Your Daily Dose Technology Injection

Another day, another spectacular tower in Dubai: The Michael Schumacher World Champion Tower, a curvy building “inspired by the geometrical order of a snowflake and the aerodynamics of a Formula 1″, will not only appear in Dubai but in six other cities around the world. According to the architects—who worked in Beijing’s Water Cube—the design will allow for an easy construction process and an efficient use of energy, all while making the building change its look through the day.

The building features an iconic silhouette and a facade characterised by vertical slots with private balconies. A series of reflective fins generates a vertical dynamic and gives the building a constantly changing appearance. The fins track the sun, control the solar shading and dissolve the rationality of the plan into a continuously evolving building volume. The facade’s continuous surface enables curvature with a lot of repetition and the potential for standardisation in the building process. State-of-theart engineering and innovative materials will be used to achieve a fully sustainable performance.

Seen at the Valley Apple store, this guy protesting for something  and wearing up his Apple iPhone Custom Made costume. But unfortunately, it was a horror design. Look even like the China Iphone instead. However, I would say that his face would look better than the costume itself, probably.

Google just celebrated its 10th anniversary,then they were someone out from a nutshell claiming that he was the third founder for Google, obviously.

Hubert Chang claims that as an NYU Ph.D student in 1997 he was introduced to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin by Stanford professor Rajeev Motwani. He then helped the two come up with PageRank (the underlying algorithm that powers Google’s search engine), the name Google, and even the business plan.

So why wasn’t his name on the original PageRank paper? Because, he says, he decided to pursue his Ph.D instead. Then when he did finish his Ph.D n 2002 and contacted Google, he got the big brush off from Larry and Sergey’s handlers. (Surprise, surprise). Remember, boys and girls, always ask for a byline.

But the truth is, he walk out because he didn’t think it will worth too much at the present, and likely, it was his mistake.

This is what I called, Awesome!

Fiber optics have a new competitor, if a group of Italian scientists can get their claim of a new world record for wireless data transmission confirmed by the people who confirm such things. The scientists, based in Pisa, claim that during an uninterrupted 12-hour experiment, they achieved throughput speeds above 1.2 Terabits per second. They say the speeds beat the previous wireless data transmission speed record of 160 Gigabits per second, set by some speedy Koreans. The Italians also claimed these speeds were previously attainable only with fiber optics. That’s fitting considering both methods involve communicating with light. Don’t get too excited though, as there are major issues keeping this experiment from becoming widespread. At least, on earth.

Via the original article, the Harvard Broadband Communication Laboratory provides this explanation of Free-Space Optical Communications and gives some insight as to why this method doesn’t work very well unless used under optimal conditions:

“Free space optical communications is a line-of-sight (LOS) technology that transmits a modulated beam of visible or infrared light through the atmosphere for broadband communications. In a manner similar to fiber optical communications, free space optics uses a light emitting diode (LED) or laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) point source for data transmission. However, in free space optics, an energy beam is collimated and transmitted through space rather than being guided through an optical cable. These beams of light, operating in the TeraHertz portion of the spectrum, are focused on a receiving lens connected to a high sensitivity receiver through an optical fiber.”

The hurdles with this form of “wireless” are many, and it really only gets optimal speeds in places like space. Rain, fog and snow can all affect the transmission here on earth. Even wind has a tendency to make the beam “wander” off course.

via hothardware

Apple’s decision to transition from the fat third-generation iPod nano to the new svelte fourth-generation iPod nano must have been an easy one. The latest version has the same size screen, the same 8 and 16GB storage and the same video support as before, but adds a much more comfortable (sorta) oval shape, a curved screen, an accelerometer and most importantly, a much improved user interface that aims to solve some of the limitations the Clickwheel has compared to the iPod Touch and iPhone UIs. This evolution succeeds beautifully, even if it’s relatively minor.

The hardware:
The very first thing you’ll notice is how much better the curved aluminum body feels in your hand, even compared to the very similarly shaped 2G nano. The brushed metal feels great, looks great, and is much less scratch-prone than the shiny silver backing in the 3G fat. It’s also thinner, because it tapers off to the sides, but it’s as thick at its thickest point as the entire body of the previous generation. There’s slightly more glare from the screen because it’s curved to be flush with the surface, but that’s nothing you can’t live with. Aesthetically, it’s a lot nicer looking than the previous flat screens.

Pocket-ability is definitely important in nanos, and it’s less conspicuous in your pocket than the 3G fat version. Unless you have really tight pants and have your pockets up to your stomach, you will most likely not even notice the difference between the two. But if you do do this, watch out. The sharp edges on the top and bottom—a result of constructing the body with one piece of metal and having caps at the ends—are likely to draw blood when scratched directly up against the flesh. So let that be a warning to you, shirtless guy who has his really tight pants hiked up way too high. I didn’t think it was a big deal, but Lam carved the word iPod into his table with the edge to prove a point, that it WAS really sharp.

An added accelerometer also brings some iTouch/iPhone functionality to their little brother, which is well integrated where it makes sense. Rotating to landscape mode is as fast as it is on the iTouch/iPhone, and the subsequent Cover Flow view is baby butt smooth. Games, which were on the nano before, can also access motion-sensing. The built-in marble maze game is as good as the ones we’ve seen in the App Store. The “shake to shuffle” feature picks a random song when you jiggle the nano, but is smart enough to not skip tracks if the screen is off or if the hold switch is on. You can of course disable the thing entirely if you’re listening to music on a bulldozer.

