#Manufacturing Advances Mean Truly Flexible Devices Are on the way One of the innovations packed inside the Apple Watchnd highlighted by designer Jony Ive at the company grand unveiling this weeks a flexible display.
Contrary to some earlier speculation about the device, however, this doesn mean you can actually bend the screen.
As with other devices featuring flexible displays, such as those from LG and Samsung, the display has been laminated onto a stiff pane,
fixing it in place to prevent the damage that would come from repeated flexing. Even so, the appearance of the first few flexible screens in commercial devices may be a sign of things to Come in fact
fully flexible electronic gadgetsith full-color displays that wrap around a wrist or fold upay be just a few years away,
thanks to solutions that manufacturers have started already to demonstrate. Apple hasn disclosed why the Apple Watch has a flexible display.
It might allow for a slight curve at the edges, and it may also simply be thinner than a conventional one (see he Apple Watch May Solve the Usual Smart Watch Annoyances.
In a conventional LCD display the liquid crystals within the pixels need to be positioned perfectly between two sheets of glass.
These sheets cannot be bent without misaligning the pixels. According to Max Mcdaniel chief marketing officer for Applied materials, a company whose equipment is used to make displays,
is also extremely difficult to make a flexible backlighthe component needed to illuminate LCD pixels.
So the screen in the Apple Watch is almost certainly an OLED display. Rather than the pixels being illuminated by a backlight,
each pixel glows on its own, like a minuscule light bulb. Manufacturers can already make OLED displays flexible.
They first laminate a sheet of plastic to glass and then deposit the materials for the pixels and the electronics on top of both.
The glass stabilizes the manufacturing process and afterwards the plastic, together with display and electronic components, is lifted off the glass.
Manufacturers have known how to do this for years. Samsung showed off a fully FLEXIBLE OLED display in 2013.
The tricky part is making sure the devices are durable. OLED pixels can be destroyed by even trace amounts of water vapor and oxygen,
so you have to seal the display within robust, high-quality, flexible materials. This is costly, and there are challenges with ensuring that the seal survives being bent hundreds or thousands of times over the lifetime of a device.
The parts within a flexible display also need to survive being bent. This is tricky because different layershe battery
the electronics, and the touch componentsend to be stacked, and the innermost layers have to bend more than the outermost ones.
The outer layers also stretch while the inner ones compress. Some researchers have developed stretchable electronics,
which might help accommodate stresses (see tretchable Displaysand aking Stretchable Electronics. Novel materials for touch screens that use flexible nanomaterials could also help.
One patent application suggests Apple is already looking at this issue. It describes measures such as varying the thickness of materials in a device to allow it to bend
while keeping the electronics lined up properly with the pixels they control. Making a flexible battery is another challenge.
While the lithium-polymer batteries used in smartphones today are somewhat flexible they can survive being bent many times.
One option is to make a segmented battery, like a segmented watch band, says Kevin Chen,
general manager for energy storage solutions at Applied materials. His company is developing solid-state batteries, which could easily be cut up into small pieces for flexible devices,
and which also have the potential to store much more energy than conventional lithium-ion batteries (see onger-Lasting Battery Is Being tested for Wearable devices.
Apple outlines a similar battery design in another recent patent application. Steady progress means fully flexible devices could be available in just a few years.
Meanwhile we have flexible displays that are fixed in places in the Apple Watch r
#A Nimble-Wheeled Farm Robot Goes to Work in Minnesota This summer a Minnesota startup began deploying an autonomous robot that rolls between corn plants spraying crop fertilizer.
The robot applies fertilizer while the plant is rapidly growing and needs it most. This eliminates the need for using tractors,
which can damage the high stalks, and reduces the amount of fertilizer needed earlier in the season,
says Kent Cavender-Bares, CEO of the company, Rowbot. Further, by reducing the fertilizer, the robot reduces the amount of nitrogen that can end up polluting waterways after rainstorms.
As the machine travels between rows it can spray two rows of corn on either side of the machine.
It uses GPS to know when it reached the end of the field, and LIDAR,
or laser-scanning, to make sure it stays between rows of mature cornstalks without hitting them.
Although such fields could also be fertilized at any time via irrigation, only about 15 percent of U s. cornfields are irrigated.
