Geek Squad’s Ish Matos examined the demonstration of wireless charging for iPods and cell phones at the iVolta booth at Macworld 2008.

There’s no question that living in Cambridge and writing about technology has its benefits. The city is swimming in startups, geeky events and plugged-in discussions.

Last month, I was lucky enough to score an invitation to a Q&A session with two distinguished MIT physicists focused upon the theoretical underpinnings of teleportation , followed by a roundtable discussion that brought in with “Jumper” director Doug Liman and Anakin Skywalker himself, Hayden Christiansen. The movie will be in wide release tomorrow, so I thought it would be timely to offer a comment or two concerning this confluence of fact and fiction.

You know you’re in a special place when professors receive enthusiastic applause comparable to the reception given to a Hollywood director and bonafide heart throb movie star. That being said, Hayden was clearly the focus of considerable adoration, expressed at his entrance and in more than one invitation to dates and afterparties.

Serious students of quantum physics are going have to employ the classic “willing suspension of disbelief” to fully embrace this picture. In other words, when questioned, both Dr. Edward Farhi and Dr. Max Tegmark kindly but firmly ruled out the possibility of human teleportation any time in the near future. The current state of this branch of science is exciting, however, given that experiments have successfully teleported the properties of photons over a distance. This sort of quantum teleportation relies on “quantum entanglement“, whereby the properties of two particles can be tied together even when they are far apart, a phenomenon Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

I managed to capture the presentations of Professor Tegmark and Farhi on the physics of teleportation on my webcam and stream it on uStream. My apologies: The quality of both the audio and video is regrettably poor. Still, I’m happy to share. Jumper’s plot relies on a staple of science fiction, however, not fact: genetic mutation. In other words, some evolved version of CERN’s large hadron collider or a hitherto undiscovered means of stabilizing worm holes powered by cold fusion is not at at the heart of the film. Some people are born with the ability to teleport from one place to another. Off to the races.

Mr. Liman’s direction of Swingers, Go and the Bourne Identity , however, recommends taking a chance on his vision of the moral and ethical challenges presented to someone with the power to teleport at will. I found his willingness to research what the event would actually look and sound like was impressive, particularly the collapse of air into the vacuum left by the removal of a body. He said he fell in love with the script when he read that the first action of the character upon discovering his power was to rob a bank.

For more coverage of the event, check out:

• Doug Overbye’s “Quantum Teleporting, Yes; The Rest is Movie Magic” in the New York Times
• Jess K’s hilarious blog post, Hayden Christensen Comes to MIT, Looks Pretty, for some perspective from a current MIT student
• Sharon Gaudin’s “Teleportation: The leap from fact to fiction in new movie Jumper“
• Jim Rapoza’s “Hollywood Jumps to MIT” at Emerging Tech

Following is the trailer, if you’ve somehow missed it theaters, on TV or elsewhere on the Web.

UPDATE: I’ve gotten some anecdotal feedback that “Jumper” isn’t exactly Citizen Kane. RottenTomatoes.com has delivered a dire rating of 15% while imdb.com users are being considerably kinder with a rating of 6.4/10.  That being said, the film raking in $27.2 million at the box office this past weekend, so tastes may be for forgiving out and about.

Last night, Bill Gates gave his swan song keynote at CES 2008. Before his speech, which as always enjoyed blanket coverage from the tech press, the outgoing chairman of Microsoft played a hilarious video.

Gates was able to pull in celebrities from all walks of life to participate: Speilberg, Clooney, Bono, Hillary, Al Gore, Obama, Jay-Z and a particularly hilarious bit with Matthew McConaughey. Even you didn’t make it to CES, this one’s worth adding to your lunchtime video snacking. It turns out that Bill balances funny with brilliant, though not so much on a fitness ball.

Aside from the humor, Gates orated at length about the next “digital decade,” where we can expect vast improvements in hardware and software to drive media to places it’s never been, though he painted in broad strokes rather than introducing many specific products or services. He outlined three major themes : high definition displays with 3D, multiple devices always connected to Web-enabled services ( so-called “cloud computing,” a trend we and others are documenting) and the power of vastly improved natural interfaces. To that end, Gates managed to get through a successful demonstration of snowboard design software using the Surface I/O platform without a single crash, an improvement on past experiences. Gadget geeks, epitomized by the Engadget and Gizmodo crowd, took note of the Windows Mobile 7 (Photon) image that snuck into the presentation, promptly linking to leaked interface designs for the OS that might show up on an upcoming Palm/Treo handset.
It looks like the iPhone’s multitouch interface spurred Redmond to improve on the feature-laden but complex interface of Windows Mobile 6.

