or shipping companies (cruise lines got satellite internet years ago, while most of Asia and Africa still lack it).
and store energy from wind and the Sun. As designs improve oe and get cheaper oe the idea of a home on the ocean will become more affordable.
Wafer-thin artificial leaves separate with the rising sun as buildings wake up. They continue to follow the sunlight over the course of the day,
These substances are filtered into the fleshy fabric within the walls of our homes, not dead spaces but active processors,
and their leaf litter feeds the acidic soils that nurture networks of microorganisms, such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria,
In August, two more were found using images from Google earth. Radar has even been used, famously uncovering vast new areas of the vast Cambodian temple complex Angkor Wat.
software can begin to build up a picture of the machine's surroundings. Â Using it in combination with GPS and other location technologies,
Software can then be used to remove the points above the ground, according to University of Alabama archaeologist Dr Sarah Parcak,
but has used Lidar at other sites. This leaves a detailed"digital elevation  model of the hidden forest floor with the ability to pick out features as small as 20cm across."
hand-created maps of their site with an unexpected level of exactitude. But what really astounded them was the amount of detail they had seen never before.
Previously, they had mapped around 3. 5 sq km of agricultural terraces on the site. The Lidar revealed more than 150 sq km more.
11 new waterways, more than 60 caves as well as clues that suggest there could be up to 1400 water reservoirs on the site.
Overnight it changed archaeologists'perception of the site from a rarely-inhabited ceremonial center to a bustling city with a complex system of agriculture to support it.
Population estimates of The americas at the time of European contact have been steadily increasing over the past decades as archaeologists have slowly found new sites and dug over existing ones.
if we are interested in understanding sites, not just discovering them. Â To really understand a site,
you need boots on the ground, they say. These are arguments that the Lidar community are familiar with,
Both the Chases and Fisher teams admit that cruising over the tree-tops in a plane does not totally supplant the need to get up close and personal with a site.
It also allows sites to be mapped quickly, allowing them to be preserved from looters and development.
living on site, hiring workers, provisioning the dig and the thousand other misfortunes that an expedition to the jungle can encounter.
as with all developments in computing, Fisher expects to see that cost continue to fall and its use to sky rocket."
For example, Arlen Chase believes it could help us to better understand settlement patterns along the Amazon,
Other targets include Sri lanka, India and other sites around Southeast asia. They also believe it could begin to be used to find sites such as ancient harbours
currently covered by water.""I suspect that, as we examine Lidar for different places, we're going to wind up finding things in different places that we would not have thought to try to find,
India's electricity grid is kind of like the sun, White explains. You get electricity every day,
The modified design incorporates a wireless device that can send employees text messages about the amount of milk in the tank,
and powerful computers can stitch them into a genome sequence. Scientists published a 80%complete version of the mammoth genome in 2008
A group led by British-born plant scientist Stephen Long is trying to improve the ability of plants to harness energy from the sun. Their aim is to turbocharge photosynthesis,
and ramp up the plant's ability to harness the sun. That is easier said than done.
However, this is not the only way of increasing photosynthesis. Scientists are also exploring the idea that genes from the ancestors of modern-day plants might boost the ability of crops to harness the sun. It is well known that primitive plants known as cyanobacteria have a talent
A Visual Exploration on an ipad. Twelve year old Emma Teitgen thought the chemistry book her teacher recommended would make perfect bedside reading.
A Visual Exploration to her ipad. Instead of making her drowsy, it blossomed in her hands.
Sound, animation and the ability to connect to the Internet have created the notion of a living book that can establish an entirely new kind of relationship with readers.
