and my notebook dusted. I am as clean as I am ever likely to be.
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#Taiwan's struggle to become an innovation leader It has a population that is half that of Spain's crammed into a land mass one-fiftieth the size of Mexico.
Yet Taiwan still manages to make nine out of 10 of the world's laptop computers.
You may not have heard of the companies Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics, Pegatron, Wistron and Inventec, but together they make more than 90%of the laptops sold worldwide,
including those sold by top brands such as Apple and Dell. Yet making devices at low cost for others has become less profitable than it was,
PC shipments worldwide fell from 363 million in 2011 to 352 million last year, with further declines in the first half of this year.
Taiwanese PC makers have shifted their attentions to tablets; however, they do not enjoy the same dominance of this market as they do for laptops.
Small marketmeanwhile smart phone sales are growing rapidly. HTC, Taiwan's only manufacturer and its best-known brand, was once the number two vendor in the US.
Neither are they cheap enough to compete with increasingly popular low-cost Chinese brands, such as Huawei and Xiaomi.
and manufacturing hardware means it lacks expertise in software development, which generates a growing proportion of tech industry revenues.
making it a good testing ground of consumer acceptance of new gadgets such as netbooks and phablets.
mobile internet, such as apps and games, and internet advertising are all growing rapidly. Yet it may be that the decline of Taiwan's traditional hi-tech companies contains within it the seeds of a solution, with a growing number of people breaking out to set up their own companies.
Mr Lin's tech incubator appworks provides office space for around 40 start-ups. He says the number of start-ups in Taiwan has doubled at least in the past three years to several thousand.
which has developed an app that helps people search for and watch television programmes shows and music videos on their smart phones.
It has accumulated more than two million downloads. Another is software start-up Goodlife. Its portal collects information on daily discounts from local restaurants, convenience stores and other businesses.
Founded in 2010, it's now one of the top 130 websites in Taiwan and its fan page has more than 500,000 members."
"It's hard to run a software start-up in Taiwan, #says cofounder Brenda Chen.""It's hard to make money.
Why do it? It's like a dream. I felt no one was doing this, but there was a need.
I used to go on Google search on companies'websites, and spend a lot of time doing that. Now, I can easily find discounts and coupons.#
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#Solar-power vehicles pushing boundaries of possibility The promise of fleets of clean, green transport powered by solar energy has for decades just been that:
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#Israel: Boot camp for start-up success Rothschild Boulevard has always been one of the grandest streets in Tel aviv, with its broad tree-lined central promenade and elegant Bauhaus architecture.
The cafes, kiosks and benches teem with young entrepreneurs who seem to survive on a diet of caffeine and wi-fi. Of Israel's 5, 000 tech companies,
#Big data pioneersinside the HQ of the Mamram, the Israel Defence forces (IDF) technical support unit in nearby Ramat Gan, computer training course commander Capt.
H (her full name is classified) says new recruits on a six-month intensive programming course study from dawn till night
and are taught programming skills, teamwork, project management and#most importantly how to be creative. It's like a school for start-ups."
"When you do a degree in computer science you study the technical things, she says. You study how to write a code, mathematics.
and make software that fits his demands. How to write good code that you will be able to debug
IBM has spent nearly $1bn(#640m) on four Israeli companies that all developed big data storage solutions:
Earlier this year, Google acquired the mapping app Waze for more than $1 bn. The founders of Waze received their technical training in Israeli military intelligence.
a website security start-up he#founded with ex-army buddies. A white-hat hacker (one that works for non-malicious motives),
he was running his own web security consultancy by the age of 17, before being headhunted for Matzov, the#army's cybersecurity unit."
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#The latest tech weapons the US might deploy in Syria Military action against Syria may have been put on hold, at least for now.
Agent Defeat Weaponsthe US military has for many years been working on weapons designed specifically to target sites believed to house weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical or biological weapons.
and upgrades to the fleet designed to address that issue won't be completed until next year. Despite this,
High Power Microwave Weaponsimagine a weapon that can knock out all the computers in a Syrian military command centre without killing a single person.