The nascent Silverlight platform also scored a big win, as Gates announced that MSN would be NBC’s exclusive online provider for the 2008 Olympics in Bejing. That means that if you want to watch the Olympics online, you’ll need to download the player and install it on your browser. Well, legally, anyway. I’d be shocked if NBC wasn’t chasing .torrent files around the Net or YouTube mashups. I had to install Silverlight to watch the slive last night, actually, with a few bumps along the way. Version 1.0 of anything always worries me. You can watch the entire Gates CES keynote here.

It’s sometimes said that the only constant that you can count on is change. Change is necessary, after all — “Adapt or die” being an imperative of the natural world. And perhaps even more so in the world of technology…

These are the sorts of thoughts that occur as I poke around in the definition database, reviewing likely suspects for Words of the Day.  WhatIs has been around since 1996, when founder Lowell Thing started his little “dining room table experiment in hypertext.” Eleven calendar years ago. I’m not sure how long ago that is in Web years, for which the calibration must always be ramping up. However long the years since, though, what it means for us editors is a whole lot of updating.

We try, with varying success, to make definitions as future shock proof as we can without compromising the value of current information. Today’s Word of the Day, Antikythera mechanism, lends itself to that approach pretty well. You don’t expect a lot to change on a 2000-year-old computer. But for breaking news and link rot, we’re pretty much set with that one.

On the other hand, there are those definitions that seem to have been written in a simpler time, probably in the last century. Occasionally, I review a definition that predicts future developments that have either not panned out or have proven so prescient that all we have to do is change the tenses and phrases like “might become” to “is.”

Take silicon cockroach for example. I came across that one yesterday, looking for WODs for the weekend. John Sidgmore coined the term back in ‘98 to refer to the multiplicity of small electronic devices that he predicted would prevail in the future. We added the definition in ‘01. Now, as we flip lightly over into ‘08, I see that not only do the tenses need to be changed from future to present but a host of new life forms added to the species. No mention of MP3 players, GPS , USB drives…

What does our definition say now? Well … that depends. How far into the future are you reading it?
~ Ivy Wigmore

Try the XEL-1. Engadget has a great photo gallery for your viewing pleasure.

Today, Sony unveiled the world’s first OLED television. That’s organic light-emitting diode, for you acronym-o-phobes.

The TV is only 3mm thick, has a resolution of 960 x 540 (though it’s described as 1080p) and comes with a TV tuner. More impressive, however, is the contrast ratio of 1,000,000:1 on the 11″ screen. The screen manages to be thinner than an LCD or PDP (plasma display panel) set because no backlight is required — ah, the wonders of OLED lighting!

You can attach your next-gen optical disc player (Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) to the HDMI port, along with USB and Ethernet inputs for other devices.

You’ll have to wait until December for this beauty, sadly — and travel to all the way to Japan!

As amazing as this may be to gadgethounds, I’m still holding my breath for FOLEDs– a flexible OLED screens — on, say, a t-shirt, jacket sleeve or smartnewspaper. The technology is still a few years out, even if this video shows a tantalizing preview of what’s to come.

One of my favorite discoveries of the past year has definitely been Marc Andreessen’s blog. From the moment he first started posting long, chewy, thoughtful discussions of his thoughts on technology, business and startups (along with wonderful digressions into great new sci-fi writers, Web 2.0, and essential online cheat sheets), Marc has been on the must-read list for most of the techie blogosphere.

Now, the famous co-founder of Netscape and co-author of the Mosaic browser has moved on to Ning, a social networking startup that’s jostling with Microsoft, Amazon, Sun, Facebook and others to provide a platform for all manner of distributed applications, all within “the cloud.” Amazon even calls their platform the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2.

Therein lies the rub. The word platform has become overused to the point of losing any precise meaning. WhatIs.com has long provided two definitions for platform:

1) In computers, a platform is an underlying computer system on which application programs can run. On personal computers, Windows 2000 and the Mac OS X are examples of two different platforms. On enterprise servers or mainframes, IBM’s S/390 is an example of a platform.