start-up that sells titles for the ipad and iphone. As a $4. 99 application sold through Apples itunes store
oethe Master of Rampling Gate comes with video interviews with Rice and others. Rice speaks about her inspiration for her works
Within the text are links to Web pages that elaborate on events and places in the story a description of the Mayfair neighborhood in London where the protagonists live or a history of the Black death plague,
and distributing digital books over the Internet and on mobile devices, said technology has the power to oebroaden our thinking about
what a book does. Owners of oeibird Explorer, a digital book produced for the iphone by field guide publisher Mitch Waite Group,
can play the songs of more than 900 bird species. Using microphones, it can also capture the chirps
and warbles of wild birds and match them against a database of bird sounds to help the oereader identify the species
Devices made by Amazon com Inc . and Intel Corp. are able to convert text into speech. oeyou now have the ability to make a book talk,
said George Kerscher, head of the Digital Accessible Information system Consortium in Zurich, Switzerland. Kerscher, who studied computer science at the University of Montana and is blind,
has spent two decades lobbying publishers to make books more accessible to visually impaired readers. Digital technology is also transforming reading from a famously solitary experience into a social one.
The newest generation of readers the texting chatting, Youtubing kids for whom the term oeoffline sounds quaint has run circles around the fusty publishing process,
Fans in other forums, blogs and chat rooms weave alternative endings or side plots for their favorite works.
One site, Fanfiction. net, features hundreds of short stories based on a series of young adult novels by Scott Westerfeld called oeuglies. oetheyre extending the world by creating new characters
Authors are pulled into the scene by fans who barrage them with e-mail to share their reactions,
He figures hes logged more than 30,000 e-mails from readers over the years. oethey educate me a lot about the way they are reading.
I get a lot of e-mail, Westerfeld said. oeadults see it as churn. But kids are affected far more by it,
Now that anyone with an Internet connection or even a cellphone effectively owns a digital printing press,
thousands of cellphone-toting authors write novels via text message, one or two sentences at a time. Aspiring writers can sign up on the free site
and begin writing, either from phones or computers. Readers can follow the stories online or receive a text every time their favorite author adds a plot twist.
Shannon Rheinbold-Gee tapped out her 85,000-word thriller about teenage werewolves in just under five weeks using the Textnovel site.
The former middle-school teacher figured she had no chance of getting a traditional publishing deal. oei had absolutely no concept of where it was going to go
is just one example of how the Internet has become fertile ground for creative amateurs.
and nonfiction books some by established authors, others by complete unknowns along with recipes for spinach calzones and 1950s-era manuals for building transistor radios,
The company gets most of its revenue by selling advertising on the site. A small portion of the titles on Scribd, roughly 15%of more than 20 million documents, is for sale.
to a $27. 99 book published by OREILLY Media for designing Web pages. Scribd takes a 20%cut of those sales.
Trip Adler, a 26-year-old entrepreneur who started developing the site as a Harvard undergraduate,
and author of oeibrain, said Internet use activated more parts of the brain than reading a book did.
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#Shifting Trend in Luxury Purchases Buying Top Technology and Investing in a Lifestyle Experience The new luxury is about investing in a lifestyle experience that not only can help improve health
The four brands most admired by Americans with six-digit incomes in a recent survey by the marketing specialist Affluence Collaborative were Apple, Microsoft, Best Buy and Sony.
there are few things closer to luxury than owning her new Apple ipad. oei dont need it.
says he bought an ipad the first week it was introduced. oepart of it is escapist luxury,
For Don Contreras, luxury is the flat-screen Sony TV that he plans to buy and install in the gazebo in his backyard.
Sony soon will be the first consumer electronics maker with a Google feature built into its TV SETS.
Folks watching any show will be able to use a special remote to search Google on the same TV screen.
and made them more function for women carrying devices from iphones to ipads, says Michael Tucci,
nothing says luxury value like getting topnotch designer clothing at 40%to 70%off simply by visiting a website.
then automatically relays the information to a forest station through mobile phone technology. oethe heat sensors are programmed to detect temperatures which are over 45 degrees Celsius,
said the soft-spoken inventor. oetemperature from the sun does not go beyond this level in terms of heating
That immediately triggered a call to his mobile phone. oethis is how the system is expected to work,
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#Future Ag Can Better Food Create Better People? Radical transformations are brewing in the worlds oldest industry Can better food create better people?
