Linking to ITKnowledgeExchange.com could be music to your ears.

Over the course of April, our sister site will be running a promotion whereby anyone that links to them or adds them to a blogroll will be eligible to win an iPod Shuffle.

All you have to do is add ITKE and then send Brent Sheets an email to let him know about it.

Good luck!

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

This video captured Dave Burke, an engineering manager within Google’s mobile team, at the Future of Mobile conference in London talking about Android and the Open Handset Alliance (OHA).

This clip demonstrates a prototype of Sony’s flexible OLED display. The color screen is only 0.3mm thick and fully flexible, even while content is being player upon it.

HowStuffWorks has posted a helpful explanation for how OLEDs work.

While the above video shows Sony’s prototype, the technology is actually licensed from Kodak. The Eastman Kodak Company, in fact, has been busy signing licensing deals with a number of electronics manufacturers, including an agreement with LG this past week.

GE’s announcement of a successful demonstration of the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured OLEDs lighting devices (press release) spurred the normal engaging commentary on a Slashdot thread.

Kyoto Prize winner Hiroo Inokuchi, whose organic chemistry work led to the development of OLEDs, is bullish on the techology. In this interview with Wired, he forsees applications in photovoltaics and improved energy conversion.

Will these thin, cheap and green color displays be embedded in surfaces around us within the next ten years? Maybe. Toshiba engineers are reporting problems with high OLED power requirements. In other words, cereal box cartoons may take a bit longer than that to play at a breakfast table near you.

Two weeks and less than 10,000 lines of code result in this demonstration of a starfighter action game on an iPhone that takes advantage of the device’s accelerometer, touch screen and high contrast display. This is a great use of the interface and should inspire some creative thinking the software development community.

My immediate thought upon seeing Steve Forstall’s demo is that there could be a lot of flying iPhones, similar to the stories we’ve heard about the Wiimote. Remember those videos of plasma screens when the Wii debuted?

Now just imagine it’s a device that costs more than $500 direct from Apple in the U.S. and often much more than that in Europe.

That being said, I’m excited to see how software designers take advantage of that new Apple iPhone SDK.

That and Spore. Given more than two weeks to work on this game, I think this could be a killer gaming app for the device.

This canine version of access control combines radio transmitters with a high pitched warning signal to keep each dog away from the other’s bowl. The scenario is similar to many that role-based access control (RBAC) solves in an enterprise.

Unfortunately, programmers would still have to eat their own dogfood.

I wonder if this would help keep my roommate out of my beer.

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.



(Thanks go to the Future Shop for the 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

As reported by the AFP, the University of California at Berkeley has created a dedicated channel on YouTube for more than 300 hours of classes and events. Videos include peace and conflicts studies, bioengineering and “Physics for Future Presidents,” though I wonder how much that last is a dig at former or current POTUSes. Given that Berkeley s a famously liberal institution, you can draw your own conclusions. You can find the courses at http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley.

Tech fans may find gems like “SIMS 141 - Search, Google, and Life,” with Google’s Sergey Brin, to be of particular interest:

If that doesn’t meet your bar for online video goodness, you might try BoingBoing TV, a new IPTV feature hosted by cybergoddess Xeni Jardin and BoingBoing’s co-creator, Mark Frauenfelder.
The 3-5 minute segments will also feature cyberpunk author and digital copyright maven Cory Doctorow and gadgets editor Joel Johnson. The debut episodes featurethe usual mix of pop ephemera and geeky art, including a piece on Listography.com, an remix of an industrial movie from the 1960s and a robot covering Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”

All Things Weird and Wonderful, here I come.

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.

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

This past weekend’s iPhone launch has introduced hundreds of thousands of users to a new paradigm for mobile computing interfaces, multi-touch. While only time will show if an small, touchscreen keyboard will be a pleasant and productive experience, there are any number of other companies and researchers experimenting with different ways of controlling our digital devices. I’ve been using a Kensington Orbit for years, for instance, a USB trackball that has proven tough, easy to use and helpful for scrolling and editing long lines of code. Earlier this year, I invested in a Logitech MX Revolution, easily the best wireless mouse I’ve ever experienced. I can’t emphasize how much I love the hyperscroll wheel, forward/backward buttons right where my thumb rests or programmable buttons.

This afternoon, however, I found a new and downright fun new way of moving the cursor around the screen. Sadly, the brain-computer interface (BCI) that DARPA is developing isn’t quite ready for prime time, so don’t get too excited — yet. Instead, programmer Larry Lart has created uMouse, a free Windows application that, in concert a USB webcam, allows the user to control the cursor and left- or right-click using head movements or hand gestures. While the real-time visual tracking the program uses to translate movement into directives is a bit processor intensive, anyone who presents often or needs to have more flexibility in where and how they interact with a laptop or workstation now has another option with undeniable geek appeal.

Nice work, Larry! Now, to decide what I want my PC to do when I smile.

OK, so I lied - I didn’t ace my SAT exam.  However, if I grew up as part of the iPod Generation, it may have turned out differently.  The New York Times has an interesting article today about Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions’ release of three interactive programs for the video iPod (and available at iTunes).

The next time you’re riding the train and see impressionable teens bobbing their heads, it may not be the beat of Jessica Simpson, but rather a mathematical stumper that they’ve just solved.  As the article notes, the exam is still a “pencil and paper” format; however, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this exam move to a digital format in the near future.

I’ll be interested to see the popularity of these Kaplan downloads, especially compared to all of the entertainment options that teens have these days.  As for me, I hereby return to my own iPod, where I’ve got podcasts loaded up from some technology sites, along with my current favorite - numerous podcasts from ESPN Radio.

Go, go Google Gadgets! Google has now made more than 100 of its gadgets available for free download and use. Like Apple’s Dashboard widgets, there have been a huge variety of Google Gadgets created, including mapping software, weather forecasts to Bible verses, quotes, IP address mapping and language translations, all available right from your desktop.