The future of America’s infrastructure
Like a 1984 Ford Tempo spewing out exhaust and with headlights held together by duct tape, our country’s infrastructure need a little tune-up if it hopes to make it into the future without breaking down. From transportation to sewage, PopSci examines the technologies in the works that to overhaul the U.S. infrastructure.
PowerUnderground Power Lines that heal themselves
Task: Coat cables with a self-repairing salve
Status: Commercially available in 10–15 yearsAnother way to dig up fewer streets is to avoid unearthing cables for small repairs. Whenever there’s a nick or hairline crack in an insulation sheath, the electrical field in the underlying copper subtly shifts. In a new insulation being developed by EPRI, nanoparticles sensitive to this shift heat up and melt surrounding polymer molecules, forming a fresh protective scar. As today’s decrepit lines gradually go kaput (about a quarter are already past their intended lifetime), EPRI hopes to replace them with these self-mending ones.
TransportationTrackless Elevated Trains
Task: Add urban railways for a third the cost of conventional light rail
Status: Texas A&M University’s Texas Transportation Institute has offered free land for a two-mile test track
To save the multibillion-dollar cost of clearing 24-foot-wide swaths for new track, trainmaker Tubular Rail wants to shoot trains up to 150 mph over existing infrastructure through a series of elevated rings 100 feet apart. As it passes through each ring, the 400-foot-long carbon-fiber car is pushed along by electrically powered steel rollers. To save juice, the motors gear up only as a train approaches; up to 90 percent of the kinetic energy of the train can be recaptured as the rollers wind down.
SewageTurn Sludge into Electricity
Task: Reduce the energy we use to treat wastewater, currently 1.5 percent of our total national power
Status: Field-testing reactors; commercial units by 2015
Bruce Logan, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State University, has designed a microbial fuel cell to turn the chemical energy in sewage directly into electricity—and clean the sewage in the process. Bacteria housed on a graphite fiber anode break down the fats, proteins and sugars in sewage, freeing up a steady stream of electrons, which the bacteria transfer directly into the electrode. Those electrons move to the cathode, providing electrical power and, at the cathode, producing hydrogen gas.
America’s Infrastructure Might Look Like…
In last night’s State of the Union address, President Obama talked a lot about the need to upgrade our country’s infrastructure, from power plants to railroads, both to create jobs and to improve efficiency. He wasn’t kidding: We lose an average of seven billion gallons of water a day to leaks in the system. Power interruptions cost the economy about $79 billion annually. And we all remember the Minneapolis bridge collapse, but up to a quarter of all the bridges in the country are in need of attention.
Fortunately, there are some amazing technologies already rolling out, and more just waiting for the funding the President talked about. We reached out to experts in transportation, telecommunications, sewage and water to figure out what kinds of technologies might be part of this next generation of infrastructure and found that the key isn’t patches, it’s an overhaul.
Smart systems that deliver only the power needed or recycle sewage for water and energy. Cantilevered trains could be built over existing roads. Roads could de-ice themselves. Here are 25 of those transformational technologies that might become reality sooner than later.
Renovating American Infrastructure,
Step 1: Transportation
Chicago road crews are scrambling to fill 67,000 potholes a month. Communities in Pennsylvania rely on 100-year-old water pipes made of wood. Squirrels still cause widespread blackouts. The country’s 600,000 bridges, four million miles of roads, and 30,000 wastewater plants desperately need attention. The solution isn’t patches, it’s an overhaul. Soon roads and power lines will fix themselves, and we’ll mine energy from sewage. America’s 21st-century tune-up won’t happen overnight, but we could start reaping the benefits (faster broadband! cleaner water!) within the next few years.
Cars that Report Potholes
Task: Fix the third of major roads that are in poor shape
Status: Three years to a prototype
In a new system developed at Northeastern University, vehicles that cover lots of asphalt—taxis, buses, garbage trucks—will be outfitted with acoustic wave sensors to detect potholes before the human eye can see them. Sound waves probe the top three feet of the road for telltale air pockets and small cracks, while ground-penetrating radar looks inside bridge decks for corrosion and lasers scan the road surface. A cellular data connection sends data to control centers, where it can be assembled into maps of trouble spots.