Intermediary metabolism is a vast web of interconnected reactions by the constituent parts of the cell.
and senior futurist at the Davinci Institute and currently Googles top-rated futurist speaker. At the Institute, he has developed original research studies,
His talks on futurist topics have captivated people ranging from high level of government officials to executives in Fortune 500 companies including NASA, IBM, AT&T, Hewlett-packard
, National Association of Federal Credit unions, STAMATS, Bell canada, American Chemical Society, Times of India, Leaders in Dubai, and many more.
Tom spent 15 years at IBM as an engineer and designer where he received over 270 awards, more than any other IBM engineer.
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#The Sahara Forest Project A Renewable Energy Oasis The Sahara Forest Project The Sahara Forest Project is a unique combination of proven environmental technologies,
The system works by mimicking the natural hydrological cycle where seawater heated by the sun,
Like the Seawater Greenhouse, CSP works well in hot arid areas where the sun is at its most powerful.
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#Two months after Paypal opened its platform, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services The banks
and credit card companies have spent 50 years building a proprietary, locked-down system that handles roughly $2 trillion in credit card transactions and another $1. 3 trillion in debit card transactions
Iveys wife, using her pink RAZR phone, sent him a note via Twitter. But instead of typing the letter d at the beginning of the tweet
Ivey, a computer programmer based in Alabama, began wondering if he and his wife hadnt hit on something:
For the most part, its powers were confined to ebay, the online auction company that purchased Paypal in 2002.
But last summer, Paypal began giving a small group of developers access to its code,
lets anyone accept physical credit card payments through a smartphone or computer by plugging in a free sugar-cube-sized device no expensive card reader required.
A startup called Obopay which has received funding from Nokia, allows phone owners to transfer money to one another with nothing more than a PIN.
Amazon com and Google are both distributing their shopping cart technologies across the Internet, letting even the lowliest etailers process credit cards for less than the old price cutting out middlemen,
and figuring out ways to bundle payments to sidestep the credit card companies constant nickel-and-diming.
Facebook appears to be building its own payment system for virtual goods purchased on its social network and on external sites.
And last March, Apple gave itunes developers the ability to charge subscription fees through their applications
making itunes the gateway for an entirely new breed of transaction. When Research in motion announced a similar initiative last fall at a session of the Blackberry Developer Conference in San francisco,
programmers crowded the room, spilling out into the hallway. About 20 percent of all online transactions now take place over so-called alternative payment systems, according to consulting firm Javelin Strategy and Research.
It expects that number to grow to nearly 30 percent in just three years. But perhaps nobody is as ambitious as Paypal.
giving anyone with rudimentary programming skills access to the kind of technology and payment-industry experience that Ivey used to build Twitpay.
since self-publishing came to the Web. Two months after Paypal opened its platform, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services,
sending $15 million through the companys pipes. Software developer Big in Japan, whose Shopsavvy program lets people find an items cheapest price by scanning its barcode,
used Paypal to add a oequick pay button to its app. Liveops, a call-center outsourcing firm, built a tool that streamlined payments to its operators, turning
what had been a nightmare of invoicing and time-tracking into an automated process. Previously anybody who wanted to create a service like this would have had to navigate a morass of state and federal regulations
Paypal is just the latest company to try to harness the creative powers of the open Internet.
Google created a platform that lets anyone buy or display online advertisements. Facebook allows any developer to write applications for its social network
and Apple does the same with its itunes App store. Amazons Web Services provides developers the cloud-based processing power
and storage space they need to build applications and services. Now Paypal has brought this same spirit of innovation and experimentation to the world of payments.
Your wallet may never be the same. The banks and credit card companies have spent 50 years building a proprietary, locked-down system that handles roughly $2 trillion in credit card transactions and another $1. 3 trillion in debit card
pipes that connected all the various banks and businesses to ensure speedy data transmission. For its time, it was a technologically impressive system that,
According to a 2003 study in the Review of Network Economics, every sale by credit card costs a merchant six times what the same sale with cash would run.
Mastercard and Visa charge hundreds of different rates called interchange fees for every type of card that runs through their networks;
when computer infrastructure was expensive and proprietary. But now, with cheap bits everywhere, the actual cost to do a transaction is pennies.
