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Monitoring innovations in hardware, software and vaporware
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Inside the BBC's R&D Labs

Inside the BBC's R&D Labs | TechWatch | Scoop.it

Whatever your views on its programming, it is hard to deny that the BBC’s research labs have produced some pretty clever things over the years. Teletext, RDS and Nicam stereo are just some of the more well known ones, but the R&D Lab is also responsible for much of the work on the DVB-T2 standard that makes Freeview HD possible, as well as research on topics like resolution and screen size that Reg Hardware has looked at before.

 

Following that long history of innovation, the closure in 2010 of the labs facility at Kingswood Warren, Surrey made some observers worry about the future of the R&D department, now split between two locations in London and a third in Salford’s new Media City UK development. No need to worry, the Corporation claims. To prove how busy the R&D Labs are, it invited Reg Hardware to travel north to take a look at what’s happening in the labs today.

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Tegra, CUDA Powering CPU/GPU Hybrid Supercomputer

Tegra, CUDA Powering CPU/GPU Hybrid Supercomputer | TechWatch | Scoop.it

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center plans to build a system using Nvidia's Tegra SoC and CUDA GPU to reduce the enormous power consumption supercomputers typically need.


On Tuesday, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), a government funded research center in Spain, revealed plans (pdf) to build the world's first ARM-based CPU/GPU hybrid supercomputer using Nvidia's Tegra ARM-based SoC and a CUDA GPU installed on a hardware board designed by SECO. The hybrid supercomputer will be used to accelerate a variety of scientific research projects.

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Sony HMZ-T1 3DTV Headset Review: An Amazing Toy

Sony HMZ-T1 3DTV Headset Review: An Amazing Toy | TechWatch | Scoop.it

I'm already living the Philip K. Dick life. I've got the communicator, the tablet computer, the everywhere Internet. All I need now is a deadly government conspiracy and an immersive 3D environment that lets me jack in and walk around.


Oh, that's here now too! At least the immersive 3D environment part. Sort of.


Sony's new HMZ-T1 Personal 3D Viewer is a gleaming bit of headgear that lets you have your 3D and wear it too, you gigantic nerd.

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Tegra 3, la nouvelle génération ARM de Nvidia

Tegra 3, la nouvelle génération ARM de Nvidia | TechWatch | Scoop.it

Annoncé depuis longtemps, attendu par beaucoup pour investir le monde de la tablette, le Tegra 3, ou Kal-El, de Nvidia est enfin officiel. Basé sur une architecture ARM Cortex-A9 quadri coeur cadencé à 1.4 GHz et secondé par un processeur compagnon et 12 processeurs graphiques, c’est l’annonce d’un niveau de performances tout neuf pour les engins mobiles.

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Intuit leverages its strengths for mobile payment push

Intuit leverages its strengths for mobile payment push | TechWatch | Scoop.it

Intuit has been competing fiercely with Square in the mobile payments market with its GoPayment app and card reader. But it hasn’t leveraged all its resources and relationships to really attack this market. That’s starting to change.

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Rackspace delivers OpenStack for private clouds

Rackspace delivers OpenStack for private clouds | TechWatch | Scoop.it

Rackspace has productized the OpenStack cloud computing software to run in customer data centers. This is an interesting move for Rackspace, a big cloud provider/managed services provider that until now has run customers’ compute loads in its own data centers and hasn’t provided software.


OpenStack is an open-source cloud computing platform and project founded by Rackspace and NASA, but which has picked up other big-name support from Dell , Hewlett-Packard , Cisco (s CSCO ) Citrix and others in its one-and-a-half-year existence. Last spring, Rackspace launched its Cloud Builders program to bring OpenStack into the private cloud realm by helping customers deploy OpenStack-based clouds, and Monday’s announcement is the fruit of that program.


That customers can now run Rackspace-blessed OpenStack cloud technology in their own data centers as a private-cloud option is a big deal for those business customers — and there are many – who want choice in where they deploy their clouds.