Rowbot developed its machine under a strategic partnership with Carnegie Robotics, which grew out of research at Carnegie-mellon University.
This summer Rowbot used its machine to fertilize 50 acres of corn at a charge of $10 per acre plus the cost of fertilizer.
Rowbot system is part of a technological revolution in farming that has gained momentum in recent years. GPS-guided tractors routinely apply seed and fertilizer across large areas,
and new airborne drones are providing farmers with high-resolution sensing ability (see gricultural Drones, although drone services can yet be offered commercially in the United states. Mike Schmitt, a professor in the Department of Soil, Water,
and Climate at the University of Minnesota, who has no ties to the startup, says the robot is great additional tool to put in the nutrient management technology toolkit.
Schmitt says the ability to apply fertilizer at precise times and locations is ery critical.
Rowbot which is operating on $2. 5 million of seed funding, is in discussions with researchers at the University of Illinois to prove the advantages of its approach.
The next step is to deploy multiple Rowbots on industrial-scale farms, and to add more sensing capacity to the machines.
The company is also testing using them for planting seed on cornfields for fall crops, called cover crops,
while the mature corn is still standing
#Datacoup Wants To buy Your Credit card and Facebook Data Datacoup one of the first companies to offer people money in exchange for their personal data has closed finished a trial of its service
and is now opening it to anyone (see Sell Your Personal data for $8 a Month).
Datacoup will pay up to $10 for access to your social network accounts credit card transaction records and other personal information and will gleaned sell insights from that data to companies looking for information on consumer behavior.
Talks are in progress with major consumer brands and financial institutions says Matt Hogan CEO of the startup.
Whether an individual user gets the full $10 a month or not depends on which streams of data he s willing to share.
Options include debit card and credit card transactions and data from Facebook Twitter and Linkedin. Datacoup won t provide raw data to companies.
Instead it will provide results of analyses performed on that data. For example a company might ask Datacoup to provide information on how often women in a certain age group mention coffee on Facebook on the same day they use their credit card in a coffee shop.
Donald Waldman a professor of economics at the University of Colorado says services like Datacoup may provide useful insights about the perceived value of privacy.
The fact that people do value their information seems obvious but the question is how much do they value it?
he says. Data streams like those that Datacoup collects could turn out to be worth more than $10 a month.
Tens of thousands of people already receive $100 a month from a company called Luth Research in return for very detailed data from their smartphones tablets
and PCS (see How much Is Your Privacy Worth?).Hogan expects the price that Datacoup offers people for their data to change as his company assesses the supply of customer information
and demand from companies willing to pay for analyses of that data. The market will decide he says s
#Fingerprinting Infants Helps Track Vaccinations in Developing Countries Billions of dollars a year are spent vaccinating children in developing countries
but about half as many immunizations are administered as could be because of unreliable vaccination records. Biometric researchers from Michigan State university have developed a fingerprint-scanning system for children under five years old that could replace ineffective paper vaccination records.
Until now biometrics experts believed fingerprints of babies and toddlers were too unreliable because image sensors are designed for the ridges and valleys of adult fingertips.
The Michigan State university researchers developed software that makes it feasible to accurately match fingerprints of children under five with off-the-shelf equipment.
They intend to present a paper detailing their work at a biometrics conference later this month.
Paper-based vaccination records are lost easily and don t reliably provide health workers with up-to-date information on patient history.
Fingerprints are a better biometric trait than the iris of the eye or palm and footprints because they are easier to record from young children
and the sensors are small and work quickly. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the research specifically for recording vaccinations
but the patient-identifying system has broader applications says Anil Jain a distinguished professor at Michigan State university s Computer science and Engineering Department and coauthor of the paper.
The technology could be used in any health-care scenario where you have the potential for fraud such as insurance fraud says Jain.
Recording fingerprints from infancy into early childhood and adulthood would also allow countries to link civil registries such as birth
and death certificates to health care records school enrollments and voter registration. The Michigan State university researchers needed to process images taken from fingerprint sensors using software to compensate for the small size of the children s fingerprints as well as their sometimes wet and oily skin.
They also improved accuracy by creating matches based on both thumbs and index fingers. In a trial in Benin West Africa the software successfully matched about 70 percent compared to 98 percent in another test in Lansing Michigan.
