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 2000 meeting of the “First Tuesday” group of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. I think the relevance has held up. Enjoy.

There are more than 2 million photos on Flickr tagged with Rome. They capture almost every nook and cranny, every column and doorway, of the old city. If you had a lot of computer power, and the right smart software, you could take these 2 million views and compile them into a single unified 3D portrait… The movie below does that same thing with huge piles of photos taken off of Flickr.

IBM makes the news with the first image of a complete molecule. It looks a lot like I thought it would…

Using an atomic-force microscope, scientists at IBM Research in Zurich have for the first time made an atomic-scale resolution image of a single molecule, the hydrocarbon pentacene. Atomic-force microscopy works by scanning a surface with a tiny cantilever whose tip comes to a sharp nanoscale point. As it scans, the cantilever bounces up and down, and data from these movements is compiled to generate a picture of that surface.

Solar satellites (a favourite of mine). Japan’s plan – a $21 billion solar-powered generator… to produce one gigawatt of energy, or enough to power 294,000 homes gains a few partners.

Mitsubishi and IHI are joining a research group containing 14 other countries to tackle the daunting task of getting Japan’s four square kilometer solar space station up and running in the next three decades. By 2015, the Japanese government hopes to test a small satellite decked out with solar panels that beams power through space and back to Earth…

What about Solar roads? Replacing the existing 25,000 square miles in the US would provide at least 3x the current electrical demand for roughly the same cost as the current road and power systems. The top layer is etched glass, the middle layer solar cells, the bottom layer power and data distribution. No discussion at all on how to store the power for night-time use. The plot would seem to call for a globe-spanning super-conducting ring…

The Solar Roadway™ is a series of structurally-engineered solar panels that are driven upon. The idea is to replace all current petroleum-based asphalt roads, parking lots, and driveways with Solar Road Panels™ that collect and store solar energy to be used by our homes and businesses… The Solar Roadway™ becomes an intelligent, self-healing, decentralized (secure) power grid.

Researchers at NASA and the Department of Energy recently tested key technologies for developing a nuclear fission reactor that could power a human outpost on the moon or Mars… To generate electricity, the researchers used a liquid metal to transfer the heat from the reactor to the Stirling engine, which uses gas pressure to convert heat into the energy needed to generate electricity. For the tests, the researchers used a non-nuclear heat source. The liquid metal was a sodium potassium mixture that has been used in the past to transfer heat from a reactor to a generator… The system performed better than expected, generating 2.3 kilowatts of power at a steady pace.

The previously top secret reusable reentry vehicle for the Soviet “Almaz” manned military space station will form the backbone of a major new U.S./Russian commercial venture to carry paying research crews on one week missions into Earth orbit by 2013… The reusable Russian hardware purchased to initiate the venture was built more than 30 years ago as part of a large Soviet space reconnaissance program… In addition to buying several Almaz reentry vehicles, the company has also bought two complete Almaz space station hulls… The several Almaz reentry vehicles were never launched or returned manned because of conflicts in the Russian space program between the military and civilian sides…

Excellent essay in Edge on the interaction between digital evolution and analog economics anticipated by Von Neumann.

What prices are going up the fastest? Health care — the cost of maintaining human beings. What prices are going down the fastest? The cost of information and machines… Financial systems exhibit the Gödelian incompleteness characteristic of all sufficiently powerful formal systems: within the given system it is possible to construct statements (or financial instruments) whose value appears to be sound, but cannot be proved within the system itself…

Using light to switch circuits comes a step closer…

Demonstrating a fundamentally new optical phenomenon, researchers at Yale University have shown the second half of an optical force that could make silicon photonics devices–such as those used in high-speed communications, network cards, even video and TV cables–faster and more capable… Scientists theorized in 2005 that tiny beams of light confined on a silicon chip could attract or repel each other when placed in close proximity, similar to the electromagnetic forces between positive and negative charges. Last year a group led by Yale University professor Hong Tang first demonstrated the “attractive” side of this optical force. Now the group has demonstrated the second side of the force, repulsion, which makes its effects reversible… The accomplishment opens the possibility of using light to manipulate light in microphotonic devices, rather than using mechanical elements like microheaters or power-hungry optical crystals… The group used two identical waveguides–the optical equivalents of electronic wires, encasing the light beams moving through them–and suspended them in a central coupling region to allow them to move freely under the influence of the optical force. Then the researchers sent in a beam of laser light, split it in half, and forced one half through a longer path than the other. When the two halves of light recombined, they were out of phase because of having traveled different path lengths. The researchers found that when the light beams were out of phase, their waveguides repelled each other, but when the light was in phase, the waveguides pulled closer together.

