Category: Innovation

10 Tools To Save on Electricity Bills

Post author By goelp
Post date May 21, 2009
1 Comment on 10 Tools To Save on Electricity Bills

“Smart meters installed at homes can unleash data about the fluctuating price of electricity throughout the day, enabling consumers that have energy management tools to shift energy consumption to the time of day when power is cheapest. The utility-focused tools use smart meter info to provide a deeper dive into energy analysis and can even control smart appliances for utilities to implement demand response events.” – earth2tech.com

My picks: Google PowerMeter and Green Energy Options. (Both pictured above)

Read the article: 10 Monitoring Tools Bringing Smart Energy Home

Business Innovation Science Technology

Breakthrough Can Put 100 DVDs on a Disc

Post author By srungta
Post date April 27, 2009

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

Business Education Innovation Life Productivity Science Technology

Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine

Post author By srungta
Post date April 26, 2009

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

Innovation Productivity Technology

Browsing sites more conveniently with Firefox add-on Autopager

Post author By srungta
Post date April 12, 2009
1 Comment on Browsing sites more conveniently with Firefox add-on Autopager

The AutoPager Firefox extension automatically loads the next page of a site inline when you reach the end of the current page for infinite scrolling of content. By default, AutoPager works with a ton of sites including Google, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, Lifehacker, New York Times etc. AutoPager is free, works wherever Firefox does.

Read the article: AutoPager Automatically Loads the Next Web Page Inline

Business Education Health Innovation Nature Science Technology

MIT designs viruses to grow “greener” batteries

Post author By srungta
Post date April 9, 2009

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’

Education Innovation Life Meta Science Technology

The End of Science

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data se ts with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot. Via Computer Program Self-Discovers Laws of Physics.

Read the article: The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

Education Innovation Productivity Technology

Portable Ubuntu Runs Ubuntu Inside Windows

Post author By srungta
Post date April 4, 2009

Free application Portable Ubuntu for Windows runs an entire Linux operating system as a Windows application. As if that weren’t cool enough, it’s portable, so you can carry it on your thumb drive!

Read the article: Portable Ubuntu Runs Ubuntu Inside Windows

Business Education Finance History Innovation Life Productivity Social Technology

Light and Cheap, Netbooks Are Poised to Reshape PC Industry

Post author By srungta
Post date April 2, 2009

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