Monday, February 22, 2010

Chandrayaan-II scheduled for 2013 lauch:

India’s next moon mission, Chandrayaan-II, will take place in the first quarter of 2013, according to ISRO. Chandrayaan-II is a part of a four-year project being carried out by India and Russia. This unmanned mission (like its predecessor) would carry lesser payloads and also investigate the presence of water.
Project director Mylaswamy Anadurai said the designs for the mission’s rover and orbiter had been finalized and the fabrication would began shortly.

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Sanyo Xacti CG11:

These simple to use camcorders from Sanyo come in range of ey-catching colours, and can shoot 720p resolution HD videos. The best feature is the ability to directly upload videos on YouTube as long there is a Wi-Fi connectivity around. The default storage is a little disappointing though, you will have only 40MB to play around with. You can pick one up for Rs.14,660($318).

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Nokia's 'Booklet 3G' Netbook With 12 Hour Battery-Life:

Nokia plans to release availablity and pricing details for their new netbook called the Booklet 3G.
Yes, Nokia is bringing out its own kind of Netbook, and even though it may look like a regular netbook, it will carry the classy, smooth design we are used to see from Nokia.
The Booklet 3G will be Windows based and powered by the popular and efficient Intel Atom processor with a whopping 12 hour battery life. This means people will be able to leave their power cables behind a little more often, without losing connectivity.
Weighing only 1.25 kilograms, this new lightweight plans to pack a significant punch with its highly portable alluminum casing. It's little more than 2 centimetres thick.
Connectivity options include 3G/HSDPA as well as Wi-fi, offering users high speed access to the internet.
The device features a HDMI port enabling HD video out, a built-in camera for video calling, bluetooth and SD card reader. Featuring a 10-inch glass HD ready display and a built-in A-GPS (which works with the Ovi Maps gadget), pinpointing your exact position takes only seconds.
Nokia is one of the world's leading providers of connectivity. Considering that Nokia is probably one of the most well known names in the world today, consumers should be able to look forward to be able to add to their list of gadgets the new Booklet 3G.
Nokia seems to be upping their game every time a new product is released, and we expect pretty much the same this time. Of course consumer expectations will likely be high with this new addition to their product line, but if Nokia continues to deliver the high quality we have grown accustomed to over the years, I am sure it will be a hit with users.

The first touch watch phone of the world:

LG GD910, is a successor to PRADA, the first full touch screen phone released by LG in 2007. Designing such a small touchscreen like the one on the LG GD910 Touch Watch Phone is far more difficult than designing a larger one. In order to be usable, the screen has to be far more precise and far more sensitive than the technology thats currently available. For the LG GD 910 Touch Watch Phone, we were able to develop a very high-resolution 1.4-inch screen that is extremely responsive to user commands and easy to read.
LG GD910 is not only quite small in size, it is also equipped with most of the features offered by the mobile phones. The watch phone is compatible with 3G HSDPA networks, videos, MP3 player, etc. Besides, LG GD910s compatibility with blue tooth sets it apart from other watch phones.

Nanowires Are Key To Future Transistors And Electronics:

A new generation of ultrasmall transistors and more powerful computer chips using tiny structures called semiconducting nanowires are closer to reality after a key discovery by researchers at IBM, Purdue University and the University of California at Los Angeles.
The researchers have learned how to create nanowires with layers of different materials that are sharply defined at the atomic level, which is a critical requirement for making efficient transistors out of the structures.
Having sharply defined layers of materials enables you to improve and control the flow of electrons and to switch this flow on and off, said Eric Stach, an associate professor of materials engineering at Purdue.
Electronic devices are often made of "heterostructures," meaning they contain sharply defined layers of different semiconducting materials, such as silicon and germanium. Until now, however, researchers have been unable to produce nanowires with sharply defined silicon and germanium layers. Instead, this transition from one layer to the next has been too gradual for the devices to perform optimally as transistors.
Whereas conventional transistors are made on flat, horizontal pieces of silicon, the silicon nanowires are "grown" vertically. Because of this vertical structure, they have a smaller footprint, which could make it possible to fit more transistors on an integrated circuit, or chip.
But first we need to learn how to manufacture nanowires to exacting standards before industry can start using them to produce transistors.
Nanowires might enable engineers to solve a problem threatening to derail the electronics industry. New technologies will be needed for industry to maintain Moore's law, an unofficial rule stating that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles about every 18 months, resulting in rapid progress in computers and telecommunications. Doubling the number of devices that can fit on a computer chip translates into a similar increase in performance. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to continue shrinking electronic devices made of conventional silicon-based semiconductors.
In something like five to, at most, 10 years, silicon transistor dimensions will have been scaled to their limit.
Transistors made of nanowires represent one potential way to continue the tradition of Moore's law.
The researchers used an instrument called a transmission electron microscope to observe the nanowire formation. Tiny particles of a gold-aluminum alloy were first heated and melted inside a vacuum chamber, and then silicon gas was introduced into the chamber. As the melted gold-aluminum bead absorbed the silicon, it became "supersaturated" with silicon, causing the silicon to precipitate and form wires. Each growing wire was topped with a liquid bead of gold-aluminum so that the structure resembled a mushroom.
Then, the researchers reduced the temperature inside the chamber enough to cause the gold-aluminum cap to solidify, allowing germanium to be deposited onto the silicon precisely and making it possible to create a heterostructure of silicon and germanium.