Roads that De-Ice Themselves
Task: Reduce the 1,300 road deaths a year from snowy and icy winter conditions
Status: In testing by more than 20 state departments of transportation
A new road coating called SafeLane not only gives tires more traction, it actually helps prevent the accumulation of ice and snow by holding on to de-icing salts, allowing road crews to scatter salt a couple of days before a blizzard rather than waiting until the snow is already on the ground. SafeLane consists of layers of epoxy mixed with dolomitic limestone. The epoxy layer is snowplow-proof, lasts up to 15 years, and helps seal the pavement to keep corrosive salts from leaching down to steel bars in sensitive bridge decks. Anecdotal results from its first five years in the field show up to a 70 percent decrease in winter accidents.
Bridges that Flex on the Fly
Task: Upgrade the 26 percent of decrepit bridges
Status: Pedestrian versions exist; traffic bridges in 10 years
Regular bridges are fairly rigid structures that break down over time from stress. “Tensegrity” structures disperse load over a nest of tensed cables and compressed struts that allow them to be both flexible and structurally rigid. Now the University of California at San Diego is developing traffic-bearing tensegrity bridges with feedback sensors to guide subtle adjustments in cable length, which could alleviate the shifting stresses of an overladen truck, counteract the vibration frequency of an earthquake, or disperse the load of a severed cable.
Concrete that Senses Cracks and Heals on its Own
Task: Replace miles of concrete highways with smarter versions
Status: Field-testing for self-sensing concrete in progress
Carbon nanotubes are prized for both their strength and their piezoresistance—they change their electrical resistance as they’re stressed. Xun Yu, a mechanical-engineering professor at the University of Minnesota–Duluth, is cooking up a concrete mix that contains 0.1 percent carbon nanotubes, making it harder to crack than traditional concrete, and smart too. By embedding electrodes into it as it sets, Yu can measure changes in electrical resistance to detect compression from passing cars. Future versions will better calculate speed and vehicle weight on the go for a real-time view of the road’s stress. Meanwhile, a new concrete mix developed by Victor Li, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan, contains unhydrated cement grains that are activated when exposed to carbon dioxide in air and water from rain—exactly what you’d find in a small crack in the road. The reaction produces a calcium carbonate seal, restoring the slab to its normal load-bearing capacity.
Trackless Elevated Trains
Task: Add urban railways for a third the cost of conventional light rail
Status: Texas A&M University’s Texas Transportation Institute has offered free land for a two-mile test track
To save the multibillion-dollar cost of clearing 24-foot-wide swaths for new track, trainmaker Tubular Rail wants to shoot trains up to 150 mph over existing infrastructure through a series of elevated rings 100 feet apart. As it passes through each ring, the 400-foot-long carbon-fiber car is pushed along by electrically powered steel rollers. To save juice, the motors gear up only as a train approaches; up to 90 percent of the kinetic energy of the train can be recaptured as the rollers wind down.
Renovating American Infrastructure,
Step 2: Water
Our water infrastructure is older than our roads and power grid, with many pipes sitting in trenches dug by hand in the 1800s. In parts of the Northeast, up to 50 percent of our clean water leaks into the ground between the treatment center and the tap. Across the country, we lose an average of seven billion gallons of drinking water a day to leaks—and we have an 800,000-mile network of pipes that needs constant monitoring and repair. We also use far too much energy treating all our water, regardless of its end use, and piping it long distances. Besides fixing up the nation’s pipes, the future of water is cleaning only what we need.
Clean Water like Plants Do
Task: Treat our water on fewer terawatts
Status: First small-scale versions by 2011
Plants pull water into their roots by osmosis, using tiny channels called aquaporins, a method that doesn’t require any energy. Now a Danish company called Aquaporin is developing a membrane based on that same principle to extract pure H20 from saltwater at about a third of the cost and a tenth the energy of conventional reverse-osmosis systems. The membrane’s protein channels, each just a few nanometers across, allow a stream of water molecules—and only water molecules—to pass single file at a rate of one billion per second. No pumps are needed to force the water across the channels.
