MSI Updates Afterburner and Kombustor

MSI have released new versions of the Graphics Card software Afterburner and Kombustor. This release comes after months of developing and bug testing during the beta phase. For those not in the know, Afterburner is MSI’s overclocking software for GPUs. It allows the user to change clock speeds and even voltmod their GPUs, thus facilitating some pretty cool overclocks. Afterburner was updated to version 2.1.0 Final in this release. MSI Kombustor is a stability testing software that places a lot of stress on the GPU in order to check how stable the overclock, or the card itself, is. Kombustor was updated to 2.0.0 in this release. New in this release...

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Apple Launches New and Improved Macbook Pros

It was Steve Jobs’ birthday yesterday, and as was speculated a couple of days ago, Apple did indeed release the updated MacBook Pros on their absentee CEO’s birthday. The new MacBook Pros come powered by Intel’s second generation Core i5 and i7 processors, codenamed Sandy Bridge, and either Intel HD3000 integrated graphics solutions or AMD’s 6-series Mobility GPUs. They also feature updated front-facing cameras for Facetime, and Intel/Apple’s new optical input/output interface - Thunderbolt (previously called Light Peak) - which will allow for transfer speeds of upto 10Gbps and also support nearly every kind of digital video output interface....

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Lava Launches Dual-SIM B8 QWERTY Business Phone

While a review of the Samsung Chat 335 is on the cards, Lava has released a QWERTY keypad business phone called the B8. The phone has some decent specs and features which we’ll look at now. The B8 is a Dual-SIM business phone with a QWERTY keypad and a track pad for navigation. The phone has business features like Push Mail and users can set up to ten email accounts in the phone. The specs for the B8 are as follows: 2.3-inch screen Wi-Fi Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP 3.2 Megapixel camera with LED Flash Memory expandable up to 16 GB B8 has an in-built G-Sensor which lets users change tracks and can also be used to play the Java games that come bundled...

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Apple Gives Developers a Sneak Peek at Mac OSX Lion

Apple have released a preview of the next iteration of Mac OSX, Lion, on the Mac App Store for developers registered with the Mac Developer Program to take a look at. The new version of the trademark Operating System aims to borrow ideas that made iOS and the iPad a success, and implement them in the PC OS experience. Some of the features include: Mission Control view Launchpad for Applications New Multitouch gestures Fullscreen applications that utilize the entire Mac display Apart from this, the preview also features the Mac App Store, the Airdrop wireless file transfer service, autosave and versioning for documents, a Resume function, FileVault...

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New Google Apps Launched

This one’s fresh off Google’s blog. Google just launched two new initiatives that should help more people experience the productivity benefits of web-powered collaboration. The first innovation is Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft, which has been made available worldwide. Anyone who has a Google account can use this service, and it seems to be quite useful; much like Google Docs. It brings multi-person collaboration to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, so everyone using this application can use the same version of a file at once. The other announcement was a 90 day programme called Appsperience, which is a way for companies that currently...

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The First Full-Color Display with Quantum Dots

Bright and bendy: Color quantum dots and oxide thin-film transistors work together in this new active matrix display prototype. Credit: Byoung Lyong Choi, Samsung Electronics Researchers at Samsung Electronics have made the first full-color display that uses quantum dots. Quantum-dot displays promise to be brighter, cheaper, and more energy-efficient than those found in today's cell phones and MP3 players. Samsung's four-inch diagonal display is controlled using an active matrix, which means each of its color quantum-dot pixels is turned on and off with a thin-film transistor. The researchers have made the prototype on glass as...

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Where Solar Power Meets the Oil Field

Steam clean: GlassPoint Solar erected this greenhouse-protected solar thermal system to concentrate heat and generate steam for an oil field in McKittrick, California.  Credit: GlassPoint Solar Extracting heavy oil from the ground carries a large carbon footprint, because the oil must be coaxed from the earth with steam. In California's Kern County, where steam-hungry oil fields account for 9 percent of the state's natural-gas consumption, GlassPoint Solar is testing an alternative: a one-acre greenhouse full of solar heat collectors. The Fremont, California, firm hopes this method will deliver steam in a way that's cleaner...

