Jul 11, 2010

O2 showcased the best of British youth talent at a Think Big sponsored event last Saturday when two acts performed on stage in front of crowds at Westfield London.

The acts were two of the first to receive awards from the Think Big programme, theatrical dance group ‘Show Off and Dance’ and MC’s ‘Mix it Up Two’. These aren’t the first O2 supported projects to take centre stage; street dancers ‘A3’ recently wowed judges on ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent show. The dance act was supported through O2’s It’s Your Community program last year and were one of the projects that inspired the Think Big programme.

The youth performances were part of O2’s wider Think Big programme which aims to champion young people’s ideas through support and training. The award includes a £300 grant, training and online mentoring from O2 employees and is open to young people aged between 13 and 25 who want to make a difference in their communities.

Helen Parker, Head of Community at O2 said, “This event was a perfect opportunity to show off some of the very first Think Big projects ‘Show off and dance’ and ‘Mix it up two’ are great examples of how nurturing young people’s ideas can make a real difference.’

The event also featured American speed-painter David Garibaldi, a street artist who turned a passion for graffiti into a performance art. The 27-year-old has already donated over $700,000 to charity and aims to raise the total to $1 million by his thirtieth birthday.

For more information about the Think Big programme or to apply for an award, please visit www.o2thinkbig.co.uk

See O2′s exclusive range of David Garibaldi cases at O2.co.uk and for more information about the artist visit www.garibaldiarts.com

Jul 10, 2010

Dell and O2 today announced that the Dell Streak will launch exclusively on O2 early next month, bringing the internet, entertainment, easy turn-by-turn navigation and thousands of Android Market apps to customers looking for a big screen experience without having to carry a laptop around.

Available in early June through O2 stores and online at www.o2.co.uk and www.carphonewarehouse.com, the Dell Streak features a 5 megapixel camera, fast processor, built in Wi-Fi and can easily connect to a range of social networks.

“The Dell Streak is a bold new class of product, something we wanted to bring to our customers first,” said Steve Alder, O2’s General Manager Devices. “This means we can continue to offer our customers a range of the very best devices to make their lives a bit easier.”

“The Dell Streak hits the sweet spot between traditional smartphones and larger-screen tablets,” said Ron Garriques, president, Dell Communication Solutions Group. “Its unique size provides people new ways to enjoy, connect, and navigate their lives.”

O2 will be enhancing the Dell Streak experience with its intelligent network, great value tariffs and award winning customer service. This includes O2 Gurus in O2 retail stores and smartphone specialists in customer service to help customers get the most out of every product and service.

Pricing and tariff information will be released ahead of launch.

Full Dell Streak specifications:

• Operating system: Google Android
• Processor: 1GHZ Qualcomm Snapdragon
• 3G, Wi-Fi & Bluetooth
• 5MP autofocus camera with dual LED flash.
• Expandable memory via Micro SD cards, up to 32GB capacity
• 5 inch touch screen

Jul 10, 2010

Jun 3, 2010

Smart Dark Zen BlackBerry Theme

Smart Dark Zen BlackBerry Theme

Buy at Mobihand

Follow the SDZ!

Smart Dark Zen BlackBerry Theme

Raw sex appeal comes to the BlackBerry

Theme for the:
8200 4.6 :: 5.0
8350 4.6.1 :: 5.0
8500 4.6.1 :: 5.0
8800 4.2.1 :: 4.2.2 :: 4.5.0
8900 4.6.1 :: 5.0
9000 4.6 :: 5.0
9500 4.7 :: 5.0
9600 4.7 :: 5.0
9700 5.0
Stylish and usable theme for Blackberry

Welcome to the Smooth large display, flooded with color and Light.
By KC
Adding style to theme design.
Awaken your need for Smooth style of the 9500 BlackBerry.

One of the collection by KC!

