TECHNOLOGY REPORT

UPDATE:  Reports, pictures, and details are still murky but this appears to be a case of overhyped nonsense where the device is simply a flash drive system without monitor or keyboard:  http://education.zdnet.com/?p=2131

The Times of India and others are now reporting that a team of students and the Government of India have developed a low cost laptop that is expected to be put into widespread use throughout India very soon. The initial cost is reported to be $20 with a mass production cost expected to be $10.

Yes, you heard that right – ten bucks for a computer.

Although the specs on these machines will obviously be marginal, it is not longer important for most users to have a robust machine – rather cloud storage and applications and internet-as-network computing has become dominant even for many high end computer users.

As admirable as the One Laptop Per Child project has been to this process it appears the India machines may wreck the One Laptop train. Although it’s not clear yet if the India systems will be self powered and have mesh networking capabilities as the One Laptops do, I think the key brilliancy of Negroponte was to create machines that were accessible to a dramatically greater number of people than have had access in the past to advanced technologies. The India project combined with the dramatic innovations in smartphones and cellular connectivity combined with Intel’s falling out with One Laptop last year may obsolete the One Laptop project in its current form, though Negroponte can certainly be proud to have ushered in an era of “extremely low cost” computing.

CES 2011 promises much higher attendance as the economy improves and is led in much of USA by technology.    Join us at CES 2011

Reports are still coming in and the official audited numbers are not ready yet, but it appears that attendance at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show CES 2009 was down over 20%, to 110,000 attendees. CES 2008 saw about 130,000 and CES 2007 even more so this does not appear to be an encouraging development for the electronics industry.

The Las Vegas Sun suggests that company expense cutbacks are mostly responsible for the lower attendance.

Is low attendance an indication of trouble yet to come? Unfortunately the answer is probably yes as CES is the world’s most influential electronics show and company cutbacks there are likely to reflect their own perceptions of troubles ahead.

John will have more later on this topic as he had a chance to test one of the world’s top racing simulators on display at CES by Simcraft but I wanted to get these pictures online .  We had a nice talk with Simcraft’s CEO about his plans for moving forward with this remarkable driving simulation tool.    Rather than the arcade market with its liability challenges he explained that one of  Simcraft’s major projects right now is a contract with the Department of Defense to use the simulators to train drivers for high speed runs when they must avoid IEDs in Iraq and other combat environments.

At $44,000 this is not accessible to most but with a remarkable cage suspension system that gives the driver 3 degrees of motion this really is likely to be the sim of choice for high end drivers who can pony up the cash.

Autoblog has more on this device – easily one of CES’ most impressive demos.

For live CES 2011 Coverage stay tuned to Technology Report

Casio’s focus at CES 2009 was on their robust new digital camera line.   G4 covered the Casio CES Press Conference at CES.

The most interesting aspects of the new Casio cameras will be high speed photography and effects which will allow regular users to deploy some things only pros could use before such as 60 frame per second sequences in simple cameras and 1200 frame per second high speed video from relatively inexpensive camcorders.

The Blue Brain project represents the most promising effort to date to reverse engineer a human brain. In phase one of this project, completed last year, the team has modelled a rat neocortical column using an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. Contrary to popular misconceptions there is little reason to believe that a human brain differs all that dramatically from that of many other animals. Many scientists now believe that the most significant difference between human and other animal brains is mainly the larger number of interconnections via a denser brain neocortex region. Surprisingly, the neocortex is a hugely redundant structure where billions of neurons are densely packed into interconnected neocortical columns.

Although it is not the stated goal of the project which is designed primarily to help understand the brain and diagnose brain disorders, the Blue Brain project may be the first to deliver a true “Artificial Intelligence” via this process of reverse engineering.

Thankfully the recent rumor reporting a problem between IBM and the Blue Brain project appears to be false. Technology Report has confirmed with IBM Switzerland that the Blue Brain project is waiting for Phase II funding from the Swiss Government. See the statement from Blue Brain project director Henry Markam below.

A recent intriguing development with Gamma oscillations and the Blue Brain AI simulation is reported here at Neuronism.

Henry Markram, Project Director as quoted by IBM Switzerland to Technology Report on January 19, 2009:

The funding:
There is a serious misconception that IBM somehow funded or donated to
support the Blue Brain Project. The BBP project is funded primarily by the
Swiss government and secondarily by grants and some donations from private
individuals. The EPFL bought the BG, it was not donated to the EPFL. It was
at a reduced cost because at that stage it was still a prototype and IBM
was interested in exploring how different applications will perform on the
machine – we were a kind of beta site.

The Collaboration:
The Blue Brain Project is a project that I conceived over the past 15
years. I chose the name because of the Blue Gene series which is a
fantastic architecture for brain simulations. When we bought the BG, we
also had to make sure that we have the computer engineering and computer
science expertise to run the machine and optimize all the programs. So BG
came to us with IBM’s full support as a technology partner. This component
of the collaboration is invaluable to the Project and will continue and
grow as long as we have a Blue Gene or other architectures from IBM. This
is by far the major component of the collaboration.

IBM Research at T.J. Watson, also contributed a postdoc that was sent to
work with us at the EPFL and assigned a researcher at Watson to work on
some computational neuroscience tasks. The research and term assigned to
these postdocs is done, a success and published. Actually, the term expired
almost a year ago, and the IBM postdoc, Sean Hill, actually transfered and
is now an employee of the BBP and not IBM. The researcher at TJ Watson
worked on a specific problem of collision detection between the axons and
dendrites and this is done very well and already published. Although very
important projects and contributions, this is a small part of the BBP which
is carried out at the EPFL and involves, neuroscience, neuroinformatics,
vizualization, and a vast spectrum of computational neuroscience.

