#Google buys startup Skybox Imaging for $500 million Google#will use Skybox s satellite-photo tech to improve Google maps.
Google is buying the startup, Skybox Imaging, a company that specializes in photos taken by satellites, for $500 million.#
and the company provides data analytics and video of Earth taken from afar. In announcing the deal Tuesday,
Google#said#the buyout will help bolster Google maps by keeping the service accurate with up-to-date images.
The acquisition will give Google the ability to design and build its own fleet of satellites.
and disaster relief areas Google has long been interested in, Google said in a statement. The deal comes as big tech companies have become more interested in aerial technology including satellites
and drones to expand their reach and business operations: getting more people online means being able to offer services to larger populations.
Google in April purchased drone maker Titan Aerospace to help further#Project Loon, the company s initiative to bring the Internet to less-connected places around the world using high-altitude Wi-fi balloons.
Facebook which was said also to be in acquisition talks#with Titan Aerospace has focused on developing drones and satellites as a means for beaming Internet connectivity to more people.
In March, the company#announced#a new lab dedicated to developing that technology. The effort is in line with the mission of CEO Mark Zuckerberg s Internet. org
which aims to bring the Web to everyone in the world. Skybox and Google share more than just a ZIP CODE,
reads a#blog post#by Skybox, which, like Google, is based in Mountain view, Calif. We both believe in making information (especially accurate geospatial information) accessible and useful.
Google maps itself got its start after Google#acquired#another satellite imaging company, Keyhole, a decade ago.
Skybox in November#launched#Skysat-1, a satellite capable of taking 90-second videos at 30 frames per second.
The satellite was to be the first of a fleet of 24 launched to capture views of Tokyo;
Bangkok; Baltimore; Las vegas; and Aleppo, Syria. Google hasn indicated t if the rest of the launches will remain on schedule after the startup joins the company.
We ve asked Skybox for comment and will update this post when we hear back.
Though people have for some time been speculating about Google s interest in Skybox, Tuesday s announcement pegged the deal at half the price of the#rumored $1 billion#that had originally been reported.
Google also warned that the price tag could be adjusted and that the deal is subject to approval by regulators.
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#HP announces plans to destroy Microsoft windows Moments after Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett-packard, announced the company grand new plan to compete with the Microsoft windows operating system,
she was thanking Microsoft for being a major sponsor of the conference and inviting the company new CEO, Satya Nadella, on stage.
Nadella joined Whitman and Intel new CEO Brian Krzanich for a fireside chat-style interview conducted by New york times columnist and author, Tom Friedman.
But just before Nadella joined via video conferencing, during Whitman keynote speech, CTO Martin Fink, head of HP Labs, showed off
what HP hopes will be a game-changing new data center computer. It internally calling that computer he Machine.
HP is creating a lot of new technology to build The Machine, especially a new form of memory known as emristorswhich won lose data if the power turns off (also known as on-volatile memory.
The Machine claim to fame is that it can process loads of information instantly while using hardly any power.
HP wants this computer to replace the servers being used in today data centers. But it also hopes the tech will become the basis for the next generation of PCS.
And The Machine will not use Windows. In fact Fink announced on Thursday that the company is working on a brand new free
and open-source operating system and is inviting universities to help research and build it. He threw in a little dig at Microsoft
when announcing the news saying: e want to reignite in all of our universities around the world operating system research
which we think has been dormant or stagnant for decades. On top of that, HP is working on a brand new operating system for The Machine based on Linux.
And another one based on Android, Fink continued: e are, as part of The Machine, announcing our intent to build a new operating system all open source from the ground up,
optimized for nonvolatile memory systems. We also have a team that starting from a Linux environment
and stripping out all the bits we don need. So that way you maintain compatibility for apps.
What if we build a version of Android? We have a team that doing that, too.
Notice any operating systems not mentioned? Microsoft windows. You might argue that it would be difficult for HP to build an operating system based on Windows
since Microsoft doesn freely share that code. Windows is not free and open source as Linux and Android is.
You would be right. However, when Nadella and Krzanich were on stage, Whitman pointed out how all three companies have been doing joint R&d for 30 years.
In other words, HP could be doing a joint development project with Microsoft if it wanted to.
As Whitman said about the HP, Intel, Microsoft combo, ur partnership, the three companies it was the defining partnership of the industry for the last 30 years but sometimes 30-year marriages,
they need a little rejuvenation. That rejuvenation will obviously come in the form of Linux and Android.
