TECHNOLOGY REPORT

The San Jose Mercury News has a summary today of the advent of “no touch” computing that will be coming fairly soon thanks to three dimensional sensors that represent the world to the machine in a much richer fashion than simple flat, 2 dimensional models.     3D sensors will allow people to interact with many devices in a much more natural way – for example via simply looking at a screen and moving your hands you could have dramatic control over a gaming environment.

The Mercury News seems to be suggesting that useful applications are about 5 years out but I’d guess we’ll have robust no touch devices within 3 years and high quality direct brain control within a decade.    Braingate is already using brain control and  Emotiv has developed a commercial version brain control device that uses theta waves that are read froma sensory “cap” with about 16 sensors.      The Emotiv headset will be available to consumers this year.

Mercury News article

Laptop Magazine looked at several of the new 10″ Netbook computers and has a nice write up of models from ASUS, Aspire, HP, Lenovo, MSI, and Samsung.

The ASUS and Aspire appear to be their favorites when all factors are considered but if you are in the market for a netbook you’ll want to read these and other reviews.

Happily for consumers if not for the industry at large, price in this category does not appear to correlate all that well with features and quality.

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.

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.

Ford CEO Allan Mulally really impressed the crowd and reporters after his CES Keynote about Ford in vehicle connectivity and navigation innovations including systems to merge cellular connectivity with vehicle systems, a customizable dashboard, and a humanized communication interace called “Eva” which will allow the driver to request features and “talk” to the car.

Mulally was even more impressive after his talk when he answered questions from the tech crowd about Ford’s plans.   His enthusiasm or Ford and for technology in cars came through loud and clear.

I had a chance to ask him if he thought all this innovation would require money from the government as part of the auto industry bailout.   Ford is the only one of the three key US manufacturers that has not asked for money, and Mulally indicated they did not have plans to do so based on his assessments of the quality of Ford vehicles and how their new models are gaining acceptance even in Europe, especially Germany where Ford remains a popular brand name.

Although I wouldn’t bet on Ford not asking for a piece of the bailout pie eventually it is great to see a charismatic and technologically sophisticated fellow in charge of one of American’s most complex and valuable industries.  If Mullaly can’t pull Ford’s feet out of the fire, nobody can.

Palm just released the product many have been anxiously awaiting, their new Smartphone the Palm “Pre” which uses Palm’s new operating system called Nova.    Engadget is reporting from the Palm press conference and has a good and postive early review of the Pre, which Palm is desparately hoping will resurrect their flagging Smartphone market share which has been dropping since the Palm Treo’s early successes in this niche.

Palm needed a knockout phone and this could be the ticket – anxious to handle one later in the conference and I’ll have more to say then.

Here’s Engaget’s first look at this amazing new mobile device.

The well-oiled CES Conference offers email stations (which can also be used for normal web browsing).   Yesterday felt eerily quiet as the conference venues prepared for the onslaught of technology enthusiasts from around the world.

ASUS PC T101 H

I think I was more impressed with the ASUS than Liliputing, but I found the idea of converting the netbook to a tablet with a quick flip, and then being able to attach this unit on a dashboard for a big GIS unit most excellent. The rep told me the GIS application will not be Google’s and I’m not clear how they’ll run that but one possibility would be the trick Blaupunkt was showcasing, also as CES Unveiled, where the user connects a device to their phone via bluetooth and then uses the mobile wireless plan to power these in-car broadband applications. Maybe I fell off the pumpkin truck but I had not heard of doing broadband in this fashion and I think that has some excellent implications for in-car mobile.

later…. at an HP presentation waiting to play with HPs similar offering which is already out, the HP tx2 tablet.   They’ve done a lot of studies in India and concluded that touch can “unlock access” to people who would not have access in tradtional form.   This is a very interesting aspect of emerging countries technology though I’m somewhat skeptical that building for illiterate folks is superior to … teaching them to read first.

Convergence08 was a great conference with many interesting people and ideas. Thankfully the number of crackpots was very low, and even the “new age” mysticism stuff was at a minimum. Instead I found hundreds of authors, doctors, biologists, programmers, engineers, physicists, and more clear thinking folks all interested in how the new technologies will shape our world in ways more profound than we have ever experienced before.

My favorite insights came from Monica Anderson’s presentation on her approach to AI programming, which she calls “Artificial Intuition“. Unlike all other approaches to AI I’m familiar with Anderson uses biological evolution as her main analogs for conceptualizing human intelligence. I see this approach as almost a *given* if you have a good understanding of humans and thought, but it’s actually not a popular conceptual framework for AI, where most approaches rely on complex algorithmic logic – logic that Anderson argues clearly did not spawn human intelligence via evolution. Yet Anderson is by no means a programming neophyte – she’s a software engineer who has researched AI for some time, then spent two years programming at Google and then quit to start her own company, convinced that her AI approaches are on the right track.

Anderson’s work is especially impressive to me because as someone with a lot of work in biology under my belt (academically as well as corporeally) it has always surprised me how poorly many computer programmers understand even rudimentary biological concepts such as the underlying simplicity of the human neocortex and the basic principles of evolution which I’d argue emphatically have defined *every single aspect* of our human intelligence over a slow and clumsy, hit and miss process operating over millions of years. I think programmers tend to focus on mathematics and rule systems which are great modelling systems but probably a very poor analog for intelligence. This focus has in many ways poisoned the well of understanding about what humans and other animals do when they … think… which I continue to maintain is “not all that special”.

Anderson’s conceptual framework eliminates what I see as a key impediment to creating strong AI with conventional software engineering – ie having to build a massively complex programmable emulation of human thought. Instead, her approach ties together many simple routines that emulate the simple ways animals have developed to effectively interact with a changing environment.

Combining Anderson’s approach to the programming with the physical models of the neocortical column such as IBM Blue Brain would be my best bet for success in the AI field.

by Joe Hunkins – Technology Report

The buzz here at Mashup Camp day one of three is mostly about solution providers”, most of which are making it easier to build very robust mashups using fairly simple tool sets.     The learning curve factor varies and I’m still digesting information, but the most impressive so far seems to be IBM’s Mashup Center which reminds me of the Google Gadget project which itself was basically launched at Mashup Camp 1 by Adam Sah and has become something of a world wide widget standard.

This morning twelve solution providers gave fast “speed geek” sessions to introduce their products and now we are reviewing some in more depth in longer sessions.     IMHO this is an excellent format even though it’s a little more structured than you’d have in a more interactive setup.