3d Video with Kinect and iPad. NESTA - The future of games. Exports back at pre-slump levels. Wednesday 21 December 2011 14.49 Enterprise Ireland has said that record levels of exports were achieved in 2011 despite the tough economic outlook. In its end of year statement, the agency also warns that 2012 will be a year of continuing challenges. Enterprise Ireland estimates that final export figures for this year will exceed pre-recession record levels from 2008.
The agency says more than €1 billion worth of exports this year will be what it describes as "new export sales". Despite the strong performance, employment in export-driven companies increased only slightly last year. Frank Ryan, CEO of Enterprise Ireland, said that Irish companies had proved resilient and relentless in their pursuit of new market opportunities. Total employment in companies backed by Enterprise Ireland stood at 162,692 in 2011. Evi arrives in town to go toe-to-toe with Siri. When Siri arrived on the iPhone 4S I thought to myself, who else could do this? It would need to be a search engine with natural language processing, but also behave in the manner of artificial intelligence and respond to voice recognition. One company that sprung to mind was True Knowledge. I pinged them. Are you working on a Siri type application, I asked? Now they can reveal what they’ve been building.
Based on very deep, patented technology around language and knowledge understanding, the iPhone app couples a licensing of Nuance’s voice recognition technology (the small charge is to cover this license) and True Knowledge’s engine. Taking speech and turning it into text is tough, so is natural language text and understanding what the user means, as well as their intent. Evi has an ontology of tens of thousands of classes into which everything that can be talked about falls.
Yes, Evi can’t do Siri’s trick of adding things to your iPhone Calendar or hook into reminders. Innovation Island - Web 2.0 University IP Commercialisation | Chaos Management. In addition to everything else on my plate, I’ve been in stealth mode for the past few months with a concept called Innovation Island. Universities patent technologies all the time arising from their research activities.
Technology Transfer Offices help to spin out campus companies based on these technologies and/or license the technology out to third parties. Inevitably, more patents come in to the system than can be spun or licensed out the other end. Many of the patents that miss the cut in their first year never make it at all because newer patents come along and continue to displace them.
There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with the patents that don’t make it but there could be factors that make them more difficult to commercialise such as: an unwillingness of the inventor to become an entrepreneur in a campus company; or a lack of understanding of the applicable markets on behalf of the University. Be Sociable, Share! Flipboard Nabs $50 Million in Funding, Bringing Valuation to $200 Million. Mobile. TechTV – Civic Media Session: "Civic Disobedience". How does Groupon work? The tipping point: Media turns a key corner. There is a chance that we may look back on the first few months of 2011 as the moment in time that things turned around for the news business. Suddenly we are seeing bold moves on several fronts. Chances are being taken again. Investments are being made. New revenue models are being implemented. Competition is heating up. Let’s take a look at very recent developments in the massively shifting news media landscape.
–AOL bought Huffington Post for $315 million. –The Daily Beast merges with Newsweek. –Comcast takes over NBC Universal. –Both Apple AND Google unveiled their systems to allow media companies to sell subscription products using their devices or hardware using their operating systems. –JP Morgan announced it’s setting aside a billion dollar fund to put into digital media efforts. –Rupert Murdoch’s New Corp. finally launched “The Daily,” the first tablet-only news publication. Each of these steps are significant and important. (For more from Larry, visit his blog. Winners in Pandora's explosive IPO. Pandora has joined the elite club of Web companies whose first day of trading took off like a raging team of horses. Pandora hit the ground running this morning at $20 a share for a market cap of $3.2 billion, after pricing its IPO at $16 per share on Tuesday night. So who are the winners in this IPO? With 34.9 million shares, Crosslink Capital owns the largest chunk of the company—nearly 23%, to be exact.
At $20 a share, that would make Crosslink’s Pandora stock worth nearly $700 million. Well done, Crosslink. Coming in second is Walden Venture Capital, which owns 28.4 million shares for 18.67% of the company. And with 21.4 million shares, Greylock Partners claims 14% of the company, which is now worth $428 million. But neither Crosslink, Walden, Greylock, nor Labrador opted to sell shares in Pandora’s initial offering. Additionally, Pandora CTO Tom Conrad offered 247,000 of his 2.5 million shares, potentially earning as much as $4.9 million.