The World's First Programmable Quantum Computer:

With only a few intense lasers, electrodes and some ultracold ions, researchers at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, have been able to build the first programmable quantum computer.
What makes this experiment different is that this new system is able to perform more than 150 random processing routines.
For Quantum computers to become more useful, these machines should be able to be progammed just like a normal computer can be programmed. This will of course mean that the system will be able to run many different programs. Up until now, earlier versions of quantum computers have been very restricted with regards to the amount of specific tasks they could perform.
The new study is "a powerful demonstration of the technological advances towards producing a real-world quantum computer," says quantum physicist Winfried Hensinger of the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. The researchers, led by David Hanneke of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo. built the computer based on two cooled beryllium ions with a temperature of just above zero.
The ions formed the quantum bits, or qubits, analogous to the bits in normal computers represented by 0s and 1s, and were trapped by a magnetic field on a gold-plated aluminum chip. To perform the processing operations, short laser bursts were used to manipulate the beryllium ions. Magnesium ions kept the beryllium ions stationary, and from getting hot. It is believed that this system may be applied to larger-scale systems.
The system built was mostly experimental, but what is important is the fact that the principal may be applied on a larger scale, and therefore become practical.

SST Unveils World's First Low-Voltage, High-Speed Quad I/O Serial Flash Memory:

SST (Silicon Storage Technology, Inc.), one of the leaders in the flash memory technology announced worlds first 1.8V, high-speed
quad-bit serial flash memory.
The memory includes an 80 MHz operating frequency, and 26 WF Series Serial Quad I/O (SQI) family of 4-bit multiplexed I/O serial interface
devices, to activate XIP (execute in place capability).
Once XIP is enabled, programs do not require code shadowing on SRAM. They can be executed directly from the flash memory. Besides, the memory functions efficiently even at a low power consumption.
"The mobile phone industry, in particular, has been yearning for a serial memory solution with high performance and extremely low power consumption and we are proud to be the first in the industry to achieve this highly challenging accomplishment," said Douglas Lee, vice president, Memory Products, SST.
"In addition to performance and power consumption advantages, our new 26WF Series offers designers of ultra low-cost mobile handsets with a low pin count, quad I/O protocol serial flash memory that is straightforward and easy to integrate, enabling continued system cost reduction. Today's announcement solidifies our leadership in low-voltage, high-speed serial flash memory and underscores our commitment to providing customers with the solutions they need to achieve their design goals."
The 26 WF Series SQI devices are based on a number of advanced features. Small block sectors on the chip may be erased within 25 ms whereas it takes only 50 ms to erase the entire chip. The write suspend and resume operations make memory manipulation remarkably easy and effective. 26WF Series devices provide software write protection to ensure code security. Besides, the secure ID area can be programmed only once.

SST Unveils World's First Low-Voltage, High-Speed Quad I/O Serial Flash Memory:

SST (Silicon Storage Technology, Inc.), one of the leaders in the flash memory technology announced worlds first 1.8V, high-speed
quad-bit serial flash memory.
The memory includes an 80 MHz operating frequency, and 26 WF Series Serial Quad I/O (SQI) family of 4-bit multiplexed I/O serial interface
devices, to activate XIP (execute in place capability).
Once XIP is enabled, programs do not require code shadowing on SRAM. They can be executed directly from the flash memory. Besides, the memory functions efficiently even at a low power consumption.
"The mobile phone industry, in particular, has been yearning for a serial memory solution with high performance and extremely low power consumption and we are proud to be the first in the industry to achieve this highly challenging accomplishment," said Douglas Lee, vice president, Memory Products, SST.
"In addition to performance and power consumption advantages, our new 26WF Series offers designers of ultra low-cost mobile handsets with a low pin count, quad I/O protocol serial flash memory that is straightforward and easy to integrate, enabling continued system cost reduction. Today's announcement solidifies our leadership in low-voltage, high-speed serial flash memory and underscores our commitment to providing customers with the solutions they need to achieve their design goals."
The 26 WF Series SQI devices are based on a number of advanced features. Small block sectors on the chip may be erased within 25 ms whereas it takes only 50 ms to erase the entire chip. The write suspend and resume operations make memory manipulation remarkably easy and effective. 26WF Series devices provide software write protection to ensure code security. Besides, the secure ID area can be programmed only once.