In the short film, Champ was seen taking out a bank of computers. While the system is likely to be still several years away from being fielded,
and first identified that same year, is believed to have been a demonstration of the US's abilities to wage war by attacking enemy computer systems.
Information can be harvested using key logging software that tracks keystrokes, for example. Spoofing involves forging packets of data
so that they look as if they come from legitimate sources. There are also data-driven attacks. A common form is the denial of service (DDOS) attack
which aims to cripple systems by bombarding them with data, usually using botnets#large numbers of compromised computers.
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#Why Bluetooth use is on the rise Bluetooth has been with us for around 15 years.
Named after Denmark's King Harald Bluetooth Blatand, who reigned in the 10th century AD, it is a technology that everyone is aware of on their computers and phones,
yet not many people choose to use. As a means of allowing devices to talk to each other cheaply and wirelessly over short distances,
it has tended to stay largely in the shadows, leaving the limelight to the technologies it connects.
Now however, with the rapid growth in the use of mobile and sensing technologies along with the release of an updated version of the system,
means the list of its applications is growing steadily. From health and agriculture, to business and electioneering, it is quietly playing an ever more central role in many of our lives."
and predictable technology,#says Professor Roch Guerin, Chair of Computer science and Engineering at Washington University, St louis."Bluetooth targets lower transmission ranges and data rates than wi-fi,
Bluetooth Smart, launched in 2011, includes a smarter power management system that allows it to turn on,
transmit data and shut down more quickly#in just a few milliseconds in some cases. Depending on the devices being connected
and the data being transmitted, this updated system consumes anywhere between half and 1/100th of the power of the previous version.
As a result, machines using Bluetooth that previously ran for a few months on a coin cell battery,
"Bluetooth classic is for sending steady streams of voice and audio,#says Suke Jawanda, Chief Marketing Officer of the Bluetooth Special interest Group (SIG),
which owns and licenses Bluetooth technology.""Bluetooth Smart is about sending packets of bits and data to applications.#
#Life changinghealthcare is cited frequently as one area that hasn't witnessed the radical transformations underway elsewhere as a result of the ongoing digital mobile revolution.
The growth of novel personal medical sensing technologies, many of which use Bluetooth, could soon change this.
Earlier this year, a Silicon valley-based start-up called Scanadu sought to raise $100, 000 on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo.
In fact donors pledged over $1. 6 million, making it the most funded project in the site's history.
The product description may have helped: the Scanadu Scout is described perhaps best as something approaching a real version of the medical tricorder wielded by Star trek doctor Leonard"Bones#Mccoy.
This data is transmitted via Bluetooth to users'phones or tablets. With recent advances in technology such as Bluetooth, we are now able to build medical devices that weren't possible just a decade ago#.
#at an affordable price using existing infrastructure of smart phone telecoms#says Scanadu's CEO Walter de Brouwer."
"For people who live far from hospitals, in places like Africa, this could be life changing.#
once embedded under the skin monitors substances in the blood such as glucose and cholesterol so that chronic diseases like diabetes or the effects of treatments such as chemotherapy can be monitored.
The raw medical data, which is sent wirelessly via Bluetooth to an Android app, can be forwarded automatically to doctors.
Bluecell is still a few years from commercialisation.""We chose Bluetooth because of its wide distribution in consumer devices,
#says Jacopo Olivo, one of the researchers.""It's an interesting way that Bluetooth can interact with the biotech industry.#
#Other personal health sensors that use Bluetooth include the Cardiopad, an electrocardiography (ECG) machine developed to monitor heart activity in patients in remote areas of Cameroon,
and Monobaby, a device being developed to prevent Sudden infant death syndrome, also known as cot death, using an accelerometer attached to baby clothing.
and sends that information directly to an ipad app via Bluetooth. By cross-checking this data against a database
the app provides information about the health of plants, when and how much to water them,
Sensors could be linked via Bluetooth to sprinkler systems to automatically optimise moisture levels. The ability to use just the right amounts of water and fertiliser to produce a good harvest without wasting resources can improve crop yields and rural incomes.
