Wireless Tech Chat

For people suffering from advanced macular degeneration, this lens implant magnifies light at 2.2x to 3x and projects it onto the healthy part of the retina, avoiding the damaged blind spot.

It also, one would think, looks pretty awesome to wear. All we have to go on now are these illustrations, but I would love to see this in actual use. The device has finished clinical trials, and experts on ophthalmic devices have unanimously recommended FDA approval. Amazing stuff.

VisionCare Inc., now out of Saratoga, California, is reporting that the “FDA Ophthalmic Devices Advisory Panel unanimously recommended that the FDA approve, with conditions, the premarket application (PMA) for its implantable telescope for End-Stage AMD.” We have been reporting about this device, designed for advanced macular degeneration, since 2005 when it was in Phase II/III clinical trials. The fresh news will probably pave way for bionic geriatrics in the next few years.

From the product page:

The prosthetic telescope, together with the cornea, acts as a telephoto system to enlarge images 3X or 2.2X, depending on the device model used. The telephoto effect allows images in the central visual field (’straight ahead vision’) to not be focused directly on the damaged macula, but over other healthy areas of the central and peripheral retina. This generally helps reduce the ‘blind spot’ impairing vision in patients with AMD, hopefully improving their ability to recognize images that were either difficult or impossible to see.

Its amazing what science and technology can do in the 21st century.

Moixa is awarded a patent on its apple sized multi-touch sphere that can be used to display the world (e.g. Google Earth), browse web pages or control interactive games.

Moixa, the UK based pioneers of folding keyboards and USBCELL re-usable batteries announced today that it has been awarded a patent GB2414309 on Sphere – a spherical hand-held display and control device. Sphere, which is the size and weight of an apple (and can also be recharged by opening a leaf like petal), can display an interactive world map (such as Google Earth), navigate the web or interact with applications. The device supports multi-touch interactions for zoom, selection, as well as 6 degree rotational and gyroscopic actions, with particular application in interactive games or complex control situations such as interacting with a nearby 3D screen or virtual space.

In Moixa tradition, Sphere can also be collapsed, used and stored in its second form - a flat ellipsoid. The patents, filed in 2004 also disclose advanced multi-touch surface interaction and gyroscopic control benefits.

Moixa founder Simon Daniel comments, “Sphere is part of an expanding IP portfolio of geometric forms that rethink the axioms of advanced portable computing. This started with cuboid folding keyboards, through flat/extendable mice and rollable screens to cylindrical re-usable batteries, and now spherical forms. In the future, phones and portable computing devices reduce to input/output and power. Sphere reinvents the look and feel of the advanced portable device as we rely more on services, memory and mapping stored on the web”.

William Blake’s insight captures the spirit of Sphere when he said ‘To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour’.

Sphere is under development for release 209 years after William Blakes’s insight, in 2010 and is linked to the commercial availability of flexible screen materials. For license opportunities or to register interest in product updates, please visit moixa.com/sphere or moixadesign.com. Moixa pioneers portable devices and won a top 50 global iF Gold design award last year for pioneering sustainable USBCELL batteries (www.usbcell.com).

From Engadget: In braille, a character is made up of six dots laid out on a two by three matrix — not something that can really be conveyed using capacitive touchscreen technology. Working with a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, researchers in Finland have developed a method for piezoelectric touchscreen devices that uses a single pulse of intense vibration to convey a raised dot, and a longer vibration made up of several weaker pulses to represent a missing dot — spelling out letters that can be easily read by touch. It took a while for volunteers to get used to this method, but once they had they were able to read a character in as little as 1.25 seconds. Now that they have letters down, the team is moving on to words and sentences — with an eye towards developing text-to-braille software sometime in the future.

To discover how visually impaired volunteers would prefer to receive these vibrations, the team developed two different presentation methods. In the first, the user touches the screen on the left-hand side to read whether or not there is a bump in that position of the matrix, then moves their finger horizontally across the screen to read the remaining five dots. “But it wasn’t that easy to read,” says Rantala.