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CloudSigma adds SSDs to its public cloud

CloudSigma adds SSDs to its public cloud | TechWatch | Scoop.it

Cloud provider CloudSigma has become the first to add solid-state-drive storage to its public cloud computing service. SSDs (aka flash memory) are well known for their ability to significantly increase storage I/O performance and decrease power consumption when compared with hard disk drives, but until recently they have been too expensive for consideration in most data centers that aren’t backed by serious computing needs and deep pockets. That’s starting to change with the advent of new companies promising ever-lower prices on enterprise-grade flash storage, but making flash available as a service to cloud customers is still relatively unheard of.

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20 Life-Tracking Tools for Better Health, Wealth and Productivity

20 Life-Tracking Tools for Better Health, Wealth and Productivity | TechWatch | Scoop.it

Optimizing your life can help free up time to enjoy more activities. One of the best ways to start is by figuring out exactly how you spend your time. Self-tracking has become something of a craze thanks to movements such as the Quantified Self, which allow you to track everything in your life and, in some cases, take action.


Here is a list of the top 20 resources for monitoring the most salient aspects of your life. What you do with the information is only limited by your imagination.

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Meduza 4K stereoscopic camera system

Meduza 4K stereoscopic camera system | TechWatch | Scoop.it

The Meduza is the first stereoscopic camera system, to allow the user to shoot at BEYOND 4K resolution in each eye view.

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Directional shoes for the blind

Directional shoes for the blind | TechWatch | Scoop.it

Sometimes, it is just amazing to see how technology is used to make the world a better place to live for the people less fortunate. One such problem has been thought out and tackled by Anirudh Sharma aka touchaddict on IRC. It is called, le-chal (Translated to ‘take me there’ in Hindi).

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Teslatouch : a new technology for enhancing touch interfaces with tactile feedback

Teslatouch : a new technology for enhancing touch interfaces with tactile feedback | TechWatch | Scoop.it

The Teslatouch technology is based on the electrovibration principle, which can programmatically vary the friction between sliding fingers and a touch surface - and provides a wide range of tactile feedback sensations to fingers moving across a touch surface. When combined with an interactive display and touch input, it enables the design of a wide variety of interfaces that allow the user to feel virtual elements through touch.

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Le futur vu par les grandes entreprises du numérique

Le futur vu par les grandes entreprises du numérique | TechWatch | Scoop.it

Les grandes entreprises du numérique ont l’habitude de faire rêver leur monde en présentant régulièrement leur vision du futur plus ou moins lointaine où tout fonctionne à merveille, avec une informatique sans couture et des interfaces utilisateur ultra-intuitives. Les plus rompus à l’exercice sont Microsoft, Cisco et Intel mais les grandes entreprises japonaises et coréennes s’adonnent aussi à l’exercice.

 

La vision du futur des grands acteurs est généralement présentée sous trois formes :

- Dans les keynotes de ces sociétés réalisés à grand frais dans les grands salons du secteur comme feu le Comdex, le CES de Las Vegas ou autres. Ceux-ci étant agrémentés de vidéos hollywoodiennes.

- Dans ces vidéos qui sont ensuite diffusées sur Internet, et sont faciles à trouver sur YouTube ou sur les sites Corporate des sociétés.

- Dans des maisons du futur qui prennent la forme d’appartements témoin installés dans le siège des sociétés voire dans certaines de leurs filiales à l’étranger lorsqu’elles en ont les moyens.

 

Comme cette forme de marketing de l’innovation existe depuis au moins une vingtaine d’année, on dispose d’un peu de recul. L’objet de ce post est d’évaluer cet exercice de style, le mode de création de ces visions du futur et la manière dont elles se concrétisent ou pas, et de comprendre pourquoi. Nous évoquerons aussi le cas spécifique d’Apple qui est une exception puisqu’il est le seul grand acteur à ne pas s’adonner à cette exercice. Et cela a l’air de plutôt lui réussir, ce qui est paradoxal.

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This computer-on-a-USB-stick turns any device into an Android terminal

This computer-on-a-USB-stick turns any device into an Android terminal | TechWatch | Scoop.it
Remember that $25 computer-on-a-stick we showed you a couple months ago? This gadget might seem familiar: It's a dual-core computer on a USB drive, and its makers say it's all about computing from any screen, anytime, anywhere.
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Apple iTV Television Concept Shows Up, Based on Steve Jobs Walter Isaacson Biography

Apple iTV Television Concept Shows Up, Based on Steve Jobs Walter Isaacson Biography | TechWatch | Scoop.it

The biography of Steve Jobs written by Walter Isaacson has stirred quite a few discussions, especially with the hate against Android and the plans to develop an Apple television set. The latter is now covered by artist Guilherme M. Schasiepen, who created a mockup of the iTV.

