In this episode, I explore the possibility of Android never being released and Google eating its investment. Will it happen? It’s entirely possible.
And as always, drop me a line or follow me on Twitter!
I also misspoke: I’m looking for a 15 second intro, not a 15 minute intro! Sorry about that!
Heart Robot has a heart that breathes, a belly that beats and skin that responds to every movement, touch and shriek.
Science decided to recreate the perfect film star. It seemed like such a good idea at the time.
This perthing does, however, have bad feelings too.
Could they not have at least carded every male who looked under-25? Exposure to constant pain can be a lasting blight on development. This was like Will Smith being tossed to the ministrations of thousands of Louis Farrakhans.
This robot has no feelings. It does, however, predict the future.
Its visible signs of happiness include limp limbs, lowered eyelids, a slowed heartbeat and relaxed breathing.
If you offer it cross words, if you give it a shove, a shake or a contract at Screen Actors Guild minimum rates, HR will flinch.
The Museum, naturally, is defending this gratuitous robot-baiting by saying it is merely capitalizing on the success of Wall-E, a movie that has already enjoyed its share of fat-bashing accusations.
I mean, this is our future we’re talking about. We must protect it. We must nurture it. We must educate it.
Should we be surprised?
I am sad, therefore, to report that a significant proportion of visitors to the museum have been teenage boys who have delighted in making the perthing unhappy.
Its hands will twist into fists of hurt, its eyes will widen in stunned horror and its heart and breathing will reach rates only known to ritual cocaine snorters.
(Those of you who think these are somehow post-coital signs should immediately volunteer for community service.)
(Credit:
CC Paul Keller)
What can the scientists and marketers have been thinking when they allowed this poor, defenseless perthing to be left emotionally naked before the underdeveloped teenage male emotional spectrum?
I’m talking about the robot, not the children.
Currently on display at the London Science Museum is a thing, no, a person, no, a perthing called Heart Robot.
Like the finest human diva, Heart Robot responds instantly to coddling, cuddling and the attentions of an ever-loving agent.
It might even use curse words on the phone to its representatives.
The company announced Wednesday that it will be launching HuffPost Green, a site division specific to “green” content through a content partnership with Discovery Communications’ Planet Green channel as well as TreeHugger, the popular eco-news blog that Discovery acquired last year.
“HuffPost Green will focus on eco news and trends–from style and eco-conscious celebrities to green lifestyle tips and the latest scientific findings and expert analysis,” a release from the company explained, hinting that we will likely see photos of Leonardo DiCaprio with his shirt off in addition to the latest grim findings on climate change. “The section will also feature advice on sustainable investing and highlight eco-friendly businesses and sustainable business sectors such as renewable energy, green building, recycling and organics.”
The Huffington Post, the news aggregation and commentary site founded by political pundit Arianna Huffington and former AOL exec Ken Lerer, is finally jumping on the post-Al-Gore bandwagon.
The new section of the site is set to launch June 4. Huffington Post representatives said the effort was spearheaded by current Editor-at-large Willow Bay, a TV journalist who currently hosts programs on the Lifetime women’s cable network.
But although it runs sections pertaining to politics, media, entertainment, business, and “living,” as well as a comedy site called 23/6 in conjunction with IAC, there still hadn’t been a section devoted to the unavoidably trendy niche of environmental media. Until now.
If you’re like me, your reaction to this news might’ve been, “What? You mean there isn’t a ‘green’ section already?” The New York-based Huffington Post got its start as a liberal answer to the wildly popular Drudge Report news site, and while it’s since branched beyond its political roots, it remains targeted toward a well-educated, left-leaning audience.
Nokia Tube makes an appearance in the Dark Knight.