In the second method, the user simply places a finger anywhere on the screen and holds it still. The phone then displays a character by vibrating the sequence of six dots, each 360 milliseconds apart. “It took some time for them to start reading, because this representation is totally different from anything else that they had previously used,” says Rantala. But once the volunteers were used to it, they were able to speed it up and read a character in as little as 1.25 seconds.

From MSNBC Tech:
Tough economy will not deter mobile competitors

Research In Motion, Microsoft and Nokia are getting ready to launch online “app” stores for their mobile phones, attempting to play catch-up with Apple’s hugely successful “App Store” for the iPhone. With a tough economy, will consumers be willing to spend tightly held dollars on software programs for their phones?

Most in the industry believe they will. “While buying a car or house may be out of the question for many people, a 99-cent or $2.99 application may be in the budget,” said Allen Nogee, In-Stat wireless infrastructure and technology analyst.

“And with many people canceling their wired-line phones, Internet or cable so they can keep their mobile phones, now is the perfect time for an app store.”

Mobile apps’ draw
Microsoft, which plans its online Windows Mobile Marketplace this fall, agrees. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

“Whether we’re in very spare or prosperous times, the opportunity for someone to be able to go and enjoy either a free application download that gives their phone a new capability or a reasonably priced application download that gives their phone a new capability — that opportunity will be welcomed in all economic times,” said Daniel Bouie, senior planner for Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

Like its competitors, Windows Marketplace for Mobile will feature both free and paid programs.

“The thing about mobile applications is that a ton of them are available for free, or are at least available at a low price,” said Ramon T. Llamas, senior research analyst for IDC Mobile Technology and Trends.

Tanita’s BC-1000 Body Composition Monitor is hardly more than a sophisticated scale, designed to hold humans for just moments at a time while collecting measurements on muscle mass, overall physique, daily caloric intake, metabolic age, bone mass and visceral fat. From there, the unit can either send those details wireless to the aforesaid watch, or it can beam them to any PC with an appropriate dongle. The device is slated to ship this summer for $279.99 with a USB stick or $399.99 with an FR60 watch.

In addition to weight, body fat percentage and hydration levels, the BC-1000 Body Composition Monitor provides measurements on muscle mass, overall physique rating, daily caloric intake, metabolic age rating, bone mass and visceral fat. The BC-1000 will communicate with your computer and Tanita’s new HealthyEdgeTM Software to wirelessly transmit these nine readings within seconds after stepping on the platform. When using the Garmin FR60 Fitness Watch and its wireless technology, the readings of weight, body fat and body water are wirelessly displayed on the FR60, while all nine readings are stored in the watch. When in range of a consumer’s computer, the information is automatically transmitted to the computer using the wireless USB Stick and captured with Tanita’s HealthyEdge Software.

“Tanita’s new alliance with Garmin brings an immense amount of value to the marketplace. As both Tanita and Garmin represent the leaders in technology and innovation in our respective fields, it was a natural fit,” said Heather Bundgaard, Marketing Director, Tanita Corporation of America. “Wireless integration with the BC-1000 platform generates the most intelligent consumer monitor available, and we are excited to bring such a revolution in measurement and connectivity to the market this summer.”

The wireless interface protocol enables ultra low power applications ideal for fitness and health monitors and offers all the benefits of digital wireless communications with much lower power consumption than other wireless protocols.

The BC-1000 scale platform features no visible display, as readings are automatically transmitted to remote displays such as the Garmin FR60 fitness watch, a personal computer, or Tanita’s tabletop remote display for easy viewing in various locations. This dynamic feature—the first of its kind—will allow for private readings and is perfect for anyone who wants to keep their health and fitness levels private, making the BC-1000 the ultimate choice for discretion.

The Itronix GD8000 sports an Intel Core 2 Duo SL9400 processor, 4GB of memory, integrated GMA 4500MHD graphics, 120GB storage, and a 13.3-inch DynaVue sunlight-readable touchscreen display. But that ain’t all! This bad boy also features integrated GPS, WiFi, a biometric fingerprint reader, a smartcard reader, and an integrated Gobi 2000 WWAN module. Bluetooth is optional.

