TECHNOLOGY IN BUILDINGS.

A 16m-high (55ft) glass church in the shape of a high-heeled shoe has been built in Taiwan, apparently in a bid to attract more women.

A huge glass... what?

Yes, you read that right: a glass church, shaped just like a vast high-heeled shoe as if lost by a titan Cinderella while racing through the coastal province of Chaiyi.

Made out of over 320 tinted glass panels, the shiny blue building measures more than 10m (36ft) wide and cost about T$23m (US$686,000 £477,000).

FOR MORE VISIT.http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35320373

Are Smart Phones Spreading Faster than Any Technology in Human History?

Mobile computers are on track to saturate markets in the U.S. and the developing world in record time.

Today’s technology scene seems overheated to some. Apple is the most valuable company on earth. Software apps are reaching tens of millions of users within weeks. Major technology names like Research in Motion and Nokia are being undone by rapid changes to their markets. Underlying these developments: the unprecedented speed at which mobile computers are spreading.

Presented below is the U.S. market penetration achieved by nine technologies since 1876, the year Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Penetration rates have been organized to show three phases of a technology’s spread: traction, maturity, and saturation.

Those technologies with “last mile” problems—bringing electricity cables or telephone wire to individual homes—appear to spread more slowly. It took almost a century for landline phones to reach saturation, or the point at which new demand falls off. Mobile phones, by contrast, achieved saturation in just 20 years. Smart phones are on track to halve that rate yet again, and tablets could move still faster, setting consecutive records for speed to market saturation in the United States.

It is difficult to conclude categorically from the available data that smart phones are spreading faster than any previous technology. Statistics are not always available globally, and not every technology is easily tracked. Also, because smart phones have not yet reached market saturation, as electricity and television have, the results are still coming in.

The Sudden Rise of the Smart Phone 

BellSouth launched the IBM Simon, with its rudimentary touch screen, back in 1993, but the era of the smart phone in America really began in 2002, when existing PDAs took on the ability to make phone calls. That year RIM shipped its first BlackBerry with phone features, Handspring launched its Palm-OS-powered Treo line, Microsoft shipped its Pocket PC.Phone Edition, and mobile data technology such as GPRS became increasingly widespread.

Four and a half years later, in late 2006, the quarter before Apple announced its now-iconic iPhone, only 715,000 smart phones were sold, representing just 6 percent of U.S. mobile-phone sales by volume. Up to that point, the smart phone was spreading not much faster than personal computers had in the preceding decades, and more slowly than radio decades before.

That changed when Apple’s iPhone sold 1.12 million units in its first full quarter of availability, despite prices starting at $399. Year over year, the market share of smart phones almost doubled, to 11 percent of U.S. mobile-phone sales. Now Nielsen reports that smart phones represent more than two-thirds of all U.S. mobile-phone sales. Nielsen also reports that 50 percent of all U.S. mobile-phone users—which equates to about 40 percent of the U.S. population—now use smart phones.

These figures show that smart phones, after a relatively fast start, have also outpaced nearly any comparable technology in the leap to mainstream use. It took landline telephones about 45 years to get from 5 percent to 50 percent penetration among U.S. households, and mobile phones took around seven years to reach a similar proportion of consumers. Smart phones have gone from 5 percent to 40 percent in about four years, despite a recession. In the comparison shown, the only technology that moved as quickly to the U.S. mainstream was television between 1950 and 1953.

A CAMERA.

Still pining for the days when snapping a Polaroid and instantly (well, almost) showing a finished printed photo to your friends was a hot thing?

Well, Polaroid is still here (more precisely, at ) and it just announced the Polaroid Snap, a digital camera that can immediately print out a photo, and it doesn't even need ink to do it

See also:

The trick is in the Zero Ink printing technology developed by a company called ZINK. Instead of using ink, the camera uses special printing paper which contains cyan, yellow and magenta dye crystals under a protective polymer coating. The ZINK-enabled printer inside the Polaroid Snap camera then activates those crystals to create a full-color photo.

September 2, 2015Stan Schroederfeatured

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A Wi-Fi reflector chip to speed up wearables

Whether you're tracking your steps, monitoring your health or sending photos from a smart watch, you want the battery life of your wearable device to last as long as possible. If the power necessary to transmit and receive information from a wearable to a computer, cellular or Wi-Fi network were reduced, you could get a lot more mileage out of the technology you're wearing before having to recharge it.