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 jobs displayed in front of buildings that house them… Applications like Layar… use a phone’s global positioning technology to determine a person’s location and use the phone’s compass to discern the direction the device is pointed. In this way, the phone can guess what the user is seeing. The augmented-reality application then pulls in information about points of interest in that sight line and displays it on top of the camera view… Novarama has developed a game called Invizimals that makes it appear as if the world is populated by formerly invisible creatures that can interact with one another. Sony plans to release Invizimals for the PSP handheld device this holiday season…

Tech is going feral in China. A cottage industry has sprung up to aid cheating students in exams for college places and the civil service.

The devices uncovered were reminiscent of those seen in spy movies: transmitters embedded in pencil erasers or watches, wireless microphone gadgets the size of a bean, earplugs as thin as a vein, and high-definition cameras shaped like buttons. The devices were able to bypass wireless shield and metal detectors… The spy devices are not cheap. One set of devices and answers was sold for 20,000 yuan (US$2,900), the average yearly income of a blue collar worker in a Chinese city… The industry is present in almost all major exams, from national English-level tests and college entrance tests to lawyer’s qualification tests and civil service tests… Selling spy-gear to exam cheaters could result in up to three years in jail…

The Spirit Rover lost the use of one wheel, and is stuck in sand, but a random wind gust cleared its solar panels of dust and it lives on, 2,000 (martian) days into a 90 day mission.

First consumer data-glove – the AnthroTronix AcceleGlove, for $499.

It comes with software that lets developers use Java to program it for any application they wish… When the user’s hand moves, the accelerometers can detect the three- dimensional orientation of the fingers and palm with respect to Earth’s gravity. Measured to within a few degrees, this information allows programs to distinguish even very slight changes in hand position.

The Guardian is claiming initial success in ‘crowd-sourcing’ the auditing of MP’s expense claims. Faced with over 457,000 pages of documents to sift through, they decided to enroll their public by distributing the documents to interested readers. So far 20,900 or so readers have scanned 175,000 pages looking for anomalous claims which they flag as requiring further investigation. I believe this will become commonplace in open democracies with nothing to hide.

Australian researchers have achieved storage densities of 1Tb per square centimetre in a matrix of gold particles that respond to lasers of different frequencies and polarization.

The material is being developed by researchers led by Min Gu, director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics at the Swinburne University of Technology in Victoria, Australia. The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic spun flat on a glass substrate… Using three wavelengths and two polarizations of light, the Australian researchers have written six different patterns within the same area. They’ve further increased the storage density to 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks of as many as 10 nanorod layers…

A simple guide identifying any tree from its leaves is in prototype on an iPhone. This guy was just featured by Apple in one of its TV ads, and the business has exploded.

A team of researchers financed by the National Science Foundation has created just such a device — a hand-held electronic field guide that identifies tree species based on the shape of their leaves… The field guide, now in prototype for iPhones and other portable devices, has been tested at three sites in the northeastern United States… The tree guide, and other electronic guides to nature being developed, may be used one day not only by backyard botanists, hikers and children on field trips, but also by scientists and volunteers to compile data for environmental inventories, or as part of species discovery… The program will probably show up first in educational kiosks at, for example, the Smithsonian, where people will be able to bring in a leaf to have it identified automatically…

CloneCloud, invented by Chun and his colleague Petros Maniatis, uses a smart phone’s high-speed connection to the Internet to communicate with a copy of itself that lives in a cloud-computing environment on remote servers. The prototype runs on Google’s Android mobile operating system and seamlessly offloads processor-intensive tasks to its cloud-based double… because CloneCloud creates a perfect copy of the phone’s software, it can take on literally any processor-intensive task that it calculates it can do faster than the phone itself, after weighing the amount of time and battery life required to transfer the required data…

UCLA scientists have developed a digital camera that takes 6 million shots per second.

By using a laser that emits different infrared frequencies to illuminate the subject, each pixel picks up individual signals that are amplified to be visible. According to the scientists–who detail their research in the current issue of Nature–this technology is called serial time-encoded amplified microscopy, or STEAM for short… Right now, STEAM can capture an image of only 3,000 pixels, but the team is planning to develop a multi-megapixel shooter that can record 100 million snaps a second.

Scientists have decided that the Northern Lights are “electrical tornados” striking the ionosphere.

The lights, also known as Aurora Borealis, are generated when electrical tornadoes hurtle towards Earth and come into contact with the ionosphere, one of the upper layers of the atmosphere. These tornadoes, spinning at more than a million miles an hour, are produced by vast clouds of solar particles. They gather 40,000 miles above the planet’s surface, releasing whirlwinds when they become destabilised by the strength of their own electrical charge.

A GE lab in Albany says it has achieved a readable holographic storage medium.

In G.E.’s approach, the holograms are scattered across a disc in a way that is similar to the formats used in today’s CDs, conventional DVDs and Blu-ray discs. So a player that could read microholographic storage discs could also read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. But holographic discs, with the technology G.E. has attained, could hold 500 gigabytes of data… The holographic research was originally related to G.E.’s plastics business, which it sold two years ago to the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation for $11.6 billion…

First we had flourescent fish; now the same genetic marker is in a flourescent dog.