Bluetooth is also being used to help those in agriculture in other ways. Kenyan mobile tech company Virtual city has developed Agrimanagr
an app designed to speed up and automate the flow of information and reduce costs for farming businesses.
electronic scales are used to transmit the weight of produce via Bluetooth to a mobile phone which records this in farmers'accounts on a cloud-based server.
#Going digital and printing receipts"cuts out fraud#and increases the value to farmers 9-13%,#he adds.#
#This system could of course be done without Bluetooth, but being wireless makes it easier.""Out in the rural areas,
With Bluetooth, our devices do that, and can work for 12 hours without electricity.##Bluetooth can also provide new ways of communicating in rural settings where internet access is unavailable or out of reach for the poor.
Gary Marsden, a computer scientist at the University of Cape town, developed Big board, an electronic notice board that disseminates information wirelessly and for free.
The system displays a series of icons representing information on various topics on a screen.
Users take a picture of an icon they are interested in with their phone and send it via Bluetooth to a nearby device which sends them the information they want.
Files can be pictures text, video or audio. Potential applications include distributing information on health, job offers or entertainment.
In a pilot project Big board was used to inform voters about the manifestos of politicians standing in the 2007 Kenyan presidential election.
He also developed Com-Me, a collection of hardware and software components to help people with limited access to electricity
and the internet create and share content. This includes a solar-powered phone charging station and a Bluetooth-based local version of Dropbox
designed to allow off-grid communities to share and store information in a variety of formats.
Bluetooth Smart, like its older sibling, may be a relatively straightforward radio wave-based transmission technology. But as we devise more and more ways to benefit from ever greater connectivity between the people, other living organisms, objects and our environments,
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#Electric cars: A universal plug for all models? Electric vehicles promise us a future of guilt-free travel.
The second site will open in Petten The netherlands and Ispra, Italy, in 2014. Walking through the Chicago facility (see video above),
Often to our frustration, so many of our devices like laptops and phones have different chargers for different models,
which can give a real time data feed of how much power is being consumed. Soon that could be expanded so that our devices,
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#Exoplanets: New missions hunting for alien worlds As mountains go, Cerro Armazones may not be much to look at.
but in November 2012, it suffered a computer malfunction, which made it impossible to send any data back to Earth.
In June 2013, The french Space agency announced it would switch the satellite off and let it burn up as it re-enters the atmosphere#the usual fate of our mechanical helpers in space.
The fact that there have been few good candidates for planets that host life found so far should not discourage the searchers The data already collected suggests that there are about 100 billion planetary systems in our galaxy alone,
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#Nanotubes: Can we make speakers as thin as paper? It's time for one of those imagined futures
In 1917 Harold Arnold and IB Crandall of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company and Western electric Company showed that they could create sound by simultaneously passing alternating and direct currents through a very thin platinum foil.
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#Smart cards that top-up health Zack Oloo and Sam Agutu have been friends since they met at school 43 years ago.
and finance healthcare through use of mobile phones, mobile money and smart cards. While all employers are required by law to enroll their employees into the National Hospital Insurance Fund,
the mobile money service that allows the nearly 75%of adult Kenyans who subscribe to it to use their phones to store money
Medi-Save users could then transfer extra money into an account linked to their card number simply by sending a text message.
which work the same way as the previous system except now providers bill patients via a secure website,
##Changamka, in collaboration with one of Kenya's largest insurance companies British American Insurance and telecom provider Safaricom, launched a microinsurance scheme called Lindi Jamii in November last year.
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#Artificial food: Incredible or inedible? Pass the salt. And the pepper. And while you're at it, the ketchup too.
Funded by Google cofounder Sergey Brin, the five-year project took cells from organic cows,
By the time the story was adapted loosely for the big screen in the 1973 film Soylent Green,
Nasa recently admitted that as part of a programme"to turn science fiction into fact#they are funding work to develop a 3d food printer.
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#Organs on chips: How to make a microchip that breathes Drug testing is a costly business.