It not wholly surprising that HP is building a new computer that will extricate itself from Microsoft,
and potentially from Intel, too, depending on who HP chooses to fabricate its new chip. Last year, Whitman called out Microsoft and Intel as competitors.
After a disappointing quarter for the company PC business she told Wall street analysts: P traditional highly profitable markets face significant disruption.
Wintel devices are being challenged by ARM-based devices. We are seeing profound changes in the competitive landscape.
Current partners like Intel and Microsoft are turning from partners to outright competitors. Since then, HP has introduced new Windows 8 PCS.
But it has introduced also new Google Chromebook laptops and an experimental new desktop aimed at businesses that runs Android.
This is a bold move by HP. The ability to process large amounts of data with little energy consumption plus nonvolatile memory could be a game changer on the hardware side.
Obvious benefits are longer life of mobile devices more processing power on the device for things like speech recognition, instant on/off functioning, superior servers, removing most of the device cooling engineering,
and lower energy costs for storage and server providers. There hasn been a real hardware advancement in decades.
As the article points out, this opens the door for a change in operating systems, and hp is interested clearly not in helping Microsoft,
and prefers open source OSS. Intel also might be left out in the cold. If hp has the goods
and delivers, this technology will become THE big data system, and take over the server world just for the energy savings alone.
Pricing will be the adoption issue for consumer mobile devices. When the price points are attractive the mobile phone and tablet suppliers will switch too.
Nice tech advancement we all can benefit from. And, if u have investment money for speculation,
hp stock could be a nice retirement plan. Since snubbing Microsoft seems to be the sport of tech royalty this year,
shorting MS stock might be fun money too t
#Ostendo Technologies chip to bring holograms to smartphones Ostendo chip that can produce a hologram Virtual reality won t require strapping a bulky contraption to your head in the future.
Instead, you may just step into an empty room and then suddenly seeing life-size, 3-D images of people and furniture.
Or look down at a smartwatch and#see virtual objects float #and bounce above the wrist,
like the holographic Princess Leia beamed by R2-D2 in the moviestar Wars.####A key to this future may lay in Carlsbad, Calif,
. where startup Ostendo Technologies Inc. has spent the past nine years quietly working on miniature projectors designed to emit crisp videos and glasses-free 3-D images for smartphones and giant screens.
Other companies have shown they can project floating images that appear to be holograms, but many involve large machines employing a system of mirrors to direct light with limited viewing angles.
For instance, the lifelike image of the late rapper Tupac shakur, which graced the Coachella music festival stage in 2012,
was a combination of computer graphics and video projection that relied on visual effects first designed in the 19th century.
Ostendo s projectors in contrast, are roughly the size of Tic Tacs, powered by a computer chip that can control the color, brightness and angle of each beam of light across one million pixels.
One chipset, small enough to fit into a smartphone, is capable of projecting video on a surface with a 48-inch diagonal.
A patchwork of chips, laid together, can form far larger and more complex images. The first iteration of the chip,
which is scheduled to begin shipping next year, will only project 2-D videos, but the next version, expected to follow soon after will feature holographic capability,
according to Ostendo s chief executive and founder, Hussein S. El-Ghoroury. Display is said the last frontier Dr. El-Ghoroury, who in 1998 sold Commquest Technologies, a mobile chipset company, to#International business machines#Corp. IBM for about $250 million in cash and stock.
Over the years, processing power has improved and networks have more bandwidth, but what is missing is comparable advancement in display.
The race to disrupt the screen is intensifying as both upstarts and technology giants try to find new ways to bring content to life.
Microsoft corp. and Advanced micro devices Inc. are both working on their own virtual reality rooms building a complex system of projectors and computers.
Hewlett-packard Co. recently spun out a company called Leia, that like Ostendo, is trying to bring 3d imaging to smartphones.
Meanwhile, Facebook Inc. agreed in March to spend $2 billion to buy Oculus VR Inc.,maker of the Oculus Rift headset that pulls users into a 360-degree virtual environments.
Facebook CEO#Mark Zuckerberg#was convinced, in part of the value of virtual reality after he accidentally tried to set down a real world object on a virtual table
while testing the Oculus Rift, forgetting for a moment that the table didn t exist in the real world,
according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Ostendo, tucked away in Southern California, is known little
but has raised $90 million from venture-capital firms and Peter Thiel, Facebook s first outside investor,
and has secured some $38 million in government research and development contracts. A large bulk of that has come from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
or Darpa, the government s futurist agency that worked on the predecessor to the Internet and self-driving cars.