Webwirereports:

Ready-for-anything, GD8000 computer boots cold, runs fast and hits the dirt without losing performance or data

Spokane Valley, Wash. – The new GD8000 notebook computer by General Dynamics Itronix is now available for military personnel, field service workers and first responders who require high-performance computing while working in extreme temperatures, humidity, dust and rain-soaked environments.

“Our customers told us that to perform their mission-critical duties, they needed a notebook that was more rugged, had longer battery run-time and was equipped with a display they could see in all lighting conditions. We responded by producing the GD8000, a unit with the industry’s best drop protection, rain resistance, battery run-time and display viewability,” said John Schneider, business unit director for General Dynamics Itronix.

Engineered to operate in extreme conditions, the GD8000 kept working after multiple 42-inch drops onto a hard surface, operated in the rain for more than four hours and successfully booted-up in freezing and scorching temperatures. Powered by the Intel® low-voltage Core2Duo processing architecture, the GD8000 is housed in a user-friendly, ergonomic casing with a 13.3-inch DynaVue® touchscreen display. The GD8000 delivers uncompromising performance from command centers, to helicopters, to tactical vehicles and everywhere in between.

To mark St Patrick’s Day, Faith Central has compiled 10 celebratory tidbits, some myth, some fact, on the Patron Saint of the Irish.

1. The potato crop was traditionally planted in Ireland after March 17

2. Blue not green is the color originally associated with St Patrick. “St Patrick’s Blue” is used on Ireland’s Presidential Standard or flag, while the Irish Guards sport a plume of St Patrick’s blue in their bearskins. The emphasis on green is thought to be linked to “wearing the Green”, a symbol from the 18th century on, of sympathy with Irish independence.

3. St Patrick is patron of fishermen in the Loire, where a legend associates him with a blackthorn bush. The saint is said to have slept beneath it, and when he awoke the next day, Christmas, the bush flowered, and was said to have continued to do so every Christmas until its destruction during the First World War.

4. A regiment of the Mexican army in the 1846 -8 War between Mexico and America was named after St Patrick. Members of the Batellón de San Patricio included Afro-Americans freshly liberated from the slave plantations of the South, and the soldiers were granted Mexican citizenship afterwards.

5. The first St Patrick’s Day parade took place in 1737 in Boston, followed in 1762 by New York. George Washington allowed his soldiers a holiday on March 17, 1780 as “an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence.”

6. Until the 1970’s, all pubs were shut in Ireland on St Patrick’s Day, and the sole venue selling drink the annual dog show. Lenten fasting – and the obligation to abstain from meat – were lifted on the day, which most families would begin with Mass.

7. St Patrick’s Day is a public holiday in Ireland and also in Monserrat “the Emerald Isle of the Carribean,” so called because it was settled in 1633 by Irish migrants from St Kitts.

8. According to legend, on the day of Judgement, while Christ judges all other nations, St Patrick will be the judge of the Irish.

9. Since 1962, tons of green dye are tipped on St Patrick’s Day into the Chicago river, although the quantity has reduced, for environmental reasons, from 100 to 40.

10. Should you wish to carry on celebrating St Patrick after March 17, in the United States, you might visit the four Shamrocks in the USA including Mount Gay-Shamrock, W.Va or the nine cities named Dublin, including Dublin, Ohio (the largest Dublin in the U.S.) and Dublin, Georgia.

At least 26 percent of households are now cell-only in Oklahoma and Utah, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated. That rate was at least 20 percent in nine other states — Nebraska, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, New Mexico, Texas, South Carolina and Tennessee — and the District of Columbia.

The study is sure to be watched closely by telecommunications companies trying to understand state and local markets better, and by government, academic and commercial survey researchers using telephone polling to monitor health trends, politics and much more.

The CDC, blending its own 2007 survey data with Census updates, found the prevalence of cell-only households varies widely by state — sometimes within regions and even between neighboring states. This is tied to differences by state in demographics known to predict wireless-only ownership, especially being young and renting rather than owning a home.