A cloned beagle named Ruppy – short for Ruby Puppy – is the world’s first transgenic dog. She and four other beagles all produce a fluorescent protein that glows red under ultraviolet light… A team led by Byeong-Chun Lee of Seoul National University in South Korea created the dogs by cloning fibroblast cells that express a red fluorescent gene produced by sea anemones… This new proof-of-principle experiment should open the door for transgenic dog models of human disease… Starting with 344 embryos implanted into 20 dogs, Lee’s team ended up with seven pregnancies. Five dogs are alive, healthy and starting to spawn their own fluorescent puppies…

Prox Dynamics (http://www.proxdynamics.com) of Asker, Norway, has developed what it says may be one of the world’s smallest unmanned helicopters… Although even smaller than a typical cheapo toy-copter, the Hornet is fully controllable, with the ability sprint from a dead hover to almost 20 mph… The sound from the helicopter was inaudible at three yards over ambient noise … Delivery to select customers is expected later this year.

Another battery-powered sports car in the USA, this one from Fisker Automotive.

The Karma, a luxury four-passenger sedan, can be recharged by plugging it in; it can then be driven on power from a battery alone for 50 miles. After that, an onboard gasoline generator kicks on to recharge the battery, extending the range by 250 miles between fill-ups… The car will run on a lithium manganese oxide battery made by Advanced Lithium Power, based in Vancouver… Two 150-kilowatt electric motors together deliver 403 horsepower–enough to accelerate to 60 miles per hour in 5.8 seconds… the car carries a hefty price tag of $87,000.

Asians are getting into the race for the Google Lunar X prize… many teams are drawing heavily on Asian engineering and manufacturing but several new teams are based there.

A US$20 million first prize goes to the team which is the first to build, launch and land a privately-funded lunar rover on the moon by the end of 2012. In this case, “privately funded” means that at least 90% of a team’s support or funding must come from the private sector… After making a successful soft landing, the lunar rover needs to go at least 500 meters across the lunar surface while simultaneously transmitting video, images and data back to Earth in order to win… There are only 3 GLXP teams now based in Asia, including two in Malaysia – Independence-X Aerospace (IDXA) which is based in Shah Alam and Kuala Lumpur, and Team Advaeros in Perak…

I’m not sure how I missed this, but better late than never. Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

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 music industry… Top100.cn will sell advertising on its own site to pay for more than 1.1 million songs it plans to offer to Chinese consumers. And the struggling music industry gets a new revenue source, sharing income with Google… Google also said its new service would offer high-quality music downloads and protect consumers from viruses and poor-quality recordings, which the company says are a problem with illegal sites.

Skype is explicitly going after cellular revenues. A review says “awesome”.

As with Skype on the computer, users of Skype on mobile phones can make calls and send instant messages to other Skype users free, and they pay lower rates than the phone companies would charge when they use Skype to call landlines or other mobile phones… Apple will limit Skype’s use on the iPhone somewhat, allowing Skype calls to be made only when the device is connected to local Wi-Fi networks, and not allowing Skype calls over the data networks of its carrier partners like AT&T.

But Google is going after Skype with its own service; collateral damage being the death of telco’s.

Google Voice allows users to route all their calls through a single number that can ring their home, work and mobile phones simultaneously. It also gives users a single and easy-to-manage voice mail system for multiple phone lines. And it lets users make calls, routed via the Internet, free in the United States and for a small fee internationally. Skype… has 400 million registered users and is adding 350,000 users a day…

The long tail of magazines. HP has a new service MagCloud. NYT calls it “the YouTube of magazines” but I think it’s more like the iTunes store. Publishers provide hi-res pdf’s of their magazines and the site handles previews and orders and then farms out printing to a network of presses around the world – billing the publisher only 20c per page when magazines are actually printed and shipped. Publishers charge what they like and net the difference.

OnLive is extending the SAAS (software as a service) model to games.

OnLive, which was started by WebTV founder Steve Perlman and former Eidos CEO Mike McGarvey… will digitally distribute first-run, AAA games from publishers like Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Atari, and others, all at the same time as those titles are released into retail channels… The system is designed to allow players to stream on-demand games at the highest quality onto any Intel-based Mac or PC running XP or Vista, regardless of how powerful the computer… The system will also stream games directly to a TV via a small plug-in device, and players can use a custom wireless controller as well as VoIP headsets… instead of requiring users to download the games, OnLive will host them all and stream them from a series of the highest-end servers… players won’t have to upgrade anything to keep on playing games on the system years into the future. Instead, the upgrades will happen on the back-end… OnLive has set an ambitious goal: dethroning the console makers as the game industry’s kings…

I’m really excited about e-books, particularly those at least A5 in size with wifi, an embedded browser, and SD card storage. Not so worried about color vs grayscale.

