NEC offers an entire range of display products ranging from mobile projectors to Digital Cinema projectors. NEC has the largest range of projectors in the industry today manufacturing both LCD and DLP projectors. NEC designs all the major parts of projectors thereby having consistently developed unique technologies. A case in point is the WT 615 projector, which uses NEC's original developed mirror projection technology to achieve large screen projection with an ultra short throw distance. NEC's NP60 is the world's lightest 3000 ANSI lumens projector at 1.6 kg. At NEC it is believed that only the best will do since it is "Your image being projected!" NEC offers an entire range of display products ranging from mobile projectors to Digital Cinema projectors. NEC has the largest range of projectors in the industry today manufacturing both LCD and DLP projectors. NEC designs all the major parts of projectors thereby having consistently developed unique technologies. A case in point is the WT 615 projector, which uses NEC's original developed mirror projection technology to achieve large screen projection with an ultra short throw distance. NEC's NP60 is the world's lightest 3000 ANSI lumens projector at 1.6 kg. At NEC it is believed that only the best will do since it is "Your image being projected!"

Solar Phone Unveiled

The world's first solar-powered mobile phone was unveiled in Barcelona. The 'Blue Earth'cellphone,manufactured by Samsung,takes 10-14 hours in the sun to be launched initialy in Europe in second half of 2009 .The phone can also be plugged in to charge, with the solar panels used to top up the battery to extends its power.

Touted as an eco-friendly cellphone, the Samsung Blue Earth has a solar panel at its back, which charges the battery inside. The Samsung solar panel is not expected to keep the battery charging round the clock though. It is intended more as a support system for the Blue Earth’s battery. The Blue Earth phone will come with a regular charger, Samsung said.
Samsung says that the Blue Earth’s solar panel will make enough power in 10 minutes to make a call for 3 minutes. Some reviewers find this difficult to believe, since the Blue Earth’s touchscreen (Yes, Samsung Blue Earth sports a touch screen) can draw more power than a regular screen.
Samsung has not released any further information about how the solar panel at the back will charge the Blue Earth. However, locating the solar panel at the back means that the Blue Earth will have to be kept face down to tap sunlight. Again, the location of the solar panel means that you will have to keep the Blue Earth out of your pocket if you want to make use of its solar power capability.
Samsung Blue Earth
The name Blue Earth has been selected to pinpoint the eco-friendliness of the new solar mobile. Samsung’s Blue Earth has an eco-mode - meaning you can turn this feature on, and the solar-powered battery will consume less power. This is achieved by automatically reducing screen brightness, reducing backlight duration and turning Bluetooth off.
Blue Earth, which looks like a pebble with rounded corners, will also have a pedometer, which will tell you how much energy is saved when you walk. The Samsung Blue Earth is built from PCM a material recycled from plastic water bottles. (Samsung already sells a mobile phone made from recycled corn.) Unlike most cellphones, it does not use harmful materials like Brominated Flame Retardants, Beryllium and Phthalate. Samsung says that Blue Earth will consume just 0.03 watt of power while in standby mode, reducing its impact on the environment.
The Blue Earth has been released with the slogan: “The Blue Earth Dream: Eco-living with SAMSUNG mobile”. The company said in a statement: “Samsung’s ‘The Blue Earth Dream’ demonstrates our small but meaningful commitments for the future and our environment,” said JK Shin, Head of Mobile Communication at Samsung. “We are committed to achieving the highest eco-status with our customers and business partners by providing the best eco-products and promoting eco-activities.”

Ten Dollers Laptop.....

