Could This Be The First Solar Powered Laptop?

While there are plenty of solar-powered peripherals that plug into your laptop to boost its battery power, we haven’t yet seen a model that runs solely on solar. Industrial DesignerAndrea Ponti‘s concept for the Luce Solar Panel Powered PC could become the greenest laptop ever made.

The computer has two solar panels: One on the back of the monitor and one underneath a touch keyboard. Ideally, the two panels would be able to power the computer continuously, though it’s unclear whether this has been successfully tested. Using a laptop in the sun is far more battery intensive than indoors since the screen brightness needs to be cranked up to compete with the sun’s bright light.

One solution could be to use an electronic ink display in place of the usual backlit flat panel. Although the laptop includes a battery, the cordless design means your productivity will plummet in the evening — at least until you reach for another digital device.

The Luce, which means light in Italian, is made from a clear polycarbonate and weighs about four pounds. It was shortlisted in Fujitsu’s 2011 design competition.

There’s no word on whether Fujitsu plans to turn Ponti’s design into reality, but either way they’re not the only ones thinking about integrating sunlight into computer design. Last year Apple filed a patent for “harnessing external light to illuminate a display screen.”

AT&T: Our 4G will catch up to Verizon's in 2 to 3 years

Rancho Palos Verdes, California (CNN) -- AT&T's data network won't be on par with Verizon Wireless' until 2013 or 2014, AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said on Thursday.

AT&T has yet to launch its faster fourth-generation cellular technology but has plans to do so in the second half of this year. The first cities to get the 4G LTE service will be Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.

The launch will come at least seven months after Verizon Wireless', which began rolling out in December.

AT&T has used some marketing misdirection to claim its data network is 4G. But it will take some time for AT&T's wireless Internet to match Verizon's in speed, reliability and coverage, de la Vega said at the All Things Digital conference.

Initially, de la Vega said he "can't say when" AT&T will meet Verizon's quality. But he later added, "In the next two to three years, they will probably be indistinguishable."

U.S. regulators still have to approve a merger between AT&T Mobility and T-Mobile USA, which will reduce the wireless industry's big competitors from four to three.

In its bid to acquire the fourth-largest carrier from Deutsche Telekom, AT&T has pledged to eventually reach 97% of the U.S. population with its 4G LTE network. "We're doing something that I don't think has been done in any country anywhere in the world," de la Vega said.

Verizon plans to cover 97% to 98% with its 4G network, CTO David Small said in an interview in March. As is the case for all carriers, customers need to buy new phones that are compatible with 4G.

De la Vega says the proposed merger will improve the quality of AT&T's network because it will be able to use T-Mobile's cell sites. Major cities, such as New York and San Francisco, should see the most significant benefits, he said. Building a new cell site in San Francisco takes two to three times longer than in other cities, he said.

Owners of Apple's iPhone, which was exclusive to AT&T until this year, have been among the loudest to complain about AT&T's service. Some blame the design of the phone's radios and antennas. But as it turns out, AT&T may also take some blame.

When designing the first iPhone, Apple CEO Steve Jobs had asked AT&T to provide guidance on cell-phone building, de la Vega said.

"When we first did the phone for Apple, Steve Jobs called me and said, 'We want you to send us the specs on how you build a phone,'" de la Vega recalled. "So we bent over backwards to give them that kind of information."

The schematics included information on cell radios and how they interact with software, de la Vega said.

De la Vega stressed that AT&T was integral in the release of Apple's early products like the iPhone and iPad. It is "our software in collaboration with Apple that makes the iPad work," he said.

Capitulating to Apple's insistence on absolute secrecy in relations, AT&T had to retool its internal-communications system to make it more secure, de la Vega said.

"In the case of Apple, they're very, very concerned about stuff getting out," he said. "We built a complete infrastructure in our company to keep their information private."

Apple has yet to commit to building an iPhone that runs on 4G. The Verizon iPhone debuted when that carrier was preparing to roll out its first 4G phones. Apple COO Timothy Cook said the 4G chips available weren't up to the iPhone's standards yet and would require design changes Apple engineers weren't willing to make.

Hackers gather around the globe to fight climate change

CNN) -- When you hear the word hacker, you probably don't picture someone dedicated to solving the problems of global development.

