By Maggie Shiels

By 2015 more than 12 billion devices will be capable of connecting to 500 billion hours of TV and video content, says chip giant Intel.

It said its vision of TV everywhere will be more personal, social, ubiquitous and informative.

“TV is out of the box and off the wall,” Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, told BBC News.

“TV will remain at the centre of our lives and you will be able to watch what you want where you want.”

Mr Rattner said: “We are talking about more than one TV-capable device for every man and woman on the planet.

“People are going to feel connected to the screen in ways they haven’t in the past.”

Speaking at Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, he said the success of TV was due to the growing number of ways to consume content.

Today that includes everything from the traditional box in the corner of the living room to smartphones, laptops, netbooks, desktops and mobile internet devices.

Continuing the theme, Malachy Moynihan, Cisco’s vice-president of video product strategy, told IDF attendees to expect an explosion of content for such devices.

“We are seeing an amazing move of video to IP (internet) networks,” he said. “By 2013 90% of all IP traffic will be video; 60% of all video will be consumed by consumers over IP networks.”

Infinite choice

Developers keen to tap into this growth were told by Eric Kim, Intel’s digital home group boss, to “keep it simple and easy”.

“Don’t make my TV act like a PC. This is what we hear consistently from the consumer,” said Mr Kim. “The key challenge is how to bring the power and richness of the internet but keep it TV simple.”

Mr Kim unveiled some hardware Intel hopes developers will adopt to make more devices TV capable.

He showed off the Atom CE4100 system-on-a-chip (SoC) that can be used to bring internet content and services to digital TVs, DVD players and advanced set-top boxes.

Codenamed Sodaville, it is the first 45 nanometre manufactured consumer electronics SoC based on Intel architecture.

IDF attendees also heard from speakers about what promises to be a new kind of TV experience as broadcast content, video content, internet content and personal content is all blended together.

Eric Huggers, director of the BBC’s Future Media and Technology, who has driven development of the iPlayer, said: “It’s about unlocking a whole raft of new capabilities and services.

“Think of TV as an opportunity to give consumers a gateway to infinite choice,” he added.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Future is TV-shaped, says Intel: BBC

LONDON, England (CNN) — Over the past 20 years, robotics have revolutionized surgery, and new innovations are continuing to push the boundaries of medicine.

Mike Rustic, senior lecturer at the mechanical engineering department at Imperial College, London, says machines such as the “da Vinci” system have had a huge impact on surgery.

The “da Vinci” first appeared in 1991 and lets surgeons carry out keyhole surgery remotely, allowing them to control robot arms from a console that also provides a three-dimensional image of the proceedings.

While the “da Vinci” system is the most widespread robotic surgery tool, Rustic says the “Sensei Robotic Catheter System” is also starting to be used for electrophysiology procedures on the heart.

A new exhibition at London’s Royal College of Surgeons called “Sci-Fi Surgery: Medical Robots” has displays ranging from the “da Vinci” system to prototype microbots designed to be swallowed and self-assembled in the human body.

Rustic says there is much ongoing research into micro machines — miniaturized robots that could be placed in a patient’s body to gather information or carry out medical procedures.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: What surgery will look like in the future: CNN

(WIRED) — Scientists are one step closer to knowing what you’ve seen by reading your mind.

Having modeled how images are represented in the brain, the researchers translated recorded patterns of neural activity into pictures of what test subjects had seen.

Though practical applications are decades away, the research could someday lead to dream-readers and thought-controlled computers.

“It’s what you would actually use if you were going to build a functional brain-reading device,” said Jack Gallant, a University of California, Berkeley neuroscientist.

The research, led by Gallant and Berkeley postdoctoral researcher Thomas Naselaris, builds on earlier work in which they used neural patterns to identify pictures from within a limited set of options.

The current approach, described this week in Neuron, uses a more complete view of the brain’s visual centers. Its results are closer to reconstruction than identification, which Gallant likened to “the magician’s card trick where you pick a card from a deck, and he guesses which card you picked. The magician knows all the cards you could have seen.”