• Created for most technical yet stylish devices on the market today!
• The BlackBerry no other device touch’s it.
• Get the theme to match!
• Secure
• Email
• Business savy
• Simple to use
• Stable Operating System
• KC Blackberry theme
• Finally the much awaited theme for Blackberry 9500 is here!
• Stylish
• Creative
• Original
• Easy to use
• Designed by KC!
• Beautiful design
• 3D background created in state of the art 3D editing software.
• Purposely for this device.
• As are all the themes by KC.
• Be apart from the crowd with your theme by KC.

My newest video for Time Magazine is about Pandora, the internet radio service.  I visited the Oakland offices of Pandora and spoke with founder and Chief Strategy Officer Tim Westergren.  We discussed various recommendation engines used by other companies and what makes Pandora’s Music Genome Project different.

Link to the Pandora video on Time’s website

May 22, 2010

A great new theme for Christmas exciting design scintilating graphics, impressyour firnds and colleagues with the Smooth Berry. Stylish and usable theme for Blackberry Buy at Mobihand Welcome to the Smooth large display, flooded with color and Light. By KC Adding style to theme design. Awaken your need for Smooth style of the 9500 BlackBerry.

A great new theme for Christmas exciting design scintillating graphics, impress  your friends and colleagues with the Smooth Berry.

Stylish and usable theme for Blackberry

Buy at Mobihand

Welcome to the Smooth large display, flooded with color and Light.
By KC
Adding style to theme design.
Awaken your need for Smooth style of the 9500 BlackBerry.

One of the collection by KC!

Features:

• Created for most technical yet stylish devices on the market today!
• The BlackBerry no other device touches it.
• Get the theme to match!
• Secure
• Email
• Business savy
• Simple to use
• Stable Operating System
• KC Blackberry theme
• Finally the much awaited theme for Blackberry 9500 is here!
• Stylish
• Creative
• Original
• Easy to use
• Designed by KC!
• Beautiful design
• 3D background created in state of the art 3D editing software.
• Purposely for this device.
• As are all the themes by KC.
• Be apart from the crowd with your theme by KC.

Smooth Berry Blackberry theme

Minimum Requirements:

• Smooth Berry 9600 4.7
  • Smooth Berry Blackberry theme 9600 :: 4.7 5.0 / 9700 : 5.0
• Smooth Berry 9600 5.0
  • Smooth Berry Blackberry theme 9600 :: 4.7 5.0 / 9700 : 5.0
• Smooth Berry 9700 5.0
  • Smooth Berry Blackberry theme 9600 :: 4.7 5.0 / 9700 : 5.0
• 9000 5.0
  • BlackBerry 9000 5.0
• SB 8900 4.6.1
  • Blackberry 8900 4.6.1
• SB 8900 5.0
  • Blackberry 8900 5.0

Smooth Berry Blackberry theme

May 22, 2010

Is the downturn getting you down, are you feeling the credit crunch, do you want something to make you feel like a millionaire!

Booboomobile has designed a BlackBerry theme for those of us looking to put that Bling Bling back into ours lives and at a incredibly small price for a limited period.

This has to be the Blingiest BlackBerry theme I have ever seen, it certainly brightened my BlackBerry up. My fiancée has now demanded I buy her one also. She wants the Bling and she wants it bad.

So orders is orders and I’m of the Mobihand to purchase her one or two, better get the mother in-law one!

Bling BlackBerry Theme

This has to be the Blingiest BlackBerry theme I have ever seen, it certainly brightened my BlackBerry up. My fiancée has now demanded I buy her one also. She wants the Bling and she wants it bad.

I now feel like a million dollars for what its worth, not a lot at the moment but nether the less, oh what the hell, a billion dollars that’s still worth something? right! Anyway for such a small price its well worth it, to look so cool, my BlackBerry has officially been pimped big style!

Buy one or two at Mobihand:

http://www.mobihand.com/product.asp?id=45822&n=Bling-Berry-Zen-BlackBerry-Theme

May 18, 2010

Metalic BB theme

A fantastic theme for the BlackBerry designed to make your device look like the most impressive around. Metalic display creating a strong tough looking interface.

• 9700 Bold
• 9600 Tour
• 9000
• 8900

More to come..