But this weekend, self-proclaimed hackers around the world will gather at "hackathon" events to tackle disaster-risk management and climate change. The occasion is the semiannual Random Hacks of Kindness global conference, which seeks to leverage Internet data to address world problems.

Gatherings will be held in cities around the globe, from Atlanta to California's Silicon Valley and from Basel, Switzerland, to Bogota, Colombia. The conference is the result of a 2009 collaboration by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank, which founded Random Hacks of Kindness. (Both the organization and the events it organizes are known as RHoK.)

The group solicits "problem definitions" from organizations in the field of disaster preparedness, relief and climate change and puts them before "tech-savvy do-gooders," according to Elizabeth Sabet from SecondMuse, RHoK's global operational lead.

It's this synthesis between subject-matter experts and computer hackers that makes RHoK effective, its leaders said.

"Technical solutions created only by technical people are often too cumbersome for the field," said Philadelphia organizer Mike Brennan. "Solutions created by field experts alone often lack the technical and scientific basis for an effective solution. RHoK is looking to address these weaknesses directly."

Sabet is also quick to point out that "hacking" doesn't always mean what some people might think.

RHoK celebrates hacking in its most positive context -- using minimal resources and maximum brainpower to create outside-the-box solutions -- 'hacks' -- in response to interesting problems," she said. "The intent is to finish the weekend with some concrete prototypes and demo applications that can go on to be put to use by the experts and (nongovernmental organizations) who proposed the problems."

If previous years are any indication, these hackers will walk away with real results.

The 2009 RHoK event generated I'mOK, an SMS service used by people in Haiti and Chile to inform families of their status via mobile messaging after the earthquakes in those countries. The World Bank is piloting a program generated at the 2010 RHoK to visualize landslide risk. These are just two of many examples.

RHoK serves as a global umbrella organization and provides resources, but volunteer groups on the ground in each city put together the individual events. Willow Brugh is one such volunteer, hard at work preparing the RHoK this weekend in Seattle.

She said she's still enthused about last year's event in which she was part of a team that designed a tool enabling disaster victims to report their losses more easily and ask for help. By the end of the weekend, her team had functioning prototypes of an iPhone app, an Android app and a Web portal. Now local governments across the country are picking up their program.

"That's a success, when the thing you've built continues to be used and worked on, and makes it out to the public," Brugh said. "It was awesome."

In Melbourne, Australia, RHoK has been driven by issues close to home.

"Many of our friends and families have been personally impacted by the bush fires and floods in Victoria, and we know people who experienced the tsunami and the Christchurch (New Zealand) earthquake," Melbourne organizer Jane Treadwell said. "No community is perfectly safe from these threats, and through RHoK we can all make a contribution to preventing, helping and alleviating stress and suffering."

In Bangalore, India, Praveen Selvasekaran has been working with "a volunteer army of 10 members" to put together an event for an expected 200 hackers. The Bangalore event will follow the common RHoK format, he said, but each hackathon is far from identical.

"What really makes every RHoK unique is the ability to solve local problems," he said. "Sometimes two different RHoK locations may take a completely different approach to the same problem."

That diversity of outcomes is exactly what makes RHoK appealing to its sponsors, according to Nicholas Skytland of NASA's Open Government Initiative.

"Innovation is always a numbers game: The more you do it, the better your chances are of being successful," he said. The process of innovation is itself much of the reward, Skytland said.

"RHoK breaks down barriers that prevent innovation and challenge the way business has always been done, by taking advantage of many of the possibilities created by working in a networked digital world. A successful weekend for us is one in which hundreds, if not thousands, of developers from around the world gather to invent technology that didn't exist 24 hours ago."

Gather they will, from Nairobi, Kenya, to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and everywhere in between. RHoK organizer Heather Leson has been putting together Toronto's second RHoK and is expecting 90 hackers to attend.

"The most exciting thing is to watch brains collide," she said. "People come from all walks of life. We have emergency managers, accountants, health care professionals, journalists, open data and open source developers, UX/UI, trainers, and many more. It is a diverse group of people lending their time, energy and knowledge in inspiring ways."

