New Echo SmartPen

Livescribe Echo SmartPen

The livescribe Echo SmartPen alowws u to record audio while you are writing notes ,and thn play them later.
You can save or share interactive notes to your computer ,i-pad or i- Phone via a Micro-USB connector that also allow u to recharge ur Pen.The memory holds 400 or 800 hours of recorded audio,depending on the model and with an OLED which make itn easy to navigate smart pen apps.

Cost  starting from $169.95.

Note - Don't forget to give credit to Tech master In the comment

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Latest Invention: The Smallest Laser in the World Created by US Researchers

The latest invention of American researchers is the laser that claims to be the smallest in the world. They managed to develop the laser by squeezing light into a space that is even tinier than a protein molecule. Their latest invention could be a significant breakthrough in the field of optical technology, making one step closer to nanolasers, which can be used to investigate and manipulate DNA. In addition, the laser can lead to the creation of super-fast computers and improved telecommunications.
The team of researchers was led by Professor Xiang Zhang. He mentioned that the plasmon laser constricts light into a gap that is only 5nm wide. An important step was the ability to detain light in a small space for a specific period of time required for light to stabilize into a "coherent" laser state, having all of its waves synchronized.
It is worth mentioning that plasmons are in fact wave-like movements of excited electrons on the surfaces of different metals. By connecting light to these oscillations, scientists managed to compress it further than usually, reports The Telegraph. More information on lasers and latest inventions you can find here at www.IfoNIAC.com, please check the links at the bottom of the story.
Professor Zhang, from the University of California at Berkeley said: "Plasmon lasers represent an exciting class of coherent light sources capable of extremely small confinement. This work can bridge the worlds of electronics and optics at truly molecular length scales." Their latest invention was described in the online version of the journal Nature. The scientist who co-authored the research, Dr Thomas Zentgraf, from the University's Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centre, stated: "The advantages of optics over electronics are multifold. For example, devices will be more power efficient at the same time they offer increased speed or bandwidth."

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HP announces split into two companies, but sadly they won’t be called H and P

HP, after years of will-they-won’t-they deliberation, has officially announced that it will be split into two separate companies: HP Inc, which will focus on PCs and printers, and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which will take over the servers, storage, and other enterprisey aspects of HP. Current CEO of HP Meg Whitman will become the CEO of HP Enterprise; HP’s head of printers and PCs, Dion Weisler, will become HP Inc’s new CEO.
Updated: 5,000 employees will be laid off as part of the split, bringing the total number of redundancies to 55,000 under Whitman’s restructuring measures over the last three years. HP still has over 300,000 employees currently.
In theory, this split will give each company the focus, independence, and flexibility to effectively compete in markets that have become a lot more competitive over the last few years — Lenovo has eaten a lot of HP’s bread-and-butter PC business, and the commodification of the server market (mostly thanks to Intel/x86) has weakened HP on that front as well. Funnily enough, printers are still one of HP’s biggest profit centers — but obviously, that isn’t really a growth market.

Dion Weisler, the incoming CEO of HP Inc.

HP’s split comes at a time when it’s fairly fashionable for larger technology companies to spin-off or break-up into smaller chunks. The idea is that these smaller companies have a narrower focus, and can thus react to market/consumer demands much faster — and, of course, be in a better position to take on the next startup that threatens to cripple their business entirely. Just last week, Ebay announced that it would be spinning off PayPal into a separate company — a move that shareholders were very fond of .

HP has been toying with the idea of breaking up some of its divisions for a few years. Back in 2011, HP announced that it was interested in spinning off its PC business — but in the end, then-new-CEO Meg Whitman decided to maintain the status quo for the time being. Now, some two years after Whitman restructured the business, HP still isn’t doing very well — and so it’s time to do something a little more dramatic. Read the full press release for all of the details — but basically, the company is being split along consumer/enterprise lines, with printers and PCs going one way, and every other division/product (servers, networking, software, etc.) going towards HP Enterprise. The split should be completed by theend of fiscal year 2015 — October 2015. 

Some memristors — one of HP’s better inventions over the last decade or so, which will hopefully used by The Machine

Moving forward, the new HP Inc will focus on “new computing experiences” and “new markets” like 3D printing, ultimately working towards “inventing technology that empowers people to create, interact and inspire like never before.” HP Enterprise will “accelerate innovation across key next-generation areas of the portfolio.” Overall, the main thing is that the new companies will be able to focus their R&D efforts and financial resources on things that will directly benefit them. Presumably HP Enterprise will continue to work on The Machine. It will be interesting to see if HP Inc finally gets into the smartphone market, after Whitman said way back in 2012 that they really should get into that market.

