ViewSonic Announces 3D Glasses for its 3D-Ready Projectors

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ViewSonic just announced its $99 (street) PGD-150 Active Stereographic 3D shutter glasses for its projectors, which helps to answer the question: Now that you can go out and buy 3D-ready projectors, what are you going to do with them?

That’s a question I’ve been asking as I’ve been working on ways to test the new generation of projectors, but you may have been asking the same thing about using them. There’s been lots of talk about 3D games and movies; however, when I first asked ViewSonic how to test 3D on their 3D-ready projectors, they told me I’d need stereographic glasses. And they weren’t for sale yet except as part of the Nvidia 3D Vision kit, which also required running games or movies strictly on a PC and worked only with systems using specific Nvidia video cards. Oh.

That’s just changed–at least for the particular 3D scheme that ViewSonic is using.

Report: Google Buys Agnilux

Google has purchased component company Agnilux, according to reports from the blogosphere last night. There’s not a lot of information surfacing, in terms of the deal or in terms of what exactly the small start-up manufacturers.

Earlier reports about Agnilux suggested that the company has been building some kind of server. As PE Hub points out, “The name Agnilux is derived from the Sanskrit word for fire (gni) and the Latin word for light (lux),” so there’s that.

Agnilux is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it was founded by the same folks behind P.A. Semi, the chip manufacturer acquired by Apple in 2008. That purchase that helped Apple build its own iPad A4 processor in-house.

First Leg of Qi Wireless Power Spec Completed

Qi.jpgThe Wireless Power Consortium said Monday that it has completed the first of three parts of its “Qi” wireless power spec.

The first part, covering the interaction between wireless charging stations and their receivers, has been completed. It has been delivered to its members, which include LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, and Verizon, among others.

Wireless power can mean different things to
different people; in this case, the technology

refers to magnetic induction, which can
charge a Qi-compatible device resting on a compatible power pad.

The announcement’s significance is debatable. On one hand, as the consortium notes, delivery of the first part of the spec allows product development to go forward. But true compliance and interoperability requires obeying the second (performance requirements) and third (compliance test specification) portions as well. And those haven’t been written yet.

It’s also useful to point out that the spec was at a 0.95 version milestone last August, so development may not be progressing as fast as hoped.

HP on Track to Build Computerized Real Brains

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Scientists at Hewlett-Packard will soon announce advances in atomic-sized memristors, or memory resistors, that could set the stage for replacing transistors in today’s computers, the New York Times reports.
Memristors aren’t a new idea; a fellow by the name of Dr. Leon O. Chua first proposed them in 1971 at the University of California, Berkeley, but it’s only now that they’re becoming possible.
Memristors are smaller than semiconducting transistors; current 3-nanometer prototypes are an order of magnitude less than the smallest transistors available today. They store information even without an electrical current, and can be used for data processing as well as storage, according to the report. They could even form the core of analog computing systems that act as biological brains.
“Our brains are made of memristors,” he said, referring to the function of biological synapses, in the article. “We have the right stuff now to build real brains.” Scared yet? (Via Engadget) (Image credit: IEEE Spectrum/Wikimedia Commons)

Seismic Laptops Help Detect Earthquakes

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If you’ve got a laptop with a built-in accelerometer, you, too, could help detect earthquakes.
It turns out an ordinary laptop is all people need to join the 1,000-volunteer Quake-Catcher Network, which transmits data about earthquakes to researchers at UC Riverside and Stanford University, LiveScience reports.
The accelerometers in today’s laptops power down the hard disk in the event of a fall or sharp jolt. Elizabeth Cochran, a UC Riverside geoscientist, came up with the idea of tapping into the accelerometers to record earthquakes, the report said.

Bill Gates, Toshiba Team Up to Build Nuclear Reactor

Last time Bill Gates and Toshiba teamed up, it involved running Windows on a Qosmio. This time, it’s a nuclear reactor. Toshiba and Gates’s energy-investment company, TerraPower, are working to create a nuclear reaction. Seriously.

The traveling-wave reactor runs on depleted–rather than the standard enriched–uranium, ensuring that it has to be refueled only every 60 to 100 years. According to Fast Company, the reactors are “small enough to fit in a hot tub.” They’re part of Gates’s zero emissions goal.

