Digital Future is Now
…For those who don't know, 5G wireless is about 50 times faster than the average home broadband network today. And because it's wireless, providers won't have to dig trenches and lay cable to sign up customers.
That means there will be more competition for internet access than there is today, and at speeds that make today's broadband look like dial-up.…
…one of the nation's leading Virtual Reality companies THE VOID has rejected… explicit content on their immersive hyper-reality experiences," which will open to the public in "VOID Experience Centers" around the world.…
A Russian robot with artificial intelligence and programmed to learn may be destroyed following its second attempt at escaping its creators.… other robots of the same series have not attempted to escape like Promobot IR77, leading them to question what it is about this particular robot that so desperately wants to escape.…
…Microsoft is back at it again… making a robot that guesses what's in pictures. I have taken the liberty of putting some of the more frequent faces on the Kube through the new Microsoft robot and screenshotting the results. It was rather humorous…
…On Ethereum, the same types of services offered by companies like Facebook, Google, Ebay, and Amazon, will be provided instead by computers distributed around the globe. But how does Ethereum bring together these scattered nodes into one network? By using the groundbreaking organizational system known as a blockchain, which The Economist has aptly dubbed "the trust machine."…
…Alex has two favourite things, riding his bike and superheroes. But Alex has a birth defect, his right arm is only partially formed making it difficult to ride his bike. Limbitless… builds 3D-printed bionic limbs for disabled children… enlisted a fairly special friend to [give Alex his bionic arm].
[I can imagine a 7yo thinking, I know he's just an actor who plays genius inventor Tony Stark in the movies, but he brought me a real bionic arm! Don't know which is cooler, that I've got a bionic arm, or that I got it from Iron Man!]
Taking the notion of online collaboration to a whole new level, VinylMint has created a cloud-based solution for musicians to jam and record in real time.
Once the winning candy bar wrapper is opened, the tracking device will go off and Nestle officials will be able to find the exact location of the customer. [What could go wrong?]
On your phone or tablet… move your phone around in space… It’s like augmented reality, except it’s even more augmented because your phone is showing you things that aren’t there… phone becomes a moving window to the place and time in which the panorama was created… 360-degree panorama tool… when we played with these in the newsroom at VentureBeat we were soon moving our phones through the air like complete idiots … and enjoying every second of it.
Resembling a futuristic visor, the £480 ($800) device is worn like a pair of chunky goggles and earphones in one. It is equipped with two 0.7in high definition organic light emitting diode (OLED) panels and 5.1 channel dynamic audio headphone. The gadget enables the wearer to experience cinema-like viewing, equivalent to watching a 750-inch screen from 20 metres away.... It seems unlikely that most people - or even technology enthusiasts - will want to buy a product that involves sitting alone and wearing a little helmet. [Oh, REALLY??]
My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy. More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not. ... Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded. In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day. On the back end, software programming tools and Internet-based services make it easy to launch new global software-powered start-ups in many industries—without the need to invest in new infrastructure and train new employees. ...
The PaperPhone has a flexible electronic display that is set to herald a new generation of computers. Extremely lightweight and made out of a thin-film, the prototype device can do everything a smartphone currently does.
The bill, which would require only that the notices appear on newspaper websites, is similar to a Senate bill that would demand only that the notices appear on county-controlled websites.
A laptop that will recognize your eyes and the movement you make with them, to open emails, browse online, scroll through websites, among other small tasks. There is also a green feature built in that would brighten the screen once the user looks at it.
Computer systems that dynamically create, monitor, manage or suspend online contractual agreements are being developed to deliver greater reliability and security to service-oriented e-business applications.
"When the human eye searches for an object it looks globally for the rough location, size and orientation of the object. Then it zeros in on the details," said Jiang, an assistant professor of computer science. "Our method behaves in a similar fashion, using a linear approximation to explore the search space globally and quickly; then it works to identify the moving object by frequently updating trust search regions."
Scientists have discovered a "magnetic superatom" -- a stable cluster of atoms that can mimic different elements of the periodic table -- that one day may be used to create molecular electronic devices for the next generation of faster computers with larger memory storage.
27 hydraulic cylinders bring the mechs to life, its movements matching those of the person inside it
Snake broadcasts pictures, sound to soldier with laptop [video]
General Electric Global Research says it has figured out a way to put up to 500GB of data on a regular-sized DVD disc under laboratory conditions. GE says its breakthrough was achieved by writing 3-dimensional patterns that represent data onto a disc made of highly reflective material. The disc then acts as a mirror that makes it possible for a laser to pick up the entire piece of data. GE's process doesn't just put information onto the surface of the disc -- as DVDs and CDs do -- but etches the micro-holographic patterns below the surface of the disc as well.
Thanks to exponential increases in computer power — which is roughly doubling every two years — robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like flesh-and-blood people. Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult — perhaps impossible — challenge. Nevertheless, robots guided by their own computer "brains'' now can pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims or explore craters on Mars.
A couple of the coolest gadgets from this year's CES, Sony's OLED-based Walkman and Samsung's slim Blu-ray Disk player, are now on their way with availability from April.
Sony Japan has finally acknowledged the existence of the X-Series Walkman by noting that Japanese consumers will be able to purchase a NW-X1050 (16gb; 40,000y) or a NW-X1060 (32gb; 50,000y) on April 25th. The Japanese Touchscreen Walkman will have the ability to receive broadcast TV signals.
The dominant media player of the '00s (the iPod) still hasn't integrated with wireless headphones. Maybe it should take a quick lesson from the dominant media player of the '80s: the Walkman.
The 3-inch OLED touchscreen has 240 x 432 resolution. The Walkmans will have an audio player, One-Seg TV tuner, and FM tuner for basic use, but the fun really starts when you use the built-in Wi-Fi web browser, including a YouTube interface. The players support MP3 and AAC files, so your unprotected iTunes library might have a new home.
Now comes news of a bot that doesn't need to bother with any human thought at all, thank you very much. It's a "robot scientist" that researchers believe to be the first machine to independently come up with new scientific findings
Now ADAM is the first robot—but maybe not the last—to have independently discovered new scientific information, according to scientists who recently built themselves the mechanical colleague. ... The robot eventually identified the genes that code for enzymes involved in yeast metabolism—a scientific first for a robot.