Electronics manufacturer Fujitsu says it is shipping an LCD-based electronic reader called FLEPia in Japan next month that displays vivid color, a first in the industry. It hopes the technology can compete directly with E Ink, the manufacturer of the black-and-white e-paper displays used in the Kindle and eReader… The new Fujitsu e-reader takes about a second to fully refresh its screen, which is about five inches by six and a half inches in size…

Not coincidentally, this is the best thing I’ve ever read on the death of newspapers, and publishing generally.

If you want to know why newspapers are in such trouble, the most salient fact is this: Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run. This bit of economics, normal since Gutenberg, limits competition while creating positive returns to scale for the press owner, a happy pair of economic effects that feed on each other… When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works…’ No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.

New iPod voice overlay is very, very clever (I thought of proposing it several years back).

If you hold down the center clicker for one second, you hear, in your earbuds, a crystal-clear male voice identifying the song and the performer; it knows 14 languages, so it can handle Italian aria names, for example. If you hold down the clicker longer, until you hear a beep, the voice starts rattling off the names of your playlists (“Jogging Tunes…Purchased…Makeout Music.”) You click the clicker when he gets to the one you want, or use the + and – buttons to go forward or back through them. You can also flip the power switch off and on again to hear him tell you how full your battery is—for example, “Battery 50 percent.” [BUT] the new Shuffle locks you into using Apple’s earbuds. No other headphones have the clicker on the cord, and so can’t make the music play music at all.

This is somewhat amazing – RailCorp in Sydney is suing a developer who is making their weekday schedule available via an iPhone app. Seems the schedules are copyright the crown, and RailCorp is planning to make a plan themselves about an eventual mobile strategy… tax dollars at work.

Chip sales are plummeting at a rate reminiscent of auto sales… reminding me that the chips in a car are worth more than the steel.

In January alone, chip sales plummeted by almost a third from the previous year, to $15.3 billion…

Gartner data has CS lowering PC forecasts.

We are lowering the forecast from a 4.5% unit decline in 2009 to a 15.3% decline… desktop units decline by 26.6% in 2009, with notebooks showing a fairly resilient 3.7% decline… traditional notebooks, excluding netbooks, unit decline is 14.1%… desktop ASPs decline by 8.5% and notebook ASPs decline by 17.3%… annual unit declines go from 1.4% in 4Q08 to 17.3% in 1Q09… annual unit declines reach a bottom of 19.1% in the June quarter.

You’ve got to be a special kind of stupid to fire 1,400 employees and then realise that you’ve paid them too much severance and THEN ask for the money back. Oh, and then back down, publicly apologize and let them keep it. The total amount? About $125,000. With PR like this…

Microsoft says it made an accounting error when it laid off some employees last month and now feels the best way to correct the error is with what will likely add up to a public relations blunder… “An inadvertent administrative error occurred that resulted in an overpayment in severance pay by Microsoft,” the letter states. “We ask that you repay the overpayment and sincerely apologize for any inconvenience to you.”

In a statement, Microsoft said that it had mishandled the affair and would no longer be chasing repayment.

Space Energy, Inc. has assembled an impressive team of scientists, engineers and business people, putting together what Sage calls “a rock-solid commercial platform” for their company… “This is an inevitable technology; it’s going to happen. If we can put solar panels in space where the sun shines 24 hours a day, if we have a safe way of transmitting the energy to Earth and broadcasting it anywhere, that is a serious game changer.” If everything falls into place for this company, they could be producing commercially available SBSP within a decade.

Terrafugia, the car/plane hybrid, made its first flights for the FAA, (gallery)

The aircraft is designed to be driven on public roads: its wings fold up in 30 seconds, and it operates in front-wheel drive and uses 27 miles per gallon. Transition also fits in a standard garage. In the air, it can reach speeds of 115 miles per hour on flights of 450 miles or less at 30 miles per gallon… it will not hit the market for at least two years, and even then it’ll cost around $194,000.

I’ve been agnostic on cold fusion, with not enough data either way. Now U.S. Navy researches claim to have experimentally verified that fusion at room temperature exists, though still an incredibly weak effect.

U.S. Navy researchers claimed to have experimentally confirmed cold fusion in a presentation at the American Chemical Society’s annual meeting… Cold fusion was first reported in 1989 by researchers Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, then with the University of Utah, prompting a global effort to develop the technology… Other scientists were unable to duplicate the 1989 results, thereby discrediting the work… Now, the Naval researchers claim that the problem was instrumentation, which was not up to the task of detecting such small numbers of neutrons… Antonella De Ninno, a scientist with New Technologies Energy and Environment (Rome)… reported both excess heat and helium gas… Tadahiko Mizuno of Japan’s Hokkaido University also reported excess heat generation and gamma-ray emissions…

All three research groups are currently exploring both experimental and theoretical studies in hopes of better understanding the cold fusion process well enough to commercialize it.

This is a great idea for funding fun to fly robots. WiFly?