Purchase at Mobihand

This theme gives a feel of strength and security marrying it self well with BlackBerry’s solid secure software system.

The graphic metalic interface looks so real, you will really believe your BlackBerry is made out of solid hardened steel.

Metalic BB theme

Totally fantastic look to.

ollow the Smooth path to quality stylish BlackBerry themes

Smooth Metalic Interface
Zen Style!
BlackBerry Theme!

Stylish and usable theme for Blackberry

Welcome to the Smooth large display, flooded with color and Light.
By KC
Adding style to theme design.
Awaken your need for Smooth style of the 9500 BlackBerry.

One of the collection by KC!

Features:

• Created for most technical yet stylish devices on the market today!
• The BlackBerry no other device touch’s it.
• Get the theme to match!
• Secure
• Email
• Business savy
• Simple to use
• Stable Operating System
• KC Blackberry theme
• Finally the much awaited theme for Blackberry 9500 is here!
• Stylish
• Creative
• Original
• Easy to use
• Designed by KC!
• Beautiful design
• 3D background created in state of the art 3D editing software.
• Purposely for this device.
• As are all the themes by KC.
• Be apart from the crowd with your theme by KC.

Time Magazine has announced the Time 100 – their annual list of the most influential people of the year.  It’s divided into four main categories:  Leaders, Heroes, Artists, and Thinkers.

One of those Thinkers is Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and current CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX.

Jon Favreau – director of the Iron Man movies – wrote the entry on Musk, having used him as a model for the billionaire Tony Stark character.  David Clair and I made a new video about him:

Here’s the new video on Time’s site.

For a more in-depth piece, check out our previous piece about SpaceX and private enterprise in space:

Space: The Private Frontier

Apr 14, 2010

TOKYO, Japan, April 13, 2010 – Honda Motor Co., Ltd. revealed the latest prototype of the EV-neo electric scooter and announced plans to begin lease sales in Japan in December 2010 to businesses and individual business owners who provide mainly delivery services.

Honda developed the EV-neo, an electric scooter designed to provide the durability necessary for business use, envisioning a wide range of uses by businesses such as delivery services. Equipped with a lithium-ion battery and a brushless motor, EV-neo realizes excellent environmental performance with zero CO₂ emissions in use. The battery is rechargeable using a household power source with attention given to the range per charge. Moreover, EV-neo provides performance equivalent to that of mass-market under-50cc gasoline engine motorcycles realizing a powerful ride even with cargo by leveraging the characteristics of a high-torque motor even at a low speed ride.

Under the key words of “quiet and clean” Honda held the world premier exhibition of the EV-neo concept model (under the name EVE-neo) at the 41st Tokyo Motor Show in 2009 as one of Honda’s new-generation personal mobility products which will contribute to the realization of a low-carbon society while transporting people and cargo. The mass-market model of EV-neo is currently under development.

Honda will continue providing products with excellent environmental performance to more customers in order to contribute to global CO₂ emission reduction efforts.

[ Key specifications of EV-neo Prototype ]

Apr 1, 2010

I’ve been performing stand up comedy for two decades. I get all the stage time I need.  But I realize not everyone has such an outlet. And, yet, humans are such complicated, emotional creatures.  They have so much to express!

That’s why I’ve always been fascinated with vanity plates and bumper stickers.  And I’ve always lumped them in with answering machine outgoing messages and Karaoke.  I think, for some people, these might be the only outlets they have through which to express themselves to the world.  They have so much to say – and so little space!  But humans are creative.

And humans that drive the Toyota Prius Hybrid Vehicle in the San Francisco Bay Area…  well, they are particularly creative.  And consistent with their message.  I keep seeing hybrids with green-themed vanity plates.  Not every one below is a Prius, but most of them are.

Have you seen any other vanity plates with environmental themes or messages?  Let me know!

Thanks, as always, to Tara for photo touch-up and editing!

