On the heels of awarding $3.4 billion in broadband grants earlier this week, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on Wednesday awarded an additional $12.9 million intended to improve education and graduation rates at community colleges. This latest round of grants is part of the Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Success initiative, which aims to double the number of low-income students who earn a degree or credential by age 26.

Wednesday’s grants are intended to advance the role of technology at community colleges, improve virtual learning improvements, incorporate Web 2.0 tools and social media, and create learning tools that are open and available to all students. Among the four organizations that received funding was Global Skills for College Completion (GSCC), which got $3.6 million. GSCC strives to come up with ways to teach math and writing skill using social media and technology in order to improve the pass rate for students in basic skills courses.

The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), meanwhile, was awarded $5 million to produce developmental math course material that will be available as an open educational resource (OER). The MITE project aims to increase the number of students that meet math standards so they can move into post-secondary educational programs. Individual students and teachers get free access to materials at hippocampus.org while institutions can get subscription-based access for a nominal fee.

Make it two in a row for clean diesels: The Audi A3 TDI was honored Thursday as Green Car of the Year by Green Car Journal. Last year’s winner was the Volkswagen Jetti TDI, also a clean diesel. The Audi won in no small part because the diesel version gets 42 mpg highway, 50% better than the gas edition. The Audi A3 TDI won over the Honda Insight hybrid, the Mercury Milan hybrid (sibling to the Ford Fusion), the Toyota Prius hybrid and the Volkswagen Golf TDI clean diesel.

For the full story, see Good Clean Tech.

One of the natural side effects of being the largest maker of cellphones in the world is that you produce a lot of different models — a lot — which makes it way too easy for product planning, engineering, and marketing to all have corners cut for even the most important devices in the herd. Nokia seems to be coming to terms with that, though, announcing that it’ll scale back from “around 20” smartphones released this year to roughly a half of that in 2010, allowing it to give each phone the TLC it so desperately needs. Interestingly, the company says that it’s looking to the low- to midrange smartphone realm as a hot new competitive frontier — and an area where it’ll “have tools to play offence [sic] as well as defense,” possibly thanks to its continued involvement in Symbian even as it looks to Maemo to grow the high end. By any measure, it sounds like Nokia’s starting to get the hint — but it’s still anyone’s guess what kinds of products will ultimately see out of these guys over the next 12 to 18 months.

Nokia slashing smartphone lineup in half for 2010 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Withings Wi-Fi would have been alien technology in the 1950s. “What do you mean, this scale posts your weight on the ‘internet’, and then graphs it on your ‘iPhone'”? And yet, folks, this is our world today.

The Price:

$160

The Verdict:

Expensive, but worth it.

How do we justify a $160 scale when normal scales are $20 at Target? Think about when the last time your parents replaced their bathroom scale. Was it before you were born? Was it never? $160 isn’t too much when you spread it out over a lifetime.

But even if you you just look at the features, the Withings scale is worth it. On the “weighing you” side, it reports your weight in pounds, kilos or the weird British stone, plus calculates out your fat mass and BMI.

The top of the scale is made out of, in their words, “tempered glass slab, covered with a layer of metal”, which looks and feels classy. The whole thing feels modern—again, the complete opposite of a normal filthy bathroom scale.

After the Withings weighs you, it’ll send all three data points online, to their free website, where it charts and graphs it for you. You can even have different users in your family, each with their own separate data graphs. And (this is probably something you won’t use) it’ll post your weight updates to Twitter, if you want. It’s not mandatory.

And here, for example, is a kid being tracked as she gets older—not a person devolving into a serious eating disorder.

And if you have an iPhone/iTouch, you can access your chart via the free app as well, in case you want to show off to your friends how much weight you’re losing.

In essence, the Withings makes for the perfect holiday gift. It’s pricey enough to not make you look cheap, yet it still conveys the “I think you’re fat” message that’s inherent in giving someone a scale. [Withings]

Internet connectivity and functionality is impressive for a scale


Works great as a scale


Slightly expensive

It’s been awhile since we heard anything from Sensitive Objects, the French firm that developed Anywhere Multitouch, the platform that uses piezoelectric sensors to extend touch sensitivity beyond the display to the entire device. Well, we thought it was a pretty sweet idea — and apparently Motorola did as well. According some spicy and exotic PR, Moto’s investing some of its hard-earned cash in the company, which began as a project by the French Science National Research Center. As Reese Schroeder, managing director of Motorola Ventures, put it: “Natural user interface (NUI) and in particular interacting with a device through touch is an area of rapid development and great excitement. Sensitive Object provides an innovative and unique approach allowing new ways of interaction. We’re most excited to be involved in their growth and success.” One has to wonder what kind of new and innovative handset interfaces are coming around the bend — and one has to wonder what kind of havoc it will cause when you put one of these “anywhere multitouch” phones in your pocket without locking it first. Luckily, the technology is said to be cheaper to implement than the other touchscreen solutions currently available — so if these guys get their way, we might be accidentally calling our ex-girlfriends with the whole device very soon indeed. PR after the break.

Continue reading Motorola invests in Anywhere Multitouch technology

Motorola invests in Anywhere Multitouch technology originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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