Mitchell Wolfe, an ecommerce veteran who ran Compaqs Canadian Internet sales team before moving on to a series of startups,
He once helped build an ecommerce system for a Persian rug vendor and was stunned to find that the rug dealers bank required it to keep $250,
and maintain an expensive digital network between vendors and banks around the world; it operated over the Internet.
There was no need for a credit card reader, cutting point-of-sale system providers and their vigorish out of the equation.
Paypal piggybacked on a communications system that enables digital transactions like direct deposits and automatic bill payment without charging a fee.
Apples itunes and Research in motions payments program reduce transaction fees by bundling a customers purchases before sending them to a credit card company for processing.
Virtual currencies, from Microsoft Points to Linden Dollars, encourage oein-world trade, incurring credit card and banking fees only when their users buy in.
when it was purchased by ebay for $1. 5 billion. Suddenly the service, always a favored payment method on the site
became almost entirely focused on making auctions easier. Between 2005 and 2008, Paypal went from serving as the payment provider for 47 percent of ebay auctions to facilitating more than 60 percent (ebay expects it to hit around 75 percent by 2011.
That was a fine strategy as long as ebay was growing. But in CEO Meg Whitmans last years at the companys helm,
as the auction platform started to see a slowdown in revenue growth, it became clear to the Paypal team that it was time to get aggressive again.
Users dragged Paypal onto ebay in the first place. The company had resisted initially the move. Other users cobbled together Paypal-enabled oetip jars,
embraced its developers, and turned its service into a platform? What if Paypal asked its users to create the tools
you cant just let developers come in here and open accounts and move money around, he says.
whether developers would play along. So in late 2007, he started on a road trip to meet with the people who were already building on Paypals limited open code.
He met with more than 100 developers most of whom were eager to help build an easier, more flexible system.
and sellers to go through several steps to complete a transaction go to its site, fill out forms,
The developers envisioned something larger, a true digital currency that could be used on any Web site,
that enabled money to move as easily as email: Send funds with a click, from and to anywhere and anyone on the Net.
In April 2008, Bedier led a meeting at ebays North First street headquarters, where he presented his idea to CEO John Donahoe and his lieutenants.
When Bedier was finished, he was stunned to get applause. oeit was like a lightbulb clicked on,
Donahoe says. oei basically said, You have unlimited funding. This is the highest-potential business Ive ever seen in my career.
Most of the information is already available there are plenty of databases that provide real-time pricing information,
Iveys wife, using her pink RAZR phone, sent him a note via Twitter. But instead of typing the letter d at the beginning of the tweet
Ivey, a computer programmer based in Alabama, began wondering if he and his wife hadnt hit on something:
For the most part, its powers were confined to ebay, the online auction company that purchased Paypal in 2002.
But last summer, Paypal began giving a small group of developers access to its code,
lets anyone accept physical credit card payments through a smartphone or computer by plugging in a free sugar-cube-sized device no expensive card reader required.
A startup called Obopay which has received funding from Nokia, allows phone owners to transfer money to one another with nothing more than a PIN.
Amazon com and Google are both distributing their shopping cart technologies across the Internet, letting even the lowliest etailers process credit cards for less than the old price cutting out middlemen,
and figuring out ways to bundle payments to sidestep the credit card companies constant nickel-and-diming.
Facebook appears to be building its own payment system for virtual goods purchased on its social network and on external sites.
And last March, Apple gave itunes developers the ability to charge subscription fees through their applications
making itunes the gateway for an entirely new breed of transaction. When Research in motion announced a similar initiative last fall at a session of the Blackberry Developer Conference in San francisco,
programmers crowded the room, spilling out into the hallway. About 20 percent of all online transactions now take place over so-called alternative payment systems, according to consulting firm Javelin Strategy and Research.
It expects that number to grow to nearly 30 percent in just three years. But perhaps nobody is as ambitious as Paypal.
giving anyone with rudimentary programming skills access to the kind of technology and payment-industry experience that Ivey used to build Twitpay.
since self-publishing came to the Web. Two months after Paypal opened its platform, 15,000 developers had used it to create new payment services,
sending $15 million through the companys pipes. Software developer Big in Japan, whose Shopsavvy program lets people find an items cheapest price by scanning its barcode,
used Paypal to add a oequick pay button to its app. Liveops, a call-center outsourcing firm, built a tool that streamlined payments to its operators, turning
what had been a nightmare of invoicing and time-tracking into an automated process. Previously anybody who wanted to create a service like this would have had to navigate a morass of state and federal regulations
Paypal is just the latest company to try to harness the creative powers of the open Internet.