Adrian Tang of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is working on a technology to do just that. He and M.C. Frank Chang at the University of California, Los Angeles, have been working on microchips forwearable devices that reflect wireless signals instead of using regular transmitters and receivers. Their solution transmits information up to three times faster than regular Wi-Fi.

"The idea is if the wearable device only needs to reflect the Wi-Fi signal from a router or cell tower, instead of generate it, the power consumption can go way down (and the battery life can go way up)," Tang said.

Information transmitted to and from a wearable device is encoded as 1s and 0s, just like data on a computer. This needs to be represented somehow in the system the wearable device uses to communicate. When incoming energy is absorbed by the circuit, that's a "0," and if the chip reflects that energy, that's a "1." This simple switch mechanism uses very little power and allows for the fast transfer of information between a wearable device and a computer, smart phone, tablet or other technology capable of receiving the data.

The microchip for wearable devices.

The challenge for Tang and his colleagues is that the wearable device isn't the only object in a room that reflects signals - so do walls, floors, ceilings, furniture and whatever other objects happen to be around. The chip in the wearable device needs to differentiate between the real Wi-Fi signal and the reflection from the background.

To overcome background reflections, Tang and Chang developed a wireless silicon chip that constantly senses and suppresses background reflections, enabling the Wi-Fi signal to be transmitted without interference from surrounding objects.

The technologists have tested the system at distances of up to 20 feet (6 meters). At about 8 feet (2.5 meters), they achieved a data transfer rate of 330 megabits per second, which is about three times the current Wi-Fi rate, using about a thousand times less power than a regular Wi-Fi link.

"You can send a video in a couple of seconds, but you don't consume the energy of the wearable device. The transmitter externally is expending energy - not the watch or other wearable," Chang said.

GOOGLE GLASS.

Google Glass is a type of wearable technology with an optical head-mounted display (OHMD). It was developed by Google X with the mission of producing a mass-market ubiquitous computer. Google Glass displays information in a smartphone-like hands-free format. Wearers communicate with the Internet via natural language voice commands. Google started selling a prototype of Google Glass to qualified "Glass Explorers" in the US on April 15, 2013, for a limited period for $1,500, before it became available to the public on May 15, 2014, for the same price.

On January 15, 2015, Google announced that it would stop producing the Google Glass prototype but remained committed to the development of the product. According to Google, Project Glass was ready to "graduate" from Google Labs, the experimental phase of the project.

DEVELOPMENT.

Google Glass was developed by Google X, the facility within Google devoted to technological advancements such as driverless cars.

Google Glass is smaller and slimmer than previous head-mounted display designs.

The Google Glass prototype resembled standardeyeglasses with the lens replaced by a head-up display.  In mid-2011, Google engineered a prototype that weighed 8 pounds (3,600 g); by 2013 they were lighter than the average pair of sunglasses.

In April 2013, the Explorer Edition was made available to Google I/Odevelopers in the United States for $1,500.

A Glass prototype seen at Google 

The product was publicly announced in April 2012. Sergey Brin wore a prototype of the Glass to an April 5, 2012, Foundation Fighting Blindness event in San Francisco. In May 2012, Google demonstrated for the first time how Google Glass could be used to shoot video.

Google provided four prescription frame choices for $225 and free with the purchase of any new Glass unit. Google entered in a partnership with the Italian eyewear company Luxottica, owners of the Ray-Ban, Oakley, and other brands, to offer additional frame designs. In June 2014, Nepal Government adoptedGoogle Glass for tackling poachers of wild animals and herbs of Chitwan International Park and other parks listed under World heritage sites. Gurkha Military currently uses Google Glass to track the animals and birds in the jungle. This operation led to the latest development in military operation. Google Glass was used in military for the first time in the world by Nepal.

In January 2015, Google ended the beta period of Glass (the "Google Glass Explorer" program)

RAY OFLIGHT.

Light is what allows us to understand the world we live in. Our language reflects this: after groping in the dark, we see the light and understanding dawns.

Yet light is one of those things that we don't tend to understand. If you were to zoom in on a ray of light, what would you see? Sure, light travels incredibly fast, but what is it that's doing the travelling? Many of us would struggle to explain.

It doesn't have to be that way. Light certainly has puzzled the greatest minds for centuries, but landmark discoveries made over the last 150 years have robbed light of its mystery. We actually know, more or less, what it is.

