SoonR Talk workaround enables VoIP on your iPhone
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Musipen DAP concept breaks from convention
Filed under: Portable Audio
Good vibes power tiny generator
A tiny generator powered by natural vibrations could soon be helping keep heart pacemakers working. 
Here the generator, in the centre of the chip, powers an accelerometer
Created by scientists at the University of Southampton, UK, the generator has been developed to power devices where replacing batteries is very difficult.
The device is expected initially to be used to power wireless sensors on equipment in manufacturing plants.
The generator's creators say their technology is up to 10 times more efficient than similar devices.
Power packed
The tiny device, which is less than one cubic centimetre in size, uses vibrations in the world around it to make magnets on a cantilever at the heart of the device wobble to generate power.
Although the generator produces only microwatts this was more than enough to power sensors attached to machines in manufacturing plants, said Dr Steve Beeby, the Southampton researcher who led the development of the device.
"The big advantage of wireless sensor systems is that by removing wires and batteries, there is the potential for embedding sensors in previously inaccessible locations," he said.
Using the tiny generator also made it possible to use larger numbers of sensors because there was no longer the need to visit them to replace or recharge batteries, Dr Beeby added.
The generator was developed to sit inside air compressors but, said Dr Beeby, it could find a future role in self-powered medical implants such as pacemakers.
In a pacemaker, the beating of the human heart would be strong enough to keep the magnets inside the device wobbling.
It could also be used to power sensors attached to road and rail bridges to monitor the health of such structures.
Work on the project was funded by the EU as part of the 14.3m euros (£9.67m) Vibration Energy Scavenging (Vibes) project that is looking at how to use environmental vibrations to generate power.
King.com got MyGame
If you hadn’t guessed it, casual gaming is so hot that even normally lumbering Electronics Arts has jumped on the bandwagon. Nevermind them, for casual gaming is still the playground of start-ups. We have written about Boonty’s Cafe.com and Kongregate in the past. And now three-year-old casual gaming company, King.com is getting its game on with MyGame.com, a new service that lets you create, play and also share games (via widgets of course.)
The service which is going to be widely available tomorrow allows anyone to create games in 2-minutes, London-based King.com claims. You can pick a game template, personalize it with text, sounds, and a photo, and start playing. Since the company is going for big impact, some of the games are downright hokey, and simple.
You can share the games on social networks, embed them in your MySpace profile, or even post them to your blog. If your game gets really popular, then King.com plans to share advertising money with the game creators. (I have labeled this share-the-profit concept, iCompany, and have written about it in the past.)
Going Bonkers by the Bay
There is no getting away from Facebook: everyone is talking about it on the email lists, on the blogs, in the restaurants. Even grownups are happily confessing their addiction to the Silicon Valley's own Furby. What is more amusing is that seemingly clever guardians of wealth are getting caught up in the euphoria and loosening their purse strings.
Take Bay Partners as an example. A sedate venture fund that typically invests in semiconductor companies and infrastructure start-ups has started a new effort that invests exclusively in Facebook applications. The right applicants can get anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 as an investment for their applications.
The collateral of this project, imaginatively dubbed App Factory, is interesting, cringe-worthy reading filled with clichés like "application entrepreneurs" and "affect adoption, virality, and usage." Here is just a nugget of wisdom from the press release announcing this new funding strategy.
A fully baked business model is also not a requirement, as long as there are reasonable theories and approaches that can be explored together.
Putting my newly acquired Hebrew Yiddish skills to use, I say, Oy-vey!
Facebook, despite the cleverness of its recent platform strategy, is still a start-up, and a funding vehicle focused entirely on its ecosystem seems a bit rash. There is still a fog around these Facebook apps-as-businesses. Advertising on social networks is still a hit-and-a-miss phenomenon, still heavily reliant on banner advertising than anything else.Sure some Facebook apps have been acquired by other start-ups, like Favorite Peeps bought by Slide, but there is less to this land grab than meets the eye. Travel-focused vertical search engine, SideStep recently snapped up Extended Info, which has nothing to do with travel.
Rob Solomon, CEO of Sidestep told Liz earlier today "Trey Philips, the guy who built it, hacked it together at the facebook event. He's a talented young guy who understands these social networks."However, since Phillips is still in school, Sidestep hired him as a summer intern who is basically advising them on building Facebook stuff. As I said earlier, there is fog of confusion.
But Bay Partners (via the press release) rationalizes its decision by saying that since Facebook is a Social OS , it is an opportunity to develop in the marketplace and ecosystem around it.
They are partially right, except for the fact that this OS is inward looking: people work on Facebook's terms, and not the other way around. Last time an inward looking ecosystem caught the imagination of developers, it was Windows 95, the defining moment for Microsoft.
The winner of that movement: Microsoft.
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