Some recent rumored spec lists have surfaced, hinting that the Nokia Tube will have a 3.2-megapixel camera, a wide-screen display, GPS, a 3.5 mm headset jack, Bluetooth, HSDPA, haptic feedback, and more. From what I could tell from its brief moments in the movie, the Nokia Tube looks like quite the slender device, and perhaps even smaller than the current
iPhone. Of course, I can’t tell a whole lot more from that, but perhaps this recent bout of fame means Nokia will spill the beans on the Tube sooner rather than later.
Warning: this Crave post may contain minor spoilers of the Dark Knight movie.
(Credit: Wired's Gadget Lab)
It is both a curse and a blessing that as an editor who reviews cell phones here at CNET, I have a tendency to notice mobile gadgets in almost every TV show and every movie I come across. And so it was with the recent Batman flick, the Dark Knight, that I noticed a very intriguing touch-screen handset that I’ve never seen before. Lucius Fox (played by Morgan Freeman) showed this slick-looking Nokia cell phone that was able to send sonar waves in 3D, letting him pull up a 3D sonar map of its location. Other blogs have noticed this phone as well, and have identified it as the yet-to-be-released Nokia Tube, which we have blogged about on Crave before. Of course, Nokia has mentioned that the phone seen in the film is not available commercially, but we can’t help but speculate it’s a taste of what’s to come.
The end game is to allow utilities to provide baseload power–meaning electricity during the middle of the day when demand is highest–with stored energy.
Challenges
But for all the promise of making the grid operate more like a hybrid
car, there are serious challenges, panelists said.
Regulations for utilities are written around power generation units, but not energy storage, said Matt Lazarewicz, vice president and chief technology officer of Beacon Power.
Batteries with different chemistries as well as ultra-capacitors, such as the ones being developed by secretive start-up EEStor, serve this end of energy storage, Nordan said.
“There’s a lot of technology development and new work. But one of the reasons we don’t see more of it today is because the economics of this are actually quite complex,” said Bruce Phillips, director at Northbridge Group.
The latest generation of concentrating solar power plants are being developed with integrated storage, in the form of hot water or even molten salt to deliver electricity after the sun goes down.
Earlier this year, grid operators in Texas had to shut down power to its customers because the wind died down momentarily, effectively cutting off supply from its wind farms, noted Lawrence Gelbien, vice president of technology at utility NStar.
But utilities are risk-averse, and power plants take 5 to 10 years to construct. As a result, Lux Research pegs the market at $600 million in 2012, growing at about 25 percent per year.
With grid stabilization, kilowatts’ or a couple of megawatts’ worth of electricity are pumped onto the grid for a short amount of time, from a few seconds to under an hour. It’s used to match grid demand and supply to make generators run more efficiently or to ensure a steady frequency.
“Buying power at night and then selling it during the day–something like that will happen maybe in 30 or 40 years when storage technologies are one-tenth the costs they are today,” said Ric Fulop, co-founder and vice president of business development at lithium-ion battery company A123 Systems.
Air is compressed and pumped underground into geological features like depleted gas wells or limestone caverns. There are currently two compressed air energy storage (CAES) plants in operation with a few others in development. But some utilities are seriously considering CAES.
A panel of experts, organized by the New England Clean Energy Council, earlier this week said that the utility storage field has enormous potential. But rapid deployment of storage devices is held back by concerns over technology risk and financial complexity.
This “peak shaving” practice avoids the need to build new power plants to meet growing demand. Utilities could also idle dirty and expensive “peaking plants,” which are only turned on during times of high demand, such as very hot summer days when air conditioners max out the load.
Grid support is relatively mature at about $2.4 billion and growing at 3.3 percent per year, said Lux Research President Matthew Nordan.
But as utilities try out new technologies for different uses, Fulop and others predicted that storage will start to take hold in a variety of ways.
Utilities are showing interest in more options, but storage is still very much an emerging technology.
If only 10 percent of the installed wind power plants adopted large-scale energy storage, the market would hit $50 billion, according to Lux Research. That’s because electricity costs more for utilities to purchase and deliver during peak times.