The lower accuracy is because the Benin clinic was outdoors with dust and high humidity but Jain believes match accuracy can be improved to 95 percent in these types of conditions.
The Michigan State university researchers plan to do further tests potentially in India where already there is a national biometric ID program.
Privacy groups have warned that biometric data can be misused or faked. However people in developing countries typically do not voice concerns over privacy
and security with biometric data says Mark Thomas the executive director of Vaxtrac a nonprofit that worked with the Benin trials.
Compared to the status quo of not getting vaccinations for life-threatening diseases mothers are not asking these questions
because the benefits are so intuitive he says s
#Google Launches Effort to Build Its Own Quantum computer Google is about to begin designing and building hardware for a quantum computer a type of machine that can exploit quantum physics to solve problems that would take a conventional computer millions of years.
Since 2009 Google has been working with controversial startup D-Wave Systems which claims to make the first commercial quantum computer.
And last year Google purchased one of D-Wave s machines. But independent tests published earlier this year found no evidence that D-Wave s computer uses quantum physics to solve problems more efficiently than a conventional machine.
Now John Martinis a professor at University of California Santa barbara has joined Google to establish a new quantum hardware lab near the university.
He will try to make his own versions of the kind of chip inside A d-Wave machine.
Martinis has spent more than a decade working on a more proven approach to quantum computing and built some of the largest most error-free systems of qubits the basic building blocks that encode information in a quantum computer.
We would like to rethink the design and make the qubits in a different way says Martinis of his effort to improve on D-Wave s hardware.
We think there s an opportunity in the way we build our qubits to improve the machine.
Martinis has taken a joint position with Google and UCSB that will allow him to continue his own research at the university.
Quantum computers could be immensely faster than any existing computer at certain problems. That s because qubits working together can use the quirks of quantum mechanics to quickly discard incorrect paths to a solution
and home in on the correct one. However qubits are tricky to operate because quantum states are so delicate.
Chris Monroe a professor who leads a quantum computing lab at the University of Maryland welcomed the news that one of the leading lights in the field was going to work on the question of
whether designs like D-Wave s can be useful. I think this is a great development to have legitimate researchers give it a try he says.
Since showing off its first machine in 2007 D-Wave has irritated academic researchers by making claims for its computers without providing the evidence its critics say is needed to back them up.
However the company has attracted over $140 million in funding and sold several of its machines (see The CIA
and Jeff Bezos Bet on Quantum computing). There is no question that D-Wave s machine can perform calculations.
And research published in 2011 showed that the machine s chip harbors the right kind of quantum physics needed for quantum computing.
But evidence is lacking that it uses that physics in the way needed to unlock the huge speedups promised by a quantum computer.
It could be solving problems using only ordinary physics. Martinis s previous work has been focused on the conventional approach to quantum computing.
He set a new milestone in the field this April when his lab announced that it could operate five qubits together with relatively low error rates.
Larger systems of such qubits could be configured to run just about any kind of algorithm depending on the problem at hand much like a conventional computer.
To be useful a quantum computer would probably need to be built with tens of thousands of qubits or more.
The chip at the heart of D-Wave s latest machine has 512 qubits but they are wired into a different more limited component known as a quantum annealer.
It can only run a specific algorithm used for a specific kind of problem that requires selecting the best option in a situation with many competing requirements for example determining the most efficient delivery route around a city.
Martinis was a coauthor on a paper published in Science earlier this year that took the most rigorous independent look at A d-Wave machine yet.
It concluded that in the tests run on the computer there was no evidence of quantum speedup.
Without that critics say D-Wave is nothing more than an overhyped and rather weird conventional computer.
The company counters that the tests of its machine involved the wrong kind of problems to demonstrate its benefits.
Martinis s work on D-Wave s machine led him into talks with Google and to his new position.
Theory and simulation suggest that it might be possible for annealers to deliver quantum speedups
and he considers it an open question. There s some really interesting science that people are trying to figure out he says.
Martinis thinks his technology for fabricating qubits could make better quantum annealers. Specifically he hopes to make one
whose qubits can more stably maintain a quantum state known as a superposition effectively both 0 and 1 at the same time.
The qubits of D-Wave s machine can maintain superpositions for periods lasting only nanoseconds.