That capital has given Dr. El-Ghoroury, an immigrant from Egypt, the luxury to work for nearly a decade undisturbed.
Ostendo now employs about 115 people including scientists suited in scrubs and goggles who handle fragile nanotechnology equipment at a high-tech semiconductor lab. The long effort has yielded the Ostendo Quantum Photonic Imager, an appropriately sci-fi-sounding name,
which fuses an image processor with a wafer containing micro light-emitting diodes, or LEDS, alongside software that helps the unit properly render images.
During a recent test reviewed by The Wall street journal, Ostendo showed a working prototype: a set of six chips laid together that beamed a 3-D image of green dice spinning in the air.
The image and motion appeared consistent, irrespective of the position of the viewer. According to Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the Massachusetts institute of technology, who is working on 3-D displays for MIT s Media Lab,
Ostendo s advantage and the key to its 3-D capability is its resolution. The Retina display on Apple Inc. s#iphone, for example, has about 300 dots per inch,
Ostendo s chips are at about 5, 000 dots per inch. Ostendo which says it has several opportunities with major handset manufacturers,
expects the first 2-D projector unit to be in the hands of consumers before the summer of 2015.
With a lens attached, it will be less than 0. 5 cubic centimeters, roughly the size of the camera in the#iphone.
It also expects to begin manufacturing the second version of the chip, with 3-D capability, in the second half of 2015.
The cost to the consumer should be about $30 a chip, Ostendo estimates. Dr. El-Ghoroury said the company still needs to improve the 3-D product
and is aiming to make the pixels even smaller to achieve higher resolution. Ultimately the larger vision is to have Ostendo s chips everywhere electronic displays are needed,
whether it is a glasses-free 3-D television screen, a smartwatch, or tables that can project hologram-like images.
So what happens in a world where 3-D and virtual reality is everywhere? Dr. El-Ghoroury predicts people s relationship with technology will change
and breed a wave of business opportunities, on scale with the introduction of the iphone.
Imagine if everything coming back to you was in 3-Dall of your shopping, all of your gaming,
every way you retrieve data, he said. Via Wall street Journa i
#Smart rifle uses Google glass to let you shoot around corners Google glass-equipped smart rifle. Trackingpoint is the company behind the U s army s new#smart rifle.
They are already famous for developing a gun that does all the hard work of aiming for you.
Armed with one of their precision guided firearms, you simply tag your targets as if you were piloting an Air force jet
and then aim your weapon where it tells you to. You re almost guaranteed to hit your target every time.
Video)##Apparently not satisfied with giving you the instant equivalent of military sniper training, the folks at Trackingpoint#have whipped just up another super power for you:
the ability to see around corners. They re calling the innovation Shotview, and what it does is link your smart rifle s sight to your phone, tablet or Google glass.
By networking your sight and your headset, you see everything your gun does streamed in real time. Basically, when you want to give yourself your gun s POV,
you simply select your scope as your Wi-fi server, open your Shotview app and you re suddenly able to see whatever your barrel is pointed at.
With a little practice, this means that you ll be able to aim your smart rifle from around corners
or behind cover and still have all the#precision#of a trained sniper. Unless you re out there stalking things with Spider-man s sixth sense for danger, your prey doesn t stand a chance.
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#Denver crime rate falls over 10%after pot legalization despite dire predictions The most dramatic decrease was in the number of homicides.
Overall crime rates in the city of Denver are down more than five months after legal marijuana sales began in Colorado,
despite dire predictions by anti-marijuana activists. Rates of violent crime are down, as well as burglaries, leading to an overall decrease in crime of 10.6 percent, according to the Denver Department of Public Safety.
The city measured the number of reported crimes from January 1st to April 30th of 2014 and compared them to the same period last year,
prior to the legalization of medical and recreational marijuana use. The number of murders, sexual assaults, violent robberies and other assaults fell by 5. 6 percent.
The most dramatic decrease was in the number of homicides. In 2013, from January to the end of April, the city lost 17 people to murder.
In the same period in 2014, only 8 died, a drop of more than 50 percent.
Rates of arson and petty larceny each rose, but all other forms of crime were down.
The New york times quoted legalization proponent Brian Vicente as saying, Every major institution said this would be horrible and lead to violence and blood in the streets.