All our stuff is made of dreams, and all technological accomplishments rest on an initial imaginative leap. So tomorrow, in Tirupati, land of miracles, India will unveil a ten-dollar laptop. Developed jointly by Vellore Institute of Technology, the Indian Institute of Science and IIT Chennai, supported by companies like Semiconductor Complex, the laptop has reportedly been fitted out with 2GB of memory, wi-fi, ethernet, and expandable memory.
If that sounds fabulous, it probably is. Even with a huge government subsidy, it is unclear how ten dollars can get you much more than a souped-up calculator. It supposedly costs twenty dollars to manufacture, but India's massive economies of scale should drive costs down to ten dollars - roughly five hundred rupees. According to a report, "It uses a cheap microprocessor (not Intel or AMD's standard PC chips) and removes the hard disk, CD/ DVD drive and other costly and problem-prone components, leaving the keyboard, screen and USB port." But even the most rudimentary netbooks cost more than ten times as much, and it is uncertain how this laptop will manage to display most internet content or really, even cover the cost of its material components. Atanu Dey, economist and tech commentator, has been scathing in his attack on the credulous press that bought the ten-dollar boast. Most tech blogs have tagged the news in the "yeah right" category.
The ten-dollar laptop was based on a dare. When MIT Media Lab founder and Old Testament-style prophet of the new media universe, Nicholas Negroponte, started his One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project promising 100-dollar laptops to children in the developing world, the HRD ministry flung the offer right back, claiming that India could produce its own cheap and best laptop. It rightly claimed that funds would be better used ramping up secondary education; and then, ludicrously added that OLPC seemed "pedagogically suspect", and that rural children were probably not up to the "physical and psychological" effects of personalised computer use.
To be fair, Negroponte's scheme was based on his conviction that affordable computing for children could help developing countries "leapfrog" into the future and indeed, that this was a burning necessity given that children in the developed world are now "digital natives", having grown up in a wired world.
The OLPC laptop (closer to 200 dollars now, as some expected large contracts failed to materialise) is a small marvel of design and durability, built for rugged use and child's play. With a screen that can hold up even in direct sunlight, wireless mesh networking, and its own Linux-based Sugar platform, its green, Wall-E-like adorability is hard to resist. But the project has had a twisted trajectory, and has failed to sell in the millions Negroponte expected. It has teamed up with Microsoft for a controversial dual-boot version, and is now launching a dramatic open-source engineered XO-2 ebook for 75 dollars. OLPC has also made its way back into India through a partnership with Reliance ADAG, and runs a pilot scheme in Khairat, Maharashtra. Meanwhile, Intel, which famously broke with OLPC, provides a similar Classmates PC. And now, whatever India produces for ten dollars, it will only add to the options in educational computing.
But the entire flap over laptops is another instance of our inability to critically evaluate technology - we either fall into techno-mysticism of the Negroponte variety ("Give a laptop. Change the world" is OLPC's cheery motto) or a generalised hostility to such technology as a frippery we can't afford, instead of a substantive reflection on the ways in which computers open valuable new avenues for learning and play. For instance, it is possible to ask whether computers are really an invitation to limitless experiment, given the fact that all possibilities are inscribed into the tool itself, as opposed to the free-form creativity of a sketchboard and crayons. Or that the multiple tracks of attention demanded by digital interaction cannot replace the deep reading and deep thinking that a book encourages. The holes in traditional schooling can't be fixed with a shiny green laptop. This is not to second the HRD ministry's dark suspicions about OLPC, but a reminder that a laptop is empty and unproductive by itself, and the adoption of a technology must depend on the particular ends being aimed at, in each situation. For instance, who will maintain and support these laptops in rough conditions? Might cellphones be a more malleable tool for certain contexts? The digital divide is an important issue, but there are more painful deprivations in India and this kind of techno-euphoria is downright dangerous when it displaces public attention away from the gross inadequacies of education delivery.
But we tend to imbue digital technology with a patina of virtue (or the other way round, we impute all kinds of cultural decline to the rise of the PC). As media scholar David J. Bolter has written, if the spindle and the potter's wheel were the defining technologies to the ancient Greeks, Renaissance Europe was suffused with clockwork imagery, whether in the work of Descartes, Leibniz or Newton, and the 19th century explained itself through the steam engine - our particular moment is dominated by converging screens. But fetishising the computer ignores the social and institutional context in which it is placed. For example, if a political figure happens to wield a laptop, that is not a totem of progress, it is purely a matter of personal convenience. Positive change depends on what s/he does with it. The internet is of course, like magic potion for organisational efforts, as Barack Obama (and Howard Dean before that) demonstrated in phenomenally efficient campaigns. But the mere fact that Obama is familiar with Facebook and knows his way around a Blackberry does not automatically make his a "2.0" presidency, with all the surrounding associations of transparency, openness, and bottom-up connection.

Electric motorbike that promises 150 MPH unveiled

For all those who have a passion for bikes, here's some good news: Mission Motors is coming up with an electric motorcycle that promises a speed of almost 150 miles per hour.

The bike, dubbed as Mission One, gets its power from 3-phase AC induction motor and a liquid-cooled lithium-ion battery, which the company claims, delivers 150 miles.

Moreover, it takes just two hours to get recharged at 240 volts.

The top-shelf hardware includes Ohlins suspension at both ends, four-piston Brembo brakes and Marchesini forged wheels.

The components - and the claimed 150 horsepower - put the bike on par with hardcore sportbikes like the Ducati 1198.

The motorcycle developed by former Tesla Motors engineer will begin selling them next year for 69,000 apiece dollars.

"As a motorcycle enthusiast and engineer, I knew I could combine my passion for motorcycles with my passion for innovation and create a motorcycle that truly sets a new standard in the perception of electric vehicles," Wired.com quoted company founder and CEO Forrest North as saying.

"With Mission One, we're writing the next chapter in motorcycle design, delivering a new riding experience without sacrificing performance or design in a zero emissions vehicle," he added.

