David Lidsky's Blog, page 4735

Will Smart Contact Lenses Be the Bluetooth Headsets of the Future?

Imagine instant access to the latest market segment information at a
meeting, or seeing the fourth quarter earnings for a company in (literally) the blink of an eye.

Although it might sound like something from a science fiction novel,
scientists at the University of Washington are working on solar powered contact
lenses with transparent LEDs embedded onto the lens. This technology could be applied in countless ways, from health monitoring to
text translation right in front of the wearer's...

Earth Day

Forty years ago, 20 million Americans took to the streets on the first Earth Day, rallying for the nation to show the environment some love. Today, it's easy to pooh-pooh the day as an occasion celebrated most avidly by aging hippies and elementary-school students. But that early groundswell led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, along with a raft of laws to safeguard clean water, air, and ecosystems. Environmental issues, of course, transcend national borders, as does...

Ball-Nogues Turns the Tables on UCLA

Tables are places we gather to socialize, but in the case of a new installation for a UCLA courtyard, it appears that the tables have gathered to socialize with each other. Table Cloth features hundreds of tables dripping down from the second story of the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA that are linked together with a series of brackets to create both a seating area for students and a dramatic backdrop for summer concerts. The tabletop-textile was created by architectural alchemists...

Crib Sheet: Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook f8 Keynote

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his pal from the recently acquired Friendfeed, Bret Taylor, showed off a whole bunch of new features that'll impact your entire Web experience today at the f8 developers conference. Here are the highlights.

• The death of Facebook Connect. No longer do you have to deal with a middleman forcing you to confirm Facebook Connect every time you want to use your Facebook login at another site or service. Facebook is moving to a one-click authorization, so once...

Google Spent $1.3 Million on Lobbying, What Are They Buying?

Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization, revealed today that Google upped its spending on Washington lobbyists by a mammoth 57% from the same period last year. Lobbying disclosure forms filed with the Senate Office of Public Affairs show that the firm handed over $1.3 million in the first quarter of 2010, compared with $880,000 in 2009.

"Five years ago they had no one in Washington," John M. Simpson, consumer advocate of Consumer Watchdog, told Fast Company in a phone...

Live From Facebook's f8 Conference: Real-Time Check-In Data

Speculation about a location-aware feature grows, thanks to a convention gimmick.

f8--the always growing convention for Facebook developers--is going on now, and a kicky little conference gizmo has speculation raging that Facebook is about to announce some sort of location-aware capability.

Everyone attending the show is getting RFID tags (including our own Dan Nosowitz), so that you can check into the various booths on site. That enrolls you on the event's fanpage, so that you can follow it...

Microsoft and Facebook Team Up for Attack on Google Docs

Google (and Apple) can't seem to make anything successful without Microsoft releasing their own spin on it. Google search led to Bing, the iPod led to Zune, and now Google Docs have led to Microsoft's collaboration with Facebook, Docs.com.

Here at Facebook's f8 conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the further expansion of Facebook into other sites by using the new Open Graph framework. The idea is that Facebook should bring a social element to more of your online life than ever...

Will Faster, Better E-Ink Save the E-Reader?

Without e-ink's technology, e-readers as entire genre of portable gizmo wouldn't really exist: The paper and ink-like display is their main selling point. Yet e-ink's far from perfect, which is why you'll want to see next-gen stuff to see how it'll improve.

The chaps at RedFerret scored a nice hit with this news. They managed to speak to Sriram Peruvemba, VP of Marketing at E Ink (the company behind the tech,) and he not only described some of the progress made in improving e-ink, but he...

New Benjamin Note Revealed: High Tech...but Where's the High-Value Pizazz?

The U.S. Department of the treasury has just revealed its "advanced technology" $100 bill for a new digital millennium. And it's ... well, kinda similar to the old one. A bit flashier maybe, more uncopyable for sure. Just a bit disappointing overall.

The D.O.T. is calling it advanced thanks to a number of "high tech" fixes that make the job of counterfeiting these high-denomination bills much trickier. There's the old faithful embedded security thread and watermarks, but now they're joined...

IBM, Columbia University Team Up for Green Jobs Initiative

 

With 5 million new jobs in the clean energy sector expected as part of the Obama administration's $150 billion clean tech investment, any science-minded college student that doesn't consider a future in clean energy would be misguided. That's where IBM's Smarter Cities Skills Initiative comes in. The program opens up the company's green IT resources to Columbia students, presumably in an attempt to sway the next generation of college students towards IBM tools.

Among the resources that...