None of that has happened. The sky did not fall. Photo credit: The Grio Via Informed Comment Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorat t
#Researchers discover 3d material that behaves like graphene This illustration depicts fast-moving, massless electrons inside cadmium arsenide.
Researchers from Oxford, SLAC, and Berkeley Lab have found that cadmium arsenide could yield practical devices with the same extraordinary electronic properties as 2d graphene.
The researchers also found that the new semimetal material exists in a sturdy 3d form that should be much easier to shape into electronic devices such as very fast transistors, sensors and transparent electrodes.
The results are described in a paper published May 25 in Nature Materials. There is a quest to find graphene-like materials that are three-dimensional
and thus much easier to craft into practical devices. Two other international collaborations based at Princeton university and in Dresden,
Germany, have also been pursuing cadmium arsenide as a possibility. One published a paper on its results in the May 7 issue of Nature Communications,
and the other has posted an unpublished paper on the preprint server arxiv. The research team also included scientists at Fudan University in Shanghai, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Diamond Light source.
The work was funded partially by the U s. Department of energy Office of Science and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Mesodynamic Architectures program m
#Electric car travels over 1, 100 miles without a recharge on a new aluminum-air battery Together the Israeli company, Phinergy,
and the aluminum giant, Alcoa Canada, demonstrated an electric vehicle (EV) capable of driving over 1, 100 miles between charges using a combination of aluminum-air and lithium-ion storage technologies.#
#The Phinergy aluminum-air battery at 100 kilograms (220 pounds) weight contained enough on board energy to allow the vehicle to travel up to 3, 000 kilometers (over 1, 860 miles.
Compare that to the best, current lithium-ion batteries in the Tesla Model S sedan.
At best they can do less than 500 kilometers (310 miles) on a single charge and the on board battery weighs 5 times as much.
How does an aluminum-air battery work? They use an air-electrode capable of breathing ambient air
and extracting the oxygen from it. Compare this to traditional batteries which store and release oxygen from chemicals contained in a liquied or solid cathode.
An air battery doesn need t to replace or recharge its cathode. And an air battery is far lighter.
The combination means significantly more power for a longer period of time. Phinergy batteries use a porous electrode with a large surface area that captures the oxygen from ambient air.
The electrode also contains a silver-based catalyst that doesn t let CO2 interact with it.
This unique and proprietary catalyst solves a common problem in air-battery technology carbonization caused by CO2 permeating the electrode.
To make the aluminum-air battery even more economical they are produced in areas where electrical energy capacity
and cost is low. In the case of the demonstration EV this week, the battery was forged at the Alcoa smelter in Baie-Comeau,
Quebec where the company can draw on a significant hydroelectric power resource. Aluminum-air batteries do break down over time.
As they drain the metal turns into aluminum hydroxide. When spent the entire battery can be recycled to forge new aluminum-air batteries.
For the air-battery operator it will mean swapping out the old battery for a new one every few months.
This could be done at service centres which would keep an inventory of these batteries in supply.
Tesla#demonstrated its plans#for charging and swap out service centres back in July of last year.
In the Tesla demo the battery was swapped out in 90 seconds. So this notion of a quick battery replacement service that is as fast as refilling a conventional gas
or diesel tank seems very doable. In the case of the test car demonstrated at the#Canadian International Aluminum Conference#on Wednesday in Montreal,
it was outfitted with both an aluminum-air and lithium-ion battery system. The notion behind this was that the EV could run on its lithium-ion charge
when driving on short urban trips of 50 kilometers (31 miles) or less, but when used for longer trips the aluminum-air battery would kick in.
To feed the chemical reaction from the aluminum-air battery drivers using a test car like this would add tap water every month
or two to feed the chemical reaction. Phinergy is also experimenting with other metal-air technologies.
They have developed a zinc-air battery that has some advantages over aluminum. Zinc-air is extremely durable.
A battery can last thousands of hours without chemical deterioration. The company hopes to see metal-air batteries made with aluminum
and zinc become the primary storage devices for transportation, for backing up renewable power sites, for electronic devices and for industry and defense.
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#Robots that self-assemble when heated up Printable robotic components that, when baked, automatically fold into prescribed three-dimensional configurations.
MIT researchers have developed some printable robotic components that fold into a specific 3d shape when they are baked under heat.
The team, led by Professor Daniela Rus, has introduced thebakeable robots in the hope that they lead to a variety of self-assembling designs that function on their own and fold together like origami.