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i'm watch – Android watch with carved capacitive touch display

Available on January 30.

Store : http://www.imshop.it/

Apps : http://live.imwatch.it/en/smartwatch/apps/

Developer site : http://www.imdeveloper.it/

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GoWebGL : More tests of WebGL in iOS on iPad 2

The UIWebView gesture browser was hacked by Daviid (https://github.com/gauthiier/) on late Friday evening at CIID. You can find the source code here https://github.com/gauthiier/GoWebGL .

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Touch Free technology by eyeSight

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Vidyo First to Achieve 100 HD Rate Matching Ports on a Virtualized Machine over Amazon Web Services and VMware [PR]

Vidyo First to Achieve 100 HD Rate Matching Ports on a Virtualized Machine over Amazon Web Services and VMware [PR] | TechWatch | Scoop.it

Vidyo today announced it has virtualized the first video conferencing infrastructure and delivered an HD video conference on over 100 concurrent lines. To date, virtualization in the video conferencing market has been limited to call control. Vidyo has now virtualized media processing, enabling service providers to offer unlimited multipoint scalability and low latency rate matching capability on demand to accelerate the adoption of high quality, universal video conferencing on any endpoint.

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Google Talk and Hangouts close to go native in Chrome

Google Talk and Hangouts close to go native in Chrome | TechWatch | Scoop.it

Chrome users will soon be able to access Google Talk and Google+ Hangouts video chats through a native, open-source implementation based on the WebRTC protocol, as opposed to the proprietary plugin that’s currently bundled with the browser.


This change also means Hangouts and Google Talk will be replacing the H.264 video codec with Google’s open-source WebM video format.

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NetApp does network-attached Hadoop

NetApp does network-attached Hadoop | TechWatch | Scoop.it

Seeking to appease enterprise customers demanding more-reliable and efficient Hadoop clusters to power their big data efforts, NetApp has partnered with Cloudera to deliver a preconfigured Hadoop storage system. Called the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop, the new product combines Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution and management software with a NetApp-built RAID architecture.

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Olly: A device that lets you smell the Internet

Olly: A device that lets you smell the Internet | TechWatch | Scoop.it

While we’re used to seeing and hearing content on the Internet, smelling it has never really had much of a look in. That changes with the launch of a cool new product from London’s Mint Digital Foundry.


Olly is a USB-powered device which takes events on the Internet and turns them into smells. Just got a reply on Twitter or a ‘like’ on Facebook? Maybe a new email or calendar reminder? Olly can be set to notify you by filling the room with a fragrance.

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Nvidia dépose un brevet pour un ordinateur au format clé USB

Nvidia dépose un brevet pour un ordinateur au format clé USB | TechWatch | Scoop.it

Nvidia a enregistré un brevet assez intéressant aux US, il s’agit du concept d’un nano-ordinateur de la taille d’une clé USB, que l’on peut brancher à un écran, et qui dispose lui même d’un port extérieur. La taille de l’objet est indiquée : De 40 à 60 mm de profondeur et de 10 à 12 mm de profondeur ainsi que 5 à 10 mm d’épaisseur : Des dimensions très modestes pour ce qui pourrait être une solution au demeurant très complète.

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Canon EOS C300 and RED Scarlet X – A Great Day for Video Cameras

Canon EOS C300 and RED Scarlet X – A Great Day for Video Cameras | TechWatch | Scoop.it

Yesterday was an amazing day for the world of video cameras with Canon announcing their new EOS C300 and RED almost immediately announcing the Scarlet X afterwards.

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India plans 'safer' nuclear plant powered by thorium

India plans 'safer' nuclear plant powered by thorium | TechWatch | Scoop.it

The development of workable and large-scale thorium reactors has for decades been a dream for nuclear engineers, while for environmentalists it has become a major hope as an alternative to fossil fuels. Proponents say the fuel has considerable advantages over uranium. Thorium is more abundant and exploiting it does not involve release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, making it less dangerous for the climate than fossil fuels like coal and oil.

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