Cars to friend drivers in new social network

TOKYO Toyota Motor and cloud computing company Salesforce.com will build a social network service that will enable owners to become friends with their cars and get friendly,tweet-like reminders for maintenance checks and other notices.
Information technology and telematics are expected to play a key role in adding value to future cars,as consumers look for connectivity not just from their laptops and phones but also with their cars.Toyota has already developed its own telematics service to connect it with drivers and dealers.
Under the new private social network,called Toyota Friend, owners will be able to chat with their Toyotas like they would with a friend on Twitter or Facebook.
The car would have its own profile and send a message to the drivers phone,for instance,reminding him to recharge its depleted battery.The owner would be able to carry out a simple,twoway conversation with the car.
The service would be an extension of Toyotas network to be based on Microsofts cloud computing platform that would give customers across the world access to Toyotas digital services such as GPS and multimedia.Customers will be able to extend the private Toyota Friend network to include their family and friends through social networks.The service will be offered first in Japan with Toyotas first battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid cars due next year,Toyota said.REUTERS

President of Japans Toyota Motor Akio Toyoda (left) shakes hands with CEO of Salesforce.com Marc Benioff (right) during a press conference in Tokyo

IS THIS THE FUTURE OF COMPUTERS

German designer Philipp Schaake displays his award winning design entitled Crowd,which enables users to transform its shape from tablet to notebook computer as the screen and keyboard are separated during a computer design contest in Tokyo on May 20,2011.Schaake received the runner-up prize of the Fujitsu Design Award 2011 with 10,000 euro prize money from Fujitsu.The grand prize winner Egle Ugintaite from Lithuania designed a cane which provides mobile navigation and health management services




Source: newspaper

Audi Calamaro Concept flying car

The Audi Calamaro Concept was developed by Tibor for a design competition, organized by Porsche Hungary. The futuristic concept looks like a cross between a boat, a ski and perhaps even a stealth aircraft. According to the designer, the shape is inspired by “the bone of the cuttlefish”. Being a design of the future, we guess, the Calamaro will be powered by clean fuel options. We can’t really comprehend how this car will take off, land or even fly, simply because we can’t see any propellers, thrusters or for that matter, even exhausts.



  source : link

New Buoyant-Aircraft Design Could Lead to Fleets of Efficient Cargo Zeppelins

by eklipz 

A California company is working on a new airship design that could solve one of the biggest problems facing buoyancy-aided aircraft — how to control floatworthiness without wasting fuel.
Aeros, founded by Russian-born entrepreneur Igor Pasternak, is working on a rigid-hulled airship that varies its buoyancy to take off and land vertically. By compressing and decompressing helium, the density in the ship can be varied as a means to control the ship’s static heaviness. Static heaviness is the ratio of buoyancy to gravity, and it’s the main variable that must be controlled to fly a ship along a predictable path.
Buoyant ships can float in the air because their fuel, usually helium these days, is lighter than the air. Any kid who has ever lost a balloon at the county fair understands, and rues, this phenomenon. The buoyant gas is counterbalanced by fuel, cargo or other ballast, allowing the ship to fly at a controlled altitude. But in order to move forward, a ship has to burn fuel, and this reduces its weight — so it would gain altitude. To balance the buoyancy, airships must vent their precious helium or let in regular air, but this wastes an expensive and diminishing resource.
Modern airship designs deal with this by employing non-rigid hulls, multi-lobed hulls containing different gases, taking on water ballast at cargo unloading docks, and so on. But Aeros uses a compression system instead, called Control of Static Heaviness (COSH). It involves a rigid airframe and a membrane containing helium gas. The membrane will contain pressurized tanks: More pressure in the tanks makes the vehicle heavier, and less makes it lighter, Aviation Week explains.
In 2012-2013, Aeros will test a ship called the Pelican, a 230-foot-long, 600,000-cubic-foot rigid air vehicle with the COSH system. The Pelican project is funded by the Pentagon’s Rapid Reaction Technology Office, after DARPA’s Walrus contest went the way of the dodo. Walrus was intended to loft an entire military battalion and all its equipment and plop it down somewhere else, but the project was later cancelled because it wasn’t feasible — the ship would have been so huge that it couldn’t fly above 10,000 feet, well within the range of surface-to-air weaponry.
Pelican still has some issues to iron out, such as providing enough lift to take off with a heavy load; the Register explains further. But on its face, changing gas density to control buoyancy seems like a novel solution to an old problem.

Source: popsci

Eton’s Soulra XL solar-powered iPod boombox will cost $300, now ready for your pre-orders

by eklipz on May 8th, 2011 at 10:36 AM in Gadgets

Summer’s nearly here, the sun shining bright — wouldn’t you like to share your tunes with friends with friends while basking in the light? That’s what Eton’s counting on as it prepares to ship the Soulra XL, the solar-powered iPod boombox formerly known as the Soulra 2. As we discovered at CES in January, its set of eight speakers get pretty loud, and Eton claims it charges twice as fast as its predecessor (five hours) thanks to a sizable monocrystal solar panel, and lasts five hours on a charge. It’ll juice your phone, too. All told, you’ll be schlepping around seven pounds and paying $300 for the privilege of completely cordless mobile sound. Sound like a deal to you? You’ll find Eton ready to shake your hand at our source link.
Source: Engadget, Eton