Sony Pictures website hacked

Sony's headquarters in Tokyo, Japan (Image: Aflo / Rex Features)

Sony has suffered another massive data breach, with a hacker group known as Lulz Security, or LulzSec, claiming to have stolen details about one million users from SonyPictures.com.

In a statement, LulzSec say they are not attempting to come across as "master hackers", but instead wish to highlight Sony's lax security. They say:

Every bit of data we took wasn't encrypted. Sony stored over 1,000,000 passwords of its customers in plaintext, which means it's just a matter of taking it.

The group says the data stolen includes users' passwords, email addresses, home addresses and dates of birth, and has placed samples online for others to verify their claim.

LulzSec say they accessed SonyPictures.com with an SQL injection, in which attackers exploit vulnerabilities in a website and force it to run unauthorised code. The group calls this "one of the most primitive and common vulnerabilities", and asks: "Why do you put such faith in a company that allows itself to become open to these simple attacks?"

Sony says it is aware of LulzSec's statement and is investigating the issue. "We are looking into these claims," Jim Kennedy, executive vice president of global communications for Sony Pictures Entertainment, told the Associated Press.

AP also called a number listed by LulzSec and verified that it belonged to a woman in Minnesota, who confirmed the rest of her details.

This latest attack comes as Sony recovers from a previous hacking incident, with its PlayStation Network only just fully restored after a month-long outage.

It is also the latest in a string of security breaches carried out by LulzSec, who last weekend hacked into and defaced the website of PBS, the US public broadcasting organisation, and previously stole data from the Fox broadcasting company.

Meanwhile, infamous hacktivist group Anonymous today said it has stolen 10,000 emails from Iran's Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of its latest endeavour, OpIran.

Anonymous carried out its attacks as a response to Iranian crackdowns on anti-government protests, with one member telling The Epoch Times they aimed to damage the image of Iran "both in cyber space and the real world." The emails were taken from the Iranian Passport and Visa Office, and appear to be mostly visa applications.

How Facebook Can Put Google Out of Business

Editor’s note: Guest author Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, an online publisher with an audience of 10 million monthly uniques, and author of the Digital Quarters blog. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile, the online retailer of luxury goods. He is an angel investor in media and e-commerce companies.

I was surprised to hear former Google CEO Eric Schmidt publicly lament lost opportunities and missed chances to catch Facebook the other day.

I used to envy Google and the vast digital empire that Schmidt commanded.  Google had one of the most intricate monopolies of all time. It had the most impressive dataset the world had ever seen; the most sophisticated algorithm to make sense of it; an audience of a billion users expressing their interest; and more than a million advertisers bidding furiously to reach those consumers at just the right moment.

What’s more, it had captured the ultimate prize: increasing returns to scale. Only Google could spread such huge R&D costs among an even more humongous query volume, all while offering advertisers the chance to reach most of the population with one buy. Google had earned its success.

It competed on being smarter.

It was.

And it won.

Google’s business strength was simply taken for granted; so much so that even deep-pocketed competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft stopped trying to outdo Google’s massive scale and core algorithmic know-how.

And that’s why I used to think that Google was unstoppable.

Until I realized one very important thing: despite the fact that Google goes to great lengths to keep its index fresh by indexing pages that often change every hour, or even every few minutes, and despite its efforts at realtime search (including searching the Twitter firehose), its dominant dataset is dead, while the Web is—each day more so than the last—vibrantly and energetically alive.

Indeed, Google’s revered and unparalleled dataset is increasingly dating itself as an ossified relic akin to the Dead Sea Scrolls—outshined by the freshness of the living, breathing organism that is the social Web.

Like dusty and determined archaeologists, Google’s massive bots crawl the Web looking for the artifacts of digital civilization. And what they find is fossils—in the form of pages and links: the leave-behinds of writers, contributors, and casual end-users who have deposited traces of themselves in the skinny crevices and dark recesses of the Internet. Google analyzes these remains, and yet it has almost no first-hand knowledge of any of the users who created this content—or those who are searching for it.

Enter Facebook.