 Personally, I’m a bit disappointed that the two new companies aren’t called Hewlett and Packard — but it probably is the right move to make, business-wise. HP, along with other big tech giants from the pre-Google days such as Dell, Microsoft, IBM, are now being faced with the hard truth that the wellsprings that made them hundreds of billions of dollars will probably dry up a lot faster than they expected. In the olden days, technology and consumer demand moved slowly enough that companies could keep up — but now, it’s becoming increasingly hard for these behemoths to fulfill that demand before a sprightly little startup arrives on the scene and quickly lays down roots. The split into HP Inc and HP Enterprise, if they are managed well, could be a very savvy move.

 

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IBM unveils new Power8 servers in last-gasp effort to battle Intel’s x86 dominion

Just two days after jettisoning its last x86-oriented division to Lenovo, IBM has unveiled the first servers based on the new Power8 CPU architecture. Somewhat unusually, IBM’s press release for the new servers directly attacks both Intel’s “closed and proprietary” way of doing business and its products (IBM says Power8-based systems are nearly 20% better on price-performance than x86-based systems). Is IBM all bark and no bite? Or does the Power8 architecture and and OpenPower Foundation (which now has 59 members) actually stand a chance against Intel’s server monopoly? Let’s dive in and take a closer a look.

The new servers

First, the new Power8 servers: There’s the mid-range scale-out S822L and S824L, which can support up to two 12-core Power8 chips each (pictured above), and the high-end Enterprise E870 and E880, which can accommodate up to 8 and 16 Power8 chips respectively. The top-end E880, with its full complement of 16 Power8 chips, has 192 CPU cores — and 16 terabytes of RAM, 32 third-gen PCIe x16 slots, and lots of other goodies. There’s even space for a DVD drive. And don’t forget that each Power8 CPU core has 8-way simultaneous multithreading (SMT) — so, on the 16-chip system you actually have up to 1536 concurrent threads.

An IBM Power8 E880 server rack

The S822L and S824L have a trick up their sleeves: They’re both outfitted with a CAPI slot, which is essentially a direct link to the Power8 chip. CAPI is where the OpenPower Foundation enters the equation: Because the CAPI spec is fully open, hardware makers can create a whole host of CAPI-enabled components. For example, Nvidia is designing a Tesla-like GPU coprocessor that can plug straight in, providing even more ridiculous levels of parallelism. Altera is designing CAPI FPGAs that can be programmed for specific Big Data workloads, providing utterly insane speed-ups (on the order of 1,000 times faster than a comparable x86 system). I’m not sure why the E870 and E880 don’t have CAPI capabilities.

For a lot more details on the Power8 architecture, CAPI, and the OpenPower Foundation, read our featured story: IBM unveils Power8 and OpenPower pincer attack on Intel’s x86 server monopoly. The new Power8 servers are available from October 31. Pricing starts at around $8,000 for a single-socket S812L; for a 16-socket system, you’re looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars, I imagine. (If a single Power8 chip was available for OEMs, it would probably be priced at around $5,000.)

Taking on Intel

The whole point of the Power8 architecture and the OpenPower Foundation is to take down Intel’s dominance of the server market — similar to how AMD and a few others are trying (and failing) to poke a hole in the low-power server market with ARM-based chips. Gartner estimates that Intel provided 92% of all new server chips in 2013 — and IBM, and OpenPower members like Nvidia and Samsung, want a piece of that incredibly lucrative pie. I’m not a business analyst, but such a pincer attack seems like a smart way to go about weakening Intel’s position — and it certainly helps that the Power8 chip is monstrously powerful, and that the OpenPower Foundation has almost every big hardware player except for Intel on its roster.

Intel’s answer to the ARM threat: Bringing 15-core and 18-core Xeon parts down to mainstream servers (EP, as opposed to EX)

It will take a lot to unseat Intel, though. Something in the region of 95% of all servers in the world are powered by Intel-x86 chips — and thus, most of the software and hardware ecosystems are also x86-oriented. Power, Sparc, and other RISC-type chip architectures have been trending towards obsolescence for a long, long time. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that IBM — which itself is quite fond of closed, proprietary tech — finally opened the doors on its Power architecture to create the OpenPower Foundation. I don’t think it would be unfair to characterize this as a last-gasp effort.
But hey, if Power8 is really as powerful as IBM says, and if IBM and its OpenPower partners really are serious about bringing to market solutions that can flatten Intel/x86 in terms of performance and performance-per-watt, then maybe this will be one of the few last-gasp efforts that actually pays off. It’ll be an interesting few years, that’s for sure.