Not only do today's physicists understand the nature of light, they are learning to control it with ever-greater precision – which means light could soon be put to work in surprising new ways. That is part of the reason why the United Nations designated 2015 as the International Year of Light.

New Nexus 5 and Nexus 6 specs almost completely

We may well see some new Nexus handsets as soon as next month, so it's no surprise that they've started being the subjects of rumours and the latest leak is one of the most detailed yet.

GizmoChina has unveiled a long list of specs for both of the rumoured Nexus handsets. The LG Nexus phone (the new Nexus 5, perhaps) will apparently have a 5.2-inch 1080p P-OLED screen, an octa-core Snapdragon 620 processor, up to 4GB of RAM, up to 64GB of built in storage and a non-removable 3180mAh battery.

There will apparently be a 13MP camera on the back, with an f/1.8 aperture lens, optical image stabilisation, a laser autofocus and a dual-LED flash, while the front-facing snapper will supposedly be 4MP.

You can also apparently look forward to a fingerprint scanner integrated into a rear power button, which matches up with cut-outs in some leaked cases we've seen.

Premium and affordable

Plus the phone will have front-facing stereo speakers, an aluminium frame with chamfered edges and a matte plastic back cover.

You can keep it charged up with both wireless and quick charging and it's said to support NFC too. According to the leak all that will cost in the region of $300-400 (around £193-257 / AU$406-542), so it should undercut rival flagships.

The site doesn't have as many details on the Huawei Nexus (potentially the new Nexus 6) but reports that it will have a 5.7-inch WQHD AMOLED display, a metal unibody, a 21MP camera and Rezence/WiPower wireless charging.

For the most part this all lines up with what we've already heard, though it fills in some specs gaps too. The only bit that slightly conflicts with earlier rumours is the Snapdragon 620 processor, as previously it was thought the LG Nexus would sport either a Snapdragon 808 or a Snapdragon 820.

It's also worth noting that GizmoChina makes no mention of where it obtained this information, so its authenticity is anyone's guess, but if it's accurate then both new Nexus handsets could be pretty exciting.

• The OnePlus 2 is another affordable flagship.

SOON.

Latest update: The first shots of the iPhone 6S seem to have leaked, along with new camera and specs rumors and the possibility of a Liquidmetal design and no more home button.

The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have been with us long enough now that we're getting a little tired of them. Fickle, we know. But the mooted specs and features of the new iPhone (probably called the iPhone 6S, with the iPhone 7 coming in 2016) are starting to trickle out.

Current highlights include Force Touch, the Apple SIM, a DSLR-quality camera and double the RAM of the iPhone 6, so you're free to start getting excited.

• Best iPhone 6 deals in the UK this month

We've also rounded up 10 things we think should appear in the next iteration for Apple to finally have the all-conquering handset it's been trying to create for so many years.

FUTURE MOBILE PHONE TECHNOLOGY.

In just a few years, smartphones have taken over our lives – half of the UK population now owns one. We’re hooked on touchscreens, apps and smartphone smugness but there are still plenty of surprises in store.

Here’s a taster of the innovations you might carry in your pocket in years to come.

Bendy screens

Touchscreens made phones more intuitive than ever, and the next generation of screens promises to revolutionise our habits yet again. Several companies are working on the first phones with flexible screens, expected to hit the shops by late 2012.
The innovation inside these bendy screens is OLEDs (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) - thin films of organic molecules that produce light when you run an electric current through them. Often less than a millimetre thick and offering a bright, crisp image with low power consumption, it’s not just flexibility that makes OLEDs a popular choice.

OLEDs could pave the way for bigger screens that fold away neatly,  and new ways of controlling your phone by bending or twisting its screen.

Self-powered phones

It’s a simple trade off:  the more processing power is packed into your smartphone, the faster its battery charge vanishes. A phone that powers itself sounds like a dream come true – and it might just happen.

Piezoelectric devices can convert mechanical movement into electric current. They rely on piezoelectric materials, which generate a tiny electric current when flexed or pressed. Microphones, amongst other things, use this effect to turn sound into an electrical signal.

The amount of power produced by piezoelectricity is usually miniscule, but at the nano scale, even the tiniest of movements can be harnessed. The latest research into nanomaterials promises ultra efficient systems that could power your phone using the vibrations of your voice or the tapping of your fingertips on a touchscreen.
 BYEEE.