In the latest study, “the card could be a photograph of anything in the universe. The magician has to figure it out without ever seeing it,” said Gallant.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Brain scans reveal what you’ve seen: CNN

FORTY years ago this month American academics sent the first message over the ARPANET, a military network that was the precursor of today’s internet. A legacy of those efforts is that the American government continues to control the internet’s underlying technology—notably the system of allocating addresses. This is about to change, albeit slightly.

For the past decade America has delegated some of its authority over the internet to a non-profit organisation called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)—an arrangement other countries have complained about, both because they have little say in it and because ICANN’s management has occasionally proved erratic. ICANN’s latest mandate is due to expire on September 30th. The day before, a new accord is planned to come into effect, whereby America will pass some of its authority over ICANN to the “internet community” of businesses, individual users and other governments.

Previous agreements had maintained close American oversight over ICANN and imposed detailed reforms, but the latest document, called an “affirmation of commitments”, is only four pages long. It gives ICANN the autonomy to manage its own affairs. Whereas prior agreements had to be renewed every few years, the new one has no fixed term.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Regulating the internet: ICANN be independent: Economist

Forgot to charge your cell phone last night? Imagine that you could power it by walking. Weirder still, you might be able to just spray a new battery on.

These concepts are being developed by two leading nanotechnology researchers who are developing cleaner, more efficient ways of delivering electrical power. In working toward making these ideas realities, they are making use of structures that are 100 nanometers or smaller, where one nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

“[The nanoscale] can make the components small, sensitive and high-performance,” said Zhong Lin “Z.L.” Wang, distinguished professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Engineering. “The toughness and the flexibility increase by orders of magnitude.”

Barely lifting a finger

Wang and colleagues are working on harnessing the energy of the body’s natural movements to power small devices. Even the simple act of moving your fingers while typing creates energy that could power a small device, and these researchers are showing that nanotechnology can enable this transformation.

Here’s the hard science: To take advantage of animal movement for energy, Wang’s team makes use of the piezoelectric effect, which refers to the ability of certain materials to generate an electric potential when a stress is applied to them. For instance, if you compress a crystal, it temporarily changes shape, causing the ions inside the crystal to polarize and produce a voltage drop.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Tiny technologies could produce big energy solutions: CNN

FEW companies are as creative as Google, which serves up innovations almost as fast as its popular search-engine serves up results. This week the firm unveiled a new version of its Chrome web browser and launched Fast Flip, which lets users scroll through the contents of an online newspaper in much the same way that they leaf through its pages in print. On September 30th the company will roll out another fledgling product, Google Wave, for a test involving some 100,000 people. Billed as a revolutionary way to collaborate online, Wave is also the product of a new, more structured approach to innovation within the company.

For years Google has had a fairly informal product-development system. Ideas percolated upwards from Googlers without any formal process for senior managers to review them. Teams working on innovative stuff were generally kept small. Such a system worked fairly well while Google was in its infancy. But now that it is a giant with 20,000 employees, the firm risks stifling potential money-spinners with a burgeoning bureaucracy.

To stop that happening, Google has begun to hold regular meetings at which employees are encouraged to present new ideas to Eric Schmidt, the firm’s chief executive, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin, its co-founders. It has also given some projects more resources and independence than in the past. Both moves are designed to ward off the conservatism that can set in as companies mature. “We are actively trying to prevent middle-agedom,” explains Mr Schmidt.

Google Wave has benefited from this anti-ageing treatment. The new software allows people to create shared content that is hosted on Google’s servers online, or “in the cloud”. When they open Google Wave, users see three columns on their screens. The left-hand one contains folders and address books, while the middle column is a list of “waves”—online conversations users have initiated or signed up to. Clicking on a wave displays its contents in the right-hand column. People can post text, photos, web feeds and other things into a wave and exchange comments with one another instantly.

Illustration by Claudio Munoz

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Google’s corporate culture: Creative tension: Economist

Oliver Yeh is the kind of guy who cooks up ideas so kooky, so out-of-this-world, that even his fellow MIT students tend to roll their eyes when they hear them.

But that never stops him.

His latest concept — to launch a camera into near-space using a weather balloon, a cell phone, hand warmers and a drink cooler — fell flat when he sent out an e-mail message to dozens of his classmates, asking for help.