Researchers at Germany’s Ilmenau University of Technology are developing flying quadcopter robots that can be used to form a self-assembling ad-hoc wireless network in the event of disaster. Built with off-the-shelf parts (including VIA’s Pico-ITX hardware and a GPS unit) the robots are designed to provide both mobile phone and WiFi access — and they can do it far more quickly than a technician on the ground might be able to. The device comes in a kit for €300 (about $380), which includes all but the battery…

“Alpha” from Wolfram Research computes answers to natural language questions.

In a nutshell, Wolfram and his team have built what he calls a “computational knowledge engine” for the Web… Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions — like questions that have factual answers such as “What country is Timbuktu in?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” or “What is the average rainfall in Seattle?” … The vision seems to be to create a system which can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media)… The system is beautiful, and the user interface is already quite simple and clean. In addition, answers include computationally generated diagrams and graphs — not just text.

Japan researchers have put a female face on a dynamically stabilised robot, and are saying it will appear as a fashion model later in the month.

The fashion-bot is 158 centimetres (five foot two inches) tall, the average height of Japanese women aged 19 to 29, but weighs in at a waif-like 43 kilograms (95 pounds) — including batteries… The institute said the robot “has been developed mainly for use in the entertainment industry” but is not for sale at the moment… Like her real-life counterparts, robot model HRP-5C commands a hefty price — the institute said developing her cost more than 200 million yen (two million dollars).

Researchers at the universities of Miami, Tokyo, and Tohoku have discovered a completely new way of storing energy using a magnetic field.

Charged by the application of a very strong magnetic field, the Magnetic Tunnel Junction (MTJ) contains a set of nano-magnets–zones some 5 nanometers across in a zinc-gallium-arsenic-magnesium matrix–which absorb energy and then release it over time… “the device produced a voltage over a hundred times too big and for tens of minutes, rather than for milliseconds as we had expected,” said one of the researchers… the current device is a few hundred micrometers across… the current delivered by the MTJ is spin-polarized; the electrons are predominately spinning in one direction… That’s hot news for spintronics, which, together with graphene, has the most exciting potential for fundamentally new computational devices. Spin logic could work much faster at much lower power…

TED video from Juan Enriquez – How mindboggling science will outlast the crisis. The non-financial crisis part starts about half-way.

Venture backed companies are 0.02% of GDP investment creating about 17.8% of output… three big trends – the ability to engineer microbes (beer with resveratrol, bacteria to aid kidneys), the ability to engineer tissues (human molars, a trachea, an ear, a bladder, a heart) and the ability to engineer robots… prosthetics are the wedge into bionics… rate of improvement is orders of magnitude beyond biologic. Homo Evolutis: a self-evolving species

A key development in naval firepower gave England the sea in Elizabeth’s time

The new research follows the discovery of the first wreck of an Elizabethan fighting ship… Elizabeth’s navy created the first ever set of uniform cannon, capable of firing the same size shot in a deadly barrage…. Elizabeth’s “supergun”, although relatively small, could hit a target a mile away. At a ship-to-ship fighting distance of about 100 yards, the ball would have sufficient punch to penetrate the oak planks of a galleon, travelling across the deck and out the other side… the English navy and its gun founders were almost 50 years ahead of their time technologically… This made Elizabeth I the mother of British naval dominance lasting three centuries.

Scientists at UC Berkeley and University of Massachusetts Amherst have a new data storage technique that lets microscopic nanoscale elements precisely assemble themselves over large surfaces.

Russell and Xu conceived of the elegantly simple solution of layering the film of block copolymers onto the surface of a commercially available sapphire crystal… the molecules in the thin film of block copolymers – two or more chemically dissimilar polymer chains linked together – self-assemble into an extremely precise, equidistant pattern when spread out on a surface… the density is over 15 times higher than anything achieved before… 10 terabits per square inch… Today’s commercial hard disks carry 200 gigabits (0.2 terabits) per square inch.

The trouble is intelligent life is scattered not just across space, but across time. Explains why there is precious little here on earth in the 21st century.

The discovery of more than 330 planets outside our solar system in recent years has helped refine the number of life forms that are likely to exist. The current research estimates that there are at least 361 intelligent civilisations in our Galaxy and possibly as many as 38,000.

ASUS was showing Eee desktop all-in-one slabs (iMac clones) with HDMI and Blu-ray, an EeePC built into a wireless keyboard, and a wireless LCD screen prototype, but the star to my mind is the dual panel touchscreen laptop. This concept was mooted about a year ago by the OLPC group as their second generation design and follows on from the Nintendo DS. One of the screens will act as a full-size keyboard when need be.

A new trend is to bolt a netbox with an Atom chip and HDMI output to the back of an LCD screen to enable browsing etc. by remote control.

Nice PC case from BMW design… lots of pocket projectors… lots of NAS devices stacking drives… the usual robots.

Fraunhofer was showing 3D ping pong hooking the motion detection from last year up to a glasses-free 3D flat screen.