A Neighborhood-Sized Saltwater Purifier
Task: Decentralize our clean-water system
Status: Prototypes now; commercial units within a year
Yoram Cohen, a University of California at Los Angeles chemical engineer, has a solution for thirsty communities in states like California, which burns 20 percent of its power treating and pumping in water from far-off high-grade reservoirs: to spread out the task. His tanning-bed-size reverse-osmosis machines could be deployed up and down the coast, with each unit tapping into the ocean to provide neighborhoods with about 5,000 gallons of drinking water per day. The units carry software that can fine-tune filtering in response to local changes in water temperature, salinity, pH and silt, and can be remotely controlled from a central operations center.
Clot Leaky Water Pipes
Task: Pump rubberlike blocks into our system to find
and automatically fix leaks
Status: Deployed in the U.K. in 2008
Scottish oil-and-gas company Brinker Technology has a no-dig system of pipe repair that mimics the way clots form at a cut. When a leak is detected, a service truck could drive to a nearby fire hydrant and pump in Platelets—squishy, rubberlike cubes and balls ranging in size from less than a millimeter to nearly two inches across, depending on the size of the leak. The Platelets travel in the pipe until the outflowing pressure pulls them toward to the crack. There, they bunch together to form a long-lasting clot. Utilities don’t even need to know exactly where the leak is located.
Lay New Pipes Without Digging Trenches
Task: Deal with 240,000 annual water-main breaks more quickly by using simple slide-in liners
Status: Thousands of feet of pipe repaired since March
Another way of fixing broken pipe without summoning the backhoes is to coat it with a new inner lining—already common today in sewage pipes, which are under less pressure because they rely on gravity to move their contents along. But Missouri-based Insituform Technologies’s new InsituMain liner can withstand the internal forces of pressurized pipe, allowing in-place repair of drinking-water mains. Instead of a full-length trench, two access points (up to 700 feet apart) are cut on either side of the broken pipe. Then workers insert at one end a flexible liner made from a felt-and-glass-fiber composite and soaked in thermosetting epoxy resin and pull it through the inner walls of the crumbling pipe. Exposing the liner to steam or hot water stiffens and seals it, leaving it flush with the inside of the pipe.
Bacteria that Make Toxic Water Glow
Task: Install phosphorescent poison detectors at the nation’s 155,000 drinking-water systems
Status: Commercially available in 2–5 years
Bacteria are little geniuses at identifying molecules. They’re also prolific, cheap, and easy to manipulate, which makes them ideal workers. Using genetically modified, nonharmful strains of E. coli, chemist Sylvia Daunert of the University of Kentucky has designed a prototype biosensor system capable of detecting a variety of drinking-water toxins, including arsenic, anthrax, lead and PCBs. The bacteria are housed in the tip of a fiber-optic cable, which dangles in the drinking-water supply. When they detect a toxin, the bacteria glow; the light they produce is carried along the fiber to a monitoring station, where its intensity is measured to determine the precise concentration of toxic molecules (sensitive down to parts-per-billion scale).
Renovating American Infrastructure,
Step 3: Power
A 2006 study at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that power interruptions cost the economy about $79 billion annually, or about one third of national electric spending, thanks to our aging grid. Meanwhile, energy use is expected to grow by 1,150 terawatt-hours—the equivalent of adding 13 New York Cities—by 2030. A smarter power grid will surely help, but we’ll need additional innovations like these to keep up with spiking demand.
Make Energy like Plants Do
Task: Convert sunlight into chemical energy
Status: Last year, scientists found a plentiful raw material that can free oxygen from waterSolar panels are not the only energy-harvesting strategy under the sun. For years, scientists have also been trying to do what plants do—use sunlight to photosynthesize fuel. Until now, most approaches relied on impractically scarce materials like iridium as a catalyst that triggers the reaction. But last year, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory figured out how to use cobalt oxide, one of the most abundant industrial catalysts. To overcome the relative inefficiency with which cobalt oxide uses sunlight to crack water molecules and free the oxygen, researchers layered the catalyst on a tightly stacked scaffold that makes it effectively 1,600 times as efficient. The net result: Arrays of cobalt-oxide panels could provide a steady supply of oxygen, protons and electrons. The next goal is to find a similarly efficient second catalyst to transform the by-products into an energy-dense fuel like methanol to give gasoline a run for its money.
