Sunday, June 24, 2007

Peer to peer patent review

A yearlong pilot project, endorsed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in partnership with the New York Law School, the Peer to Patent Project, officially launched last Friday. It aims to allow anyone who's interested to weigh in on 250 pending patent applications belonging to one of the more difficult categories to decipher: that including computer architecture, software and information security.

Interesting to see how that works!

From CNET.

Saturday, June 09, 2007

Wireless Electricity?ً

Yes!
Yesterday, I was thinking, what if we invent wireless electricity, where you don't to plug any power chords. You just come to the vicinity of a wireless electricity source, and all the devices you are carrying get charged. We won't need any power sockets in the home or office, and we won't need to plug in our phones, computers or PSPs. We won't even need to replace the batteries on the remotes or wall clocks! I say to myself: I don't believe this hasn't been done yet. Nice Dreaming.

Well, voilà! About an hour later, my RSS reader gives me this: MIT Wirelessly Powers a Lightbulb, and my dream comes true. What a coincidence!

They call it WiTricity. "The MIT researchers successfully demonstrated the ability to power a 60 watt light bulb from a power source that was about 2 meters away. The setup powered the bulb on even when the coils were not in line of sight. The researchers plan to miniaturize the setup enough for commercial use in three to five years." I'll wait.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

For technology to really be useful

I expect information and communication technologies to serve me better: faster, easier, more intuitive. Whoever does it first will win my mind and heart.
  • I'd rather not wait for something to download, or wait for search to finish, or wait for my CPU to process some tasks.
  • I'd rather have all (ALL) my data available all (ALL) the time from anywhere. I don't want to say to myself or to someone else "I don't have it with me now" or "I can't access it from here"
  • I am reading an article on my mobile phone in a cafe. When I leave the cafe I want to continue to hear it in my car, starting where I stopped reading. I will call this: 'cross-format cross-media continuous access' for now. I heard that Motorola is doing some 'same-format cross-media' work (listening to something in your home, then continue listening to it in you car then your office).