Bluetooth watch

Heard about this watch which has Bluetooth in it. Sometime in 2007, Sony Ericsson launched its new Bluetooth watch, called MW-150. It has now 3 versions of the same; the classic as well as the business and music versions.

Some benefits of the watch:

• It connects to your phone via Bluetooth and displays caller information. You can use it to answer or reject calls probably while you are driving
• You can use your Bluetooth Watch as a music remote control when your phone is on the other side of the room or if you’re using it to listen via your home speakers. View tracks, adjust the volume, change the tune or switch your music off, all from your watch and without getting out of your chair
• The watch gives a vibrating signal when your phone goes out of range

Read more here.

Large Hadron Collider

I learnt about CERN the first time while reading Angels and Daemons, where in Antimatter generated would be used against the vatican (to which CERN issued this interesting read)

The other reference to CERN was when the making of Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was in the news. As what the site describes itself

This site introduces the most exciting scientific adventure of the next decade and is for anyone interested in how we might answer some of the fundamental questions we have about the Universe we live in.

Some questions that the LHC intends to answer are

• How did our universe come to be the way it is?
• What kind of Universe do we live in?
• What happened in the Big Bang?
• Where is the antimatter?
• Why do particles have mass?
• What is our Universe made of?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionise our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.

Two beams of subatomic particles called ‘hadrons’ – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.

With a budget of 9 billion US dollars (approx. €6300M or £5600M as of Jan 2010), the LHC is the most expensive scientific experiment in human history. The total cost of the project is expected to be of the order of 4.6 billion Swiss francs (approx. $4.4 bn, €3.1 bn, or £2.8 bn as of Jan 2010) for the accelerator and 1.16 billion francs (approx. $1.1 bn, €0.8 bn, or £0.7 bn as of Jan 2010) for the CERN contribution to the experiments.

Jive

TVS launched Jive, the first clutch-less bike in India. The technology is touted to reduce stress on the left hand as there is no need to operate a clutch anymore.

The engine is mated to TVS Motor Company’s innovative T-Matic technology which includes the four gear rotary gearbox that allows the rider to shift gears like a conventional bike except without the need to press a clutch. Further to this, the rider can start the bike in any gear and even while braking, the bike will come to a halt in any gear without jerks or stalling the engine. To make matters even easier, TVS has put an electric start on the bike as standard fitment.

It is priced at Rs. 42,235/- ex-showroom, Delhi. For more details, read this.

ATM Skimming Machines

The picture below got me to think about researching on this topic

Clearly, this kind of a card data theft can be extremely dangerous. For all you know, you might have already been a prey.

Here’s a laundry list of ways the ATM machine could be skimmed.

This is an amazing presentation on ATM Skimming. Need to be careful the next time you are swiping your card in the ATM machine.

ATM Skimmers are available for sale here

iPad

The highly anticipated iPad tablet was launched recently and priced suprisingly low at $499 for 16GB of storage.

The iPad can run movies, games and a gamut of applications. And taking on e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle, Apple announced a digital bookstore called iBooks that will let users buy from publishers including Pearson Plc’s Penguin, News Corp’s HarperCollins, and Hachette Book Group.

Shares of Apple rose to as high as $210.58 after the pricing news, up 5.5 percent from their session low. The stock closed up 0.94 percent at $207.88 on Nasdaq, within reach of its all-time high of $215.59 logged on Jan 5.

Apple announced a data plan with AT&T Inc, which appeared to have beaten out Verizon Wireless for the deal.

The iPad is Apple’s biggest product launch since the iPhone three years ago, and arguably rivals the smartphone as the most anticipated in the company’s history.

Apple hopes to sell consumers on the value of tablets after other technology companies, including Microsoft Corp and Toshiba Corp, have failed in recent years.  As iPod sales wane, Apple is looking for another growth engine.

Jobs said there was a need for a new type of device that would sit between a smartphone and laptop computer, and that can perform tasks like browse the Web and play games. The iPad has a near life-sized touch keyboard and supports Web browsing. It comes with a built-in calendar and address book.

Click here and here to read more.

Accelerometer

Have (rather had, before it got stolen) an ipod touch on which I played super games. Thanks to the accelerometer.

I could move the pac-man just by tilting the iPod. I could play bowling by holding the iPod in one hand and then doing the bowling action. All this, thanks to an accelerometer inside. What is an accelerometer?

An accelerometer is a device that measures proper acceleration (speed and direction, remember!!!); the acceleration it experiences relative to freefall.

An accelerometer measures proper acceleration which is the acceleration it experiences relative to freefall, and is the acceleration that is felt by people and objects. Put another way, at any point in spacetime the equivalence principle guarantees the existence of a local inertial frame, and an accelerometer measures the acceleration relative to that frame.

