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MIT makes transparent solar panels Transparent solar panels — think about it for a moment: Sheets of transparent glass or plastic film that also generate electricity. It’s almost the perfect solution for all our energy needs, generating free power from every available surface, window, and computer display. The concept of transparent solar panels isn’t new, of course, but it now looks like they’re finally finding their way to market: Ubiquitous Energy, a startup that was spun off from MIT last year, is developing a technology and patent portfolio and hopes to bring affordable transparent solar panels to market soon. At this point, you might be wondering how transparent solar cells actually work — after all, if it’s transparent, how can it absorb light energy? The simple answer is that light energy comes in many frequencies (colors), but as far as we humans are concerned, it is only the visible wavelengths — from blue, through green and yellow, to red — that really matter.

I used Google Glass: the future, with monthly updates The frosted-glass doors on the 11th floor of Google’s NYC headquarters part and a woman steps forward to greet me. This is an otherwise normal specimen of humanity. Normal height, slender build; her eyes are bright, inquisitive. She leans in to shake my hand and at that moment I become acutely aware of the device she’s wearing in the place you would expect eyeglasses: a thin strip of aluminum and plastic with a strange, prismatic lens just below her brow. What was a total oddity a year ago, and little more than an experiment just 18 months ago is now starting to look like a real product. But as I release from that handshake and study the bizarre device resting on my greeter’s brow, my mind begins to fixate on a single question: who would want to wear this thing in public? Sticky TOC engaged! Finding Glass Finding Glass I was about to beta test Glass myself. "Why are we even working on Glass? Steve goes on. I get it. Maybe, but obviously the Glass team doesn’t want to wait to find out.

Next-Gen Video Format H.265 Is Approved, Paving The Way For High-Quality Video On Low-Bandwidth Networks The ITU has approved a new video format that could bring 4k video to future broadband networks, while also making streaming HD video available even on bandwidth-constrained mobile networks. The H.265 standard, also informally known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), is designed to provide high-quality streaming video, even on low-bandwidth networks. The new video format is the successor to the H.264 codec, which nearly every video publisher has standardized after the release of the iPad and several other connected devices. It seems crazy now, but once upon a time, Apple’s adoption of H.264 and insistence on HTML5-based video players was controversial — especially since most video before the iPad was encoded in VP6 to play through Adobe’s proprietary Flash player. The hope is that, through improved compression techniques, H.265 will enable publishers to stream 1080p video with about half as many bits as required today.

The first flexible, fiber-optic solar cell that can be woven into clothes An international team of engineers, physicists, and chemists have created the first fiber-optic solar cell. These fibers are thinner than human hair, flexible, and yet they produce electricity, just like a normal solar cell. The US military is already interested in weaving these threads into clothing, to provide a wearable power source for soldiers. In essence, the research team started with optical fibers made from glass — and then, using high-pressure chemical vapor deposition, injected n-, i-, and p-type silicon into the fiber, turning it into a solar cell. The lead researcher, John Badding of Penn State University, says the team has already produced “meters-long fiber,” and that their new technique could be used to create “bendable silicon solar-cell fibers of over 10 meters in length.” Moving forward, the potential for flexible, woven solar cells is enormous. These fibers also have two other intriguing properties that still need to be investigated.

Leap Motion controllers to ship in mid-May for $80 | Cutting Edge Leap Motion, which has developed an innovative motion-control system that's accurate to the hundredth of a millimeter, said today that it will begin shipping its controller on May 13. The controller, which gives users the ability to control what's on their computers with touch-free pinch-to-zoom gestures, will sell for $80 -- though customers who have already pre-ordered it will pay $70 -- and will ship to pre-order customers on May 13, and be available to everyone else on May 19. The device will be available in the U.S. only through Leap Motion's Web site, and at Best Buy's stores and Web site and wherever Asus computer bundles are sold. BestBuy.com will begin taking pre-orders today, Leap Motion said. Buckwald wouldn't say exactly how many units Leap Motion is producing, but did say that the number of pre-orders was already in the hundreds of thousands.

Apple’s Planned ‘IWatch’ Could Be More Profitable Than TV While Tim Cook has dropped hints that Apple Inc. (AAPL) is hard at work on a television to drive the next era of growth, the company’s wristwatch-style device, still in development, may prove more profitable. The global watch industry will generate more than $60 billion in sales in 2013, said Citigroup Inc. analyst Oliver Chen. While that’s smaller than the pool of revenue that comes from TVs, gross margins on watches are about 60 percent, he said. Apple, with its iconic brand and lucrative retail network, is poised to tap into the growing watch industry. “This can be a $6 billion opportunity for Apple, with plenty of opportunity for upside if they create something totally new like they did with the iPod -- something consumers didn’t even know they needed,” said Chen, who covers luxury- goods retailers. Apple has filed at least 79 patent applications that include the word “wrist,” including one for a device with a flexible screen, powered by kinetic energy. Close Open Source: Bloomberg

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines Advertisement Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. Here are 10 useful usability findings and guidelines that may help you improve the user experience on your websites. 1. A study by UX Matters found that the ideal position for labels in forms is above the fields. Tumblr features a simple and elegant sign-up form that adheres to UX Matter’s recommendation. Positioning labels on the left also poses another problem: do you left-align or right-align the labels? 2. People instinctively notice other people right away when they come into view. Eye-tracking heat map of a baby looking directly at us, from the UsableWorld study. And now the baby is looking at the content.

Gapminder: Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view. Microsoft shares code for Kinect game gadget 12 March 2013Last updated at 06:06 ET The Kinect works by flooding a room with infra-red light Microsoft has opened up access to some of the code for its Kinect for Windows motion-sensing device. The device, first built for the Xbox, lets people play games by moving their body instead of using a controller. Before now anyone wanting to use the Kinect had to work via an official software toolkit that hid the underlying code. Microsoft said it had opened the code up to make the Kinect easier to use and get feedback about how to improve it. Soon after the Kinect's 2010 release, hardware hackers wrote code that let them control the device so they could use it for their own projects. Later on, Microsoft aided these "home-brew" efforts with the release of a software development kit and a program that allowed the Kinect to be controlled via Windows. However, both these programs hid the core code of the device, limiting what developers and others could do with the gadget.