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Musk’s million man march to Mars

With SpaceX now set to receive its $2.6 billion slice of the manned space travel pie, Elon Musk has sensed the time is right to set the Mars agenda. There is nowhere else on the planet where such private financial power, engineering resource, visionary clout, and now responsibility is concentrated into the will of one man. In short, Musk is US citizen number one right now, the mold for mankind.
Rogue asteroids are the god’s little ways of reminding us all of the importance of having a space program. They also remind us that having a nuclear program capable of generating versatile nukes to defend Earth against them may not be such a bad idea either. But many, including Musk, have realized that Earth probably has but one shot at the big leagues, and we are it. In other words, if life created on Earth is to be that which seeds the entire galaxy, we best have a backup.

AElon Musk in front of a SpaceX Merlin rocket engine

Together with Mars society president Robert Zubrin, and Mars One co-founder Bas Lansdorp, the will to go to Mars is now birthing a way. For reasons detailed decades ago, the case for making Mars humanity’s backup is a good one. More importantly, it doesn’t have to be settled science that Mars is the place to be, only that those making it happen say it is so. As Musk will tell you, Mars is the reason there is a SpaceX, and the best time to go is probably in about 15 or 20 years.
In the mid-2030s, Mars will be about as close to us as it gets. During this window of opportunity Mars will be about 36 million miles away and the travel time measured in months rather than years. As far as the size of the Mars cultural-genetic depot, Musk isn’t thinking small. Rather than just a skeleton crew of a few pioneers with Swiss Army Knife-like skill sets, he imagines a colony that grows a million strong in shipments of 100 at a time.

Mars’ east hemisphere, billions of years ago, when it might’ve been covered in water/atmosphere. If humans colonize (and terraform) Mars, it might one day look like this again.

That’s going to be a lot of trips back and forth. To meet the demand, Musk says he is working on a reusable rocket that can land smoothly and be ready for action again within an hour. The growth of a colony on Mars would be exciting to watch, and probably more exciting to join. The recent Mars One colony signup quickly drew over 200,000 applicants.
It seems there will be no shortage of folks eager to take a one-way trip into the unknown. Provided technology can keep pace with dreams, the first Martians might actually be us.

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This weird exoskeleton adds the sensation of touch to virtual reality

Virtual reality is so much more than visuals, but most of what we’re used to seeing is little more than head-tracking and 3D imagery in a head-mounted display. For real immersion, VR is going to need to take advantage of the other senses as well. Touch and smell are just as important as sight and sound, but those are much harder problems to solve. Thankfully, a company by the name of Dexta Robotics is developing a peripheral to simulate the sensation of touch in a virtual world.

We’re on the brink of a massive wave of consumer-friendly virtual reality solutions. The Oculus Rift has stirred up enough interest over the last year or two that everyone from tiny engineering projects to giant corporations are investigating VR. However, nearly everything we’ve seen is focused on the motion-tracking and display parts of the VR equation. Thankfully, this mechanical exoskeleton dubbed the “Dexmo F2” is being designed specifically to give you the experience of touching a solid object.

In a Q&A on Reddit, a Dexta representative went into the details of how this oddball mechanical skeleton works. In this early model, the pointer finger and the thumb are fitted with a tiny disc braking system that prevents the joints from moving past a specific point. If you’re trying to pick up a virtual object, your finger and thumb will actually meet resistance like it would if you were picking up an object in the real world.
 Virtual reality for chickens is the future of farming, but is it also the future of humanity?
 

The Oculus Rift paired with an omnidirectional treadmill creates an extremely immersive experience — but the sense of touch would take things to the next level.

Unfortunately, this prototype doesn’t have the ability to convey exactly how firm the object in question is. As it stands, the brakes are either on or off — there is no middle ground. It’s disappointing, but remember that this is extremely early on in the life of virtual touch. To keep costs down, this early model doesn’t even have the ability to simulate touch on the other three fingers. The prototype will supposedly be available through a Kickstarter campaign later this month for under $200, so keep that in mind before you go off and pre-order a Dexmo F2 for your very own.
This implementation is bulky, cumbersome, limited in scope, and extremely unattractive, but don’t let that fool you. If we want real virtual reality, we have to go through some growing pains. Of course your grandpa is never going to strap on this weird mechanical spider, but this kind of research is a stepping stone to true Matrix-style immersion.

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Screenless Display tecnology

latest screenless display

Technological advancement nowadays is moving to a faster pace. The latest display technology -Touch Screen Display, commonly used in our smart phones and tablet computers will move to a mere history in the coming future. Screenless Display, the emerging new display technology will replace this touch screen environment and will solve the problems at higher level, making life more comfortable. The main aim of the Screenless Display is to display or transmit the information without the help of a screen or the projector. Using this display, we can directly project images onto the human retina, open space and even to the human brain. It avoids the need of high weight hardware and it will provide privacy at a high rate.
This field came into progress during the year 2013 by the arrival of products like holographic videos, virtual reality headsets, retinal displays, mobiles for elderly, eye tap etc. At present, we can say that only part of the Screenless Display Technology is brought up which means that more advancement is necessary for a boost in the technology. Lack of space is one of major problem faced by screen displays. This problem will surely provide a pathway for screenless display.