Since its founding in 2004, Facebook has focused on enabling social connections, not on search. And yet, in the process, Facebook has created a platform that knows more than 600 million people, complete with identity, interests, and activities online. The company’s relentless and organic expansion—from an application to an emergent social operating system—has enabled it to know its users, not only on the Facebook.com domain, but also on other sites, as they travel throughout the Internet.

While Google has amassed an incredible database consisting of the fossilized linkages between most Web pages on the planet, Facebook possesses an asset that’s far more valuable—the realtime linkages between real people and the Web.

What does this mean, and what are the implications here?

Well, in a nutshell, Facebook has stored a treasure trove of distinctive data that, if fully utilized, could put Google out of business.

Yes, put Google out of business.

Here’s why.

Facebook’s data allows it to do more than just guess what its customers might be interested in; the company’s data can help it know with greater certainty what its customers are really interested in. And this key difference could potentially give Facebook a tremendous advantage in search when it eventually decides to move in that direction.

If Google’s business has been built on choosing which Web pages, out of all those in the universe, are most likely to appeal to any given (but anonymous) query string, think about this: Facebook already knows, for the most part, which pages appeal to whom—specifically and directly.

And, even more powerfully, Facebook knows each of our individual and collective behavior patterns well enough to predict what we’ll like even without us expressing our intent.

Think of it: Facebook can apply science that is analogous to what Amazon uses to massively increase purchase likelihood by suggesting and responding to every minute interactive cue. Whereas Amazon relies on aggregate behavior, Facebook adds in the intimate patterns of each individual—along with their friends and the behavioral peers they’ve never met all around the world. And each of them is logged in and identified as a real person.

When Google was born, its advantage stemmed from its ability to collect and analyze superior data. While other publishers looked myopically at each page on the Web as a standalone realm, Google found that the link relationships between those pages held more valuable relevance data than the pages themselves. All of a sudden, the isolated views of players like AltaVista and Yahoo began to look one-dimensional. And ownership of what is now the $20-billion-plus search advertising market was cemented.

In the last several weeks, Google has indicated how important Facebook-like social networks are to its still-vast ambitions. One proof point is the launch of the new +1 product; another is the company’s internal announcement that bonuses will be tied to success on the social Web.

It may seem that this is about capturing a new market opportunity. But, trust me, it’s not. In reality, it’s Google’s recognition that Facebook has the same kind of advantage over Google that Google is used to having over its competitors.

And Google is smart to be scared.

Very smart.

But, if the truth be told, it will take far more than +1 to measure up to the whole new human dimension of the Internet. After all, the human organism is home territory for Facebook and utterly foreign turf for Google’s algorithmic machine.

Gold-mine worm shows animals could be living on Mars

"It's like finding Moby Dick in Lake Ontario," says Tullis Onstott of the nematode worms his Princeton University team discovered living far beneath the Earth's surface in South Africa.

The tiny worms – just 500 micrometres long – were found at depths ranging from 900 metres to 3.6 kilometres, in three gold mines in the Witwatersrand basin near Johannesburg. That's an astonishing find given that multicellular organisms are typically only found near the surface of the Earth's crust – Onstott's best guess is in the top 10 metres.

The creatures seem to live in water squeezed between the mines' rocks, can tolerate temperatures reaching 43 °C and feed off bacteria. Carbon dating of compounds dissolved in the water suggests that the worms have been living at these depths for between 3000 and 12,000 years.

"To have complex life sustain itself for such a long period completely sealed away from everything else – from sunlight, from surface chemistry – is pretty amazing," says Caleb Scharf of the Columbia Astrobiology Center in New York City.

No place for a worm

Onstott says no one thought multicellular organisms would be found living in this so-called fracture water. He points out that microbiologists are still trying to prove and understand how even single-celled organisms can exist at these depths. "The lack of oxygen, temperature and food is a big dissuader," he says.

"We've had this preconception that there can only be certain types of organisms in certain environments," says Scharf. "But it's not true at all. There are more complex organisms in these bizarre environments."

Animals on Mars

If complex life forms are able to survive inside cracks deep inside Earth, it raises the possibility that they might have survived undetected in similar environments on Mars.