Martinis has built qubits that can do that for as long as 30 microseconds he says. Martinis makes his qubits from aluminum circuits built on sapphire wafers
and chills them to 20 millikelvin a fraction above absolute zero so that they become superconducting. D-Wave s chip requires similar cooling to operate
but has made circuits from a superconducting material called niobium on top of silicon wafers. Martinis is in the process of switching to making his own qubits on silicon
and believes certain electrical insulator materials used in D-Wave s chips may be limiting its performance.
However Google has given not up on D-Wave. In an online statement the leader of Google s quantum research said that the two companies will continue to work together
and that Google S d-Wave computer will be upgraded with a new 1000 qubit processor when it becomes available e
#Germany and Canada Are Building Water Splitters to Store Energy Germany which has come to rely heavily on wind
and solar power in recent years is launching more than 20 demonstration projects that involve storing energy by splitting water into hydrogen gas and oxygen.
The projects could help establish whether electrolysis as the technology is known could address one of the biggest looming challenges for renewable energy its intermittency.
The electrolyzer projects under construction in Germany typically consist of a few buildings each the size of a shipping container that consume excess renewable energy on sunny and windy days by turning it into an electric current that powers the water-splitting reaction.
and distribution infrastructure already used for natural gas and eventually turned back into electricity via combustion or fuel cells.
It can also be used for a variety of other purposes such as powering natural-gas vehicles heating homes and making fertilizer.
Germany isn t the only country investing in hydrogen energy storage. Canada is getting in on the action too with a major demonstration facility planned for Ontario.
It can be deployed almost anywhere it can store vast amounts of energy and the hydrogen can be used to replace fossil fuels not only in electricity production but also in industry and transportation
which account for far more carbon emissions. Even so it has long been considered a relatively lousy way to store energy because of its low efficiency about 65 percent of the energy in the original electricity is lost.
But improvements to the technology are reducing costs and the large-scale use of renewable energy is creating new needs for storage making electrolysis a practical option in a growing number of places.
Earlier this year Siemens broke ground in Mainz Germany on what it says will be the world s largest proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer.
Whereas other electrolyzers are designed to operate with steady power levels the PEM system performs well even with quickly changing amounts of power from wind and solar.
When it opens next year it will have the capacity to produce 650000 kilograms of hydrogen a year the energy equivalent of 650000 gallons of gasoline.
because excess wind and solar power creates a glut of power on the grid. Because power needs to be used as soon as it s generated to keep the grid stable prices are dropped sometimes to zero
so buyers can be found. Cheap electricity makes electrolysis far more competitive. Electrolysis remains more expensive than producing hydrogen from natural gas at least in the United states where natural gas is cheap.
But it can compete with storage options such as batteries says Kevin Harrison a senior engineer at the National Renewable energy Laboratory in Golden Colorado.
It s also more versatile than the cheapest way to store energy: pumping water up a hill
and then letting it back down to drive a turbine. That approach is limited severely by geography
but he says you can put an electrolyzer almost anywhere e
#Revolution In progress: The Networked Economy No question about it: The Networked Economy is the next economic revolution.
In the coming years it will offer unprecedented opportunities for businesses and improve the lives of billions worldwide.
In fact the revolution is already under way. Over the last few decades we ve grown beyond the industrial economy to the IT economy and the Internet economy each
of which led to significant inflection points in growth and prosperity says Vivek Bapat SAP s global vice president for portfolio and strategic marketing.
Now we re looking at the Networked Economy. This new economy resulting from a convergence of the economies that came before it
and catalyzed by a new era of hyperconnectivity is creating spectacular new opportunities for innovation.
And like any revolution the Networked Economy is going to be big. Very big. Over the next 10 to 15 years it has the potential to double the size of the gross world product Bapat says.
SAP estimates that the Networked Economy will represent an economic value of at least $90 trillion. Three Questions##and Answers##About the Networked Economywhat exactly Is networked the Economy?
It s an emerging type of economic environment arising from the digitization of fast-growing multilayered highly interactive real-time connections among people devices and businesses.#
#What s driving the Networked Economy? Over the past decade the world has seen significant changes in how people
and businesses connect to each other. Social networks let billions of people collaborate in a variety of ways.
Meanwhile business networks have enabled new types of frictionless commerce. Now these two trends are converging catalyzed by the exponential increase in the network of devices connected via the Internet of things (Iot.
