A disc that can store 500 gigabytes (GB) of data, equivalent to 100 DVDs, has been unveiled by General Electric. The micro-holographic disc, which is the same size as existing DVD discs, is aimed at the archive industry. But the company believes it can eventually be used in the consumer market place and home players. More here.
Read the article: Optical disc offers 500GB storage
It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy — it looks like a large photocopier — but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass production of books possible. Launching today at Blackwell’s Charing Cross Road branch in London, the machine prints and binds books on demand in five minutes, while customers wait.
The Espresso Book Machine — which actually is a self-contained 150 pages-per-minute printing and binding machine — can produce a full book in five minutes from a catalog of 400,000 references. It only takes one button. High-speed all-in-one printing-and-binding machines are not new, but this idea is. Using the Espresso Book Machine, any customer can walk in, pick any book from a touchscreen (or bring its own in CD or USB stick,) and walk away with a “real book” in five minutes. The price? Around $43 for a 300-page out-of-copyright book. Some photos here.
Read the article: Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London
US President Barack Obama on Saturday named a Harvard-educated Indian-American to the newly created post of Chief Technology Officer in an appointment much-awaited by Silicon Valley.
As the country’s first Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, 36, will use technology to “improve security, ensure transparency, and lower costs,” Obama said in his weekly address to the nation.
Read the article: AFP: Obama names first US Chief Technology Officer
A fascinating description of how the current 2009 Time 100 poll of “the world’s most influential people in government, science, technology and the arts” has been precision hacked to include a message from the folks, and to vote 4chan.org founder moot at the top!
Please note that this article assumes computer knowledge!
Read the article: Inside the precision hack
Researchers constructed a lithium-ion battery, similar to those used in millions of devices, but one which uses genetically engineered viruses to create the negatively charged anode and positively charged cathode. The virus is a so-called common bacteriophage which infects bacteria and is harmless to humans. “The advantage of using genetics is that things can be made better and better”…
Read the article: Virus battery could ‘power cars’
Get ready for the next stage in the personal computer revolution: ultrathin and dirt cheap. Personal computers — and the companies that make their crucial components — are about to go through their biggest upheaval since the rise of the laptop. Netbooks are a big success story in the PC industry, with sales predicted to double this year, even as overall PC sales fall 12 percent, according to the research firm Gartner. By the end of 2009, netbooks could account for close to 10 percent of the PC market, an astonishing rise in a short span.
The new breed of netbooks, built on cellphone innards, threatens to disrupt that oligopoly. Intel and Microsoft, which make the chips and software that run most PCs — face an unprecedented challenge to their dominance. The big winners in the rise of netbooks that use cellphone chips could be the cellphone carriers, which would have access to a whole new market: PC users.
Read the article: Thin and Inexpensive Netbooks Affect PC Industry
India has multiplied its per capita income levels many times over since 1950, and has done so far faster in recent years than Britain or the United States did during and after the industrial revolution. In the last 15 years, India has pulled more people out of poverty than in the previous 45 – 10 million people a year on average in the last decade. The country has visibly prospered, and, despite population growth, per capita income has grown faster than ever before. The current financial crisis is unlikely to change the basic success story.
Read the article: Resilient India
China’s central bank has called for the creation of a new global currency as an alternative to the dollar, in the latest sign of that country’s growing assertiveness on the international stage. But would the idea even work? China has more than $1 trillion in U.S. Treasuries and other government securities, analysts estimate — and the country doesn’t keep all of that money in its own currency because that would cause inflation. Also, by buying assets in dollars, China keeps the yuan from strengthening too much against the U.S. currency — which would make its goods more expensive to American consumers and hurt Chinese exports. But as the U.S. government ramps up spending to stimulate the economy and assist the battered financial sector, Chinese officials are worried that inflation will result — and that would erode the value of their dollar holdings, economists said.
Read the article: Will China global currency idea fly?
A well-thought, back to basics article on good business practices.
An Excerpt:
“When you deliver a product or a service in the belief that the customer will eventually pay you for it, you are making a loan, and you should treat it accordingly. That means determining whether customers are creditworthy and finding out in advance how long they take to pay their bills. It also means getting into the habit of checking the quality of your loan portfolio regularly and making sure your average collection time is what it should be.”
Read the article: Street Smarts: Secrets of a $110 Million Man
Have you ever sent an email, and just as it was going on its merry way, you realize you misspelled something or you sent it to the wrong person. Well, now you can take advantage of that delay to “undo” the message. Just enable the feature in Gmail Labs in Settings. It only works during that 5 second delay between the time you hit send and the time that Gmail actually sends the message.
Read the article: Gmail Undo Send