Tech Today w/ Ken May

by Jacob Goldstein There’s a legal war on in the smartphone industry. Everybody is suing everybody else for patent infringement. The patent war is a key reason Google is buying Motorola for $12.5 billion: Motorola has some 17,000 patents that will belong to Google when the deal goes through. This graphic from Reuters shows how many lawsuits are flying back and forth. The key for Google is not Google itself, but rather all the hardware makers that build smartphones and tablets that run Android, Google’s mobile operating system. Those companies are the ones with green dots next to their names. Reuters For more on why programmers don’t like software patents, and why patents may be hindering innovation in the industry, see our story ” When Patents Attack .” Hat tip: Gizmodo via @abwardlaw Copyright 2011 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/ .

Electronic paper has come a long way, but displaying content in color in a way that makes sense (refresh rate, resolution etc.) is still a problem. One of the bigger companies working on color e-papers is Fujitsu whose FLEPia is among the most advanced devices out there. The FLEPia went through several iterations since its launch in 2007, and now Fujitsu has showcased the latest version last week in Tokyo. As you can see in the video embedded below, the new device is more of an evolution than a revolution, especially with regard to the refresh rate (0.7 seconds is still too slow). But they’re getting there: just like the already commercialized FLEPia Lite , the prototype has an 8-inch screen displaying 4,096 colors. At 220g, the new model is 60g lighter than the FLEPia Lite, with

I can’t say the market for Windows tablets is blowing up right now, what with the iPad-Android war heating up and the enticing Windows 8 on the horizon, but there is a market and Dell would want a part of it. Their Peju tablet was leaked before but in very little detail, so this new info is welcome. All your Peju-related news can be found at Dell Peju Insider, a rather finely-pointed website, but useful nevertheless. The specs are all there in the latest (and only) post, and haven’t been confirmed, though they don’t seem so far out. A Core i5, 4GB of RAM, a nice variety of ports, digitizer pen support, and a fat battery, coming in at just under two pounds. The spec that gets me going is the screen: 10.1 inches of Gorilla Glass at 1920×1080. That would be nice! Windows tablets right now are aimed at enterprise for the most part, but this would be a sweet home media tablet, especially with the little dock station there. They (whoever “they” are) peg the release at October-ish, and it’ll ship with Windows 7 but be Windows 8 compatible (naturally). Hopefully we’ll hear some more soon that corroborates this. [via Engadget ]

We’ve come to love the fantastic and sublime images of space taken from such satellites as the Hubble, but the truth is that the technology that created those images is incredibly out of date. And while you can’t argue with the results, it has gotten to the point where the sensitivity, angle of view, and data collection rate just need to be moved up to 21st-century standards. The European Space Agency (ESA) is happy to bring space into the gigapixel era, and they’re packing a monster camera array onto their Gaia astrometry platform. The mission of Gaia is accurate mapping of the entire Milky Way galaxy, and they plan to chart the positions of a billion stars about seventy times each over the next five years. The result will be (they hope) a more accurate and precise three-dimensional map of the galaxy. They’ll also pick up innumerable minor bodies (i.e. asteroid, planets, and so on) and will collect a ton of other useful miscellaneous space data. The camera itself is actually over a hundred individual sensors put into an array — which makes sense, as a single gigapixel sensor would likely be far too small and pixel-dense to be of any use in this situation. The 102 sensors are 4.7×6.0cm each, and arranged in a large 1.0×0.5m field, and four more are used for quality checks. The precision of the camera is pretty insane. It can resolve items of magnitude 15, which is 4000 times dimmer than what can be seen with the naked eye, down to 24 microarcseconds. To give you an idea of how powerful that is, if the Gaia array was on Earth, it could measure the thumbnails of a person standing on the moon. It will produce a huge amount of data, but its transmitter will be able to maintain a multi-megabit connection to its base station here on the ground even at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers. There’s a ton (or tonne, I suppose) more information at the ESA’s Gaia site , and some other links at Network World .

On June 22nd, 1996, id Software released Quake , the true successor to the Doom franchise and among the first games (certainly the most well-known) to be presented entirely in 3D. That is, with polygons. Those of us old enough to do so will remember the first set of levels (that is to say, the demo) with perfect clarity, and recall the classic grunts, moans, and clangs that accompanied that fantastic atmosphere and ambitious level design. It’s still a hell of a lot of fun. You can download a version compatible with modern Windows and OS X here, and there are tons of mods and level packs at Planet Quake . Graaaa!

Seeing solar energy progress is a good thing, but it still has one problem: at this point, it’s still inefficient when compared with other sources of energy. And now Japan and Europe have announced [PDF] that they will work together to develop the world’s most efficient photovoltaic cell over the next four years. The aim is to reach the world’s highest photoelectric conversion efficiency of at least 45%. Using it in practical applications, however, will not be possible until 2025, Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization says. Commercializing the cell will take another 5 years. The project is expected to cost $15.5 million, with the Japanese side shouldering $8.1 of that sum. Participants from Japan include big names such as Toyota, Sharp, and the University of Tokyo. From Europe, organizations from five different countries (Germany, the UK, Italy, Spain, and France) will be contributing.