What is Screenless Display?

Screenless Display was an excellent thought that came into many experts inorder to solve the major problems related to the device miniaturization. Lower space screen displays have made the need of screenless displays more than ever. Screenless, as the word suggests clearly means ‘no screen’. So, Screenless Displays can be defined as a display which helps to display and even transmit any information without the aid of screens.
When will screenless displays be fully available? This question is not yet answerable since many developments are under stage only. Since the displays are capable of projecting 3D images to the space, many disadvantages of 2D and screen based displays can be avoided. Displaying feature of it can be thought of as a projector without a movie. Using this excellent technology, we can even make our smart phone a TV. The countdown for the first screenless display has started now currently from the month of May 2014 onwards. Screenless Display currently uses Interactive Projection technology with visual display and 3D Projection Technology.

Screenless Display Types:

Screenless Display can be grouped into three main categories. They include Visual Image, Retinal Display and Synaptic Interface.

Visual Image Screenless Display:

Visual Image is a type of screenless display were the eye or the retina can recognize any screenless image. Holographic display, Virtual Reality Goggles and Heads Up Display are some present visual image screenless display examples. The display works on the principle that; light gets reflected by the intermediate object before reaching the retina. The intermediate object can be holograms, windows, or even LCDs.
Holographic messages that became popular through the ‘Star War Film’ are now becoming a truthful reality. Holographic Displays allow the display of three dimensional images by using simple components like Helium – Neon Laser, a Lens, an object, mirror and a holographic film. The laser beam used will initially create a plasma environment. When the laser and object beams coincides, a 3D image will be projected. The projected image will appear to be floating in air. Presently, MIT’s Media Lab reported a holographic color video display (inexpensive) with the resolution of TV. Latest fiction movies the ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Avengers’ have shown this technology in more advanced form. This advancement can be expected in the coming future.

 

Holograpic images

Virtual Reality Goggles (VRG) is an eyewear display device. Wearer can view and interact with a series of computer generated images. Consist display screens in front of face. Images can be projected with sound and video, allowing it more popular for entertainment applications. Presence of polarized lenses is the major feature of VRG. These lenses will show two images, one per each eye and the brain combines them to form a three dimensional image. They show an illusion of depth. Many of these goggles are accompanied by head tracking systems connected to a computer, thereby adjusting images seen by the wearer as they move around.
‘World of Warcraft’, ‘Quake2’ are some popular games that can be played using VRG. The famous ‘Oculus Rift ‘and the recent ‘Google’s Cardboard Virtual Reality Goggles’ is an evidence that VRG is on its way. Now many DIY VRG are coming out since it requires only components like a smartphone, two lenses, a rigid paper or cardboard and some tape. ‘Sony Headman’ a virtual reality headset by ‘Sony ‘is also gaining popularity now.

OCULUS RIFT

In January 2014, Glyph Company had raised a sum via KickStarter with the aim of bringing personal gaming and cinema device using retinal display. Eye Tap and Bionic Contact Lenses are some present day examples for retinal displays. Eye Tap, is a display device that can act as a camera and a monitor. It can be worn on the eye. Generally a beam splitter is the major component of the eye tap. Now the eye taps are replaced by the smart Google Glasses.

GOOGLE GLASSES

Bionic lenses use components like electric circuit with red light-emitting diodes, a sensor and a micro size silicon chip for visual display. Controlling the display intensity and all functions by voice is the major feature. Infrared rays help transfer of information within the lenses. Many research and developments are taking place with these lenses.

Screenless Display Advantages & Disadvantages

The products belonging to this emerging technology bring out many advantages compared to the existing products with the old technology. While taking the images into consideration, the present screenless displays have the ability to present 3D images, far point images and an image with higher resolution one. Good brightness and contrast and large angle of view are the other essential advantages. With the increasing use of the screenless products, we can expect a decrease in the cost also in the coming future. Lower power consumption, light weight, and providing better privacy are some essential advantages achieved in all the smart screenless display products. The screenless displays will boost up the field of entertainment at a great stage.
Disadvantages faced now are basically the higher cost and limited availability of the screenless display products. Most of the technologies required for the outward of screenless display are in development stage only. Many problems related to eye sight can arise since the products require close interaction with the eye.

 

This the latest technology introduced to us  .

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