Flywheels are also a viable alternative. Flywheel maker Beacon Power earlier this month said it expects to have a megawatt-size machine, able to store 15 minutes of power, on the grid by the end of this year.
So-called flow batteries, where liquid chemicals move between huge storage tanks to deliver a charge, are also being tested on the grid.
“There is an increasing gap between the growing demand for electricity and the availability of options,” said Julianne Zimmerman, chief marketing officer for General Compression. “With increasing shareholder resistance to new fossil fuel and nuclear plants, there’s a shrinking set of options.”
Different types of batteries are competing for bulk storage as well.
They are also very capital intensive. To get around that problem, Beacon Power doesn’t sell its flywheel. Instead, it bids on power generation contracts and sells the electricity to utilities.
But moving megawatts’ worth of electricity around the grid like files on a computer is more theory than practice these days.
“If you could take the wind power, store it in batteries, and discharge when the wind starts again, then that’s a fine application of storage,” he said.
Someday, the electricity grid will operate with the equivalent of a giant hard drive. But in the short term, grid storage will look more like a PC’s cache or RAM, able to serve up small bursts of power to keep things from crashing.
Many of these technologies don’t have a 15-year track record that utilities like to see, which makes them skeptical. Large-scale battery projects requires systems integration that involves batteries, electronics, software, and thermal management systems, said A123 Systems’ Fulop.
Two markets for energy storage
A123 Systems, which makes batteries for plug-in hybrids and power tools among other devices, is actively pushing into utility storage with more than 100 people dedicated to the market, said Fulop.
This part of the market, where companies are developing a range of technologies, from so-called flow batteries to compressed air storage, represents the biggest business opportunity in grid storage.
It’s targeting what’s called grid stabilization, or grid support, where warehouse-size installations of lead-acid batteries are the incumbent technology. That alone is a multimillion dollar market and will pave the way for different grid storage applications, he said.
Ideally, a utility would be able to get money from a storage unit in multiple ways. One rural co-op installed a four-hour, 300-kilowatt storage system to offset peak electricity rates and to provide backup power to a nearby industrial company, said Matthew Johnson, director of business development at Gaia Power Technologies.
“I think we will see a lot of deployments in the next few years that will change how the grid works,” Fulop said. “Then we’ll see utilities jump on the bandwagon.”
Technology optimists say that wide-scale energy storage will change the face of the transmission grid and make wind and solar power more compelling economically.
Rising fossil fuel prices are an incentive to explore energy storage, as well as the rising costs of constructing new plants.
Dizzying array of technologies
At the opposite extreme are companies pursuing the “bulk storage” market where power is delivered for more than an hour.
Start-up Deeya Energy says it is developing a flow battery for grid backup power or to integrate wind and solar power that will be far cheaper than lead-acid, lithium-ion, or nickel-metal hydride batteries and cheaper than fuel cells. Its products will be able to delivery between 2 kilowatts and 2 megawatts of electricity for 2 hours or up to 24 hours, it says.
Pumped hydro, where water is pumped up a mountain and released as needed in a hydro plant, is also used, but its use is limited by the number of available sites.
“The market rules have to change to allow nongeneration assets to connect to the grid and get paid for it,” he said. “And to make the grid look more like a Prius, utilities need to change their mindset to make more efficient use of the generation system.”
In this scenario, utilities store electricity made from renewable sources or produced during off-peak times. Then, when demand for electricity peaks in the middle of the day, they could draw from the stored-up charge.
Gelbien said that storage units could be deployed in place of installing more “wires and poles” in a place that isn’t served with enough electricity to meet demand for only a few days of the year. Because storage devices are movable, they could be redeployed in other places after a few years as the need arises.
One company tackling bulk storage head-on is General Compression, which is developing a wind turbine with an integrated air compressor.
Another flow battery maker, VRB Power, is currently testing systems, including a 5-kilowatt, four-hour prototype in Florida.
commentary
The next time you want to flame me for something I write…remember that I have Lily, and have pity.
