An Ultra-High-Definition 3-D TV

  New electronics enable a jump in performance in a prototype display made by Samsung Samsung has shown off a prototype of an ultra-high-definition 3-D television. The 70-inch prototype uses a novel electronic circuitry to control eight million pixels. It's not likely to go into volume production soon, and there isn't any content to display on it, says Paul Semenza, a senior analyst at Display Search. But at last month's Society for Information Display conference in Los Angeles, the display drew crowds and garnered a best-in-show award. Samsung is the latest TV manufacturer to demonstrate a technology that uses a type of backplane—the...

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Putting Location-Based Ads to Work

Ads targeted to a person's location are an advertiser's dream. The reality is more complicated. The spread of smart phones that track their owners' precise location seems like a wonderful development for advertisers. These devices could enable completely new kinds of digital marketing that make ads more relevant, meaningful, and effective. At the Location Based Marketing Summit, held last week in New York City, experts discussed the promise--and teething problems--facing this new section of the advertising industry. Search engines already use positioning information from smart phones to deliver search results--and search ads--that are...

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Using Wi-Fi for Navigating the Great Indoors

A phone can locate you indoors to within a few paces by combining Wi-Fi signals and the jolt of your footsteps. The arrival of GPS receivers in cell phones led to a boom in location-based apps and services—everything from maps that show you where you are, to new kinds of social networking. But step inside a building and GPS often fails. Now a startup has technology that enables devices to know their position inside a building to within a few steps, and it hopes this could lead to a second wave of indoor location-aware services. WiFiSLAM, which publically demonstrated its technology for the first time last week, enables a phone to...

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Rise of the Point-and-Click Botnet

In 2005, a Russian hacker group known as UpLevel developed Zeus, a point-and-click program for creating and controlling a network of compromised computer systems, also known as a botnet. Five years of development later, the latest version of this software, which can be downloaded for free and requires very little technical skill to operate, is one of the most popular botnet platforms for spammers, fraudsters, and people who deal in stolen personal information. Last week, the security firm NetWitness, based in Herndon, VA, released a report highlighting the kind of havoc the software can wreak. It documents a Zeus botnet that controlled...

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Most Malware Tied to 'Pay-Per-Install' Market

A shadowy industry lets spammers and other cybercriminals pay their way into your computer. New research suggests that the majority of personal computers infected with malicious software may have arrived at that state thanks to a bustling underground market that matches criminal gangs who pay for malware installations with enterprising hackers looking to sell access to compromised PCs. Pay-per-install (PPI) services are advertised on shadowy underground Web forums. Clients submit their malware—a spambot, fake antivirus software, or password-stealing Trojan—to the PPI service, which in turn charges rates from $7 to $180 per thousand successful...

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A New Kind of Smart-Phone Connection

Several smart-phone manufacturers are developing plans to launch U.S. handsets that can connect to other devices when tapped together, or act as electronic wallets by instantly paying for goods when waved over a reader.The technology to make this possible--Near Field Communications (NFC)--is a step beyond the contactless radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology used in many transit systems or security access cards for buildings. NFC uses the same high-frequency radio waves as RFID and can make a connection over a distance of up to around 10 meters. It is also compatible with existing RFID systems. But NFC devices can both send and receive...

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New System Swaps the Cash Register for an iPhone

Square, a new startup based in San Francisco and headed by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, opened its doors amid much hype and fanfare last week. But some experts are already questioning whether the company will be able to sustain itself. The startup hopes to make it make it big by allowing virtually anyone to accept credit card payments by connecting a simple reader to a mobile device. Dorsey, Square's CEO, envisions the technology being used by small businesses, street vendors, and even individuals who want to sell a couch on Craigslist or collect money from a friend.However, some experts question whether the device will find a niche in the...

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Google Wallet: Who'll Buy In?

Google announced an app and a number of partnerships that could help it become a key gatekeeper in mobile electronic payments—a space that many expect to boom over the next few years.Google Wallet, announced today at an event in New York, is a app that lets users tap their smart-phone in stores to pay for purchases using near-field communication (NFC) technology—but only after they've entered their credit or debit card details. A related product called Google Offers will let users send coupons to their virtual wallets, via a Google search, for instance, or an advertising billboard using NFC.Ubiquitous and increasingly sophisticated smart phones...

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Device Tracks How You're Sleeping

If you had asked me this morning how many times I woke up last night, I would have guessed four or five. But according to the Zeo, a new gadget that monitors a person's sleep, it was a disturbing 15 times. I'm also getting considerably less sleep than I thought, averaging about six to seven hours rather than the seven to eight hours I had always estimated.The Zeo Personal Sleep Coach, developed by a startup headquartered in Newton, MA, is the first at-home device that allows people to track their sleep cycles over time. With a simple headband recording system, the device represents a neat feat of engineering. And it certainly seems...

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A Nightshirt to Monitor

What if your pajamas could tell you how well you slept? That's the dream of startup Nyx Devices, which has developed a nightshirt embedded with fabric electronics to monitor the wearer's breathing patterns. A small chip worn in a pocket of the shirt processes that data to determine the phase of sleep, such as REM sleep (when we dream), light sleep, or deep sleep."It has no adhesive and doesn't need any special setup to wear," says Matt Bianchi, a sleep neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-inventor of the shirt with Carson Darling, Pablo Bello, and Thomas Lipoma. "It's very easy—you just slip it on at night," says Bianchi,...

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Salty Solution for Energy Generation

The difference in salinity between freshwater and saltwater holds promise as a large source of renewable energy. Energy is required to desalinate water, and running the process in reverse can generate energy. Now a novel approach based on a conventional battery design that uses nanomaterials could provide a way to harvest that energy economically.  The new device, developed by researchers at Stanford University, consists of an electrode that attracts positive sodium ions and one that attracts negative chlorine ions. When the electrodes are immersed in saltwater, they draw sodium and chlorine ions from the water, and the movement of the ions...

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Tapping Quantum Effects for Software that Learns

In a bid to enable computers to learn faster, defense company Lockheed Martin has bought a system that uses quantum mechanics to process digital data. It paid $10 million to startup D-Wave Systems for the computer and support using it. D-Wave claims this to be the first ever sale of a quantum computing system.The new system, called the D-Wave One, is not significantly more capable than a conventional computer. But it could be a step on the road to fuller implementations of quantum computing, which theoreticians have shown could easily solve problems that are impossible for other computers, such as defeating encryption systems by solving...

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U.S. Aims Missiles at Hackers

The Pentagon will soon release a strategy that formalizes a long-articulated position: the United States reserves the right to launch conventional attacks in response to the cyber kind. But figuring out who is behind such attacks may be difficult, or impossible."To say that cyberattacks can be acts of war, and that they can be met by kinetic responses, simply confirms a longstanding Department of Defense consensus," says Stewart Baker, a lawyer who was policy chief at the Department of Homeland Security for part of the Bush administration. "Neither of those statements make a strategy, however."Baker adds that the threat "is much less effective...

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