A platform consists of an operating system, the computer system’s coordinating program, which in turn is built on the instruction set for a processor or microprocessor, the hardware that performs logic operations and manages data movement in the computer. The operating system must be designed to work with the particular processor’s set of instructions. As an example, Microsoft’s Windows 2000 is built to work with a series of microprocessors from the Intel Corporation that share the same or similar sets of instructions. There are usually other implied parts in any computer platform such as a motherboard and a data bus, but these parts have increasingly become modularized and standardized.

Historically, most application programs have had to be written to run on a particular platform. Each platform provided a different application program interface for different system services. Thus, a PC program would have to be written to run on the Windows 2000 platform and then again to run on the Mac OS X platform. Although these platform differences continue to exist and there will probably always be proprietary differences between them, new open or standards-conforming interfaces now allow many programs to run on different platforms or to interoperate with different platforms through mediating or “broker” programs.

2) A platform is any base of technologies on which other technologies or processes are built.

Fortunately, in this mammoth post, Andreessen both modifies and adds to these definitions, putting the term in the context of the Internet and then exploring three different levels of online platform: the “Access API,” the “Plug-in API,” and the “Runtime environment.”

As a rather famous online pundit often writes,  read the whole thing (RTWT). If you’re at all interested in programming, online business strategy and the concept of the cloud, you’ll be glad you did.

This past weekend, many of the world’s foremost thinkers gathered at the Singularity Summit within the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. You might ask what the Singularity is, of course, as the focus of all of this heady cogitation?

It’s the point where a consciousness is comes into being (usually an AI) that is itself smarter than the humans who created it.

According to the Summit’s overview:

Vernor Vinge originally coined the term “Singularity” in observing that, just as our model of physics breaks down when it tries to model the singularity at the center of a black hole, our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human.

The summit’s Web site features videos, podcasts and coverage from all over the Internet of the yearly event, including a great piece from Peter Thiel on Wired.com exploring how to invest in the Singularity.

I can’t help but think of SkyNet, the decidedly nasty entity depicted so dramatically in the Terminator series, but there are more positive outcomes, many of which are amply explained here, where the summit’s organizers explain why the Singularity is worth working towards.  Whether humanity is willing or able to do so is another question entirely. We can only hope!

Speaking from a somewhat philosophical perspective, Joe Foran also had some deep thoughts regarding the concept, articulated in Virtualization and the Singularity on the Server Virtualization blog. If you’re wondering how virtualization and futurism blend together, look no further.

It’s not quite perpetual motion — but it might be the next best thing. Dr. Steve Beeby and a team of researchers at the School of Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) at Southampton University in the UK have developed a kinetic energy generator that harnesses the energy of environmental vibrations and movement. When you think about it, Elvis was right: There’s a whole lotta shakin’ going on. And the scientists working on the VIBES (Vibration Energy Scavenging) project want to put all that energy generated to good use.

Actual size: less than 1 cubic centimeter

Although the generator is not the first of its kind, it’s said to be 10 times more powerful than any previous implementation. The technology, which has an industrial background, is being adapted for use with pacemakers. In this application, the beat of a person’s heart could power their pacemaker, which would mean that they would no longer require surgery to replace the batteries.

Here’s Beeby’s explanation (quoted in IndiaTimes Infotech):
“There is a big drive towards using wireless devices, but one of the challenges in supplying power to these devices is that batteries have a finite supply that needs to be replaced. We have a spin-out company that is now looking at powering pacemakers from the movement of the heart.

“As the power consumption of electronic devices continues to fall, the opportunity to use these devices to power them becomes more apparent. The potential is there for devices like mobile phones and MP3 players being at least augmented by vibration generators. There is quite a lot of energy available on a human such as the impact of a heel on the floor which could also be used.”

When you think about it, there’s no end of vibrational energy being generated all day every day. The VIBES team and other researchers are also exploring the potential of vibrations from roads and bridges. ~ Ivy Wigmore

Car spot in the future. (Note: It will become very important to mention that it was a closed course and the cars were flown by professional…um… flyers.)

And for those of you who already looking beyond the flying car, how about a flying minivan?