Carl Pilcher, director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute in Moffett Field, California, points out that Onstott has previously discovered a bacterium living 2.8 kilometres underground, completely isolated from all other ecosystems on Earth (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1127376). The bug gets its energy from the radioactive decay of elements in the surrounding rocks. "The significance was that you could imagine an ecosystem existing in the subsurface of a planet that didn't have a photosynthetic biosphere, like Mars," he says.

Until now, it was thought such an ecosystem could be made of bacteria only. But Onstott's new findings have completely changed that. "It has extended the [earlier] work to an animal," says Pilcher.

"These nematodes are grazing on microbes. So now you could imagine that if animal life had ever developed on a planet, and the surface of that planet became lifeless," Pilcher explains, "you could imagine that animals [small enough to fit in tiny cracks] could coexist with microbial ecosystems all powered by radioactivity."

Kingston Introduces Wi-Drive, Portable Hard Drive Connected IOS Via Wifi

Limitations of the iPhone, iPad Touch or iPod it has no memory card slot so you can easily supplement the capacity of memory for your machine, this is a real need. So a series of companies specializing in the manufacture of storage devices have jumped into this lucrative market, finding a storage solution for wireless. After Seagate (with GoFlex Satellite), the last Kingtong also launched its own solutions, such as Wi-Drive. The compact portable hard drive can be via wireless links, with IOS, you are provided a separate software, with other devices you can use your browser to access.


Wi-Drive can be connected to multiple devices simultaneously and transfer rate is quite good. Kingston is promising up to 4 hours of battery life. Its weakness is in storage, While Seagate went the mass storage route with a 500GB hard drive, today Kingston is announcing its Wi-Drive an external 16GB or 32GB. Rates corresponding to each version is $ 129.99 (16GB) and $ 174.99 (32GB).

Stephen Elop's Nokia Adventure Market share dwindling, stock cratering, persistent takeover talk. How the CEO is trying to lead Nokia past its epic fail

On a slushy morning in early March, Stephen Elop, a Canadian executive who built his résumé at U.S. technology companies, found himself in front of 2,000 Finns delivering a speech about failure. Six months earlier, Elop had been hired away from Microsoft (MSFT), where he oversaw the company's Office products, to lead Nokia (NOK), the world's largest manufacturer of mobile phones. At its peak, in 2002, it contributed 21 percent of all of Finland's corporate tax revenue, and its success over the past dozen years has fueled the nation's sense of possibility in the same way that General Motors (GM) once propelled the aspirations of the U.S. Elop's message to his employees in the factory town of Salo was that, despite the 450 million phones the company sold in 2010—402 million more than Apple (AAPL)—almost everything Nokia had done since 2007 was wrong.

Without slides or props, Elop stood in the town's gymnasium and explained his signature decision as chief executive officer: to dump Nokia's homemade Symbian software, which has shipped on some 400 million phones, in favor of Microsoft's nine-month-old Windows Phone 7 software that runs on a mere 4 million. Elop spoke in his usual manner, an engineer's earnest, you-know-as-well-as-I-do appeal to reason. As he marched through his logic, the Nokia employees, aware that their new boss had only recently arrived from the very company whose software they would now be humiliatingly forced to use, betrayed no signs of emotion. Rather, a heavy silence filled the room, as if Elop were a defense attorney being watched for signs of inconsistency.

Much of what Elop had to say wasn't news to his audience, but it was still distressing. In his measured telling, Apple and Google (GOOG) had changed the industry from handset-focused to software-focused. Symbian had fallen too far behind to have any hope of catching up. Worse, the company's great hope for the future—a software platform created with chipmaker Intel (INTC), called MeeGo—wasn't ready to pick up the slack. He tried to negotiate a deal with Google to run Android, but Google refused to give the world's biggest phonemaker any advantages over its smaller partners, meaning Nokia's corps of 11,600 engineers would have next to no ability to add their own innovations to Google's software. "It just didn't feel right," Elop says to the crowd. "We'd be just another company distributing Android. That's not Nokia! We need to fight!"

Silence.

For a moment, Elop, 47, lays into the complacency he sees settling over the company. When he asks how many people in the crowd use an iPhone or Android device, few hands go up. "That upsets me—not because some of you are using iPhones, but because only a small number of people are using iPhones. I'd rather people have the intellectual curiosity to understand what we're up against."