Continuation:
BBP needs BG’s to continue the project. The architecture is perfect for
brain simulations. When we manage to get our funding to buy the next BG/P
finalized, we will start Phase 2 and that will of course involve the basic
(and most significant) technology collaboration, and most likely also many
new collaborations on specific research targeted topics where we see that
IBM can, and would like to, contribute. So this is an intermediate phase
while we get ready for phase 2 – molecular level modeling.

BBP sees IBM as a key partner in the BBP and I do think that IBM also sees
the value in the BBP. We are getting ready for Phase 2, but it has not
started until we get the next BG series.

More about Blue Brain is here

The fantastic Cntrstg blog lounge at the Wynn during CES 2009 was definitely one of the conference highlights for me.  The event lasted for much of the conference late into the night and provided a fantastic venue for blogging, relaxing, and several good tech presentations.     Cntrstg was along the lines of the Bloghaus in the Bellagio – a great event from the past two CES’s.

Thanks so much to the Cntrstg crew who did an amazing job of keeping folks fed and fueled and to the sponsors of this excellent Blog lounging event:

HP Microsoft American Airlines Scooba Design Pro Clip AMD BuzzCorps OtterBox Boston Power Eye Fi Adapt Mobile Big Skinny

Disclosure:  Freebies from the blog lounge included beer, great Wynn catered food, a Scooba laptop bag, and a free airline ticket from the American Airlines presentation.

One of my *favorite* companies at CES was Freeplay with several innovative humanitarian technology solutions as well as their innovative line of self-powered lanterns, radios, and more.

As part of their Foundation Work, Freeplay is building cheap, self powered devices for remote medicine in developing world and another device to charge One Laptop Project computers.   Below are three such devices – all self powered.    Emergency Radio, One Laptop Per Child Power crank (I’m not clear if this is better than the one built into those devices but I think it’s to be used for OLPC plus other devices), and one of the best innovations at CES 2009 which is an inexpensive fetal heart monitor to be used by nurses and doctors in the field to help lower infant mortality.    Freeplay’s work in this field will help save thousands of lives very cheaply because the lack of such medical data in the field is a key reason for the high mortality rates in the developing world.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Carol Bartz is about to accept Yahoo’s offer to be their new CEO, replacing Jerry Yang after his stint of about a year where Yahoo saw their share price collapse after a rejection of offers from Microsoft that many feel were as much an ego play by Yang than a reasoned business decision.

Bartz has been CEO of Autodesk and it remains somewhat unclear why Yahoo’s board sees Bartz as the best person for the job at this challenging time in Yahoo’s corporate history. One idea bandied about on CNBC right now is that Yahoo’s plans are to sell off their search business to Microsoft and then reinvent themselves as a software company, although I’m skeptical even Yahoo would be so foolish as to think they can monetize software in the current online environment where most software is free.

Yahoo does have huge potential to leverage it’s brilliant Web 2.0 development to date (e.g. Flickr, Open Search APIs, etc), but only if they can find ways to make sure their huge internet footprint stays intact and users start to see and interact with Yahoo advertising. If Bartz can do this Yahoo’s prospects could improve significantly.

Disclosure: Long on YHOO

The Palm Pre is the big winner here at CES with an incredibly innovative new phone design that some think may resurrect Palms flailing business in 2009. CNET has awarded the Palm Pre the prestigious best of show award for 2009, and so far there are no bad reviews of this device to my knowledge. As Treo users we are obviously excited to see if the Palm Pre shows better stability than what we’ve suffered with Treos, but this phone looks so good it’s clear it’ll be my next model as soon as Sprint carries the Pre.

Video from CNET:

John and I are prowling the floors at CES 2009 this afternoon and we’ve managed to bump into some interesting technologies as well as more than a few clever marketing pitches.   The Hoover Reports economic analyst folks have a great looking Robot roaming the floors, but it turned out it is controlled by a human operator standing nearby and appears to have no to very limited autonomy.    One of last year’s incredible technologies was the Darpa Autonomous Vehicle which drives itself, dodging pedestrians and traffic based on the software with no human control – not sure if Darpa is here this year or not.

A vehicle technology that really impressed us today was the Simcraft full motion simulator.   John tested it out and we’ll have pictures soon, but Simcraft’s simulator offers 3 degrees of freedom thanks to a strong steel frame system combined with electric servo motors.     Three monitors on the front provide a wrap around visual of the track and John was very impressed with the realism.     At $44,000 this is not the best Anniversary gift for your wife but for the very high end consumer market and (I think far more importantly) military and training markets this represents a lot of potential cost savings over real vehicles.    We spoke with Simcraft’s CTO Sean MacDonald who indicated they are now working with Dept of Defense on training projects for combat vehicles.     More and pictures later….

Also impressive was a new slim format notebook coming up from ASUS with a raised keyboard that allows low/no fan thanks to increased air flow between the keys and the CPU.   The unit was the most stylish of all the netbooks I’ve seen so far.   We spoke with Daniel Alenquer of the Asus design team who should be very proud of bringing low cost form to the high function of the many new ASUS models.  Engadget has a good report on what most will probably agree is the most stylish notebook design of the show: http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/10/video-asus-airo-laptop-with-amazing-sliding-keyboard/