Hang Superconducting Cables that Won’t Leak Electricity
Task: Replace miles of copper wire with cables that carry up to 10 times as much electricity per cubic inch
Status: 10–20 years to wide use
Instead of clearing paths for thousands of miles of new power lines to carry renewable energy across the country, we could restring the existing ones to run with high-temperature superconducting cables like those being studied at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The cables transmit electricity along a one-micrometer-thick superconductive layer of tape wrapped around a stainless-steel tube full of liquid nitrogen that cools the line down below –321ºF. In that chilled superconducting state, the lines lose no energy to resistance (today’s copper cables lose 5 to 7 percent).
Cram More Copper Underground
Task: Replace thousands of miles of buried wire with a better-insulated version that carries 25 percent more power
Status: 5–10 years away from widespread use
In urban areas, overhead power lines are a nuisance and a danger, which means most electricity crosses the city in underground tubes. As urban power demands increase, we could rip up streets to lay new lines, but an easier solution is just to cram more copper into the conduits we already have. That’s what the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), an industry R&D consortium, is aiming for with a new insulation material that’s embedded with vinylsilane-coated particles of silicon dioxide to give it 33 percent more insulating ability than existing line coatings. That means the next generation of power lines could carry up to a quarter more current without adding any more bulky insulation.
Underground Power Lines that heal themselves
Task: Coat cables with a self-repairing salve
Status: Commercially available in 10–15 years
Another way to dig up fewer streets is to avoid unearthing cables for small repairs. Whenever there’s a nick or hairline crack in an insulation sheath, the electrical field in the underlying copper subtly shifts. In a new insulation being developed by EPRI, nanoparticles sensitive to this shift heat up and melt surrounding polymer molecules, forming a fresh protective scar. As today’s decrepit lines gradually go kaput (about a quarter are already past their intended lifetime), EPRI hopes to replace them with these self-mending ones.
Copper-Crawling Robots
Task: Deploy fleets of nimble robots that scoot along power lines, looking for flaws so that humans don’t have to
Status: First commercial versions around 2012Conventional inspection is slow and expensive, often requiring a helicopter flyby. EPRI is working on a robot that can autonomously survey an 80-mile length of line twice a year for cheaper and more reliable inspections. The robot will straddle the line, carrying a camera, a diffused scanning laser and on-board image-analysis software, which it will use to construct both a visual history of the deterioration of the line, as well as a 3-D map of encroaching tree branches and other potential problems.
Add Storage to the Grid
Task: Build plants full of spinning drums that store electricity, so we can finally save surplus energy
Status: 20-megawatt plant under construction in Stephentown, N.Y.
Incredibly, today’s grid has practically no storage capacity. The electricity coming out of your socket was generated less than a millisecond ago, so power plants have to continually generate enough energy for the biggest spikes. To prepare for the power fluctuations endemic to renewable energy, we’ll need to inventory excess power to use during cloudy, windless afternoons and nights. The Massachusetts-based company Beacon Power’s solution is to store the grid’s surplus energy in hundreds of spinning carbon-fiber-and-fiberglass drums. Each of its Generation 4 flywheels features a 2,500-pound rotor mounted on magnetic bearings and sealed in a vacuum to create a near-friction-free environment. Energy coming in from the grid accelerates the three-foot rotor to 16,000 rpm (about Mach 2), where it keeps spinning with at least 97 percent efficiency. To pump energy back into the grid, some of the rotational energy is bled off to power a generator on the main shaft. Each flywheel can store a 15-minute, 100-kilowatt charge and can discharge 150,000 times over 20 years.
Renovating American Infrastructure,
Step 4: Telecom
The U.S. ranks 17th worldwide in broadband access, but not for long—last year’s stimulus package allotted $7.2 billion for upgrading our underperforming broadband infrastructure. Our legacy copper wiring just can’t carry the data to support HD-video streaming, for instance, and next-gen wireless networks are slower to roll out than in, say, Japan, because of the sheer size of this country. But advances in fiber-optic cables and broadband blimps could bring serious speed increases to homes and smartphones.
