World's First Ice Touchscreen Made by Nokia

A team at Nokia in Finland has created the world's first ice touchscreen. Though it is not a practical device, of course, but the screen is being seen as a step towards an era in which the surfaces around us gain computing capabilities. The team used a tonne of 25-centimetre-thick river ice, and used a chainsaw to cut it into 50-centimetre-square slabs. They used these to make a 2-metre by 1.5-metre ice wall and then blasted the surface with a heat gun - more typically used for stripping paint - to create a smooth surface.
"This was a playful experiment, but one that we think showed interactive computing interfaces can now be built anywhere," says Jyri Huopaniemi at Nokia's research lab in Tampere, whose team built the touchscreen, dubbed Ubice, or ubiquitous ice. Finland has a tradition of building snow and ice sculptures during its long winter. It was these that inspired the device, says Antti Virolainen, a member of the Nokia team. "We decided to see if we could make an ice sculpture that was interactive." 
The Nokia research team did basically was take blocks of ice, stack them up use heat guns to join them together and then using infrared, optics and some electronics to create the World’s first touchscreen made from ice.
"Playful experiments like this are important - people really liked it," says Huopaniemi. "New forms of interaction, sensing and content delivery for future mobile devices could come out of it."
Here a Video of World's First Ice Touchscreen Made by Nokia:

Google's Chrome OS to be Available Soon This Year

Google’s own operating system, Chrome OS will be out this year. The Google has confirmed this news now wait to be over soon. The Google's CEO Eric Schmidt informed last week at Web 2.0 Conference that the OS would come in the next few months. The Chrome OS surely a great challenge to Windows and Linux in the netbook market. 

Recently Slashgear has reported that “Component makers are whispering that the fabled Google Chrome OS will ship in November”, and also cites Digitimes reports that “Google will supposedly planning the launch its own brand Chrome notebook along the lines of Nexus One”.

Though according to some other news Google will only launch software rather than hardware, and has been told by the search giant that “We’re not going into details at this point”.


Schmidt also confirmed at the Web 2.0 Summit talk that Chrome OS was meant for keyboards, while Android was meant for touch. Very soon a first beta release of the Chrome OS will be available for users waiting from a long time. Currently six bugs presenting major problems in the software. Problematic features, however, could be removed to speed up the release date.

What we know about Chrome OS already:
It will be free and open source
It is built on the Linux Kernel but has a totally new windowing system.

It will support both x86 and ARM architecture.
It will run Web apps as if they're native desktop apps.
It is not a handset OS like Android, but there will be "overlap" in functionality
Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba have all voiced support for Chrome OS.
Chrome OS Director Matthew Papakipos is director of the HTML 5 Open Web Platform efforts at Google.
The underlying security architecture of "standard" operating systems is being completely redesigned.

Until today, these facts have only raised more questions. Far too many to even list here.

Genius Launched World's First 4D Mouse Traveler 355 Laser

Inspan Infotech has announced the launch of the world's first 4D mouse Genius's Traveler 355 Laser, optimised with OptoWheel technology and this mouse has been launched in India. OptoWheel is the latest in optical sensor technology, where turbo-scroll replaces the traditional mechanical wheel scrolling. This enables the user the power of four-way scrolling, which includes forward and backward webpage scrolling and up/down document scrolling.

The Genius Traveler 355 Laser is a laser mouse with touch-panel technology that allows four way scrolling to turbo scrolling during webpage or document browsing, allowing you to view up to 100 pages per second. What makes it unique is its advanced laser technology that allows the mouse to scroll over most types of surfaces. The presence of advanced laser technology at the bottom of the mouse, allows its operation on any type of surface with superior tracking & higher precision than the regular optical mice. 

It has a stylish design with unique and innovative features. The OptoWheel technology that also known as the Blue Eye. With this you can easily scan through the documents or skip webpages at the wink of an eye in a single click. At the same time you can stop the scrolling function with the second click of the OptoWheel. The Traveler 355 Laser makes a strong selling statement for a normal PC user, as well as a hard-core gamer. It gives quality browsing up to 1600 DPI. 


At the same time this mouse is very affordable. The Genius Traveler 355 Laser mouse is priced at Rs 645 and comes with a warranty of 3 years. It has been launched by Inspan Infotech.