Rus research team demonstrate the potential of these robotic components in two new papers. One details a system that takes a digital specification of a 3d shape
and produces a 2d pattern which would enable a piece of plastic to create the shape by self-folding.
The second paper presents designs that show how to build electrical components (such as resistors, inductors, capacitors, sensors and actuators) with self-folding laser-cut materials.
Rus hopes that these folded electronics will evolve into something of ahardware compiler, where different working devices can be generated for performing a variety of tasks such as cleaning the floor.
The MIT research team developed a technique for precisely controlling the angles at which a heated sheet folds.
For example, a PVC sheet sandwiched between two films of rigid polyester featuring slits of different sizes contracts
when it is heated, causing the slits to close. The PVC becomes deformed creating different angles where the edges of the polyester films press against each other.
Producing the pattern of slits is quite a difficult process as every edge in the system moves at the same time,
so it requires designing the edges in such a way that the right geometric structure is created ultimately.
These printable, folding designs could perform a variety of functions, both around the home and in different industries.
You can check out some of the automatically folding robotic components in the video below w
#Sanaria will use robots to mass produce a promising new malaria vaccine Sporobot would increase the speed of production 20 30 times over.
What if you had developed a vaccine for malaria that, in early trials, was 100%effective.
But you couldn t get the funding you needed to produce enough of the vaccine to market it because of political wrangling over the budget.
What would you do?(Video)##If you re thinking has been influenced by the tech revolution, you would likely do two things:
First, design a robot to help produce the vaccine, and, second, run a crowdfunding campaign to pay for it.
That s exactly what#Sanaria, a biotechnology founded in 2003 by long-time malaria researcher Stephen Hoffman and based in a suburb of Washington,
D c.,has done. First, some background.##Malaria#infects about 200 million people every year and kills 600,000 of them.#
#Vaccines have been notoriously ineffective against the disease, which stems from a parasitical infection. Last year, Sanaria reported that in a Phase I clinical trial
whose participants were consenting U s. veterans, the vaccine administered at the higher of two doses kept all the patients who got it from becoming infected with malaria
when bitten by mosquitos carrying#Plasmodium falciparum, #which causes 98 percent of all malaria deaths.
This year, the company will conduct trials in the U s.,Mali, Tanzania, Equatorial guinea and Germany.
To produce the vaccine, called Pfspz, Sanaria cultivates mosquitos in a sterile environment and infects them with#Plasmodium falciparum (the Pf in Pfspz).
When the mosquitos are chock-full of Pf sporozoites (hence the SPZ), the company irradiates them to weaken the parasites.
Workers then herd up the mosquitos, chop off their heads and squeeze out their salivary glands, where the parasites prefer to live the better to port over to the mosquito s next victim.
They retrieve the weakened parasites from these tiny glands, filter out other contaminants and gather them up into an injectable vaccine.
If it sounds laborious, it is. Raising mosquitos in a sterile environment is a wild enough idea that#another company s efforts#to do it to combat dengue fever earned a featurearticle#in the#New yorker.
Sanaria s method faces the additional challenge that dissecting the little buggers is tedious. Researchers can dissect 2-3 mosquitos an hour,
which is nowhere near enough to mass-produce a global vaccine. So two years ago, Sanaria began working with theharvard Biorobotics Lab#to develop a robot that could do the work faster.
From our perspective it s a very challenging project, said Yaroslav Tenzer, a post-doc who,
with Robert Howe is developing the robot, called Sporobot. It s small-scale tissue, and they re very soft;
they re very fragile. The work has to be done under sterile conditions to produce a vaccine that could earn FDA approval.
Tenzer and Howe have succeeded in robotically performing each of the steps required to extract the irradiated sporozoites.
Tubes gather up the mosquitos and microfluidics pathways extract the parasites from the bugs 100-micron salivary glands.
Image processing provides verification at every step that the goop consists entirely of irradiated parasites. Sporobot would increase the speed of production 20 30 times over, according to Harvard and Sanaria.
That makes more vaccine available at a lower cost which is important for a disease that disproportionately affects developing countries.
What s left is to assemble the various functions into a single desktop robot, Tenzer told Singularity Hub.
It s easy to think that medical robots were#last year s innovation. But while they re#not a new idea#doesn t mean that all
If robotics manage to subdue malaria where other modern medical technologies have failed so far, it will be a powerful sign of how much the technology might accomplish as it matures.
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