Faster Fiber
Task: Replace our international fiber-optic trunk lines with thicker cables that carry 10 times the data per second
Status: Demonstrated last year
Our next generation of transoceanic submarine fiber cables may be built according to the Alcatel-Lucent design that recently set transmission speed records by moving data 10 times as fast as current cables. The new cables started with a fiber core that is on average 40 percent thicker than the ones currently draped across the ocean floor. Engineers designed an array of 155 lasers that emit light of different wavelengths, and in addition to encoding information in the timing of the light pulses the way current cables do, they modulated the polarization and the phase to pack extra data onto each light wave. The new fiber cables can send 15.5 terabytes—the equivalent of 400 DVDs—each second from Boston to Bilbao.
Make the Network Airborne
Task: Float broadband blimps above areas that are a headache to hardwire
Status: Delivery of a first ship to a military contractor this year; full platforms in 3–5 yearsWe’re going to need to dig a lot more fiber and copper in the coming years to meet the exploding communications demand. Or we can just float a few blimps. Sanswire, a manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicles, is working on a 525-foot helium- and fuel-gas-filled airship, the Stratellite, which would provide blanket broadband coverage from the tranquil heights of the stratosphere. Hovering at 65,000 feet, each blimp could provide phone, TV and high-speed Internet to an area about the size of Texas, without the lag times that have plagued satellite-based communications. Stratellites can even daisy-chain to link cities and rural areas across the country—all without a single new wire touching the ground.
Flexible Fiber
Task: Snake high-speed fiber-optics into virtually every home
Status: Available nowCorning’s new, flexible ClearCurve cable features a nanomaterial mesh wrapped around the cable core that keeps the photons in line even when stapled, bent, or twisted around a nail—usually any such quick turns would make the line go dark. That means telecoms can finally put fiber-optic lines into people’s homes, where cables often run up against right angles and tight squeezes from the sidewalk to the house. Verizon is already using the cable for its FiOS service.
Renovating American Infrastructure,
Step 5: Sewage
Every year, Americans produce 12 trillion gallons of wet sewage and burn 21 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to clean it to drinking-water standards. Why not put the smelly stuff to good use? Thanks to clever new technology, sewage will be reclaimed to provide power, produce fertilizer and, eventually, yield clean water. In other words, sooner than you think, you’ll be drinking your own urine.
Turn Sludge into Electricity
Task: Reduce the energy we use to treat wastewater, currently 1.5 percent of our total national power
Status: Field-testing reactors; commercial units by 2015
Bruce Logan, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State University, has designed a microbial fuel cell to turn the chemical energy in sewage directly into electricity—and clean the sewage in the process. Bacteria housed on a graphite fiber anode break down the fats, proteins and sugars in sewage, freeing up a steady stream of electrons, which the bacteria transfer directly into the electrode. Those electrons move to the cathode, providing electrical power and, at the cathode, producing hydrogen gas.
Drop Robots Down the Drain
Task: Deploy fleets of autonomous machines to spot leaks in sewage pipes
Status: New models that use a laser to measure inside pipes could be ready by 2011RedZone Robotics’s new Solo sewer robots will use image-interpreting software developed at Carnegie Mellon University to analyze their video feeds and tag potential problems in the pipe, so a 10-hour run can be condensed to a two-hour highlight reel of dripping cracks and grasping roots. Each Solo carries a camera at either end, sonar to scan below the water, and lasers to search sewer walls for acid corrosion.
Recycle Urine
Task: Recover phosphorus and nitrogen from wastewater to make fertilizer
Status: First U.S. plant opened last June; another coming this year
Believe it or not, the wastewater of 100,000 people could yield an annual crop of about 200 tons of high-grade fertilizer. The Vancouver company Ostara hopes to use this fact to overcome our shrinking supply of recoverable phosphorus rock, one of three essential components of modern fertilizer. Ostara’s PEARL Nutrient Recycling system extracts phosphates and other minerals like ammonia from municipal wastewater and then churns the nutrients into safe, slow-release fertilizer pellets sold under the name Crystal Green. The challenge is sequestering the urine, which accounts for just 1 percent of sewage by volume. One solution: source-separated toilets (think: a little bowl within a big bowl), already being tried in Sweden and Denmark.
The entire article can be found at Popular Science
Visuals are an important part of advertising, so it’s not surprising that so many companies have jumped on the augmented reality bandwagon, offering tools that visualize their products in a magical and memorable way.
Here we take a look at some pretty amazing promotional uses of this new tech that work with common webcams, giving everyone a chance to experience augmented reality — a trend that will be big in 2010.