AUO’s 71-inch ultra-wide 3D LCD panel eyes-on

by eklipz on May 8th, 2011 at 2:56 PM in Featured, HD

While strolling around Shenzhen earlier today, we decided to stop by at the China Optoelectronics Display Expo to feast our eyes on AUO’s “world’s largest” 71-inch 21:9 3D LCD panel. Phew, what a mouthful, but this 240Hz ultrawidescreen is indeed larger than the sub-60-inch offerings from Vizio, JVC, and Philips. But is it any good? We put on our passive 3D glasses and found the experience to be surprisingly comfortable and effective (even at about 40 degrees from the center before we hit the wall), though the glossy screen’s reflection of the neighboring booth was slightly off-putting. This would probably be less of a problem at your humble abode, anyhow.
In terms of availability, AUO told us that China-based TCL will be the first to pick up this beast of a panel, and the final product should be out in August. Apart from that, we couldn’t squeeze out further info about other brands, so you best be writing to your nearest dealership to import this exotic cinema TV. More eyes-on pics in the gallery below.

Source: Engadget

Tech Evangelists To Meet in DC to Figure Out the Future of the Postal Service

by eklipz on May 8th, 2011 at 3:03 PM in Technology

By the year 2020, when we’re all using ubiquitous organic touchscreens, augmented reality social networks, and ultra-powerful computers to communicate, will we still be using the mail? A group of technology evangelists and postal advocates will gather this summer to talk about that, and what the U.S. Postal Service can do to make sure the answer is yes.
The PostalVision 2020 conference will highlight how social networks and electronic communications continue to reshape the role of mail. Participants include Vint Cerf, Google’s “chief Internet evangelist,” and Jeff Jarvis, a blogger and journalism educator who has asked whether the Postal Service is even necessary anymore. Plenty of postal advocates will also be on hand, including members of a panel who have suggested post offices start selling gift cards and other retail items.
The goal is to discuss how snail mail might be saved, through dramatic structural changes or methods like privatization.
The USPS is on track to lose about $7 billion during the current fiscal year, the Washington Post reports. With that hemorrhaging unlikely to stop anytime soon, it’s unlikely any investors would want to buy it.
John Callan, a mailing industry consultant who is organizing the meeting, told the Washington Post that the USPS is already working to address its current problems, but outsiders might have some useful ideas for its long-term future.
The meeting will also review what foreign postal services are doing — like forgoing stamps for digital codes sent via text, and scanning all mail into PDFs for digital delivery.
Eventually, postal services may be more useful for a much broader purpose than delivering coupons and J. Crew catalogs. The mail’s unparalleled ability to reach everyone, everywhere could be useful for a host of services — delivering drugs in case of a disease outbreak or bioterrorism, for instance. Or monitoring air quality and traffic in neighborhoods. Or playing a role in the delivery and maintenance of nationwide broadband services … the list goes on. For those reasons, at least, it could be well worth saving.
Source: popsci

NASA’s Next Mission Will Be a New Mars Lander, a Comet Hopper, or a Lunar Sailboat

by eklipz on May 8th, 2011 at 3:09 PM in Science

If you could pick just one, would you A) send a new lander to Mars, B) send a robotic visitor to a comet, or C) send a ship to float in the hydrocarbon oceans of Titan?
NASA will pick one winner from these three projects, the space agency announced this week. The project will be capped at $425 million, not including the price of launch.
First on the table is the Mars Geophysical Monitoring Station, or GEMS, which will study the planet’s interior structure. It would carry three primary instruments, which would measure the planet’s wobble, marsquakes and geothermal heat flow. NASA says the mission could provide new information about the formation of rocky planets.
Next up is Comet Hopper, which will do just what it sounds like and alight briefly on a comet several times, observing how it changes as it interacts with the sun. Previous probes have already visited comets, smash wrecking balls into them and take their pictures, but this would study comets’ natural evolution.
And finally there’s the Titan Mare Explorer, TiME, which will float on one of the Saturnian moon’s massive oceans. It would be the second lander to alight on the moon after the Huygens probe, but the first to study an extraterrestrial body of water. It would study the methane-ethane oceans, possibly looking for any methane-eating inhabitants. It could also tell us whether Titan has a soggy interior, as some recently crunched Cassini data suggests.

All the missions will provide high returns at low cost, according to NASA.
Along with these missions, the space agency will choose among three technology demonstration projects designed to look for more comets, deep-space asteroids and near-Earth objects. NEOCam would be a space telescope positioned at a Lagrange point, where it would look for small bodies that cross Earth’s orbit, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Primitive Material Explorer (PriME) would study comet compositions, exploring their role in delivering water and other compounds to Earth.
And Whipple – ROSS (Reaching into the Outer Solar System) would validate a new method to search for distant celestial objects.
Those are smaller missions still in the planning phase, while the probe proposals are already fairly advanced.
Each of the probe proposals will get $3 million to build preliminary designs and test them, and NASA will review all three again in 2012, choosing one for launch.
Here’s an idea — why not let the public vote, American Idol-style, for the best one? Nothing against any of the hardworking principal investigators, but I’m going with the Titan float. Mars is great and all, and comets seem like fun to visit, but a Titan ocean lander seems like a no-brainer.
Source: popsci