Ok, these two are spoofs.

~ Ivy Wigmore

Ok, we’re still not seeing any personal jetpacks but the flying car has arrived. If we had a definition for it, I’d have to go in and change all the references from future to present tense. Because a company called Moller has — finally! — developed the Skycar.Here’s Moller’s definition of what they’re calling a volantor (from “volare” — nothing to do with volunteering. No point in even calling to ask. I tried.):

vo - lan - tor (vo-lan’ter) n. A vertical takeoff and landing aircraft that is capable of flying in a quick, nimble, and agile manner. –intr. & tr.v. -tored, -toring, tors. To go or carry by volantor. [Lat. volare, to fly. Fr. volant, to move in a nimble and agile manner

It flies! Ooooh … and it’s a sedan. Room for the kids and the picnic basket!

Sign up here! You can guarantee a spot between 25 and 100 on the delivery list for only $995,000 — yes, less than a million bucks! — assuming the FAA certifies by Dec. 2008.

I’m so excited! I’m gonna get a red one.

~ Ivy Wigmore

One of our colleagues, SearchNetworking.com’s Tessa Parmenter, wrote a provocative message to her audience this past week. In it, she commented on a new tool, Netcosm, described by Andrew Hickey in his recent article, “Network Monitoring gets a video game touch.” Here’s what Andrew had to say:

What if monitoring tools got a 3D kick and incorporated slick, video game-like graphics and sound effects to alert IT of problems on the network?

Sounds a bit goofy, but it just might work.

NetQoS, maker of tools like SuperAgent and ReporterAnalyzer, recently announced its latest creation: Netcosm, a 3D graphical representation of the network and the traffic that traverses it. It uses video game-style graphics, resembling something out of the futuristic 1980s movie Tron or early incarnations of popular games like Doom or Quake.

Netcosm, to put it simply, represents the network and the traffic that traverses it with 3-D graphics that look distinctly like those of a video game. While the tool is not yet released, Netcosm can be viewed as an online demo.

Tessa asked some provocative questions in a recent newsletter, which, with her permission, we’ve excerpted below. Please feel free to respond to with your thoughts in letters to the editor or in the comments section of this post. Do you think this is the future of networking and tech support?

Netcosm targets the younger generation of networking pros, those used to the graphics and sound effects of video games — the IT pro gamer.

What does this say to the non-gamer, networking professional? Maybe it won’t matter because the graphics are doing them a service, presenting lots of metrics all at once with quickly comprehensible images. But could this be ostracizing, or even belittling to the more informed and practiced IT pro?

My guess is no, since much of work these days feels, well, much more like work. Laughter seems to have been squeezed out of our daily work lives — no play allowed, no laughter, no games — so why not add a little joie de vivre to our work day? Isn’t this like getting paid to play video games? And isn’t that a gamer’s dream come true?

In a sense…but then what is this saying about our culture? Maybe the boundaries of work and play should not combine. If you go into this program with the mindset that you’re playing a video game, then you might want to rethink things. There are no pauses, no cheat codes, and certainly no extra lives. Once a failsafe has gone down and the bad guys have taken over your network, you’ve compromised corporate data, not just your self-esteem. And the excitement of the graphics might be tempting. Even the best network admin might want to see what happens, just this one time, when something combusts. Though unrealistic, it’s still a thought to consider. The worse things get, the cooler things look.

All in all, though, we can take this for what it is: a great way to illustrate what is going on with your network. Rather than deciphering vague alert messages, this gets the point across immediately. And, because the majority of us are image-oriented, it makes sense to represent these pertinent metrics graphically.

Do you feel differently about this? Is there something you want to add or comment on? Share your thoughts with us at SearchNetworking.com and send your message to: editor@searchnetworking.com.

Who knows what’s next? Why, Wired, of course. Among many other innovations, last year’s Wired Magazine NextFest introduced a new international icon for wireless Internet access, otherwise known as WiFi. Chris Anderson talked about the long tail. The future of exploration (see Richard Branson’s plans for Virgin Galactic) and robotics both received considerable attention. One presentation, “Green is the new Black,” described how “New homes, offices, and vehicles strutting down the retail runway incorporate innovative, sustainable materials while maintaining functionality and style.” We look forward to seeing what’s next in action down the road.