"emerging tech" entries
Tweenbots: Cute Beats Smart
If you wanted to build a robot that could go from one end of Washington Square Park to the other without your help how would you do it? How expensive in time and money would it be? Would you build or buy a navigation system? Construct a sensing system to detect obstacles? Or would you decide to take a…
Startup Marketing Isn't Rocket Science, So Don't Hire the Ph.D Too Soon
Guest blogger Darren Barefoot is a writer, marketer, technologist, and co-founder of Capulet Communications, a web marketing firm that specializes in high-tech and sustainability clients. He is the co-author of a forthcoming book about social media marketing for No Starch Press entitled "Friends with Benefits." Darren's personal blog is DarrenBarefoot.com. . A couple of weeks ago, my partner and I…
ETech Preview: On The Front Lines of the Next Pandemic
With all of the stress and anxiety that humanity deals with on a daily basis, confronting the dangers of global warming, the perils of a financial system in meltdown and the ever-present threat of terrorism; the fact that there's yet another danger lurking out there ready to destroy mankind, the threat of a global pandemic, may be easy to forget. But although you and I may have driven thoughts of Ebola and the like from our minds, Dr. Nathan Wolfe worries about them everyday. Dr. Wolfe founded and directs the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative which monitors the transfer of new diseases from animals to humans.
ETech Preview: Creating Biological Legos
If you've gotten tired of hacking firewalls or cloud computing, maybe it's time to try your hand with DNA. That's what Reshma Shetty is doing with her Doctorate in Biological Engineering from MIT. Apart from her crowning achievement of getting bacteria to smell like mint and bananas, she's also active in the developing field of synthetic biology and has recently helped found a company called Gingko BioWorks which is developing enabling technologies to allow for rapid prototyping of biological systems. She will be giving a talk entitled, "Real Hackers Program DNA" at O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies Conference in March.
ETech Preview: Why LCD is the Cool New Technology All Over Again
One of the things that the One Laptop Per Child project is best known for is the amazing transflective display technology that it utilized. Combining a traditional backlit color display with a black and white display that could be used outdoors, it both met the needs of low power usage and outdoor readability that is crucial in developing countries. When Mary Lou Jepsen, who developed the display for the XO, left to form Pixel Qi, the expectation was that some of the revolutionary engineering that was used in the XO would begin to make its way onto the broader consumer market. Since she’ll be talking at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference in March, we decided to check in and see what she’s up to.
The Kindle and the End of the End of History
Bezos' vision to make every book ever printed in any language accessible within 60 seconds could save history.
A Climate of Polarization
We are entering an new era of seismic change in policy, business, society, technology, finance and our environment, on a scale and speed substantially greater than previous revolutions. More than ever, we need to create space for learning, communication and understanding.
What Will Change Everything?
Regular Radar contributor Linda Stone sent this in to be posted today. What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see? The Internet, television, antibiotics, automobiles, electricity, nuclear power, space travel, and cloning – these inventions were born out of dreams, persistence, and imagination. What game-changing ideas can we expect to see in OUR lifetimes? As…
The State of Transit Routing
Mixed modal transit routing is coming, but it faces a different kind of data acquisition problem than street routing before it. The data isn't observable, and it's often proprietary.
DIY Appliances on the Web?
Or, My Enterprise is Appliancized, Why Isn't Your Web? I wrote a couple of posts a while back that covered task-optimized hardware. This one was about a system that combined Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's) with a commodity CPU platform to provide the sheer number crunching performance needed to break GSM encryption. This one looked at using task-appropriate efficient processors…