Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

SOURCE: CNN

LinkedIn has launched a new feature that allows users of the social networking Web site to review products and services.

The new feature, called Company Pages, is designed to give companies exposure to LinkedIn’s over 80 million members, while also giving users access to insight from other professionals in the network, the company said in a press release.

Among the 32 companies participating in the initial launch are several big technology names, such as Hewlett Packard , Microsoft and Dell. Other businesses that LinkedIn users will be able to review are JetBlue and Volkswagen.

The companies listed or advertising could include manufacturers of display cases, hair restoration doctor referral agencies, even call answering services providers.

Jeff Weiner, chief executive of LinkedIn, said in a statement that users will benefit from “the considered perspectives of those whom they trust and relate to the most - the people they know.”

At the same time, he said businesses can use the feature to display “their strongest recommendations to prospective customers and employees on LinkedIn,” which he says can “accelerate growth and trust in their brands.”

In addition to reviews, businesses can display videos, product information and targeted ads on their Company Pages, according to the press release.

LinkedIn, a privately held company that caters to professionals, said it will officially unveil the feature Tuesday at its annual marketing and advertising event in New York.

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MY TAKE: Sounds like another way for Linkedin to make a boat load of money, via advertising revenues of course. Everyone who has a Linkedin page will be tracked each time they use the site and you can bet that every family defense lawyer, the manufacturer of blackboards, Phoenix hair transplant or answering services providers in the country will have access to their online information. Think again before you linkin in to that divorce lawyer or the CEO of the company you’re trying to work for.

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SOURCE: Associated Press

Four driverless electric vans successfully ended a 8,000-mile test drive from Italy to China — a modern-day version of Marco Polo’s journey around the world — with their arrival at the Shanghai Expo on Thursday.

The vehicles, equipped with four solar-powered laser scanners and seven video cameras that work together to detect and avoid obstacles, are part of an experiment aimed at improving road safety and advancing automotive technology.

The sensors on the vehicles enabled them to navigate through wide extremes in road, traffic and weather conditions, while collecting data to be analyzed for further research, in a study sponsored by the European Research Council.

“We didn’t know the route, I mean what the roads would have been and if we would have found nice roads, traffic, lots of traffic, medium traffic, crazy drivers or regular drivers, so we encountered the lot,” said Isabella Fredriga, a research engineer for the project.

Though the vans were driverless and mapless, they did carry researchers as passengers just in case of emergencies. The experimenters did have to intervene a few times — when the vehicles got snarled in a Moscow traffic jam and to handle toll stations.

The project used no maps, often traveling through remote regions of Siberia and China. At one point, a van stopped to give a hitchhiker a lift.

Think of the technology as a sort of cloud hositing for cars. Not the kind you consider when searching for a good web hosting site, but similar to the remote technology involved.

A computerized artificial vision system dubbed GOLD, for Generic Obstacle and Lane Detector, analyzed the information from the sensors and automatically adjusted the vehicles’ speed and direction.

“This steering wheel is controlled by the PC. So the PC sends a command and the steering wheel moves and turns and we can follow the road, follow the curves and avoid obstacles with this,” said Alberto Broggi of Vislab at the University of Parma in Italy, the lead researcher for the project.

“The idea here was to travel on a long route, on two different continents, in different states, different weather, different traffic conditions, different infrastructure. Then we can have some huge number of situations to test the system on,” he said.

The technology will be used to study ways to complement drivers’ abilities. It also could have applications in farming, mining and construction, the researchers said.

The vehicles ran at maximum speeds of 38 mph and had to be recharged for eight hours after every two to three hours of driving. At times, it was monotonous and occasionally nerve-racking, inevitably due to human error, Fredriga said.

“There were a few scary moments. Like when the following vehicle bumped into the leading one and that was just because we forgot, we stopped and we forgot to turn the system off,” Fredriga said.

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MY TAKE: I can see how these driverless cars might have applications in farming. But I wouldn’t recommend that you start to compare auto insurance rates on these guys just jet. In order to compare insurance car wise, you do have to have a driver, in most cases, so not sure how that would work. Also, what if you are a Redwood City DUI lawyer? How do you work as a San Mateo County DUI lawyer defending a DUI defendant if they weren’t actually behind the wheel but operating a driverless vehicle remotely, while drunk? Puts a whole new spin on things, right?

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SOURCE: Associated Press

Sony says “so long” to the Walkman.Another iconic technological device has been banished to the dustbin of history: Sony will no longer produce its Walkman cassette player due to dismal sales. The final batch of the portable tape players was shipped from Japan in April, according to PC Magazine.

A Chinese company will continue to produce a few models for the Walkman faithful, according to the New York Post. Sony has sold about 220 million Walkman devices since the gadget’s explosive 1979 debut, but the portable cassette player has steadily yielded market share to portable CD players and then eventually MP3 players, symbolized by Apple’s no-less-iconic iPod. (Sony will continue to make portable CD players.)

Apple founder Steve Jobs, who helped introduce the iPod, was evidently very impressed with the Walkman when he first saw one 25 years ago.

“I remember Akio Morita gave Steve and me each one of the first Sony Walkmans,” former Apple CEO John Sculley told Businessweek. “None of us had ever seen anything like that before because there had never been a product like that. This is 25 years ago and Steve was fascinated by it. The first thing he did with his was take it apart and he looked at every single part. How the fit and finish was done, how it was built.”

Amazingly high tech for its time as it was, the Walkman has given way to movie sites and iPads, and not really in demand anymore than aquarium lighting for water beds is.

The iPod has already outsold the Walkman since its debut in 2001, according to the International Business Times.