SD cards up to 32Gb, Compact Flash 100Gb, ExpressCard 64Gb. 2.5″ 512Gb SSD from A-Data. 2Tb Western Digital 3.5″ drive. ASUS is showing a laptop with a 1Tb SSD, perhaps the OCZ Z-Drive.

The “BeBook” open format e-reader looks quite good at US$280. Also the Onyx Boox and iRiver Libre. All are going after the Kindle. All have E-Ink screens.

Along with the PC in a keyboard, here is another example of the interface subsuming the computer: a racing steering wheel with a dock for the iPod Touch. Tilting the wheel controls the game on the Touch.

Navigators (eg Garmin nuvi 1200, 1300) are finally catering to mass transit using pedestrians with public transit maps, bus time tables, pedestrian routes.

MSI is showing an SSD module that plugs onto their Windows motherboard giving a desktop an instant-on option for linux providing IM, Skype and browsing without having to boot up Windows.

IBM is showing a USB stick that connects directly over SSL to a bank for transactions.

Developed in Zurich by IBM, this guy opens an SSL connection with the bank’s servers, keeping the data safely on its side of things (this guy has no storage of its own) and displaying the transaction on the hardware itself. Even if your connection is breached by a “man-in-the-middle” attack, the hacker’s funny business will be exposed on the device’s display, which comes equipped with a big red “panic” button — just in case.

HTC and Mio were showing very nice windows phones.

An American’s two greatest enemies are his house and his car.

If you want to read more of Orlov, who likens the current situation in the USA to the collapse of the Soviet Union which he lived through and keenly observed, his salon is ‘Club Orlov‘ and one of the copies of his book “Thriving in the Age of Collapse” is on Google books. Perhaps the New Alchemy Institute was just 35 years ahead of its time.

Fast food or fast cars? 33% of the 2009/2010 US corn crop will go to make ethanol.

Medical News Today reported that using a carbon isotope to identify the type of feed eaten by the animals whose meat goes into hamburgers, and the oil used to cook fries, researchers were able to establish that nearly all fast food consumed in the US relies on corn agriculture. Researchers bought over 480 servings of hamburgers, chicken sandwiches and fries from some of the biggest chains in the US: McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s throughout the US. Out of the 480 samples, only 12 servings of beef did not show traces of the carbon isotope signature for corn.

Mini USA is trialling an all-electric Mini, though only 500 will be made and you lose the back seat to batteries. 200hp(!), 156 mile range, 3 hour charge. The specs (pdf). Bumper sticker I’m waiting to see:

My other car is a WrightSpeed Ariel.

Oil demand is expected to contract “sharply” this year – by all of 1/2 of 1% – according to a Reuters poll of 10 analysts, banks and industry groups. I’m not sure I take much comfort from a drop this size.

The largest drop in demand will come from developed economies, where recessions are predicted to be most severe. OECD demand is forecast to fall by more than 1.1 million bpd to 46.54 million bpd in 2009, the Reuters poll showed. [ie. 2.4%].

Carbon prices are falling… illustrating the efficient functioning of markets.

An EU permit to emit one tonne of CO2 cost €10.15 (£8.86) at the end of last week, down from €28.50 in mid-2008… The most bearish experts are now predicting that the price could fallas low as €9 as global recession, reduced manufacturing output, and the concomitant reduction in consumption of fossil fuels, feeds through to reduce the need for carbon emissions permits.

Carbon tax is the thinking man’s market solution…

Many economists argue that painful though it might be to consumers, the best way to address climate change is to put a “price” on carbon dioxide and other carbon-based emissions, thereby making fossil fuels more expensive and alternative energy sources more competitive… Over the last several years, Gilbert Metcalf, an economist at Tufts University, has calculated the costs and consequences of such a policy… From both an efficiency and an administrative perspective, a carbon tax is a better approach. I think there is a clear consensus on that among economists… The political momentum clearly favors cap-and-trade… A $20 tax per ton of carbon dioxide adds about 15 percent to the cost of electricity. For coal-fired electricity it will be a lot more. It will more than double the price of coal–about a 40 percent increase in the price of coal-generated electricity.

Airlines are researching the use of bio-fuels for running jet engines – a vital development for their long-term business plans.

On December 30th Air New Zealand will test-fly a Boeing 747-400, one of whose four engines will be powered by a blend of jatropha oil and jetfuel… Virgin Atlantic flew a Boeing 747-400 in February with one engine running on a 20% mix of biofuel… On January 7th Continental Airlines plans to fly a Boeing 737-800 with one engine powered, in part, by a biofuel derived from a blend of algae and jatropha oils.

Governments are directing fiscal stimulus programmes at renewables.