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Watson Goes to the Hospital

Last week, IBM's Watson computer beat two human competitors on Jeopardy. Before the contest was even over, IBM and Nuance, a leading maker of voice-recognition software, announced plans to put Watson to work in the health-care industry.The idea is for Watson to digest huge quantities of medical information and deliver useful real-time information to physicians, perhaps eventually in response to voice questions. If successful, the system could help medical experts diagnose conditions or create a treatment plan. But it could prove a far more challenging trick than winning a game show. "The medical domain doubles in knowledge every few years,"...

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Searching for the Future of Television

Google and the geeks from Silicon Valley aim to revolutionize the 70-year-old TV industry. Conquering the Internet was easy in comparison. Nearly every week from last February until mid-May, Google trotted wide-eyed visitors into a small room at its colorful headquarters in Mountain View, California. Inside were a comfy couch and easy chairs, a tall fabric houseplant in a corner, and a large high-definition television set atop a credenza. Under the watchful eyes of engineers and product managers on the other side of a mirrored window, the visitors would settle in with a wireless keyboard. They would search for and tune in to All My Children...

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Google TV Faces Some Prime-Time Challenges

Having conquered much of the Internet, it seems only logical for Google to try to take over television, too. But the Google TV platform unveiled at the firm's annual I/O developers' conference in San Francisco yesterday could face many problems. The goal of the platform, said senior product manager Rishi Chandra, is to offer the "best of what TV has to offer today, and the best of what the Web has to offer today." However, closer analysis of what is known about Google TV so far suggests that the firm has some work to do if its new platform is to live up to that promise. Google TV consists of a modified version of the open-source Android mobile...

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A Sticker Makes Solar Panels Work Better

The power output of solar panels can be boosted by 10 percent just by applying a big transparent sticker to the front. Developed by a small startup called Genie Lens Technologies, the sticker is a polymer film embossed with microstructures that bend incoming sunlight. The result: the active materials in the panels absorb more light, and convert more of it into electricity. The technology is cheap and could lower the cost per watt of solar power. Also, unlike other technologies developed to improve solar panel performance, this one can be added to panels that have already been installed. The polymer film does three main things, says Seth Weiss,...

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GE to Make Thin-Film Solar Panels

GE has confirmed long-standing speculation that it plans to make thin-film solar panels that use a cadmium- and tellurium-based semiconductor to capture light and convert it into electricity. The GE move could put pressure on the only major cadmium-telluride solar-panel maker, Tempe, AZ-based First Solar, which could drive down prices for solar panels. Last year, GE seemed to be getting out of the solar industry as it sold off crystalline-silicon solar-panel factories it had acquired in 2004. The company found that the market for such solar panels--which account for most of the solar panels sold worldwide--was too competitive for a relative...

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Solar Cell Maker Gets a $400-Million Boost

A thin-film solar firm spun out of Colorado State University says it has developed a way to make cadmium-telluride photovoltaic modules that could be cheaper than processes used by other makers of such solar cells. Abound Solar of Loveland, CO, has received a conditional $400-million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy. The loan will be tapped over the next three years to fund a 12-fold expansion of Abound's capacity, bringing its total annual output to 840 megawatts and giving the company the scale it says it needs to compete with industry leader First Solar. "Abound's device is almost identical to what First Solar makes," says...

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U.S. Solar Market to Double in the Next Year

n a few years, the United States is likely to be the world's largest market for solar power, eclipsing Germany, which has taken the lead as a result of strong government incentives in spite of the relative paucity of sunlight in that country. A number of factors could make growth possible in the United States--especially changes in legislation that give utilities incentives to create large solar farms. Last year, the U.S. solar industry got off to a slow start, but sales rebounded in the second half of the year, largely because of a drop in the prices of solar panels of up to 40 percent, partly caused by an oversupply due to the recession....