The software:

The portrait UI is also a great improvement over the the fat nano landscape UI, and makes much better use of the available real estate. (The older nano rather awkwardly tried to fit two columns on the screen. This only has one.) The new menu and display fills up the entire top half of device, which gives you more list items at once. Scrolling through menus and Cover Flow is as fast as we’ve seen on any iPod.

On-the-fly genius playlist creation, which recommends music already on your device based a starting point of any song in your library, worked well. When generating one from MGMT’s Electric Feel, genius recommended The Shins, Arcade Fire, Radiohead, Beck and Damien Rice. Not exactly the same genre or song type, but someone who listens to MGMT would be likely to enjoy all these other artists. And that’s the point. Apple’s basing their recommendations not off of analyzing the individual tempo or features of a track, but off of purchasing history and many customers’ music libraries. It’s too early to say whether this method is better or worse than Pandora’s, which we love.

The new nano also comes with a Voice Memo app that works just like the Belkin devices currently on the market. It’s too bad that you have to pay $29.99 for a pair of headphones that actually have a mic on board; the default ones are just standard earbuds. Voice notes to yourself, with the microphone just hanging from your ear, is plenty loud enough to understand exactly what you say. Recording conversations with someone across the table isn’t as good, but if you pump up the volume you can make most of it out. Clicking the center button also inserts “chapters” into your recording.

This generation comes in nine colors, which include pink, purple, black and silver, but no white. It’s also the first nano to use solely USB charging, so old Firewire chargers are rendered useless. If you’re into Apple and looking for a midrange media player, you should have no hesitations in picking one up. Otherwise, your current player will do just fine. [Apple iPod nano]

The day before Apple is expected to updated their iPods,Microsoft (MSFT) is reminding the world that the Zune still exists, via a handful of new features.

These include the ability to buy music over wi-fi, a new feature that lets you buy songs you hear on FM radio, casual games, and some music recommendation features — which Apple’s iTunes/iPods could also be getting tomorrow. We also hear that Microsoft will be lowering the price of its Zune Pass subscription service — from $14.99/month — sooner than later.

These are nice add-ons that should make existing Zune owners happy. But last we checked, you don’t buy an MP3 player because it’ll let you buy songs from FM radio or because it’ll recommend music to you. So these new features shouldn’t do much to disrupt Apple’s (AAPL) market dominance.

Meanwhile, we see nothing new as far as the Zune’s “social” features go — sharing music between devices, etc. — the features that were supposed to set the Zune apart from the iPod in the first place.

The GeoEye satellite that Google will use to provide mapping imagery at 50-centimeter resolution successfully blasted into space today. So don’t leave your underwear lying all over your lawn.

Andy Plesser of Beet.TV put together a cool video animation . Stephen Shankland of CNET has the story:

GeoEye-1 will orbit 423 miles above Earth, but it will be able to gather imagery with details the size of 41 centimeters… Google, though, is permitted to use data only with a resolution of 50cm because of the terms of GeoEye’s license with the U.S. government.

Each day, the satellite will be able to gather a high-resolution “pan-sharpened” format surface area equal to that of about New Mexico, the company said.

“The GeoEye-1 satellite has the highest ground resolution color imagery available in the commercial marketplace and will produce high-quality imagery with a very accurate geolocation,” said Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz, adding that most commercial satellite imagery has a resolution of 60cm. “It is our goal to display high-resolution imagery for as much of the world as possible, and GeoEye-1 will help further that goal.”

RealNetworks had launched a new soultion to rip off your DVD legally into your hard drive called RealDVD. It lets users copy DVDs onto their hard drives without facing legal troubles. Even better, it only takes about 20 minutes to do so. Sounds great, right? There’s only one catch: it keeps the DRM.

After copying the DVD onto your hard drive, you can’t transfer the movie to a friend’s computer, so you’ll be stuck using your own. Much like iTunes, though, RealDVD lets you authorize five computers to play the movies on the hard drive.

RealNetworks is quick to point out that its RealDVD solution is 100 percent legal and you won’t have any copyright lawyers breathing down your neck once you copy your first movie to the hard drive. But the down is, their hefty price tag $49.99 for your first license ($29.99 as an introductory offer) and $19.99 for the additional four licenses if you want to watch the films on five computers, not everyone will be as excited to rip their movie DVDs as they are about ripping their music CDs onto a computer.

For those who love programming, but maybe don’t have the tools and knowledge to start, AppJet is suitable candy for you. AppJet, the Y combinator fund start-up, let’s users build web applications from their browser’s has opened a new set of lessons that guide novice users through the basics of programming. The lessons focus on JavaScript, one of the world’s most popular programming languages, and have been written to be accessible to students who have never programmed before.

This online school is significant because it offers a very low barrier to entry for novices who are looking to get their feet wet and start programming. Nearly every programming tutorial requires some kind of software prerequisite, be it a downloaded client or a server, which can be both expensive and difficult to set up for a new user. Conversely, AppJet requires no software, allowing users to edit, debug, and run code through a browser interface.

Besides the lessons launching today, AppJet offers web developers a way to create and host web applications free of charge. The site appeals primarily to users in the long tail, who may not want to spend money on a web server just to host a number of small applications that are only accessed once in a while.