I didn’t have the time to get over to CeBIT in Hannover this year, but it was well covered by a range of online sources. The show’s daily newspapers weren’t online yet, but coverage from Engadget, Gizmodo and CNET turned up the following interesting items:
ASUS was showing Eee desktop all-in-one slabs (iMac clones) with HDMI [...]
I used to think that peak-oil would pre-empt the development of global warming, but peak credit now seems to have pre-empted peak oil. I love this quote from the ‘collapsnik’ Dmitri Orlov.
An American’s two greatest enemies are his house and his car.
If you want to read more of Orlov, who likens the current [...]
Here’s a price (other than gold) that is actually going up. Citibank:
According to DRAMeXchange, 16Gb MLC NAND spot and contract prices are up 60% and 50% respectively from the Dec 08 bottom.
Gartner server data is not so positive (via Credit Suisse):
Annual server shipments declined 6.1% year over year… the first decline [...]