The French government created a new feed-in electricity tariff that will subsidize the use of solar power. Under the plan, which mirrors similar incentives already available in Spain and Germany, electricity producers that invest in solar will be paid an above-market rate for the power they generate. By 2020, France hopes to increase the supply of domestic solar energy 400-fold and produce 23 percent of its entire electric output from renewables, compared with the current 10.4 percent figure… The European Union is also getting into the act. The European Commission announced a €200 billion ($252 billion) economy recovery plan that includes targeted investments in carbon reduction as a linchpin to reignite Europe’s struggling economy… Denmark’s Vestas, for example, manufactures wind turbines in the US and could be well placed to profit from government investment in clean technology. Iberian renewable energy producers Iberdrola Renovables (EBER.F) and EDP Renovaveis (EDPR.LS)—already America’s second- and third-largest wind energy producers, respectively — similarly stand to benefit from federal assistance for renewables.

A Cape Cod windfarm has passed environmental review, over the Kennedy family’s objections.

The wind farm would cover 24 square miles — roughly the size of Manhattan — five miles off Cape Cod. From the shore, the 130 turbines, each 440 feet tall, will be visible half an inch above the horizon on clear days… The project would cost more than $1 billion… the project would ultimately supply 75 percent of the electricity for Cape Cod, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard…

Wind is becoming significant despite it’s inherent variability.

Although wind generates only about 1% of all electricity globally, it provides a respectable portion in several European countries: 20% in Denmark, 10% in Spain and about 7% in Germany. Capacity in America jumped by 45% last year to reach nearly 17 gigawatts (GW). China has nearly doubled its capacity every year since 2004. Globally, wind power installations are expected to triple from 94GW at the end of 2007 to nearly 290GW in 2012, according to BTM Consult, a Danish market-research firm.

Despite the NIMBY attitude, the USA is becoming a serious wind player.

Last year America ramped up wind-power capacity to 25 gigawatts (GW), overtaking the previous leader, Germany, according to new data from the Global Wind Energy Council. America added 8.4GW of installed power in 2008, more than any other country. China is also investing heavily in wind power, nearly doubling its capacity for the fourth year running. Global capacity grew by 29% last year, the highest annual increase for six years.

Bad news on climate. Ice is melting faster than the worst-case IPCC scenarios.

More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data… The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays… and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating… adding about half a millimeter of sea level rise a year… Between Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska, melting land ice has raised global sea levels about one-fifth of an inch in the past five years… The recent [Arctic] sea-ice retreat is larger than in any of the (19) IPCC [climate] models…

Scientists are getting more pessimistic about halting global warming as trends accelerate.

Garnaut, a professorial fellow in economics at Melbourne University, said: “Achieving the objective of 450ppm would require tighter constraints on emissions than now seem likely in the period to 2020…” Many small island states are predicted to be swamped by rising seas with global warming triggered by carbon levels as low as 400ppm.

and more (from the same conference)

Climate-change researchers have found that air temperatures in the [arctic] region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is accumulating heat in the ocean. The phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, was not expected to be seen for at least another 10 or 15 years… In the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska, for instance, near-surface air temperatures were more than 7C higher than normal for this time of year…

Guardian is saying that evidence is sufficient for liability to be assessed in global warming suits. This will at least get the insurance companies’ attention.

People affected by worsening storms, heatwaves and floods could soon be able to sue the oil and power companies they blame for global warming… Peter Roderick, director of the Climate Justice programme, said the most likely route for seeking damages would be tort cases, which deal with civil wrongs… However, Stephen Tromans, an environmental law barrister, said establishing causation would be one of the main difficulties… There may also be grounds for a case on the basis that firms have tried to misinform the public – as in US cases against tobacco firms – about the effects of their business.

Let us not begin the water wars.

China’s diversion of the waters of a river originating in Tibet to its water-scarce areas could leave India’s northeast parched… This water diversion scheme will draw from the waters of the Yalong, Dadu and Jinsha rivers, which rise in the Tibetan plateau, and channel them to the Yellow River. The aim of the project is to provide water for human use, including farming and industry in China’s water-scarce areas in the north and northwest… Once completed, the water diversion scheme is expected to transfer over 40 billion cubic meters of water annually to China’s water scarce areas… China’s reluctance to pay heed to concerns of lower riparian countries is evident from the fact that it is unwilling to share even hydrological data on flood waters with India; this despite the fact that it is obliged under an agreement with India to do so…

The great Pacific plastic soup.

Discovered in 1997 by American sailor Charles Moore, what is also called the great Pacific garbage patch is now alarming some with its ever-growing size and possible impact on human health. The “patch” is in fact two massive, linked areas of circulating rubbish… Although the boundaries change, it stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the coast of California, across the northern Pacific to near the coast of Japan… Moore, an oceanographer who has made the study of the patch his full-time occupation, believes there is about 100 million tonnes of plastic circulating in the northern Pacific – or about 2.5 per cent of all plastic items made since 1950…

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 since the second quarter of 2002 and the sharpest drop of the decade… x86 servers may prove to be the most cyclical segment in hardware… Dell units fell 7.1% compared to an x86 server market decline of 5.9%… IBM server units fell 21.4% in the quarter, reflecting weakness reported in fourth quarter results. x86 units fell 22.5%, dragging down already weak hardware results. For Sun, overall units declined 6.1%, in-line with the market, while x86 units dropped a mere 0.5%.