Toshiba is already at work on a 4S (Super-Safe, Small and Simple) model reactor. It’s hoping to begin production on that model by 2014.

Video: Spotify Demo on Android Phone

Spotify‘s Daniel Ek gave the last keynote of the SXSW Interactive 2010 today. You can read the full details of his talk on AppScout here, but at the end he pulled out an Android phone and showed how Spotify works on Android. 

This demo was done using local music, not streaming, because he wanted to “avoid the roaming charges.”

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Corsair Unveils Force Series SSDs

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A few more choices in the rapidly expanding number of sol-d-state drives: Corsair recently launched the Force Series, which promise extra-fast performance. The Force Series uses an innovative SSD processor technology from SandForce to deliver up to 285MB-per-second read speeds and 275MB-per-second write speeds. The line also offers write-endurance and error-correction features.

“We have been very impressed with the SandForce SSD processor innovations in the months that we have been working with them, and we can’t wait to get these extraordinarily fast SSDs into the hands of our most demanding customers,” says Kevin Conley, vice president of engineering at Corsair.

This line comes in 100GB and 200GB capacities and should be available this week from Corsair. Pricing hasn’t been announced yet.

MIT Researchers Discover New Energy Source

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It seems like we’ve been looking for better battery technology for
decades, but it turns out some MIT researchers may have finally solved
the problem.

A team of scientists have discovered a microscopic energy source that
can generate electricity using nanotechnology
, with the hope that it
could be used some day for creating more environmentally friendly
batteries, CNN reports.

The experiment coats organic carbon nanotubes with a thin layer of
fuel and employs something called a thermopower wave (which sounds
powerful). The result could power future computers and cell phones
using batteries that are 10 times smaller than before, while retaining
the same power output.

And they could be incinerated or just degrade over time without
leaving heavy metal residue in the environment, the report said.
There’s no word yet on whether this will even scale properly to a
consumer-level product, but here’s hoping.

Image credit: MIT/Christine Daniloff

SXSW: Sparks Fly at Internet TV Debate

d-link-boxee-box.jpgOn the opening night of SXSW Interactive, HDNet founder Mark Cuban and Boxee founder Avner Ronan traded verbal barbs and a few well-reasoned arguments trying to answer the simple question: will Internet TV take over? Ronan sees Internet video services replacing the cable TV model and allowing users to purchase programming a la carte. Ever the businessman, Cuban just wants to see the money, or as he put it at one point, the “shekels.”

At times the debate seemed rehearsed, but that is because it started more than a year ago in a combative exchange of blog posts. (One of Cuban’s was titled “Why Do Internet People Think Content People Are Stupid?“) With the rhetorical groundwork laid, the two executives held nothing back in their face-to-face meeting.

“If you think that the Internet going to replace cable you’re crazy,” Cuban said, noting that no one in the Internet video space is making money, including Boxee, and that the current model of delivering content for free is going nowhere.

“But people are willing to pay for Internet video right now,” Ronan responded.  “They are paying for Netflix, they are paying for MLB, they are paying for a lot of things,” he said. “It isn’t about free or not free. It is about whether the Internet can deliver video and it can.”

How much video and how reliably it can be delivered is a different question. And that is where Cuban made his strongest points.  Having a few million users download programming a few times a week is one thing, but what about when it is tens of millions? The Internet simply wasn’t built to support that kind of delivery.

“When do you think that ESPN will say Monday Night Football could have 20 million subscribers, so let’s stream it over the Internet?” asked Cuban.

“A couple of years…,” began Ronan.

“Ha! Like two years or 200 years!?” snapped Cuban.

The hour-long debate, briefly interrupted by a fire alarm that cleared the Austin Convention Center, also touched on net neutrality, the limits of Wi-Fi home networks, and development platforms for set-top boxes.

Despite the testy exchanges and the ideological divide, there was actually a lot of agreement on practical matters. Ronan acknowledged that pay models needed to evolve and that providers like HDNet should be paid for their content. Cuban offered to put video on any network, including Internet-based platforms, as long as the numbers made sense.

For better or worse, as Cuban put it, “The future of television is television.”

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