. $30 million. GOOGLE OFFERS: Here Are The Secret Details About Google's Groupon-Killer. Popsci. Only a lucky few have ever seen what Earth looks like from space, with human impacts all but invisible and the blackness of space just beyond the horizon. Soon, everyone will have a view, via the Internet and a pair of cameras flying on the International Space Station. A Canadian company called UrtheCast (don't ask us why it's spelled this way) arranged a deal with Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, to bring two cameras to the International Space Station sometime later this year, where they will be mounted on the exterior. The video will be downlinked to Earth and broadcast online. One camera will shoot in high-definition, with a frame rate of 3.25 fps, and another will broadcast in lower resolution, offering a three-color image. The system will work as a sort of mashup between Google Earth and YouTube, Larson says, connecting live footage with maps and other capabilities.
UrtheCast hopes to launch the cameras later this year and start broadcasting by early 2012. [via Digital Journal] Finally! A Low Cost Solar Panel that Can See in the Dark – CleanTechnica: Cleantech innovation news and views. Clean Power Published on January 26th, 2011 | by Tina Casey Well…it can almost see in the dark. Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have just announced that they’ve been able to confirm a new high-efficiency solar cell design that handles pretty much the entire solar spectrum. To ice the solar cake, the new technology can be manufactured using ordinary low-cost processes that are currently in use. Harnessing the Full Spectrum for Solar Power A conventional solar cell uses one kind of semiconductor, which captures light from one part of the spectrum. Lowering the Cost of Full Spectrum Solar Cells In earlier trials, the researchers used different alloys that achieved full spectrum responses but involved very high production costs. Full Speed Ahead to Full Spectrum Solar Cells The Lawrence Berkeley breakthrough represents just one path to increasing the efficiency and lowering the cost of solar cells.
Image: Moon by r w h on flickr.com. About the Author. New Solar Power Material Can Capture Every Color of the Rainbow – CleanTechnica: Cleantech innovation news and views. Clean Power Published on October 19th, 2008 | by Andrew Williams [social_buttons] Scientists have created a new material that could dramatically increase the efficiency of solar cells, by literally capturing every color of the rainbow. Whereas other materials only catch a small range of light frequencies, and therefore only a small fraction of the potential energy, the new invention is capable of absorbing all the energy contained in sunlight. According to team leader, Prof. Malcolm Chisolm, “There are other such hybrids out there, but the advantage of our material is that we can cover the entire range of the solar spectrum.
The discovery, made by an elite team at Ohio State University, opens the door to the development of a new generation of hyper-efficient solar cells. Such long-term investment lends a great deal of credibility to the project, and is likely to increase the chances of the invention moving from the laboratory towards commercial development. About the Author. Solar Energy Breakthrough: Power from Light AND Heat – CleanTechnica: Cleantech innovation news and views. Clean Power Published on August 3rd, 2010 | by Zachary Shahan [social_buttons] What’s one way to make solar power production twice as efficient? Make power from both the sun’s light and its heat. Stanford scientists may have just nailed this one. “Unlike photovoltaic technology currently used in solar panels – which becomes less efficient as the temperature rises – the new process excels at higher temperatures,” Louis Bergeron of Stanford University News reports.
“Called ‘photon enhanced thermionic emission,’ or PETE, the process promises to surpass the efficiency of existing photovoltaic and thermal conversion technologies.” Apparently, this is a complete breakthrough. “This is really a conceptual breakthrough, a new energy conversion process, not just a new material or a slightly different tweak,” said Nick Melosh, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University who led the research group.
Tags: cesium, PETE, solar energy breakthrough, Stanford University.
Innovalight's Silicon Ink "Tattoo" Will Lower the Cost of Solar Cells – CleanTechnica: Cleantech innovation news and views. Solar Energy Published on February 17th, 2010 | by Tina Casey Innovalight of Sunnyvale, California has just won a key patent for a new process that will significantly lower the cost of manufacturing silicon solar cells.