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The iPad: Like an iPhone, Only Bigger

Apple announced its latest creation, the iPad, at a special event in San Francisco, CA, today. CEO Steve Jobs took the stage to unveil the device, which has been the subject of often dizzying speculation and excitement in recent weeks. "We want to kick off 2010 by introducing a magical and revolutionary product today," Jobs said. The expectation and hope for many has been that Apple will revolutionize both the e-reader and tablet computing markets, just as it did with the cell-phone and PDA markets through the iPhone. The iPad features a 9.7-inch (25-centimeter) multi-touch, in-plane switching LCD display; it is half an inch (1.3 centimeters)...

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What to Expect from the Open iPhone

With its easy-to-use touch screen and slick software--including Apple's iTunes--the iPhone is the darling of the cell-phone industry. And last week, Apple made an announcement that only enhances the phone's appeal. The Cupertino, CA, company unveiled a set of new features for the phone that allow it to work well with business software, including e-mail and data-synching software. And crucially, the company released the instructions for the iPhone's hardware, offering a software development kit (SDK) that lets programmers outside Apple peek inside the gadget and write their own applications for it. Anyone who uses an iPhone will soon reap the...

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Micro Solar Cells Handle More Intense Sunlight

A startup company hopes to bring down the cost of generating power with concentrated sunlight by using microscale solar cells that can utilize twice as much light as other panels, without the need for expensive optics or cooling systems. Panels made from the tiny cells, which the Durham, NC-based company Semprius developed using a novel microprinting technology, also offer significant savings on materials costs. In late January, the company announced a joint agreement with Siemens to develop demonstration systems based on its technology. Semprius plans to begin volume production of the modules in 2013. Adding concentrating lenses to solar panels...

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PlayStation Phone: Innovator or Imitator?

fter seeing the mobile gaming market invaded by smart-phone makers in recent years, Sony Ericsson has now launched the first "Playstation phone," called the Xperia Play. The device resembles a regular smart phone but has gaming buttons that slide out from beneath the screen. The Xperia Play, launched this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, is designed to fend off growing competition in the mobile gaming market while carving out a new niche among many other mobile devices. Smart phones have encroached on the mobile gaming market in recent years—in 2009, revenue from iPhone games surpassed revenue from Sony's mobile PSP...

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Silicon Solar Cells Ditch the Wafers

Startup Crystal Solar hopes to take some of the cost out of high-performance single-crystalline solar cells by eliminating conventional silicon wafers. The company says it has developed a wafer-free process for making 50-micrometer-thick solar cells with over 15 percent efficiency, with the possibility of higher efficiencies. Because the process doesn't waste much silicon, Crystal Solar expects to produce cells for half or even a third of the cost of conventional cells. Earlier this month, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) announced it would give the company up to $4 million over the next 18 months to fund development of the technology....

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A Twin-Cell Solar Panel

                                                           A start-up called Stion will receive $1 million from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to develop a new type of low-cost, high-efficiency solar panel. The company will use the new funding to make solar panels that combine two types of solar cells, which will allow the panels...

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Google Gives a First Look at the Chrome OS

                                Google gave the first demonstration of its Chrome operating system today, at the same time opening the source code to the public. The company highlighted features that have grown out of what vice president of product management Sundar Pichai called "a fundamentally different model of computing." Unlike other operating systems, which merely incorporate the Internet, Chrome is completely focused on it.The Chrome OS is based so aggressively on the Internet...

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The Android that Apple's Rivals Have Been Looking For

                                  When Apple's iPad debuted last year, it resurrected a form of computing long thought unworkable, and created entirely new markets for book and news publishers. Attempts by others to follow that lead have lacked the iPad's polish, but Google may have changed the equation by revealing its own take on the tablet experience yesterday. Rather than offering a radical departure from the vision introduced by Apple, the company's tablet-flavored version...

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