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#Artificial leaf hopes to power the world Imagine if you could draw energy from almost unlimited sources found in nature#water and light.
The catalysts are cheap, earth-abundant materials and form by self-assembly, which should make manufacture cheaper.
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#Berlin start-ups: Cool and commerce coming together? When new businesses based on the computer chip began to cluster in Santa clara Valley,
it did not take long for someone to come up with the name Silicon valley. That set a pattern,
#Bernstam's cloud data service he co-founded, Parse, was bought recently by Facebook for $85 million.
Of course, Berlin is many leagues behind Silicon valley. From Adobe through to Yahoo, via Apple, Intel, Google and Oracle, the Valley,
as its occupants call it, has combined a wealth which most countries would envy. Exact figures are hard to come by,
The average annual cost of a workstation in an office in Berlin including maintenance costs,
such as the social game developer Wooga or Research Gate, a networking website for scientists. The darling of the scene is Soundcloud
an audio sharing platform that has 200 million users every month. Alex Ljung, its cofounder and chief executive, moved the company from Stockholm to Berlin
But this resistance is beginning breaking down, on both sides, according to David Knight, editor-in-chief of Berlin tech scene blog Silicon Allee."
and once you got a core of people, which started round 2009, you started to get a lot of investors from the US
and cafes offering wi-fi, are now seeing the effect of this. In Prenzlauer Berg, Factory,
which received##1 million in funding from Google, has rented space to over 15 companies, including Soundcloud.
Florian Lanzer is trying to build a website selling green products to people who are committed not necessarily environmentalists.
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#Maker Faire: How the DIY tech force has become strong DIY technology has taken traditionally place in a bedroom, garage or on a kitchen table.
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#Juicebox: Squeezing new life into old computers By supercharging PCS that seem past their sell-by date,
one company wants to put more working machines in classrooms and in developing world countries.
New smartphones and tablets are released barely months after their previous versions, and the hardware and software quickly become incompatible.
Tablets won allow you to swap out parts, new laptops won let you remove batteries,
and the whole lifecycle of technology is becoming shorter, less sustainable, and more expensive for consumers.
But what if you could help extend the lifespan of technology that already exists? Give it a little boost, perhaps?
Its Juicebox promises to make ld computers run like new Now, I know what some early adopters may be thinking.
For those who believe that the age of tablets, smartphones, Google glass and the loudhas heralded the demise of desktop PCS,
Robert Hornik, Assistant Principal at East New york Family Academy in Brooklyn, remembers weekend trips to far-flung corners of New york city to hunt for old desktops from other city agencies like the Police
Pension fund that were giving them away for free. e had about 20 computers working at best, out of about 100, for a school with 450 students and 50 teachers, he recalls. hey were mostly the big, boxy computers,
like the Dell GX270, all about 8-10 years old. With an entire technology budget of just $12, 000 per year, including one part-time IT person (an undergraduate at a local university),
new desktops at around $500 a pop was not an option. chools usually acquire computers in big batches all at once in hope that they don have to get them anytime again soon, hich of course,
Computers eventually breakdown, wear out, or become overloaded with junk and must be replaced over time with spare parts
and hardware on a limited budget resulting in a jigsaw puzzle of infrastructure, like at Hornik school.
Then, when the computers start to get sluggish, preventing even basic browsing and application use, getting them all back up to the same speed becomes practically impossible.
Power up Neverware Juicebox fixes this problem by turning school PCS into a hin client Inside the physical box is a server with virtual machines
and computing power that many computers share across a single network. So, instead of each computer being stuck with ageing components,
suddenly all the computers have access to this powerful central store that does all the eavy lifting allowing the computers to run like new.
The Juicebox can supercharge any PC or even laptop even if it missing a hard drive and the whole system is completely wireless.
Since Hornik installed Neverware Juicebox over a year ago, East New york Family Academy now has over 100 working computers almost four in every classroom,
with two fully functioning computer labs. They haven slowed down a bit. he Neverware system gave us a big break.