New Fingernail Size Chip Stores Data Worth Space in 20 HD DVDs:

North Carolina State University engineers have developed a material to allow a small fingernail size chip that stores data worth space in 20 HD DVDs. It is equivalent to 250 million pages of text.
It is far greater than the storage capacity allowed by any computer memory system.
The team of the researchers has been led by Dr. Jagdish Narayan, John C.C. Fan Family Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and director of the National Science Foundation Center for Advanced Materials and Smart Structures at NC State. The team employed the strategy of selective doping. It involves adding impurities to specific materials thereby causing a change in its properties.
The research is expected to result in more efficient production of energy and a better fuel economy for vehicles. Besides, the heat produced by semiconductors during the production is also expected to be reduced dramatically, making the entire process more effective in turn.
Metal nickel was added to a ceramic, magnesium oxide. It resulted in nickel atoms, 10 square nanometers in size. The 90% reduction in size (a pinhead has a diameter of 1 million nanometers) is dramatic.
Instead of making a chip that stores 20 gigabytes, you have one that can handle one terabyte, or 50 times more data, Narayan says.
The discovery also aides spintronics.The emerging technology harnesses the production of energy thats produced by spinning electrons. The process releases no heat. The team manipulated the electron spin. It resulted in harnessing the energy of the electrons as well. The results of the study may be highly significant for all those aiming at producing more efficient semiconductors.

A Great Relief for Strained Broadband Networks:

Monash researchers have developed highly effective optical fibre technology to dramatically enhance the capacity of strained broadband networks. It’s also expected to improve the download times across the world.
The innovative technology called optical Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing, or oOFDM has been pioneered by the Monash researchers Professors Arthur Lowery and Jean Armstrong.
The ADSL principles employed by the technology enlarge the data transfer capacity over the traditional copper and wireless broadband to optical fibre cables. It increases their data capacity tenfold!
This is what Professor Lowery says about the technology,More and more people are accessing broadband internet and using it for data-heavy activities, such as video. This poses a major challenge to the existing optical fibre infrastructure unless the capacity or bandwidth on existing fibres can be augmented.
The appeal of oOFDM is that it offers an inexpensive means of dramatically increasing long-haul capacity from the current transmission rate of 10 Gigabits per second to more than 100 Gigabits per second, over new and existing optical fibre.
Professor Lowery is also of the opinion that the innovative technology would make it feasible for the telecommunications carriers to provide the consumers with faster download speeds at economical rates. He says, Standard data transmission is equivalent to transmitting a series of single notes, but oOFDM is more like transmitting the notes grouped together in a chord. Since more data is packed into the chord, more information can be sent that is less prone to technical issues, as each signal travels down the optical fibre.
Besides, Professor Cornish says, ‘Monash University is developing the research solutions to the key challenges facing our world. We are proudly supporting Ofidium and TTCF in taking this ground-breaking research to market.
Monash Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-Chancellor (Research) Professor Edwina Cornish expect the Ofidium technology to produce revolutionary changes in global telecommunications.
The Monash University patent is commercialized by Ofidium Pty Ltd. The company has recently secured an investment of $250,000 from the Trans Tasman Commercialization Fund (TTCF). It’s a $30 million Fund based in Melbourne. TTCF has supported the University earlier also. However, it’s the first investment by TTCF into Victorian university research.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Google on TV:

People spend a lot of time watching TV so improving the relevance of advertising information on that medium is important. Google has announced its trial to deliver Google TV ads. Working closely with its partners, Echostar, Astound Cable, the search engine giant is currently running a trial to deliver better ads to viewers and help advertisers, operators and programmers more efficiently buy, schedule and measure ads on television.
Google is exploiting advances in set-top-box technologies to report aggregate statistics on how many times an advertisement was viewed and whether it was watched through to the end. As part of this trial, Google will be working with partners to use aggregate, anonymised set-top-box metrics to deliver timely and accurate-viewing reports. Advertisers can use this data to understand the effectiveness of their TV ad campaigns and provide more relevant ads to viewers.
Google TV ads is an automated process-from planning the campaign to uploading and serving the ad to reporting on its effectiveness. Like its Adwords advertising programme, Google TV ads are brought using an auction model and through a single online interface
That is already familiar to agencies and advertisers

Watch DVDs on smartphone:

Mobile systems, a provider of productivity software and dictionary content for smartphones and PDAs, has launched MobileDVD for the S60 platform.
The MobileDVD software is avideo player for S60-powered phones, offering an easy and enjoyable way to watch video on the go. The mobile player is powered by a free video convertor utility for windows PCs, which is a powerful media tool that supports a wide variety of codes and video formats and allows users to create small video files for playback on mobile phones.
MobileDVD is compatible with the latest S60 3rd edition phones, including the whole Nokia E and N series.

