TECHNOLOGY REPORT

Lenovo Hybrid vs Apple iPad

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

One of Lenovo’s product team demos the Lenovo U1 at CES 2010. This was among the most impressive of the show’s innovations and offers users the benefits of a full computer along with a removable touchpad which is a full blown computer as well.  The system uses two separate processors and my understanding is that each unit can act independently, so you could hook up a separate monitor to the keyed portion.

The hybrid is not yet available and will appear after Apple’s much celebrated iPAD and other tablet innovations, so it’s not clear how the coming tablet wars will shake out.

Apple has a remarkable record of bringing beautiful and innovative product to the market, having them copied and offered at lower cost, and still winning the war for the hearts and minds of users.    However Apple already cut the price on the iPAD and on Apple eBooks in an effort to knock the Amazon Kindle out of the competition for the tablet/ebook market so their margins are likely very thin.    If Lenovo’s production costs are much lower (they likely are), they may find this market more profitable than Apple and thus be able to expand more quickly.

All this is very speculative until we see how consumers react to the new products as well as the many other tablets in the pipeline.  At this point it appears likely that Lenovo will be Apple’s key competitor – and only if they are lucky and the product works as well as advertised at CES –  in the 2010 tablet market.

Note: Aria Resort, Vdara Hotel, and Crystals were sponsors of Technology Report’s 2010 CES Coverage.  We appreciated that these remarkable properties – which rank among the world’s most technically advanced hotels and retail center – helped us bring you our live CES 2010 coverage.

One of the highest stakes games in technology is playing out right now as Google decides whether it will continue to maintain major Google China operations or retreat to the USA where the rules regarding censorship and government control over content are considerably more … progressive.

Reuters Reports on the latest Google v China cyber conflict

Today the Chinese Government actually warned Google about conducting itself in ways favorable to China policy *even if they leave the country* in what presumably is a threat to block Google search, effectively ceding almost all China searches to Baidu, China’s search giant which very ironically has a far more capitalistic bent than Google search.    On Baidu, companies can buy their search presence without Google’s higher levels of separation of advertising and natural search results.

The opportunity here for Baidu, and perhaps Microsoft Bing, may be extraordinary as Google’s search presence has been unassailable in the USA where it now appears they may throw in the towel in China, leaving the world’s largest and most potentially lucrative search market up for grabs even though it should be noted that currently gaming is a much bigger online market than search in Asia.   Also that Asia search portals are not nearly as lucrative as in the USA.     However this is likely to change as China’s newfound influence and affluence blossoms.

Cirque du Soleil’s KA. One of several Control Rooms

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

KA by Cirque du Soleil is Las Vegas’ most technically advanced stage production. No small order in a city known for many of the world’s most innovative and technically sophisticated shows.

Although there are about 80 performers in the show, there are even more people behind the scenes at KA in roles that vary from computer “dead switch” operators who will stop the show in the event of danger or malfunction (both very rare) to the “cork ranglers” who manage the tons of chopped natural cork that form the “sand” on the huge rotating stage.

As with all the Cirque shows, KA is remarkable in creating the appearance of death defying leaps, dives, and spectacular aerial performances. KA adds to this fireballs, archery battles, hand combat on a stage rotating in the air, and more. All this happens while an army of invisible support staff maintain an extremely high standard of safety for both performers and the audience.

Note: Aria Resort, Vdara Hotel, and Crystals are sponsors of Technology Report’s 2010 CES Coverage.  We appreciated that these remarkable properties – which rank among the world’s most technically advanced hotels and retail center – helped us bring you our live CES 2010 coverage.

HOLGER FÖRTERER is KA’s Interactive projections designer.    Unlike usual light work,  KÀ dancers and acrobats do not control what happens to the projection through their own movements.  KA’s scenery can actually react to the performers.

This creates very realistic illusions – such as falling underwater with a trail of bubbles – that play out in real time as the performers interact with the computerized part of KA’s world.

This innovation happens using infrared cameras which help track the performers and feed that data to computers in the control room pictured above.   This integrates with a remarkable system that maps the massive rotating stage, effectively turning the KA stage into an massive touch-screen that knows the precise position of each actor, dancer and acrobat.

“In essence, what we have is an intelligent set,” said Förterer in an earlier interview. “And everything the audience sees is created by the computer.”

Stay tuned for Technology Report’s live  CES 2011 coverage, starting with our “Pre-CES” specials in November.

We’ve profiled two of the world’s most promising AI efforts here at Technology Report.     Blue Brain in Switzerland and DARPA SyNAPSE here in the USA, a newer project that appears to be getting better funding thanks to backing from the US Defense Department.   Both of these projects rely on IBM supercomputers for their simulations of neurons and their interactions, and both are optimistic about the potential to develop thinking machines within the next decade.

The project leader of Blue Brain, Dr. Henry Markram, has been very vocal and very critical of claims by  the IBM team leader Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha.    Markram’s concerns are expressed here in his Technology Report guest post about the IBM project claims.

We asked Dr. Modha for a response but didn’t hear back, so I’d like to refer folks to the Modha blog here, especially to the post called ‘The Cat is Out of the bag and BlueMatter”, which details progress in the SyNAPSE project and explains the claims made that they are simulating brain activity that is roughly equivalent to that we’d see from a cat.  Here’s an excerpt from that post:

Towards this end, we are announcing two major milestones.

First, using Dawn Blue Gene / P supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab with 147,456 processors and 144 TB of main memory, we achieved a simulation with 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. This is equivalent to 1,000 cognitive computing chips each with 1 million neurons and 10 billion synapses, and exceeds the scale of cat cerebral cortex. The simulation ran 100 to 1,000 times slower than real-time.

Second, we have developed a new algorithm, BlueMatter, that exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging. Mapping the wiring diagram of the brain is crucial to untangling its vast communication network and understanding how it represents and processes information.

Finally, here is an excellent presentation by Dr. Modha that outlines in simple terms what they are trying to do with DARPA SyNAPSE, which is build a human scale brain by 2018.