Mar 29, 2010

Biomimetic guidance could make AUVs more truly autonomous

Clever as a blind fish, the underwater robot “Snookie” can orient itself in murky waters with an artificial sensory organ inspired by the so-called lateral-line system, found in fish and some amphibians. The experimental vehicle was developed by researchers at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen within the framework of the CoTeSys (Cognition for Technical Systems) excellence cluster. In the future, the researchers expect such capabilities to enable underwater robots to work autonomously in operations ranging from deep sea exploration to inspection of sewer pipes. Conventional robots are tough. Hostile environments, toxic and corrosive gases, low light levels, moisture, dirt and disease mean nothing to them — unlike humans, for whom such conditions are generally unbearable. However, these robots – the ones typically in use today – can only do their job provided that they are precisely programmed to take each step. Autonomous robots, on the other hand, will in the future be able to react intelligently to their surroundings and perform their tasks largely independently. Rather than being rigidly programmed, they rely on their own sensory perceptions. This is after all the only way in which they can recognize the situation they are in and still fulfill their tasks. However, in harsh environments their senses often fail them, laid low by fumes, dust, water, or high temperatures. New senses are called for — perhaps even sensory organs of a kind that humans lack. A new research project undertaken by the CoTeSys (Cognition for Technical Systems) excellence cluster in Munich aims to develop the technology to master such new senses. Biophysicist Prof. Leo van Hemmen of the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) has high hopes that the animal kingdom will provide the means to allow robots to perceive their environment. Fish, scorpions, even frogs, for example, perceive things that remain hidden to human organs. Not only are they able to detect minute pressure differences and vibrations and recognize threats, they use these senses to form an exact picture of their surroundings, enabling them at any moment to decide, for example, how best to seize their prey or how to conceal themselves behind a defensive obstacle. Prof. van Hemmen and his colleagues are studying just how animals do this, researching the algorithms with which their brains record their environment and developing hardware and computer programs to allow robots to imitate them. Fish and amphibians for example possess an organ, the lateral line, which is non-existent in land animals. With this sensory organ, which extends along the both sides of the body, they are able to perceive minute variations in pressure and current flow. As a result they are able, even in murky water, to form a very detailed picture of their immediate surroundings at a range of about the length of their body. They know where obstacles lie, where dangers lurk, and where their prey are to be found. Lateral lines are composed of hundreds or even thousands of fine sensory hairs that are located in tiny ducts beneath the skin and that register even tiny changes in flow velocity. The African clawed frog Xenopus laevis for example distinguishes between edible and inedible insects on the basis of water-borne vibrations. In terms of precision, these sensors are comparable with the human inner ear, where hundreds of thousands of fine sensory hairs enable us to distinguish between sounds — from the sigh of the wind to a symphony. However, the complicated part is not the sensor itself, but how the signals it sends are processed to create a complete picture of the surrounding area. Differences in pressure are much more difficult to accurately pin down than waves of light. We humans perceive the problem when a sound catches our attention and our eyes automatically seek out the source of the sound to confirm the location. Scorpions, on the other hand, use tiny vibrations transmitted through the ground to find their prey, even in the dark of night: These arachnids have sensory hairs on their eight legs, and their brains analyze the tiniest differences in the timing of vibration waves in the sand to detect where their prey is located. Similar algorithms can be used to analyze the lateral line perceptions of fish. A favorite example studied by the researchers in Munich is the blind Mexican cave fish Astyanax. As a cave-dweller it has no need of sight in the darkness, and as the fish matures its eyes degenerate. Nevertheless, it has no difficulty in navigating its pitch-black habitat, reacting flexibly to changes and adapting quickly to new environments. The fact that robots can learn to do so too is demonstrated by “Snookie,” an underwater robot built by an interdisciplinary team of scientists and technical specialists headed by Prof. van Hemmen. “Snookie” – named after a species of perch with a distinctive lateral line – is a robot fish made of Plexiglas and aluminum, about 80 centimeters long and 30 centimeters in diameter, stuffed to the gills with an electronic control system and a power supply. Among its striking external features are six propeller gondolas that drive and position the robot, and a yellow hemispherical nose to which the sensors that guide the underwater vehicle are secured. The TUM scientists intentionally chose an underwater vehicle to test their technology, as such vehicles face a very particular set of challenges not experienced by autonomous robots on land:

• Visibility under water is often limited to just a few centimeters.
• The infrared detectors commonly used by land robots alongside cameras to identify their surroundings do not work under water.
• Wireless communication is restricted under water due to poor propagation.
• Energy supplies are limited to the capacity of the batteries, so all systems must operate with extreme efficiency.
• Maximum reliability is also essential, because if something goes wrong, an underwater robot can quickly be lost for ever.