Trust me. I’m punished enough. 
Asays Ski Grand Targhee
by mjasay
Next time you want to criticize me, just remember Lily telling me to “Shut up,” over and over again.
The new version contains the usual mix of bug fixes and security updates, with iCal getting the most attention. iCal won’t delete events without telling you as a result of the latest update, for example, and Apple said the update “improves overall iCal reliability.” Airport and Spaces & Expose also received some updates.
Apple has released
Mac OS X 10.5.4, the fourth update to Leopard since it was released last October.
Time to update those Leopard laptops to 10.5.4.
There are also a couple of security-related fixes for
Safari and other issues that my colleague Rob Vamosi will cover in more detail. Mac OS X 10.5.4 should pop up through Software Update any moment now, or you can force the issue by visiting Apple’s site.
MacRumors.com notes that the update paves the way for Apple to release the MobileMe service, the successor to .Mac unveiled by Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June.
For what it’s worth, 10.5.4 did not appear in the list of available updates when I ran Software Update on my Open Computer from Psystar, as expected. As of about 2 p.m. PDT, Psystar hadn’t posted a version on its site, although it might take the company some time to get the Open Computer version of the update up and running.
(Credit:
Apple)
Management experts Rafael Ramirez and Richard Normann pointed this out in the Harvard Business Review back in 1993. Ikea, they argued, was a success because it enabled “value co-production.”
commentary
Slate is positioning Facebook’s reliance on user-generated content as a bit like IKEA:
Ikea keeps its costs and prices low by enlisting its customers–their time, their
cars, their ambitions as interior designers, and their inflated ideas of their carpentry skills.
The article’s author goes on to credit Microsoft with creating a value co-production platform but completely overlooks the open-source software industry. Is open source like IKEA? Well, I’d like to believe that open source is much better than IKEA’s good enough and cheap products. That’s where we were five to ten years ago. We’ve moved beyond then.
Teens are not abandoning TV for new media: In fact, they watch more TV than ever, up 6 percent over the past five years in the U.S.
Teens love the Internet, but spend far less time browsing than adults: Teens spend 11 hours and 32 minutes per month online. Far below the average of 29 hours and 15 minutes.
Teens watch less online video than most adults, but the ads are highly engaging to them: Teens spend 35 percent less time watching online video than adults 25-34, but recall ads better when watching TV shows online than they do on television.
Teens read newspapers, listen to the radio, and even like advertising more than most: Teens who recall TV ads are 44 percent more likely to say they liked the ad.
Teens play video games, but their tastes aren’t all for the blood-and-guts style games. Just two of their top five most-anticipated games since 2005 have been rated “Mature.”
Teens’ favorite TV shows, top Web sites and genre preferences across media are mostly the same as their parents: For U.S. teens, American Idol was the top show in 2008, Google the top website and general dramas are a preferred TV genre for teens around the world.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
Nielsen is out with a new report on media consumption by teens and the results are counter-intuitive to what we commonly believe to be the norm. According to the How Teens Use Media report (PDF), “teens exhibit media habits that are more similar to the total population than not.”
Key takeaways from the report:
One of the more interesting findings from the report is the realization that today’s teens are not uniquely wired, but are an “artifact of larger, demographically broader shifts in media behavior. Teens are wildly different–not from other consumers today, but from teens of generations past.”
If you haven’t already, watch the video to see what I mean. (Be warned, though, Feist is playing throughout the 3-minute-long video.)
I only run when chased, so biking has always been my preferred method for a cardio workout. However, I’ve never been much for stationary bikes or spinning. The RealRyder ABF8 spin bike, however, might change my mind. (Though I doubt I’ll have the $1,995 to buy one anytime soon.)
The company claims the instability allows for a more complete workout, engaging core and upper-body muscles since you are in fact trying to keep your balance.
Instead of a rigid ride, the bike has an articulating frame letting you lean, steer, and sway from side to side as if you were on a typical road bike.