Conceptually, an accelerometer behaves as a damped mass on a spring. When the accelerometer experiences an acceleration, the mass is displaced to the point that the spring is able to accelerate the mass at the same rate as the casing. The displacement is then measured to give the acceleration.

Smart Band Aid

According to this article, clinical trials have begun of a smart plaster – a sensor-studded band aid that wirelessly monitors vital signs. Once stuck to a patient’s chest, the band aid monitors heart rate, blood pressure and other health indicators. Its creators hope it will eventually take over from the wired devices that limit a patient’s movement. As well as monitoring standard vital signs, the gadget can be tuned to capture far more subtle indicators of a patient’s condition.

Initial trials will test the integrity of the data being gathered and transmitted by the plaster to ensure it gives accurate readings of a patient’s condition. The basic device monitors temperature, heart rate and respiration. The second series of trials will see it placed on patients who are recovering from minor illnesses and assess how it fares when the patient has a shower or an x-ray.

The smart plaster was developed at Imperial College by Professor Chris Toumazou who wanted a way to improve the range of data that can be gathered from a patient that did not involve festooning them with more wires and dermal patches.

Gordon Murray’s T.27

Gordon Murray, an ex-McLaren Formula One designer has come up with a trio of prototypes of his T.27 electric car that will cater for city or town use. The T.25 (its predecessor) tips the scales at a mere 600kg, which is half the weight of a small family car on average. The T.27 comes with a tubular frame to absorb energy and does well to pass all relevant safety tests.

The manufacturing process, called iStream, has received £9m of investment, half of which came from the government’s Technology Strategy Board. iStream plants can be just one fifth of the size of a conventional car factory, as the cars are not made from stamped steel. All the parts are designed by computer and welded together rather than being stamped out of metal sheets, explained David Bott, Director of Innovation Platforms at the Technology Strategy Board.

Read this news article to know more.

Orkut Promote

Guess Orkut introduced “Promote” feature on user’s dashboard last month. And as I understood it, I smiled thinking its a nice way to make users more open to the concept of online advertising. Because, if you start promoting, and if you start paying attention to your friends’ promotions, then you might as well look-up other promotions (or advertisements). This FAQ  on google is a proof of the same

Why are there sometimes ads in my promotion box?

Orkut Promote is used by both advertisers and orkut users. You can trash or repromote ads in the same way you can do with your friends’ promotions.

So what’s Orkut Promote about? Well this is what the Orkut Blog has to say

 

Almost everyday there’s something that I’d like to spread to all of my orkut friends, whether that be a hilarious YouTube video, a new orkut community I just discovered or a quote that happens to fit my mood. That’s why I’m so happy to announce the release of a new orkut feature: ‘promote’.

orkut promote is a free tool that allows you to create announcements and automatically send them to all of your orkut friends with a single click. Promote makes it easy to show text, your original photos from your orkut photo albums and your original YouTube videos to your orkut friends– just give your promotion a catchy title and a short description and you’ll be all set to go.

With this new promote tool, you get:

• the ability to easily create promotions using text, photos from your orkut albums, and your original YouTube videos
• built-in ‘spread’ and ‘trash’ features that let you pass on the promotions you like to all of your friends and delete the ones you don’t so that they never show up for you again
• the ‘my promotions’ tool that shows you how many users have viewed, clicked on, or deleted your promotions, as well as how far they’ve spread
• the ability to stop or delete a promotion that you’ve created at any time

 

What does it means for marketeer’s?

Orkut is the largest social networking site in India and has very good presence in latin markets such as Brazil. The main difficulty faced by marketeer’s in exploiting Orkut channel till date was due the lack of viral and sharing features. This promotion tool can thus help to bring brand owners back on Orkut as users or even on communities.

This features also opens up great source of incoming traffic for publishers too as they were solely relying on tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc. Publishers and marketeer’s targeting audiences in Emerging markets were desperately looking for such options as Orkut commands a majority share of social networking space in those countries.  This opening up of promotion channel will attract marketeer’s back to Orkut although the benefits are yet to be seen at initial stages.

 

Sixth Sense

For all those who missed the news about this newest device which won the 2009 Invention award by Popular Science from a 28 year-old Indian Pranav Mistry, read on.

Pranav Mistry, who did his engineering from IIT Bombay, is a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab, Before his studies at MIT, he worked with Microsoft as a UX researcher.

Pranav Mistry introduces his device in his website as:

“Although the miniaturization of computing devices allows us to carry computers in our pockets, keeping us continually connected to the digital world, there is no link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world. Information is confined traditionally on paper or digitally on a screen. SixthSense bridges this gap, bringing intangible, digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures. ‘SixthSense’ frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.”

The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user’s hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques.

The SixthSense prototype implements several applications that demonstrate the usefulness, viability and flexibility of the system. The video below illustrated what this device can do.

The current prototype system costs approximate $350 to build.