States with the fewest cell-only households: Vermont (5 percent) and Connecticut, Delaware and South Dakota (6 percent each). South Dakota was near the bottom even though next-door Nebraska was near the top. Also below 10 percent: Rhode Island, New Jersey, Hawaii, California (9 percent), Montana, Massachusetts and Missouri.

In New York — where Michael Douglas as corporate raider Gordon Gekko roamed lower Manhattan barking orders on a huge early cell phone in “Wall Street” — 11 percent of households were cell only.

The study also estimated how many adults only have cell phones. Those estimates mostly came within a point or two of the household numbers.

The study’s lead author, Stephen Blumberg, senior scientist at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, noted the data are from 2007 and all signs indicate people keep substituting cell phones for landlines at a steady pace.

Company also seeks opportunities to bundle radio service with TV packages

Deborah Yao brings this to us via msnbc. Financially struggling Sirius XM Radio Inc. is planning to stream its subscription radio service to the iPhone and iPod Touch devices from Apple Inc. beginning this spring.

After narrowly avoiding a filing for bankruptcy protection last month, the nation’s only satellite radio provider wants to step up sales directly to consumers. New car purchases — which had been Sirius’ best source of customers — are way down.

Sirius XM also said in a call Thursday to discuss its fourth-quarter earnings that it’s ramping up efforts to reach buyers of used cars with factory-installed satellite radios.

Sirius also sees opportunities to bundle its satellite radio service with TV packages from DirecTV Group Inc. DirecTV’s controlling shareholder is Liberty Media Corp., which rescued Sirius from a debt bind last month with a $530 million investment. Karmazin said he has met with DirecTV CEO Chase Carey and Liberty CEO Greg Maffei over the past few days.

Karmazin said several parties had been interested in investing in Sirius, but the company’s “complex” balance sheet and the liquidity crisis scared many away. Sirius faced $1 billion in debt that was coming due in 2009 that the company couldn’t repay and was having trouble refinancing.

One person that stepped up was Dish Network Corp. CEO Charlie Ergen, who bought a substantial amount of Sirius debt to wrestle for control of the company. Karmazin rebuffed him, turning instead to an Ergen rival, Liberty’s Chairman John Malone.

Liberty extended loans to Sirius at 15 percent interest and took a 40 percent stake in the satellite radio company. Karmazin defended that expensive decision, noting that General Electric Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. had recently raised money at 10 percent interest.

From laptopmag via engadget:

Times are tough—apparently so tough that some associates at Office Depot are willing to turn notebook customers away if they aren’t spending enough on extras. According to several LAPTOP readers, including a current Office Depot employee we interviewed, the retailer’s sales staff are under such intense pressure to sell such “attachments” as Product Protection Plans and Tech Depot Services, that many will tell customers who turn down these services that the computer they asked for is not in stock, even when it’s sitting right in the stock room.

We first became aware of this problem a few weeks ago, when we went to our local Office Depot, looking for a Gateway LT1004U netbook. We were surprised by how aggressively the sales associate tried to convince us not to buy the system and then, when we said we still wanted it, how aggressively he tried to convince us to buy its corresponding tech services. When we posted about our experience on the LAPTOP blog, some surprising comments starting coming in from several different readers claiming to work for Office Depot.

Current Salesperson Spills the Beans

While e-mails sent to these first three commenters went unreplied, we were able to make contact with a fourth reader named Rich (last name withheld), who was willing to talk to us and even provided us with a pay stub to prove that he currently works at an Office Depot. In an extensive phone and e-mail interview, Rich said that he was always honest with customers but had been instructed to lie about notebook stock both by one of his four store managers and by a district manager.

“I have witnessed lying about the availability of a notebook, and have been told to do so myself,” Rich told us. ” Once I was talking to the customer and, while I am actually speaking, my manager comes on the radio and tells me to say it is out of stock if they aren’t getting anything with it. I always ignore him and sell it anyway because lying to the customer is flat-out wrong.”