We were able to make all those old computers work Hornik says, adding nd lightning fast.
This idea of esktop virtualization has been around for over a decade, says Neverware 27-year-old founder Jonathan Hefter. his is something banks
and Fortune 500 companies around the world are using, he says, and something that cloud computing now offers. ut no one has created a simple cost-effective methodology,
It is simply a hardware solution. hat Jonathan is doing with Neverware is necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, worries Steven Hodas. very school will be where it was 5 years ago
when it got that brand new shipment of computers. Basically, it a great point of departure, he explains. ut
Just because computers are working better and kids can browse, research, and use programs faster,
says Jim Lynch, Director of Green Tech at Techsoup Global. ith the growth of internet and electricity in Africa,
the actual hardware lifespan of a PC is around fifteen years because most of the weaker parts are interchangeable.
test it, put a new OS on it, and then it will run like it came out of the box.
Energy challenge International organisations, like World Computer Exchange and Techsoup Global, facilitate the refurbishing, but Neverware Juicebox could also play a new,
Africa has a paltry recycling rate for mobile phones (just 1%in Nigeria, for example), and a similar recycling rate for PCS, says Lynch.
according to recent research creating an enormous amount of wasted hardware. By boosting the performance and extending the lifespan of old PCS in developing countries,
and effort in sourcing and shipping in new or donated PCS. ne of the problems with donated computers is that getting them through the port isn straightforward.
Wherever the potential impact of Neverware promise to make old computers run like new lies,
for Hefter the bottom line is clear. t seems silly that schools are replacing their computers every 4 years
if we could believe the data, "she says.""It seemed really spurious.""Thinking there had to be a mistake, Pluznick, then a researcher at Yale School of medicine, in New haven,
researchers poured over genomic data and reported that low levels of these receptors occurred in almost every tissue in the body.
She chuckles as she remembers how she complained to her academic supervisor about the"bad"data from her kidney gene experiments."
#Unmasking organised crime networks with data Military software engineers have developed a program that can predict the social structures of street gangs.
A team at the West point Military academy in the US state of New york has released just details of a software package it has developed to aid intelligence gathering by police dealing with street gangs.
and Contact Analyzer), can use real-world data acquired from arrests and the questioning of suspected gang members to deduce the network structure of a gang.
Mapping highly influential members of a social network has been done many times before for example in viral marketing and in studies of infectious diseases.
and his co-workers, have drawn on the large literature about mapping social networks. This body of work which has grown rapidly over the past decade,
One of the features of Orca is an algorithm a set of rules that assigns each member of the network a probability of belonging to a particular gang.
Shakarian and his colleagues tested Orca using police data on almost 1, 500 individuals belonging to 18 gangs, collected from 5, 418 arrests in an undisclosed district over three years.
The gyroscopes are under full computer control; no driver input required. The company says it is confident that the C-1 will stay upright
with one seat and a large bank of computer processors taking up most of the internal space, but the final design calls for two seats, one behind the other."
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#New designs to breathe life back into our cities By the middle of this century,
and we are likely to see a change in our experience of cities thanks to augmented realities a new way of seeing via our smart phones and Google glasses.
I founded the Avatar (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) group in 2004 to explore how the rapidly changing technologies would affect architecture.
and using 3d desktop printers to mix chemistries as a form of wet fabrication, which is a very flexible material.
people are exploring technologies that could transform one group of substances into another on a building site.
In each store, owners are given an Android-powered tablet with software that allows them quickly and easily order inventory all at the touch of a button.
Weather stations are equipped with small sim cards that wirelessly transmit data every five minutes to a cloud-based server.
At the end of the season, this data is aggregated and coupled with satellite data, and used to map out rain patterns.
Kilimo Salama then works with agronomists to calculate the index and find where the rain was too much, too little,
Sub-saharan africa has the fastest-growing mobile market in the world, increasing at an average of 44%annually since 2000, according to the worldwide mobile communications industry association GSMA.
ow, with information via mobiles, farmers are better able to bargain prices against middlemen, and can in some cases increase 25-35%of their profits.
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