1. BMW Z4
This BMW interpretation ties in with a TV ad that sees artist Robin Rhode using the Z4 as a giant paintbrush (think big-scale finger-painting with the car’s tyres). Downloading the software, printing out the 3D symbol and holding it up to your webcam will allow you to see your own miniature Z4 on your screen, which you can then drive around using keyboard commands, creating your own Rhode-esque car painting.
2. TOPPS 3D LIVE Trading Cards
Taking the trading card into the 21st century, the Topps “3D LIVE” range offers baseball (and now also football) stars that leap from the special cards onto your desk, as viewed via webcam. As well as creating miniature holographic representations of the players — a neat enough trick that would impress most kids — the concept is taken a step further with the angle that you can control the player’s signature moves via your keyboard.
3. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
As well as augmented reality, this example uses clever face-tracking technology to stick the original 3D CGI head of Optimus Prime atop your own visage. The campaign to promote “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” also includes a hidden holographic message from Bumblebee, again developed using the original 3D model of the robot that appeared in the movie, suggesting CGI films may be ripe for more AR apps in the future.
4. Doritos Sweet Chilli Chips
What we like about Doritos’ take on the tech for the Brazilian market is that the webcam code is printed on the back of the chip packet, adding value to something normally disposable. Perhaps this also means less chip bags littering the streets. Holding up the code on the Sweet Chilli chips packets initiates the appearance of a little cartoon character, which can then be used in an extended online game.
5. USPS Priority Mail Virtual Box Simulator
Erring on the functional side of promotion, the USPS Priority Mail Virtual Box Simulator is a wickedly clever use of the tech that lets users compare the size of an item they need sent to the size of boxes available from the postal service, by seeing how well their item fits inside a transparent box. Although not particularly high octane excitement, it does illustrate the practical use of AR which is yet to be fully explored.
6. Star Trek
These kind of applications work particularly well with a techie audience, or in this instance a Trekkie one. The front cover of certain versions of the Star Trek movie on DVD and Blu ()-ray doubles as a webcam code to initiate the “cadet orientation” program. It offers a holographic tour around the USS Enterprise (that appears as a hovering apparition on your screen), incorporating a look at the bridge, and best of all, a trigger to fire the ship’s weapons, complete with sound effects.
7. Wrigley’s 5 Gum
Created for the launch of Wrigley’s “5″ chewing gum in France (although the site is also available in English) this interactive example of AR sees five symbols (each representing one of the five gum flavors) becoming a different track that only plays when the webcam can “see” it. The desktop DJ experience is probably best explained by watching the demo video above, populated appropriately by masticating teens.
8. Ray-Ban
Although many items of apparel can be bought online, sunglasses are one of those tricky products that you really need to try on to ensure you look more chic than geek. Ray-Ban’s Virtual Mirror (ably demonstrated here by YouTuber NickHearne) lets you virtually try on glasses (after a quick bit of face-mapping). The software lets you move your head around to see how the shades look from different angles. Depending on the opacity of the glass, you can even see your eyes through some of the shades. Seeing this app in action makes us think this could be where the real commercial future of AR lies.
9. Lost Valentinos
John Mayer, Eminem and Julian Perretta are three other musicians that have dabbled with AR as a way of making their music videos more compelling, but this effort from the Lost Valentinos — with each printable code representing a member of the band to be arranged as you see fit — is a great example of how to keep it tight. In addition, the band’s site doubles as a video gallery for fans to share how they interacted with the AR by uploaded webcam video clips.
10. Always Infinity
This time round we’ve saved the worst for last. How best to promote feminine hygiene products? With an augmented reality white bunny of course. We think the world can do without this irrelevant foray into the AR arena that assumes a female audience will be blown away by an incredibly basic application of the tech.
Source: http://mashable.com/2009/12/26/augmented-reality-marketing/
Microsoft Tags Paper?
Microsoft tags have started showing up in magazines and newspapers. Tags can also be placed on business cards, products, and even large outdoor signs.
“It’s the hyperlink in the physical world,” said Marja Koopmans, marketing leader for Microsoft’s start-up accelerator unit.