Short version : Rosetta Stone launched its iPad app today, which is basically just a lighter version of its core “course” software. The app itself is nothing extraordinary, but the way it teaches languages is pretty awesome. Foreign language has never been my best subject, but I had a blast playing with this app because it feels way more like a puzzle than a language lesson. The worst part is the price: you have to be a Rosetta Stone customer to access the app. Features : All five language levels, with corresponding units and paths Swipe-to-scroll through tracks A single tap enlarges small contextual images Drag-to-zoom offers a little extra zoom MSRP: Free with a minimum $179 Rosetta Stone software purchase Pros : Easy-to-use Interface Very accurate voice detection Cons : No studio sessions despite the iPad’s video-chat support Requires purchase of Rosetta Stone desktop app If you take learning languages seriously, I would gladly argue that there is no better language-learning app out there. But if you’re looking for something light and fun, the price tag on this app will certainly outweigh your desire for it. Rosetta Stone has always been kind of like a yoga mat. I love yoga, and I wish I went everyday, but I hesitate to spend the money on a mat for fear it could go to waste. The same has been true of Rosetta Stone. It always sounded pretty cool, and I’ve always wanted to learn different languages, but shelling out the cash is a step I’ve never been willing to take. But after sitting down with the Rosetta Stone team and checking out the brand new iPad app, I’ve been converted. And that’s partially due to the app, itself. As far as learning languages goes, Rosetta Stone seems to have the process nailed. Instead of learning through simple flash-card style memorization or by-the-book translation, the Rosetta Stone TOTALe Companion app forces you to problem-solve while you learn. For instance, instead of reading a sentence in Spanish, hearing it, and then repeating (parroting), Rosetta Stone gives you a couple of different pictures of whatever phrase or word the lesson focuses on, and turns language learning into a puzzle. The core idea seems to come from the way children learn languages for the first time. Children hear words they don’t know and use the context around unknown words to fill in the blanks. An example given by Rosetta Stone CTO Mike Fulkerson resonated well with me. “If I am with my five-year-old and say ‘we’re in a hotel suite,’ my son knows all the words in that sentence except ‘suite,’” he said. “If I ask him what the word ‘suite’ means, he can figure out from the rest of the sentence, and his surroundings, that a ‘suite’ is a big hotel room.” The Rosetta Stone app works the same way. Some pages ask you to choose the picture that best represents the word or phrase being spoken, gradually integrating new words that you haven’t learned yet. Other pages display a pattern of different ideas or sentences, and require the user to complete the pattern. For example, one page showed four different pictures with corresponding sentences: 1. I have red apples. 2. We have green apples. and 3. I have a red bike. Based on the first three sentences and their corresponding photos, the user must then figure out what the fourth sentence will be (We have green bikes.). The iPad app still integrates the majority of the features found in the desktop app’s “course” offering, which is the main curriculum of the Rosetta Stone software. Studio sessions, where the user talks with a coach fluent in their chosen language in a video chat, aren’t supported within the iPad app. This was pretty shocking to me, since the iPad has a front-facing camera which would be perfect for studio sessions on-the-go. When I asked about it, Fulkerson explained that the company wanted to bring a lighter experience to the tablet, something that falls between its basic “parroting” iPhone app, and the much heavier desktop app. On a PC, you can really immerse yourself in a lesson, but on the iPad, most people switch back and forth from applications pretty regularly – what Mr. Fulkerson referred to as iPad ADD. For that reason, the Rosetta Stone TOTALe Companion app remains on the page you last visited once you close the application, whereas the desktop app always sends you back to the home page. A few other tweaks were made to the desktop app, as well, to get as much out of the iPad’s functionality as possible. For example, you swipe side to side to access new tracks (mini lessons) and instead of hovering over an image to zoom (like on the desktop app), iPad app users can touch to enlarge, and drag to zoom with smaller images. Of the 31 Rosetta Stone-supported languages, 20 are available in iPad app format. Right-to-left languages like Arabic, Hebrew, and Farci, will be rolled out in an app update, along with Irish, since its font isn’t yet supported by the iPad. Now for the bad news: Non-Rosetta Stone customers simply don’t have access to the app. In other words, you must buy Rosetta Stone desktop software in order to log in to the iPad application, which is a free download from the Apple App Store. Most Rosetta Stone languages come with five levels, and a few smaller languages come in a three-level set. For a single level, the software costs $179. Two levels cost $279, three levels costs $379, and if you opt for the full five-level set, the software costs $479. For now, the Rosetta Stone TOTALe Companion app is only available in the Apple App Store, but Mike Fulkerson promised an Android version at some point, he just couldn’t say when. In my opinion, the content of the app is its biggest selling point. In the few minutes I played with the app, I truly enjoyed learning a little bit of French. And this is coming from an eight-year Spanish student, who hated just about every minute of it. The app itself is nothing extra special. The interface has a clean look and is pretty self-explanatory, lacking any complex multi-touch actions. Moving through lessons was pretty snappy, and I found the app’s voice detection to be incredibly accurate. The most minor pronunciation errors are detected immediately, basically forcing the user to say the word or phrase correctly, which is the whole point of the Rosetta Stone iPad app in the first place.