Finally, after emphasizing that he believes mismanagement—not a lack of innovation—is what ails the company, Elop gets personal. "I'm deeply apologetic that I can't give you every bit of information about how this will impact each of you. That really sucks," he says of the layoffs destined to hit Salo's employees as a result of abandoning Symbian and MeeGo. "But my commitment to you is that we will get through this as quickly and transparently as we can. And I think we're going to make the best choices for the future." Within minutes the crowd has dispersed and headed back down the snowy road to the Nokia factory that since 1928 has been cranking out radios, TVs, and, more recently, cell phones. By Finnish standards, it could have gone worse. "It wasn't exactly a standing ovation, but people didn't walk out feeling resentful," says Ram Kuppuswamy, the plant's manager. "The disappointment doesn't go away. But this helped."

Could milk get ultraviolet treatment?

AT A 3000-cow dairy farm near Ithaca, New York, Rodrigo Bicalho wrestles a 3-week-old calf onto a scale. The calf totters about; the scale reads 52 kilograms, a healthy weight. Bicalho makes a note. He is trying to find out what happens if he gives his calves milk that, instead of being pasteurised, is treated with ultraviolet light.

While pasteurisation of foodstuffs has led to dramatic declines in foodborne illnesses, including tuberculosis, it does not kill all pathogens and candestroy some of the nutrients in milk, such as proteins and vitamins.

That can be a problem when using colostrum, for example. This is the first milk a mammal produces for its offspring, and it provides vital immunoglobulins to prevent disease in the newborn. Pasteurisation denatures these proteins, rendering them useless, says Bicalho, a veterinary scientist at nearby Cornell University. His is the first study to look at whether UV-treated milk might provide a viable alternative.

Exposure to UV light does not kill pathogens, but it damages their DNA enough to prevent them from reproducing. Although the technique can be used to purify water, it is still fairly new technology and it is not yet clear how effectively it deals with viruses and protozoans such as Giardia. What's more, the technique relies on light reaching all parts of the liquid; that's easy with water, but tricky with liquids such as milk and juice because of their opacity and coloration.

To get around this problem, Bicalho is using a device called the Turbulator, made by SurePure of Zug, Switzerland. It consists of a series of grooved cylinders with UV lamps running down the centre and a space 1.5 millimetres wide in between, through which the milk is passed. The grooves create a turbulent flow, and this ensures that all of the milk is exposed to UV light as it travels through the pipes.

Replacing pasteurisation with UV treatment promises to both inactivate pathogens and preserve a food's beneficial properties. The technology also uses a fraction of the energy of heat treatment, and could knock out those microbes that are unaffected by, or even thrive on pasteurisation.

Back at the farm, Bicalho pours a batch of cow colostrum into the Turbulator. The calves will receive either pasteurised or UV-treated milk until they are weaned and their weight and general health will be monitored.

The ultimate aim of work like this is to find out whether UV treatment would be suitable for baby milk. If a new mother cannot produce breast milk the baby is often given donated colostrum, which is typically pasteurised and so loses some of its quality.

Wine, beer and fruit juices might also benefit from UV treatment. Grape juice, for example, is used as a sweetener in many foodstuffs. It is often contaminated with a yeast called Zygosaccharomyces bailii, which is unaffected by pasteurisation but might be inactivated by UV.

It is still early days, though. UV treatment for juices was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration many years ago, but pasteurisation is still by far the most widely used method. Some 98 per cent of juice sold in the US is pasteurised.

Catherine Donnelly, a food microbiologist at the University of Vermont in Burlington and colleagues have shown that UV treatment inactivatesEscherichia coliin cider. SurePure's technique is promising, Donnelly says, but adds that milk contains more pathogens than juice or cider. Proving that UV treatment renders milk safe for consumption is the next big challenge, she says.

Wine under the lamps

Too much sulphite, a common preservative in wine, can make for an unappealing taste and for some people, like Neil Patterson, head winemaker at the Anthonij Rupert winery in Franschhoek, South Africa, it can even cause allergic reactions.

Legally, sulphites in wine can reach 200 parts per million. But by replacing the chemicals with UV treatment during fermentation, some Rupert wines have dropped to a quarter of that level.