Tags can link to anything from a Web page to an online brochure or electronic business card (see video below). Golf Digest magazine, for example, uses tags to link directly to YouTube videos that can be viewed on an iPhone or other smartphone. That allows the magazine to, essentially, include not just how-to articles, but also instructional videos within its publication.
To be able to “read” tags with your phone, you need to download a piece of software; luckily enough, Microsoft has supported most modern smartphone operating systems, including several varieties of Symbian, the iPhone OS, Android, BlackBerry and others.
Check out CNET’s video about Tag below.
Apple iPad First Hands On
It’s substantial but surprisingly light. Easy to grip. Beautiful. Rigid. Starkly designed. The glass is a little rubbery but it could be my sweaty hands. And it’s fasssstttt.
Apple didn’t really sell this point, but it’s the single biggest benefit of the iPad: speed. It feels at least a generation faster than the iPhone 3GS. Lags and waits are gone, and the OS and apps respond just as quickly as you’d hope. Rotating between portrait and landscape modes, especially, is where this new horsepower manifests in the OS.
Build
Imagine, if you will, a super light unibody MacBook Pro that’s smaller, thinner and way, way, way lighter. Or, from a slightly different perspective, think about a bigger iPhone that’s been built with unibody construction. The iPad really does feel like some amalgamation of these two product lines from Apple. And, in the hands, it feels great—not too heavy at all.
The screen looked nice, and it’s able to display even small text crisply. Touch responds like a dream.
But one point of the build seems odd. It’s the Home button. In portrait mode, hitting the Home button is far less natural than on an iPhone because your thumbs naturally rest in the middle of each side of the case (not the bottom). A Kindle-like side Home button may not have been a horrible idea, even if it broke up the stoic minimalism of the case a bit.
iBooks
It’s an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn’t seem to strains the eyes—but time will tell on that.
Keyboard
Typing in portrait is better than anticipated but still a BIT of a stretch for our average-sized hands, which means that letters like F G and H will take a moderate conditioning for some.
Pictures
Pinch, zoom, whatever—like we said, it’s fast—the photo app is faster than iPhoto performs on an aging Core2Duo laptop.
Apps
Apps can play in their native resolution, or be 2x uprezzed for the screen. How does it look? An ATV game we tried actually looked pretty good—limited more by its base polygon count than the scaling process itself. Bottom line: it’s about as elegant solution as Apple could have offered, even if that graphics won’t be razor sharp.
Browsing
Over Wi-Fi, Gizmodo loaded quickly. The 9.7-inch screen is an excellent size for reading the site. You can pinch zoom, but you won’t need to. Of course, on such a pretty web browsing experience, not having Flash makes the big, empty video boxes in the middle of a page is pretty disappointing. Put differently, the fatal flaw of Apple’s mobile browser has never been more apparent.
Overheard: Steve Jobs Says Apple Tablet “Will Be The Most Important Thing I’ve Ever Done.”
TechCrunch reported that Steve Jobs is talking about the new Apple Tablet as his pride and joy. We have never heard this kind of excitement come from Steve before, but it reminds me of Bill Gates when he said the same thing 7 years ago when talking about the PC tablet. It looks like this time everyone has finally caught up with the technology and is ready for the tablet technology. Back when Bill Gates was talking about his PC Tablet the iPhone was not even a concept.
With every major technology company talking about mobile being the way of the future it makes you wonder how integrated the Apple Tablet is going to be. If anyone has sneak peak – please let me know.
Best gadgets of 2010
I have compiled several 2010 lists due to popular demand, and I am getting a lot of positive feedback on them. As far as this list it was inspired by a conversation I had over Christmas Holiday that talked about some of the gadgets that came out in 2010 and which ones were preferred. After doing more research on the topic I have put together the best list of gadgets for 2010, as always enjoy.
Here is a list of the TOP … best gadgets of 2010
- vPhone: The vPhone is a new promising gadget of 2010. The main reason this has made the top of the list is its ability to allow you to perform video calls from your cell phone. The Video Phone (vPhone) is being developed by Saygus a small firm that specializes in video-calling software. Verizon will be the first to carry a two-way video-conferencing phone complete with a large touch screen, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and a 3D accelerometer. This phone is meant to compete directly with the iPhone and to out-perform Droid (Droid is the current device Verizon is using for this market). The vPhone is set to be the first mobile device approved through Verizon’s Open Development initiative, a program designed to allow developers to build technologies to operate on the Verizon network. The vPhone from Saygus will not be available in stores but only through the Utah based company Saygus.