The numbers of people-to-people connections##business networks social networks##they ve all been growing over the past 10 years says Dinesh Sharma SAP s vice president of marketing for the Internet of things.
Now businesses processes data and things##everything###can be connected in a network. That is transforming everything.
What must businesses do to thrive in the Networked Economy?##First they must understand that their customers employees
and business partners expect them to be mobile social always on and continually connected. Those who aren t yet thinking about that requirement should keep in mind that their competitors are already addressing it.
But while social mobile and cloud computing helped set the groundwork for the Networked Economy it s important for businesses to understand that this revolutionary economic environment goes far beyond those technologies creating unprecedented new opportunities for collaboration and customization.
Google Waze an app allowing drivers to share local real-time traffic and road information; and Uber a mobile app that connects people seeking taxicabs or ridesharing services.
and take advantage of one of the biggest and most immediate changes of the Networked Economy:
A business looking to purchase say a particular machine part can now turn to the ultimate consumer marketplace##ebay.
Now technology can easily extend a search via a consumer network like ebay. That dramatically increases the number of choices available
Three Pillars of the Networked Economysap has identified three main areas where the Networked Economy is having
The Networked Economy is already helping companies provide better more personalized customer experiences. But there s much more opportunity on the near horizon.
In the Networked Economy personalization of the customer experience in almost every field from retail to medicine will be become the norm. 2. ENABLING OPEN INNOVATION.
The Networked Economy will create entirely new ways of working. It will change the contract between employers
and workers that s been in place for decades if not centuries Bapat says. The whole idea of employees and their relationship to business will be reimagined.
In some ways that s already happening thanks to the millennial generation s impact on work life.
Millennials##people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s now in their teens 20s and early 30s##are quickly replacing the older Baby boomer generation in the workplace.
Today millennials make up 36 percent of the U s. workforce; by 2025 they ll account for 75 percent.
As the first generation of digital natives##people who have known never the world without computers
and the Internet##millennials are natural networkers. They re completely at home in highly connected collaborative spaces like those underlying the Networked Economy.
In fact they thrive there. That s a reality that businesses must embrace to attract the best employees and leverage their talents to fuel true innovation.
In addition the Networked Economy relies on what SAP s experts describe as a new currency based on knowledge not on geographical proximity.
This notion that you need to live near where you work may no longer apply Bapat says.
Companies are increasingly able to source knowledge from anywhere that it might happen to be and at any time.
Put another way he says: Work is no longer a place but an activity. Adapting quickly to that sea change will also help businesses foster innovation
and ultimately gain competitive advantage. 3. ENHANCING RESOURCE OPTIMIZATION. The Networked Economy will make it possible for businesses to use all kinds of resources more efficiently##enough SAP s experts believe to move from a world of scarcity to one of abundance.
There is hidden capacity all around us Sharma notes. We don t need always to make more things##we just need to be able to tap the capacity that we already have.
The Networked Economy is going to allow us to do just that. If there s one area where resource optimization is needed more urgently than any other it s agriculture Projections call for the Earth s population to exceed nine billion by 2050 up by about two billion from today.
Feeding all those people will require increasing food production by 70 percent according to the United nations Food and agriculture organization.
But of course the world is running out of new land for farming. The solution Sharma says:
but it had no room for physical expansion. So port officials explored ways to become more efficient in their existing space.
In 2011 with SAP s help the port developed a cloud-based system to better coordinate both land-side and port-side traffic based on a steady stream of incoming data.
The whole supply chain works much more efficiently Sharma says. The port which handled nine million containers in 2012 is on track to move 25 million by 2025##all without growing its physical footprint.
The Networked Economy is the key to unlocking it. The Networked Economy: Meeting the Challengesas with any revolution the shift to the Networked Economy comes with a whole new set of questions that must be answered.
The big-picture ones involve the networked information itself. The Networked Economy hinges on information
whether it s inside a business or resulting from a transaction or coming from a person Bapat says.
The questions are: Who owns that information? How is shared that information? Is it private? Is it secure?
or optimizing capacity are most likely to yield the fastest return on investment. Bapat s advice for where to start:
The potential benefits of the Network Economy far outweigh any growing pains that accompany it.
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