Google created a platform that lets anyone buy or display online advertisements. Facebook allows any developer to write applications for its social network
and Apple does the same with its itunes App store. Amazons Web Services provides developers the cloud-based processing power
and storage space they need to build applications and services. Now Paypal has brought this same spirit of innovation and experimentation to the world of payments.
Your wallet may never be the same. Want to catch up? Heres a look at forms of digital currency
Contactless smart cards: Smart cards use chip technology to communicate with card readers rather than direct contact between them.
Many public transit cards are contactless smart cards: a passenger can touch or wave the card over the turnstile to gain entry.
E-cash: Digital money that emulates properties of physical cash such as anonymous exchange. Public transit smart cards, such as Suica (Tokyo), Octopus (Hong kong) and Oyster (London), can be used as e-cash
when anonymity is preserved by not registering the card with a central authority. Mobile banking, m-banking, m-payments:
Mobile device-based applications for checking bank balances, making payments or transferring funds. Applications are being developed for sending,
Smart cards: The general term for any card with a specialized computer chip embedded, allowing it to process transactions more elaborately and securely than magnetic strip cards.
Stored value card: A payment card in which digital money has been encoded either directly or as a link to an account to be debited
A form of money used in an online virtual world, such as oelinden Dollars in Linden Labs Second life or oegold pieces in Blizzard Entertainments World of Warcraft.
pipes that connected all the various banks and businesses to ensure speedy data transmission. For its time, it was a technologically impressive system that,
The wondrous inventions of the modern economy#oogle, Amazon, the iphone#roadly improved the lives of middle-class consumers,
the revolution in information technology and the liberalization of global trade. Individual nations have offered their own contributions to income inequality#inancial deregulation
is already challenging Google, itself hardly an old-school corporation. But the biggest winners have been individuals, not institutions.
But then you had the Internet age, and then globalization, and you had people in their 30s,
We are mesmerized by such extravagances as Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen s 414-foot yacht, the Octopus,
Among these is Google s Zeitgeist conference, where I have moderated discussions for several years. One of the most recent gatherings was held last May at the Grove Hotel, a former provincial estate in The english countryside,
Google flew in overnight Internet sensations from around the world. Yet for all its luxury, the mood of the Zeitgeist conference is hardly sybaritic.
and during coffee breaks the lawns are crowded with executives checking their Blackberrys and ipads. Last year s lineup of Zeitgeist speakers included such notables as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, London Mayor Boris Johnson,
and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz (not to mention, of course, Google s own CEO, Eric Schmidt). But the most potent currency at this and comparable gatherings is neither fame nor money.
or algorithm or technology with the potential to change the world, however briefly. Hence the presence last year of three Nobel laureates, including Daniel Kahneman, a pioneer in behavioral economics.
who had sold his Zappos online shoe retailer to Amazon for more than $1 billion the previous summer.
which Google showcased some of its new inventions, including the Nexus phone. This geeky enthusiasm for innovation and ideas is evident at more-intimate gatherings of the global elite as well.
Take the elegant Manhattan dinner parties hosted by Marie-Josã e Kravis, the economist wife of the private-equity billionaire Henry, in their elegant Upper East side apartment.
Indeed, in this age of elites who delight in such phrases as outside the box and killer app,
and immediately became Europe s most highly valued Internet company#et none is focused primarily on the United states. A similar harbinger of the intra-emerging-market economy was the acquisition by Bharti Enterprises,
the Indian telecom giant, of the African properties of the Kuwait-based telecom firm Zain.
They know how to provide mobile phones so much more cheaply than we Do in a place like Africa,
I heard a similar sentiment from the Taiwanese-born, 30-something CFO of a U s. Internet company.
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