New software to improve design tools developed

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have developed software that will let engineers design new products by simply sketching their ideas on a tablet computer.
The software, dubbed SketchCAD, is a digital pen-based computer system that can be used to design 3D products for a variety of industry sectors.
"The idea is to empower engineers and designers with tools that are already familiar to them and are the most natural for the task," said Levent Burak Kara, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon.
"Right now, our technology is being adopted by Honda designers for designing new cars in fast and cost-effective ways," said co researcher Kenji Shimada, the Theodore Ahrens Professor of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon.
As thinking about a new product shape by sketching is more expressive and more intuitive for engineers than the traditional mouse-and-menu-based design interfaces, the new system gives users more freedom to be creative.
The researchers also hope that their new software system could be used by physicians for planning surgeries or by university professors to teach basic engineering design methods.The researchers are also developing a software named SimuSketch that can recognize and simulate engineers' hand-drawn diagrams and mechanical systems.
The system enables engineers to quickly implement their ideas in the form of diagrammatic sketches and test their feasibility with real-time simulations.
"These software have the potential to greatly enhance engineering practice by allowing users to design and analyze complex engineered systems by simply sketching their ideas," said the researchers.

Supercomputing speed can worsen due to more processor cores on chips

According to experts, to increase the speed of supercomputers merely by increasing the number of processor cores on individual chips may unexpectedly be slowing the computing performance for many complex applications.
The suggestion is based on the observations made by researchers associated with a multiprogram laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
The researchers observed that the simulations showed a significant increase in speed going from two to four multicores, but an insignificant increase from four to eight multicores.
According to them, exceeding eight multicores causes a decrease in speed.
The team add that 16 multicores perform barely as well as two, and after that, a steep decline is registered as more cores are added.
The problem is the lack of memory bandwidth as well as contention between processors over the memory bus available to each processor-the set of wires used to carry memory addresses and data to and from the system RAM.
The researchers explained the problem with the example of a supermarket analogy, saying that where two clerks at the same checkout counter are processing one's food instead of one, the checkout process should go faster.
However, where each clerk does not have access to the groceries, he or she does not necessarily help the process, and may get in each other's way.
Similarly, according to the researchers, if one core is fast, two would be faster, four still faster, and so on.
However, say Sandia's Richard Murphy, Arun Rodrigues and former student Megan Vance, that the lack of immediate access to individualized memory caches - the "food" of each processor - would slow the process down instead of speeding it up once the number of cores exceeds eight.
"To some extent, it is pointing out the obvious - many of our applications have been memory-bandwidth-limited even on a single core. However, it is not an issue to which industry has a known solution, and the problem is often ignored," says Rodrigues.
"The difficulty is contention among modules. The cores are all asking for memory through the same pipe. It's like having one, two, four, or eight people all talking to you at the same time, saying, 'I want this information.' Then they have to wait until the answer to their request comes back. This causes delays," says James Peery, director of Sandia's Computations, Computers, Information and Mathematics Center.
"The original AMD processors in Red Storm were chosen because they had better memory performance than other processors, including other Opteron processors. One of the main reasons that AMD processors are popular in high-performance computing is that they have an integrated memory controller that, until very recently, Intel processors didn't have, " says Ron Brightwell.
Multicore technologies are considered a possible savior of Moore's Law, the prediction that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit will double approximately every two years.
"Multicore gives chip manufacturers something to do with the extra transistors successfully predicted by Moore's Law. The bottleneck now is getting the data off the chip to or from memory or the network," Rodrigues says. (ANI)

VERY SOON : Bluetooth technology that blocks talking or texting while driving

Talking or texting on a cell phone while driving is undoubtedly a deadly mix. Yet many people ignore the fatal risk and do not take precautions. Now, a Utah company is using Bluetooth technology to create a special driving mode that makes it impossible for a driver to talk or text when the car is on.
"The recent stats show that texting on the phone has overtaken drunk driving fatalities on public roads. This is all about saving lives and safer driving."
In a bid to keep drivers focused on the road, several states have banned drivers from using cell phones while driving, or require hands-free devices, such as those equipped with Bluetooth.
Yet for some people, laws are made to be broken, and even hands-free conversations can quickly become distracting.To address that problem, the scientists developed a special Bluetooth-equipped key.
In the current prototype, pushing a button both releases the key from its shell and activates the embedded Bluetooth technology, which finds the person's cell phone and puts it into driving mode.
When in driving mode, the phone automatically answers all incoming texts and voicemails with, "I am driving now. I will call you later when I arrive at the destination safely." The only calls allowed out are to emergency services.
When the driver turns off the car, they slide the key back to an inactive mode, which returns the phone to normal operation.