New Apple TV Sales to Top One Million This Week

Apple has announced that it expects sales of its new Apple TV to top one million units later this week. The new Apple TV offers the simplest way to watch your favorite HD movies and TV shows, stream content from Netflix, YouTube, Flickr and MobileMe, all on your HD TV for the breakthrough price of just $99. iTunes users are now renting and purchasing over 400,000 TV episodes and over 150,000 movies per day. Apple has sold 1 million Apple TVs since its introduction in October some 11 weeks ago.

The iOS 4.2 update will bring features such as AirPlay to compatible devices, but a source that works closely with Apple said the software release is delayed until Nov 24. Released back in September this year, the lower priced Apple TV has seen sales success from the outset.The new, smaller and redesigned media streaming device provides a cheaper means for images, video and music to be sent from iTunes to the television. Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, had previously called Apple TV "a hobby", but the relaunched version has found new popularity.Apple TV is also AirPlay compatible which allows media to be sent between Apple devices such as the iPad wirelessly. The new technology means iPad owners could 'push' music or video from their tablets to an Apple TV and have the device play back on a large screen or sound system. The Remote app also allows for the Apple TV to be controlled via iPhone and iPad.

Previous iterations of the device had included a hard-drive to store media locally and were far larger in size. The older Apple TV was therefore priced significantly higher than current generations. Its competitor Roku has not reached the 1 million mark yet, despite having been on the market since 2008. 

Scottish Scientist create 1000- Core processor on a Single FPGA Chip

Scientist at the University of Glasgow made a 1,000 core FPGA (field programmable gate arrays) processor which is 20 times faster than current desktop processors. The team of scientist which led by Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede, divided up the many millions of transistors into 1,000 different elements or mini-circuits, each of which are able to process their own instruction set. Currently no processors has more than 12 cores.

This prototype FPGA processor has apparently already shown 20x performance increase over conventional processors while using a fraction of the power.
In this development, the Scottish scientists have used a Xilinx field programmable gate array (FPGA). Specifically, Xilinx Virtex V4 was used in this design. By creating more than 1,000 mini-circuits within the FPGA chip, the researchers effectively turned the chip into a 1,000-core processor, each core working on its own instructions, writes Daily Mail. Also, the scientists claim that the 1000-core processor consumes far less power than modern processors.The processor can process around 5 Gbytes of data per second, making it approximately 20 times faster than modern computers. Also, the scientists were able to obtain faster processing by giving each core a certain amount of dedicated memory. However, the report does not provide any details on the cores.

Dr. Wim Vanderbauwhede said, 'This is very early proof-of-concept work where we're trying to demonstrate a convenient way to program FPGAs so that their potential to provide very fast processing power could be used much more widely in future computing and electronics.” He added, “FPGAs are not used within standard computers because they are fairly difficult to program but their processing power is huge while their energy consumption is very small because they are so much quicker - so they are also a greener option.”

Vanderbauwhede continued, “While many existing technologies currently make use of FPGAs, including plasma and LCD televisions and computer network routers, their use in standard desktop computers is limited.” However, developers like Intel and ARM have already announced microchips that combine traditional CPUs with FPGAs. Hence, noted Vanderbauwhede, “I believe these kinds of processors will only become more common and help to speed up computers even further over the next few years.”Intel on the other hand has been thinking about creating a 1,000 core processor for a while now, and already have a design in mind based on their prototype 48-core Single-chip Cloud Computer (SCC). There are still computational limiting factors however, such as Amdahl’s law, which is a mathematical approximation of the speedup resultant from splitting a program into parallel threads/processors.If Intel does build upon its SSC-derived plans of building 1,000 core homogeneous multi-core central processing units, the question remains if this is actually the right approach to be taking. Modern GPUs already have thousands of processing elements, but so far can’t be efficiently used to solve massive problems or run operating systems. It’s for this reasons that AMD and Intel have been working on multi-core heterogeneous microprocessors instead – which will contain both x86 processing cores as well as high-performance stream-processors (and with AMD’s plans, even I/O controllers) – due to arrive only later this decade in the form of Bulldozer and Sandy Bridge server CPUs