World’s first 45nm processor:

In one of the biggest advancements in fundamental transistor design, Intel is using dramatically different transistor materials to build the hundreds of millions of microscopic 45nm transistors inside the next generation of its Core2 family of processors.
This new transistor design break-through will allow Intel to continue delivering record-breaking PC, laptop and server processor speeds while reducing the amount of electrical leakage from transistors that can hamper chip and PC design, size, power consumption, noise and costs. It also ensures that Moore’s Law-a high-tech industry axiom that transistor counts double about every two years to deliver ever more functionality at exponentially decreasing cost-thrives well into the next decade.
By using a new materials combination of high-k gate dielectrics and metal gates, Intel’s 45nm transistors significantly improve performance to deliver faster multicore processors that consume less power.

Your virtual avatar:

Electronic Arts and Endemol are together developing a new digital entertainment concept(called ‘Virtual Me’) to bridge the divide between traditional TV and video games. The all-new online offering is being prepared to debut in Endemol’s Big Brother reality show.
Virtual Me combines cutting-edge avatar creation technology from EA with popular formats from Endemol to give consumers a break-through way to meet, compete and socialize in online digital worlds. An easy-to-use tool will allow users to create life-like cyber-clones, with uniquely customized appearances and identities. They can then participate, via their avatars, in virtual versions of TV talent shows like ‘Fame Academy’ and game shows like ‘Deal or No Deal’.

Dual-format HD player:

Samsung Electronics will introduce a dual-format high-defination (HD) optical disk player(BD-UP5000) that will fully supports both HD-DVD and Blu-ray disk formats and their interactive technologies, HDi and BD-java.
With the player, consumers can enjoy additional studio content such as trailers, director’s comments, more elaborate interactive menus and behind-the-scene footage

Smart surveillance camera:

eInfochips has unveiled the reference design of an intelligent IP surveillance camera(IPNetCam) with complex video analysis capabilities. The camera design, based on Texas Instrument’s(TI) DaVinci technology and ObjectVideo OnBoard analytics, enables original equipment manufactures(OEMs) to build a range of intelligent IP surveillance cameras quickly with low development costs.
IPNetCam sets new standards in network-supported security and video- surveillance
Technology providing robust video content analysis that allows rule-based object detection, classification, tracking and real-time alerting. Intelligent video surveillance will help increase the overall effectiveness of security systems, reduce loss of valuable assets and, potentially, save lives

Web browser for mobiles:

Microsoft has unveiled the prototype of a mobile internet browser that mirrors the ease of going online via a desktop computer.Instead of relying on websites being tailored for mobile devices, the newly launched wed browser(Deepfish) captures and presentd sites as they would appear on a desktop or laptop computer’s browser rather than as the stripped-down versions that Web applications for wireless devices typically implement.

ZigBee stack for free:

Texas Instruments has announced a ZigBee stack, Z-Stack, for download.Z-stack is compliant with the ZigBee 2006 specification and supports multiple platforms including the CC2430 system-on-chip solution for IEEE 802.154/ZigBee and a new platform based on the CC2420 transceiver and TI’s MsP430 ultra-low-power microcontrollers (MCUs).
Z-stack supports features like over-the-air download, which allows updates of nodes wirelessly over a ZigBee mesh network, and CC2431, which features location awareness. This enables the users to create new ZigBee applications that can change behaviour based
on the nodes’s current location.

Multimedia streaming for mobiles:

AirChord, a provider of interactive mobile multimedia system, has showcased a next-generation streaming technology in India that covers the audio, video, TV and user-defined channels to be streamed from any where to anywhere over mobile data channels.
The application allows users to access numerous feeds from across the world including audio feeds of various Indian languages. It will also enable content providers to offer multimedia services to the consumers on various handsets that support Window CE, Java, Symbian OS, Brew and Palm OS. The service will be made available to the mobile users across different mobile networks.

Tamil TV soaps go mobile:

Reliance mobile customers in Tamil Nadu can now watch their favourite programmes conveniently even while on the move within the state or traveling across the country. The company has partnered with SUN Network to be beam all the programmes of SUN TV, a Tamil entertainment channel, online on Reliance mobile handsets.
Hosted on the R world, the multimedia suite of applications of Reliance mobile, the ‘Mobile TV’ menu offers news, debates and various other interesting programmes.

R and D in biotechnology:

India and Australia will cooperate in the field of biotechnology. Under the MOU signed by the Department of Biotechnology, government of India, and Department of Education science and Training, government of Australia, an Indo-Australian Biotechnology Fund has been set up. The overall objective of the fund is to develop and support collaborative research activities, which draw upon complementary science and technology strengths in India and Australia.
In the first round, biomedical devices and implants, stem cells, vaccines/medical diagnostics, transgenic crops, nutraceuticals and functional foods, and bioremediation have been identified as priority.