Unfazed, Yeh managed to find one friend willing to chip in. And on September 2, the go-it-alone pair floated a balloon-camera high enough into the atmosphere to photograph the curvature of the Earth and the deep black of space, all on a lunch-money budget of $148.

“For me, it was just about not being afraid to do what I love to do,” said Yeh, a 20-year-old MIT senior studying computer science and electrical engineering. “Before, people were just kind of like, ‘That’s a crazy idea; there he goes all over again.’ (Yeh once convinced a friend to float the Charles River with him on a raft made of plastic bottles.)

“I didn’t have a lot of people who wanted to do it with me, so I’m really glad I stuck it out and succeeded in what I wanted to do.”

For more on this article, please click on the following link: Students launch camera to edge of space, snap pics of Earth: CNN

By Maggie Shiels

Mobile providers have said that US proposals to ensure all traffic on the internet is treated equally should not be applied to wireless traffic.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants rules to prevent providers blocking or slowing down bandwidth-heavy usage such as streaming video.

Providers claim a two-tiered system is essential for the future vitality of the net.

Mobile operators said any regulation would damage innovation.

FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said doing nothing was not an option.

In his first major speech since his appointment earlier in the summer, he told an audience in Washington that the rules were “not about government regulation of the internet”.

“History’s lesson is clear. Ensuring a robust and open internet is the best thing we can do to promote investment and innovation,” he told the audience at Washington think tank the Brookings Institution.

“And while there are some who see every policy decision as either pro-business or pro-consumer, I reject that approach; it’s not the right way to see technology’s role in America.”

The FCC’s proposals are meant to ensure that internet service providers cannot block or slow down traffic, such as bandwidth-hogging video downloads. Operators must also be transparent about network management, it said.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: ‘Open internet’ rules criticised: BBC

AMERICA and other countries still have to fine-tune their cyber-defences to distinguish mere nuisances from real menaces. That, rather than any revelations about fiendish North Korean cyber-warfare, seems to be the upshot of the latest reported cyber-attack on South Korean and American websites.

Initially, it was reported that this was the first series of attacks to hit government websites in several countries simultaneously. Officials in both Seoul and Washington, DC, said they were suffering “distributed denial of service” overload (known as DDOS in geekspeak). In these a computer is overwhelmed with bogus requests for a response sent from infected computers. American targets included sites at the Treasury, the Secret Service, and the Transportation Department; the South Korean list included the Defence Ministry, the National Assembly, the presidential Blue House and some banks. The timing felt eerie: attacks began on July 4th, Independence Day.

Neither country is a stranger to cyberwarfare. The South Korean Defence Security Command reported an average of 95,000 daily attacks. Some security experts blame North Korea, which has supposedly trained an elite group of hackers at Mirim College, its military school. In a speech in May, President Barack Obama called cyber-security one of America’s “most serious economic and national security challenges.”

For more on this article, please click on the following link: A cyber-warfare mystery: Ghost in the machine: Economist

MOST technology firms fall into one of two brackets: those that sell individual components, such as Intel, a chip giant, and those that offer finished products, such as Apple of iPhone fame. MediaTek sits somewhere in between: it sells most of the innards of mobile phones in a single package, but not the phones themselves—a strategy that has made it one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers. On August 4th it said its second-quarter profits were 80% higher than a year before, at NT$9.16 billion ($277m).

Although no household name, MediaTek makes products used by most consumers in rich countries. The Taiwanese firm is a “fabless” chipmaker, meaning that it only designs its chips, while subcontracting production. It started life in 1997 making chips for CD-ROM drives, and eventually took to building the brains of all sorts of consumer devices. Today MediaTek is the leader in these markets, equipping more than 50% of DVD players, for instance.

Yet these have become commodity businesses with low margins. So in 2004 MediaTek expanded into higher-value territory by making the bundles of chips, or “chipsets”, on which mobile phones rely. Being a latecomer, the firm opted to sell processor-, radio- and other sorts of chips together with the necessary software. This “total solution” makes it much easier for phonemakers to produce handsets.

For more on this article, please click on the following link: MediaTek and mobile-phone chips Fabless and fearless: Economist