- The mCube90 developed by Innergie is a universal power adapter and surge protector that can be used on airplanes, in cars, or at home. This adapter is small enough to fit in the palm of your hand (comparable size to an iPhone) and solved the problem that most of us who travel face… How do you keep track of all your chords and adapters for your mobile devices, but more so this device powers your mobile devices with its battery power. It has the ability to power your laptop, cell phone, MP3 Player, or any other device that has a USB power input.
- Copenhagen Wheel, a dream come true for any cyclist
Mobile Phone Monitoring
Taser is the company best known for the device that allows a user piece of mind with a self-defense device that allows you to ZAP a person with thousands of volts of electricity. Taser has just announced a new Mobile Phone Monitoring tool. This dashboard allows you to login and see what is going on with the particular phone that you are monitoring and has been designed specifically for parents. You can see everything from the exact location of your child (wherever the mobile device is), this uses the built in GPS device that most mobile phones and almost all Smart Phones have built in.
You may also setup alerts for example when the child exceeds 80 mph (again this uses the GPS portion of your Smart Phone. And what would this device be without the built in “Emergency Feature” whic happens to be my favorite feature of this technology. It allows authorities to locate the EXACT location of the mobile phone (which in most cases should be with the child in the even of a missing child, or other emergencies).
Through the dashboard the authorized user can monitor all the calls that are made or received and how long each call is, in addition the authorized dashboard user can block calls or force certain calls to always ring. Great Job Taser!!
Economically the piece of mind that you get for signing up is well worth it, at a price point of $10-$30 per month.
The Skiff Reader
The Skiff Reader is similar to the PC tablet with some of the functionality but is geared more towards being the eReader of choice at a reasonable price. The Skiff Reader is from Hearst and Sprint.
The sole purpose of the Skiff Reader is to turn newspapers, magazines, and other paper only products into a digitized electronic copy. The eReader is not a new idea and was considered to be brain-child of Bill Gates and has since been adapted by Amazon with the Amazon Kindle & its newer version Amazon Kindle 2. The Skiff Reader was released at the 2010 CES show. As mentioned in the video below you will notice that the Skiff Reader has one feature that makes it stand out more than any other eReader and that is the simple fact that you can bend the Skiff Reader just like a newspaper or magazine without breaking it. Cool idea.
Netflix for the Nintendo Wii
The CEO of Netflix has confirmed the floating speculation that started to surface in October of 2009. Will you see Netflix on Wii? The CEO has not come out directly and said yes, but he did confirm several assumptions that have been made until now and stated that the two companies Netflix and Nintendo have an “Excellent” chance of working together.
We are interested in the way the interface will work and the performance that will be available. Since the processor power needed to operate the Nintendo Wii is hundreds more than what is needed to display a Netfilx video we are confident that the weakest part of the link will be the connectivity between Netflix and the Nintendo device. But Netfilx has already faced this issue with the online service that they currently offer for computers with a subscription.
Google phone accepts credit cards with credit card swiper
One of the lead engineers for the Google Android Operating System has changed jobs and is now working for a leading edge company that is able to utilize the functionality of the Google Android Operating System to accept credit cards with an awesome gadget / add-on credit card swiper called a “Square”. Square inc has an awesome physical product (the square), but it is the software foundation that caught my attention. The software that runs the square has the ability to integrate photo verification, text or email receipts, manage all your coupon, and gift cards like a Starbucks punch card. @square – I am impressed with this device and also the functionality of the software that runs this. If you get a chance to use this I would recommend it, and I would love to hear your review on the square mobile device for credit card swiping. Let me know 
The square device plugs in directly to the audio jack on most smart phones, the device is primarily focused towards Backberry, iPhone, and Android Phones at this time.
Square is backed by Khosla Ventures and a team of angels. Square, Inc. has offices in San Francisco (Product & Engineering), Saint Louis (Operations), and New York City (Risk & Partnerships).
Square inc. Has a new device out called the square, it allows users to swipe a credit card on your phone.