73-year-old man was recently given vision again after being outfitted with a “bionic eye.” After 30 years of darkness, he now can see enough to follow white lines on the road and sort socks.

The eye, known as Argus II, is made by American company Second Sight. It works by using a camera and video processor mounted on sunglasses to send captured images to a tiny receiver placed on the outside of a patient’s eye.

73-year-old Ron lost his site in his 40s thanks to retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disorder that causes progressive peripheral vision loss. He is one of 18 patients across the world taking part in Second Sight’s experiment.

“They said let their be light, there was light. For 30 years I’ve seen absolutely nothing at all, it’s all been black. But now light is coming through,” he told the BBC.

“It’s a great privilege and an honor, I think, to be able to take part in an experiment such as this - hoping that the outcome is going to be able to bring sight to people, like myself, that were completely blind.”

Argus II:

The Argus II is a minuscule artificial eye that attaches to the retina via 60 electrodes. Stephen Rose, chief research officer at the Foundation Fighting Blindness, says it has “great potential for giving vision to people with the most advanced retinal disease.” With the second phase of human trials underway, expect production models this year.

The Argus II is the second generation of an electronic retinal implant designed for the treatment of blindness due to Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP), a group of inherited eye diseases that affect the retina. The Argus II implant consists of an array of 60 electrodes that are attached to the retina. These electrodes conduct information acquired from an external camera to the retina to provide a rudimentary form of sight to implanted subjects.

The development of this technology was largely supported by the National Eye Institute (NEI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science (DOE) Artificial Retina Project, which is helping to advance the implant’s design and construction. The unique resources and expertise at DOE national laboratories - particularly in engineering, microfabrication, material science, and microelectronic technologies - are enabling the development of much smaller, higher resolution devices.

it’s expected that mobile WiMAX will “outpace LTE over the next few years due to its head start on deployments,” and potentially more importantly, the company believes that WiMAX and LTE will take “very different paths.” In fact, it’s stated that most WiMAX support will come from fixed network carriers looking to spruce up their existing offerings, while LTE expansion will likely be pushed solely (or mostly, anyway) by mobile operators. To us, it all boils down to support, and it only takes a quick survey of the field to see that LTE has the most of that. For better or worse, it seems the next-gen data war is but beginning, even though we already thought we were nearing the end.

What is WiMax? WiMAX, meaning Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, is a telecommunications technology that provides wireless transmission of data using a variety of transmission modes, from point-to-multipoint links to portable and fully mobile internet access. The technology provides up to 72 Mbit/s symmetric broadband speed without the need for cables. The technology is based on the IEEE 802.16 standard (also called Broadband Wireless Access). The name “WiMAX” was created by the WiMAX Forum, which was formed in June 2001 to promote conformity and interoperability of the standard. The forum describes WiMAX as “a standards-based technology enabling the delivery of last mile wireless broadband access as an alternative to cable and DSL”.

The bandwidth and range of WiMAX make it suitable for the following potential applications:

Connecting Wi-Fi hotspots to the Internet.
Providing a wireless alternative to cable and DSL for “last mile” broadband access.
Providing data and telecommunications services.
Providing a source of Internet connectivity as part of a business continuity plan. That is, if a business has a fixed and a wireless Internet connection, especially from unrelated providers, they are unlikely to be affected by the same service outage.
Providing portable connectivity.

Silicon Valley chip company SiBeam has a wireless replacement for that tangle of cords behind your TV set.

Wireless HD can simply be thought of as sending a boatload of data across a wireless link, except that it is a data flow many, many times greater than your average home network. To put it in perspective, the amount of digital information required to show a movie in high definition is comparable to the data pipe required to light up an entire office building with run-of-the-mill broadband Internet.

In fact, because of the tremendous amount of data that SiBeam’s 60 GHz spectrum range can carry, it has been used on the rooftops of buildings to beam data from one building to another. Another use might be for a bank with several locations that wants to build a single, giant network. The 60 GHz spectrum has also been used by the military, mostly the Navy, to beam information back and forth between ships at sea.

