USB 3.0 SuperSpeed gone wild at CES 2010, trumps even your new SSD – “Just in case you didn’t notice the arrow, that’s a USB 3.0 cable up there, plugged into a USB 3.0 port, running in a Fujitsu laptop that is the first to pack integrated support for USB 3.0. How fast was it? On the other end of this one was a Buffalo external enclosure stuffed with an old-fashioned, platter-based hard disk, which still delivered perfectly absurd transfer rates of about 135MB/sec. When another, similar setup ran with an Intel SSD what happened the results were even more impressive: a few ticks over 200MB/sec. Yes, we’re about to enter another dimension. A time when external drives are as fast as internal ones. Where the speed at which you can fill up your MP3 player is limited only by the speed of the storage on that device itself. You are about to enter… the SuperSpeed zone….”

MagicJack’s Next Act: Disappearing Cell Phone Fees – “The company behind the magicJack, the cheap Internet phone gadget that’s been heavily promoted on TV, has made a new version of the device that allows free calls from cell phones in the home, in a fashion that’s sure to draw protest from cellular carriers…”

Self-feeding robots hunt for power outlets – “Planning to build a host of robot minions, but don’t have time to plug them in when their battery goes low? Well, then you need to enable them to feed themselves by finding their own power, and Brian Mayton might have just the solution for you. His electric field sensing robot, featured above, uses a series of electromagnetic sensors to hone into the 60 Hz signal produced by an electric outlet, and then plug itself it…”

Nvidia Showcases Tablets, Tegra 2 Platform – “The company wanted these tablets to have the performance of a PC, but have the energy efficiency of a cell phone. This is where the next generation of Nvidia’s Tegra 2 comes in. It features a dual-core Cortex A9 processor—part of its eight independent processors, which also include a Geforce GPU. Nvidia claims Tegra 2 will have 10 times the performance of a smartphone, operating at only 500 milliwatts. So battery life will be far better than products based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Intel’s Atom chips, according to Nvidia…”

Completely wireless – Tesla’s dream of wireless power transmission on display – “A Haier HDTV sits on top of a clear plastic stand, playing a movie from a Blu-ray player. Except as you walk around the display, you realize the HDTV is not connected to anything, not to the Blu-ray player and especially not to a power source.

Airnergy WiFi power system gives RCA a reason to exist (video) – “We don’t usually associate RCA with new and innovative technologies, but we think know they’re on to something with its Airnergy power system, which harvests energy from WiFi signals. Shipping this summer, the pocketable dongle picks up WiFi signals from the air and manages to charge an internal battery through some magic inside. You don’t have to connect to a network, you just have to be in a place that has signal, and it will automatically charge up. As if we weren’t intrigued already, they told us that they’re planning on building the tech into actual cellphone batteries, so you would theoretically never need to plug in again and your device would always be topped off. Yeah, we want…”
…”

Skype Brings Video Chat to Flat-Screen TVs – “VoIP provider Skype has struck deals with two TV makers offer over-the-Internet videoconferencing features to users. LG and Panasonic will release Web-connected TVs later this year which, combined with a separately sold webcam, will enable video chat from one’s living room. Skype also announced the availability of 720p HD video chat on its existing PC video call

CES 2010: Evolution Robotics’ Mint Sweeper Robot

technology…”

The Five-Step Program To Achieve 3-D Salvation – “There have been two major trends at this week’s tech trade show in Las Vegas: TVs are going to have the Internet and TVs are going 3-D. Hulucination is of the mind that the first trend is all Hulu’s—and YouTube’s and iTunes’—fault. At some point today, I started thinking Hulu is to blame for 3-D TV, too. The proof lies in the film industry. Let’s look at the steps that led to 3-D’s emergence there, and their parallels in the TV industry. I think you’ll see some synchronicity….”