Working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the company has come up with a way to apply silicon ink to silicon wafers without using the expensive vacuum-based process typically in use today. [social_buttons] Innovalight’s process is based on an inkjet type technology for manufacturing solar cells. Compared to conventional vacuum processes, the inkjet method is significantly less expensive, and far more energy efficient. Silicon Ink Solar Cells, Innovalight and NREL Innovalight’s new method is based on “atmospheric processing” that eliminates the need for conventional vacuum systems. Record Breaking Solar Cell Efficiency Silicon Solar Cells and the Quantum Dot Connection Solar Cell Tattoos and Solar Graffiti, Too About the Author. Mobile App Users Are Both Fickle And Loyal: Study.
A study released by Massachusetts-based application analytics firm Localytics today confirms my suspicion that we both love — and are quickly bored by — our mobile applications. And, perhaps, that studies will confirm just about anything. In part 1 of its study, Localytics analyzed thousands of Android, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 apps. Using its realtime app analytics service, they found that, while most smartphone users are willing to try new apps (as evidenced by the 10 billion downloads from the iTunes store), 26 percent of the time they download an app, use it once, never to use it again. With 400,000 iPhone/iPad apps and 200,000 Android apps and the total number of smartphone users growing to 61.5 million in the fourth quarter, the appification of our mobile experience continues at a breakneck pace. And, as a result, it seems that many are hitting what fellow TechCruncher MG Siegler described as the “app wall”.
So, is the glass 26 percent empty, or 26 percent full? Gartner Forecasts Mobile App Store Revenues Will Hit $15 Billion in 2011. How big a business are mobile apps? In a new report, market research firm Gartner forecasts that global mobile app store revenues will triple from $5.2 billion last year to $15 billion in 2011, and keep growing to an astounding $58 billion by 2014. As with any forecast of a hypergrowth market, you can be sure this one will change in six months, and the further out you go the more guesswork involved. (Remember, less than a year ago nobody was even able to predict how many iPads would be sold this year).
But here is one prediction you can count on: you will be hearing these numbers thrown around a lot all year long until a better forecast comes along. Gartner breaks down the forecast into advertising revenues and paid downloads (including in-app purchases), as you can see from the chart above. The forecast includes all mobile app stores, not just Apple’s (such as the Android Market, Nokia’s Ovi Store, Research In Motion’s App World, Microsoft Marketplace and Samsung Apps). Things That Happen On The Internet Every Sixty Seconds. A couple fun and digestible bits of digital content were shared with me today. Infographics and well edited videos seem to be used increasingly as a great form of self promotion but at the end of a day I’m a sucker for well presented stats and figures. Check out the video below which reflects the latest update to the ‘Social Media Revolution’ series. The visual above, created by Go-Globe.com, reflects the following: a.
Square raises $100M for $1B valuation. A mere eight months after its public launch, Square has joined the big leagues. The company announced Wednesday that it has secured an impressive $100 million Series C round led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Tiger Global Management. And to cap things off, Kleiner Perkins’ own Mary Meeker—former Internet stock analyst—will be joining the company’s board of directors. The new funding effectively quadruples the company’s valuation to $1 billion from $240 million, following its last round. The new funding brings the company’s total raised to $137.5 million. Square has been adding some high-profile names to its board of directors, not the least of which is former Chief Economic Advisor to President Obama, Larry Summers.
Summers, who is also the former President of Harvard, joins Vinod Khosla on the board of directors. But can Square stand up to the new influx of mobile payment solutions from the likes of Google, Intuit, and PayPal? Image source: Squareup.com. Twitter founders return to roots, relaunch Obvious - Technology & science - Tech and gadgets. Belfast start-up sets out to disrupt the global apps business - Start Ups - Start-Ups. An innovative Belfast-based start-up, JamPot Technologies Ltd, is set to turn the mobile phone app industry on its head by enabling ordinary users to design, build and launch their own apps for less than stg£10 a month.
Up to now, mobile phone apps could only be created through a dedicated developer costing around £10,000 – far beyond the reach of all but the larger organisations. However, JamPot’s TheAppBuilder – a simple, downloadable software programme – enables non-techies to design, build and publish their own app across all platforms (iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows and Mac OSx) for a fixed monthly fee of stg£9.99. This disruptive technology means every SME in Northern Ireland – particularly in the e-commerce sector – can produce mobile phone apps to promote their businesses and products to anyone in the world using smartphones or tablets. JamPot officially launched its technology in Belfast and has further plans for a US launch later in the summer. Empower people, drive business.