The technology’s main drawback until now is that it requires exotic chip fabrication to build the radios. That translates to price tags for 60 GHz networking gear that run into tens of thousands of dollars. That expense might be worth it if you are the U.S. Navy or a large bank occupying most of a building, but not if you are a couch potato just looking to watch some HD television without plugging in a cable.

Over five years and with about $75 million in venture capital funding (raised from Foundation Capital, New Enterprise Associates and US Venture Partners as well as a strategic investment in December from Panasonic and Samsung), SiBeam has built 60 GHz chips using standard chip fabrication materials and techniques. What that means is that in a few months, for a few hundred dollars, you’ll be able to beam almost as much data wirelessly across your living room as the Navy does across the ocean.

From Engadget: We guess those bailout talks with DirecTV weren’t so futile after all, huh? The satcaster’s parent company, Liberty Media, has just stepped in to rescue Sirius XM from the clutches of bankruptcy, providing a $530 million life raft that it will use to pay off looming debt payments and keep operations humming. Liberty will write a $280 million check immediately, of which $171 million will go straight to debtors. Another round of funding (to the tune of $250 million) will be available to Sirius XM in order to “help it pay its debts and ward off a potential takeover of Sirius by Charlie Ergen’s DISH Network.” In return for this mighty appreciated favor, Liberty Media will own 12.5 million shares of preferred stock in Sirius XM, which it can convert into common stock should it so choose. Also of note, founder John Malone and Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei are likely to join Sirius XM’s board of directors.

Previously:

Safe to say that satellite radio is far down the list of priorities for Uncle Sam’s bailout bucks, so Sirius XM CEO Mel Karmazin pounded some pavement today, hitting up DirecTV and its parent company Liberty Media to try and save his bankrupted radio hydra. Apparently Smelly Melly isn’t as hot for EchoStar owner Charles Ergan to buy Sirius XM out as was previously rumored, but there’s a showdown brewing: Ergan’s been busy taking control of Sirius XM’s debt, so any deal with Liberty / DirecTV would result in feuding ownership interests. Making things even more interesting, it sounds like Ergan and Karmazin don’t really get along, so this deal with DirecTV is basically his last shot at keeping his job.

JK on the RUN posted a not about Mircosoft’s new offering, “Microsoft Recite”.

Microsoft Recite lets you enter a voice note to yourself which could be anything like a task you need to do, a phone number, you name it. The beauty of Recite is how it lets you search these nuggets of information by voice. Recite works on Windows Mobile smartphones and can be grabbed via SMS, mobile browser or PC. I’m going to give it a try and you may want to try it too.

It works on WM6 or higher.

Micorsoft’s Recite webpage has the following:

Remember
To start recording a remembrance, press the ‘Remember’ button, then say what you would like to record. Press ‘Finished’ to complete the recording and store the remembrance.

Search
To search for a remembrance, click the ‘Search’ button and say what you would like to recall. Press ‘Finished’ to begin the search.

Results
To scroll through your retrieval results, use your phone’s up and down arrow buttons. Results are ordered by match score. The darkness of the blue color and the score bars indicate the match score.

Consumer Use
We can think of countless handy ways that you might use Microsoft Recite… record your shopping list, friends’ birthdays, addresses, school happenings, gift ideas, get togethers, favorite wines… anything you might need or want to remember later. Recite even lets you remember and search in multiple languages.

Here’s an example. Imagine your co-worker, Paul Johnson, tells you about a book that he thinks you might like, Hot, Flat and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman. To start recording a mental note, launch the technology, press the ‘Remember’ button, then say what you would like to record; in this case, “Book recommendation from Paul Johnson: Hot, Flat and Crowded.” Next, press the “Finished’ button to complete the recording and store the note. Later, when you’re ready to buy the book but are unsure of the title, click on the ‘Search’ button and say what you would like to recall. In this case, you might say “book recommendation,” then press ‘Finished’ to begin the search. Recite will then retrieve and play the book recommendation for you.