Reducing sulphite content brings out a wine's natural fruitiness, Patterson says. It also expedites the maturation process, so UV-treated wines could hit the shelves faster than their sulphite-treated counterparts.

Nook Color gets Hacked MeeGo (Video)

Nook Color is a ebook reader success of Barnes & Noble for a cheap price for a good configuration. Considering the quality of hardware:

• OMAP3621 SoC @ 800MHz
  • PowerVR SGX 530
  • Differs from the 3630 by having the camera support logic disabled
• 512MB RAM
• 8GB internal storage
• microSDHC slot
• 7″ IPS panel
• Power, Volume+, Volume-, and stylized “N” home button
• Headphone jack

Previously, Nook Color was the first devices running Android 3.0 immediately after the operating system is introduced. Recently, people have found a way to set up the machine MeeGo. Tests showed that the machine works well, fairly smooth. These features are compatible, such as WiFi, touch screen, keyboard hardware. Currently doing is detailed.

Brass Monkey Acquires Emotely To Help Turn Your Smartphone Into A Remote Control

During Paul Graham’s office hours at Disrupt NYC, one of the startups chosen to pitch to the Y Combinator co-founder was Emotely, a company that converts your smartphone into a wireless controller of web apps and games. Emotely Founder and CEO Francois Labergewas nowhere to be found, at which point TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington said that he remembered liking Emotely and that it was too bad, because he was “looking forward to hearing [Graham] give him advice”.

It was indeed a missed opportunity, but it turns out that Laberge had a good reason for not attending. We’ve since learned that Laberge and Emotely were busy being acquired by Brass Monkey, a company that makes software development kits (SDKs) for Android, iOS, and others, among them a more fleshed-out kit for turning smart devices into controllers.

Though the two companies are not yet sharing the full terms of the deal, it is clear that Laberge will be joining Brass Monkey as a member of the board as well as chief innovation officer, in which he will head the startup’s business strategy and HTML5 and mobile technology. The aqui-hire is a great fit for the two companies. Because Brass Monkey has a more fully developed controller-building SDK, with support for Flash, Unity3D, and desktop games and apps, Emotely’s ability to build controllers using HTML5 for both the interface and communication layer (with HTTP and WebSockets) provides a killer complement. It essentially allows Brass Monkey controllers to hit web browsers without the need for a plug-in.

So what is this “Emotely” I keep going on about? The startup provides a technology that enables mobile apps to communicate with webpages without requiring installation or setup on a user’s computer. Laberge said that the app communicates at over 150hz, meaning that actions performed on the smartphone are sent to webpages in 1/150th of a second, 2.5 times faster than human perception of movement. Which means there’s little perceptible lag time between the phone and your computer.

While Emotely does require a user to have their phone on the same LAN connection as your computer, most people already have their phones and tablets on WiFi when they’re at home. Within the app, users can then choose from a series of controllers, some requiring payment and some free. And since Emotely is built on top of an SDK, users and developers can build their own controllers — and because Emotely’s controllers are webpages, anyone with basic skills can create and register them on the site to then appear in the app. So, if you’ve got a controller setup you like more than the ones Emotely offers, you can create your own. Pretty cool.

Emotely was designed to make Nintendo Wii-style multiplayer games, in which multiple gamers can play while sharing a screen. By linking a computer to a TV, users can play web games from the comfort of their couch, and since consoles like PS3 and Nintendo Wii employ browsers, it seems that Emotely is Trojan Horse-ing its way right into your living room experience, placing it in a great position to help speed the convergence of computers and TVs.

“Emotely adds HTML5 support at a time when web-based games are revolutionizing the gaming industry”, said Brass Monkey President and CTO Chris Allen, “Flash is no longer the only choice for creating sophisticated experiences that run in a web browser. Allowing developers to choose HTML5 as an endpoint broadens our reach tremendously”.

Considering that Emotely includes controllers for games, playing movies, music, collaborative drawing apps, and slideshows that utilize all the features of modern smartphones, like multi-touch, motion controls, geo-location, in-app purchasing, and cameras, the final product produced by the two companies has the potential to be a disruptive force for gameplay and development. It’s some exciting stuff.