“An underwater robot is as much on its own as a vehicle on Mars,” says electrical engineer Stefan Sosnowski. He works in the Department of Robotics headed by Professor Sandra Hirche and is responsible for the design of the underwater craft. His colleague, biophysicist Dr. Jan-Moritz Franosch, aided by a group of students, has developed an artificial lateral line for the robot, enabling “Snookie” to detect obstacles and movements in the water a hand’s breadth in front of its nose and on either side. This artificial organ measures changes in pressure and flow around the robot not with conventional dynamic indicators, which would be far too large and imprecise, but with thermistors. When a change in flow velocity occurs, this immediately causes a change in the heat dispersed through a heated wire. This in turn can be measured electronically by the sensor elements with great speed, and in a minimum of space. At intervals of a tenth of a second and using only a tiny amount of electrical energy, the sensors register pressure fluctuations of less than one percent over an area of just a few square millimeters. The two young scientists look on “Snookie” as more than just an experiment. They expect autonomous underwater robots to find a broad range of applications — from investigating shipwrecks to carrying out deep-sea search missions, for example to locate the flight recorder after air disasters. More mundanely, they could also be used to inspect tanks and sewer pipes. Prof. van Hemmen also expects that robots with even more sensitive lateral line systems will have considerable potential uses on land, as it is of course equally possible to detect variations in pressure and flow in air, as well as water. Another external project is working on this subject. Man-made lateral lines might for example offer a cheaper alternative to the laser scanners currently used by robots to feel their way about their immediate surroundings – with the advantage that, unlike laser scanners, lateral lines won’t be blinded by other robots. This would allow autonomous robots to be deployed in swarms, opening the way for entirely new applications. Biophysicist Prof. van Hemmen has more on his mind than just autonomous underwater robots. His goal is to develop and combine new forms of technological sensory perception, as he is convinced that in this way machines can perceive their environment with much greater accuracy. “The key here is ‘multimodal sensing,’” he explains. “Humans, too, don’t rely on a single sense. Our brains combine the input from a variety of senses to create an overall image of our surroundings. It is not until one of our senses fails us that we appreciate how important this combination is.” Prof. van Hemmen graphically demonstrates this using the following example: “It normally takes maybe ten seconds to strike a match. But if you put on thin gloves to take away the sense of touch, it becomes much harder. Often the task then takes more than a minute.” Van Hemmen is also convinced that robot intelligence benefits little from installing even more cameras to supply even more images. He believes that it is more important for robots to perceive different aspects of their environment with a variety of sensors. However, when it comes to combining these different perceptions, he has to delve deep into the secrets of brain research: How do animals sift through a mass of data to filter out what is really relevant? How do humans manage this? The CoTeSys excellence cluster, he believes, presents an opportunity not just to answer these questions, but, through interdisciplinary cooperation among physiologists, information technologists and engineers, to transfer the new-found principles to the world of technology: “To be alert means reducing data to its essentials. Robots must learn to do this too, even when faced with a wide variety of sensor information.” In fact, CoTeSys specializes in just this kind of interdisciplinary cooperation. The research cluster brings together around 100 scientists working in widely differing fields at five universities and research institutes in the Munich area, in the interest of developing better cognitive capabilities for technical systems. The goal is to make robots more self-sufficient, able to analyze for themselves and flexibly respond to the situations in which they find themselves — from recognizing their surroundings through to independently performing their allotted tasks. As part of the Excellence Initiative, the Federal and state governments have set aside a total of 28 million euros in funding for the joint project coordinated by the Technische Universität München (TUM).