NPD PC data is also very weak (via credit-suisse):

Total PC revenues declined -5.9%, year-over-year, while units increased 8.7% year-over-year. Apple Mac revenue and units increased 0.9% and 4.0% year-over-year, respectively in the December month. Total printer hardware revenues declined -21.4%, year-over-year, on unit declines of -16.6% year-over-year. Total Mp3 player revenues declined -18.9% year-over-year, on unit declines of -8.5% year-over-year in the month of December. Apple iPod units declined -3.5%, year-over-year in the month of December.

Windows 7 is being billed by MIT’s Technology Review as “Vista that Works“. Catchy slogan, and it builds on the huge PR spend on Vista name recognition.

Benjamin Bederson, an associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland, says that the user-interface adjustments in Windows 7 are good but subtle… The much more important thing, he says, is that the operating system is significantly faster than Vista. That means that many people with slower computers, who were unwilling to switch to Vista, will be more likely to upgrade to Windows 7. “It’s Vista that works,” Bederson says. “They fixed the problems, and they polished it up. Good for them.”

Oh, why not pick on the softies. In another “dog barks” type story another worm is breaking records, courtesy of Redmond.

In recent weeks a worm, a malicious software program, has swept through corporate, educational and public computer networks around the world. Known as Conficker or Downadup, it is spread by a recently discovered Microsoft Windows vulnerability, by guessing network passwords and by hand-carried consumer gadgets like USB keys. Experts say it is the worst infection since the Slammer worm exploded through the Internet in January 2003, and it may have infected as many as nine million personal computers around the world… Microsoft rushed an emergency patch to defend the Windows operating systems against this vulnerability in October, yet the worm has continued to spread even as the level of warnings has grown in recent weeks… The program uses an elaborate shell-game-style technique to permit someone to command it remotely. Each day it generates a new list of 250 domain names. Instructions from any one of these domain names would be obeyed. To control the botnet, an attacker would need only to register a single domain to send instructions to the botnet globally…

While we’re on security, a New Zealand man who bought a used MP3 player from an Oklahoma thrift store found names, cell phone numbers, and Social Security numbers of American soldiers on the device, according to news site TVNZ.

Chris Ogle, who paid $18 for the device, also found lists of soldiers based in Afghanistan, personnel who fought in Iraq, and equipment deployments, as well as private information about soldiers, including which ones are pregnant.

Pogue summarises the state of display tech. Contenders are OLED – still 3 years from significant share because of price, LCD – still on a steep price/performance ascent, laser-rear-projection – will dominate ‘thick-set’ market, and private E-Ink – owns the hand held reader market. Plasma not mentioned, ouch! Pocket projectors proliferating…

Lots of hype at CES 2009 about 3D TV. I saw these sets last year at CeBIT, and watched “Journey to the Centre of the Earth” on the digital theatre version a month ago. What impressed was the novelty value. I think the hardware and content is still some way off from providing a superior entertainment experience.

The LCD TV market is only expected to grow about 17 percent in terms of units shipped in 2009… down from growth of about 29 percent in 2008. Plasma TV… expected to grow by about 5 percent in 2009 compared with a 24 percent rise in 2008… At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, four of the top selling TV manufacturers–Samsung Electronics, Sony, LG Electronics and Panasonic–showed off their latest versions of 3D TVs… Samsung and Mitsubishi currently sell their 3D-ready TVs for between $1,000 and $2,800, depending on functionality…

The mobile/Skype wall is breaking down. Jajah, Fring and Truphone all provide applications for the iPhone Touch which allow VOIP calling and SMS over the wifi connection.

Apple has decided to chase iPhone jailbreakers on digital copyright grounds.

Apple recently told the U.S. Copyright Office that it believes iPhone jailbreaking is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act… The EFF is trying to get the Copyright Office to grant a DMCA exemption on behalf of iPhone owners who have chosen to jailbreak their iPhones, or bypass the restriction Apple places on standard iPhones that only allows the installation of applications from the Apple store… The EFF’s argument is that jailbreaking your iPhone is protected under fair-use doctrines…

Google is giving up on the newspaper advertising industry.

Google said it would halt its Print Ads program because the program to help newspapers make more money in online advertising sales was not working… Newspapers tend to make about 90 percent of their revenue, in varying degrees, from print ads, with Web sales making up the difference… The Print Ads program included 807 papers, including The New York Times, News Corp’s New York Post, the New York Times-owned Boston Globe, Tribune Co’s Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Hearst Corp’s San Francisco Chronicle, and MediaNews Group’s San Jose Mercury News…

A contrary view to online ad spend says volume will drop 40% and price never recover…