The internet giant seeks new ways to foster innovation
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. …

By John D. Sutter
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 …

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 …

How a Taiwanese firm became one of the world’s fastest-growing chipmakers
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 …

Two novel approaches to making electricity from sunlight
ISRAEL is a country with plenty of sunshine, lots of sand and quite a few clever physicists and chemists. Put these together—having first extracted the oxygen from the sand, to leave pure silicon—and you have the ingredients for an innovative solar-power industry. Shining sunlight onto silicon is the most direct way of turning it into electricity (the light knocks electrons free from the silicon atoms), but it is also the most expensive. The scientists are what you need to make the process cheaper. …