Google or Apple — who’s the smartphone money on? – “Apple and Google, once the friendliest of Silicon Valley neighbours, have set themselves on a collision course. While Google was driving its tanks into Apple retail territory this week with its new smartphone, Steve Jobs quietly bought a mobile advertising company, potentially pitching the group that he founded into the online ad sales business. Google’s Nexus One “superphone” is a direct competitor to Apple’s iPhone and, according to some, a worthy rival. In buying Quattro Wireless for a reported $275 million (£170 million), Apple is following Google’s acquisition of AdMob, a mobile advertising network that competed with Quattro, for $750 million…”

Panic over teen ‘sexting’ eclipses bigger threat – “There are obviously real concerns here. Nobody wants their children sending naked pictures or getting sexually harassed via text message. But the overblown reaction has had some nasty consequences: Kids across the country have been arrested on child pornography charges when the pictures or videos in question are of themselves or their boyfriends or girlfriends. The focus on sexting also siphons attention from a more substantive threat: bullying. A year-old study by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society discounted the notion that the wired world poses unique dangers to kids, finding instead that bullying and harassment “are the most frequent threats that minors face, both online and offline.’’”

A Peek Into Netflix Queues – “Examine Netflix rental patterns, neighborhood by neighborhood, in a dozen cities. Some titles with distinct patterns are Mad Men, Obsessed and Last Chance Harvey…”

Camera phones are the new guns – “There’s an old adage that the best camera is the one you have with you. I personally own both a standalone point & shoot plus a digital SLR with three additional lenses, and I haven’t used either since last spring. Furthermore, during a recent once-in-a-lifetime trip to Southeast Asia the only camera I had with me was this Nokia N86 8MP. Not only did it take fantastic photos and video, but I could instantly share them online with friends and family. At this point I wouldn’t even consider purchasing a camera that didn’t have some kind of wireless Internet connection built in…”

CES 2010: The Challenge of Naming Technology – “Consumer electronics technology evolves more quickly, more quickly, it seems, than the industry’s vocabulary. So this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has been full of vocabulary lessons—some for me, some for the folks in the booths. It’s all a little confusing right now, and I hope it gets sorted out before it has to get translated to those salespeople at Best Buy, and, in turn, to the consumer. 3D television is ubiquitous at the Show, and it will certainly be appearing on retail shelves this year. (I’m not saying that it will fly off those shelves to consumer’s homes; whether it will or not is another discussion. But people indeed are talking about it…”

Despite Risks, Internet Creeps Onto Car Dashboards – “To the dismay of safety advocates already worried about driver distraction, automakers and high-tech companies have found a new place to put sophisticated Internet-connected computers: the front seat…”

Taser’s new weapon: mobile phone monitoring – “Stun gun maker Taser wants to help parents, not with jolts of electricity but with a tool which allows parents to effectively take over a child’s mobile phone and manage its use. “Basically we’re taking old fashioned parenting and bringing it into the mobile world,” Taser chairman and co-founder Tom Smith said at the Consumer Electronics Show here, where the Arizona company unveiled the new product. “Because when you give your child his mobile phone you don’t know who they’re talking to, what they’re sending or texting, all of those things,” Smith told AFP. The phone application, called “Mobile Protector,” allows a parent to screen a child’s incoming and outgoing calls and messages, block particular numbers and even listen in on a conversation…”

Software Sea Change – 2,000,000 Strong – “Over the week covering this past Christmas Day a piece of software I had contributed to was downloaded two million times. I’ve been writing Pop Software for my entire professional career. I may be the first to coin the term Pop Software but it’s with the presumption that we all know what I’m talking about – I’ve worked on games and applications targeted at the larger audience rather than businesses or niche products. Admittedly many of these projects had smaller scopes than others but the general principal holds – work with a team to create a piece of software that will be enjoyed by the general public. I have contributed code to hits, misses and to the forgettable wasteland in-between. Granting myself a very generous margin of error the results have laregely been within my expectations…”

How a Crook Conned The Bush Administration, the CIA, and the Pentagon With Software – “Playboy has a fascinating article on Dennis Montgomery, the man who conned the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Navy, the Air Force, the Senate Intelligence Committee and even Dick Cheney’s office into his phony anti-terrorist decryption technology…”

Meet Roxxxy the robotic girlfriend – “In what is billed as a world first, a life-size robotic girlfriend complete with artificial intelligence and flesh-like synthetic skin was introduced to adoring fans at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas on Saturday…”

Secret robot drone for Houston police:

INVENTING THE HISTORY OF INVENTION – “THE HISTORY OF TECHNOLOGY WAS OFFICIALly born in the United States in 1958, when the Society for the History of Technology was established. But long before the subject donned that academic cloak, three lone pioneers virtually invented it, writing histories that took on the human and moral dimensions of technology in the broadest way. The Harvard economic historian Abbott Payson Usher published A History of Mechanical Inventions in 1929. That same year the literary and social critic Lewis Mumford began the first draft of what would eventually become his masterpiece, Technics and Civilization, published in 1934, and simultaneously a Swiss art historian named Sigfried Giedion began a sweeping work that appeared in America in 1948 as Mechanization Takes Command. Together these men opened up a whole new, vital side of history and pursued it with a breadth of purpose that some critics complain isn’t being emulated by anyone today. They were the founding fathers of their field…”

Japanese Social Networking – It’s All Mobile – “Three-quarters of Japanese social network users access the sites only from their mobile phones. This observation comes from a survey conducted last year with almost 4,000 social network users in Japan by Mobile Marketing Data Labo. They found that 75.4% of respondents only accessed social networking sites from their mobile phone (and not from their PC). The number only accessing it from their PC (and not their mobile phone) was very low at just 2%…”

New Terahertz Detectors and Light Sources in Japan Could Open practical application of terahertz waves – “There are high expectations for the application of terahertz-frequency electromagnetic waves in various fields, including the non-destructive detection of narcotics or stimulants in mail, the identification of foreign matter in food, and investigation of residual chemicals in crops. However, terahertz waves have yet to be used widely because of the difficulty in generating and detecting them. For this reason, terahertz waves are considered to be ‘unexplored’ waves. RIKEN’s Tera-photonics Team has been developing a terahertz light source and detector, and an associated database, to open the way for the application of terahertz waves…”

Advanced Imaging Reveals a Computer 1,500 Years Ahead of Its Time – ” X-rays and advanced photography have uncovered the true complexity of the mysterious Antikythera mechanism, a device so astonishing that its discovery is like finding a functional Buick in medieval Europe.”

Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX – “Often, when we meet other game developers and say that we use OpenGL for our game Overgrowth, we’re met with stares of disbelief — why would anyone use OpenGL? DirectX is the future. When we tell graphics card representatives that we use OpenGL, the temperature of the room drops by ten degrees. This baffles us. It’s common geek wisdom that standards-based websites, for instance, trounce Silverlight, Flash, or ActiveX. Cross-platform development is laudable and smart. No self-respecting geek enjoys dealing with closed-standard Word documents or Exchange servers. What kind of bizarro world is this where engineers are not only going crazy over Microsoft’s latest proprietary API, but actively denouncing its open-standard competitor? Before we dive into the story of why we support OpenGL, let’s start with a bit of history…”

CES: Why the White House is backing away from Net neutrality – “The Obama administration and its allies at the Federal Communications Commission are retreating from a militant version of Net neutrality regulations first outlined by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski in September. That’s my reading of a number of recent developments, underscored by comments made by government speakers on a panel on the first day of a Tech Policy Summit at CES in Las Vegas…”

The ultimate cupholder:

SunTiles generate renewable energy and block solar heat – “Normally on a sunny day an open window lets in a great amount of solar heat, which then requires cooling systems to bring interior temperatures to bearable levels. Eco-conscious industrial designer Astrid Krogh is trying to kill two birds with one stone with a concept curtain that not only blocks solar heat but also acts as a renewable energy generator…”

Anti-Whaling Captain Reflects on True Cost of Collision – “As demonstrated this week, a high-tech speedboat is no match for a Japanese whaling vessel. After being sliced in half in Antarctic waters, anti-whaling ship Ady Gil sank to an inglorious death at the bottom of the ocean after being hit by a Japanese whaling ship. RIP, we say. It was pretty cool ship while it lasted…”

Get Free Access to Pay-Walled Content with a Simple Google Hack – “Ever stumble onto a pay wall at the likes of the Wall Street Journal but aren’t ready to subscribe just to read one article? Tech blog Digital Inspiration highlights a classic Google hack for breaking through the pay wall for free…”

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