Sony uses the Walkman name for its new MP3 players. Meanwhile, in another blow to connoisseurs of outmoded technologies,  the company also announced in April that it would no longer make floppy disks.

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MY TAKE: It’s download movies online and digitized music files via the MP3 players that have pushed the tapes to the dust bin of cultural history. Yes, those water bed light bulbs were a trip and very fun to have…in the 1970s. Today, it’s all about energy efficient lighitng, right? And, in today’s world, where not only can we listen to music on our cell phones, and access movie download channels, we can also move things from one format to another so we have choices. Tapes were great. But lets face it: they got bent; they warped; and they got eaten.

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Energy-Saving Fluorescent Lights

The most common type of fluorescent light that consumers use today are CFL.  These lamps are a smaller fluorescent bulb that was created to offer the same uses as an incandescent bulb using lighting ballast, but at a fraction of the energy used. They people money on electricity every single year. Traditional fluorescent fixtures, which are what most people think of when it comes to fluorescent bulbs, are not the only product available. If you are looking for a new, fashionable design, you will have a larger selection of fixtures from which to choose.

SOURCE: Reuters

Astronomers believe a galaxy far, far away from a time long, long ago, possibly the oldest thing in the universe.

Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That’s a time when the universe was very young, just shy of 600 million years old. That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far.

By now the galaxy is so ancient it probably doesn’t exist in its earlier form and has already merged into bigger neighbors, said Matthew Lehnert of the Paris Observatory, lead author of the study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“We’re looking at the universe when it was a 20th of its current age,” said California Institute of Technology astronomy professor Richard Ellis, who wasn’t part of the discovery team. “In human terms, we’re looking at a 4-year-old boy in the life span of an adult.”

While Ellis finds the basis for the study “pretty good,” there have been other claims about the age of distant space objects that have not held up to scrutiny. And some experts have questions about this one. But even the skeptics praised the study as important and interesting.

The European astronomers calculated the age after 16 hours of observations from a telescope in Chile that looked at light signatures of cooling hydrogen gas.

Earlier this year, astronomers had made a general estimate of 600 to 800 million years after the Big Bang for the most distant fuzzy points of light in the Hubble photograph, which was presented at an astronomy meeting back in January.

In the new study, researchers focused on a single galaxy in their analysis of hydrogen’s light signature, further pinpointing the age. Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who was the scientist behind the Hubble image, said it provides confirmation for the age using a different method, something he called amazing “for such faint objects.”

The new galaxy doesn’t have a name — just a series of letters and numbers. So Lehnert said he and colleagues have called it “the high red-shift blob. “Because it takes so long for the light to travel such a vast time and distance, astronomers are seeing what the galaxy looked like 13.1 billion years ago at a time when it was quite young — maybe even as young as 100 million years old — Lehnert said. It has very little of the carbon or metal that we see in more mature stars and is full of young, blue massive stars, he said.

What’s most interesting to astronomers is that this finding fits with theories about when the first stars and galaxies were born. This galaxy would have formed not too soon after them.

“We’re looking almost to the edge, almost within 100 million years of seeing the very first objects,” Ellis said. “One hundred million years to a human seems an awful long time, but in astronomical time periods, that’s nothing compared to the life of the stars.”

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MY TAKE: Well, now we have a real galaxy far, far away to go with all those costumes and what is likely to be the most common costume of all. In case you don’t know: that would be Avatar costumes. You’d have to be living in a vaccume not to know about Avatar and what these characters look like. The movie itself is absolutely outrageous and frankly I’m not sure I buy the story line any more than I am likely to trust the Lemon Law help California has to offer. I know California lemon laws promise you one thing, but do you get another? But back to Avatar: I would say that the story was about as weak as could get, but when it came to the equipment in the onboard data center colocation and the design and graphics, nothing can top it.

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Cited: Apparel News

One Atlanta-based entrepreneur, Lauren Taylor Baker, believes that many women who shop online like to get feedback on what they are or will be buying. That is why she has launched Couture Society, which is an online shopping search engine that focuses on social networking.

The site, which is billed as a “social shopping utility,” debuted in December after soft-launching in July. Like some other sites, Couture Society compiles items from online retailers and brands in real time and makes them searchable by users according to style, price, brand and retailer. Unlike many other sites, however, Couture Society allows users to create a profile, create friend networks, build wish lists that are viewable by friends, and even chat on the site as they peruse the goods and make purchases.

“A lot of sites have an absence of the social aspects. Couture Society is a search engine and a social network combined,” said Baker, who, prior to launching Couture Society, held the post of creative director for an East Coast bricks-and-mortar and online retailer. The social aspect of shopping that women get when they go into stores with their friends is an important part of shopping that is hard to come by online, Baker said.

For those with a fashion sense for work or Halloween . . . You may be able to find Carhartt Coats at an affordable price at this website as well as Halloween costumes. Carhartt work clothing is a much sought after fashion by many workers. And in October many people look for the hottest sexy adult costumes available.

To create a sense of community, Baker and a team of software developers created a customized search engine based on the popular Ruby on Rails program and built in a variety of ways shoppers can share information. For example, Couture Society users can send friends notices about a great pair of jeans or a little black dress via FaceBook, Instant Messenger and Twitter. They can also chat directly on the site using a built-in chat function.

Baker acknowledges that other sites have also combined shopping and social networking, but, she said, Couture Society’s focus on ease of use, shopping experience and design aesthetic sets it apart from others. “We put a lot of time and energy into creating a site that users will love to spend time on. It organizes online shopping into a central and easy-to-use site.”

Baker declined to estimate how many shoppers will join Couture Society, which requires users to register, but she said 2010 will see the addition of new social-networking features, including virtual closets and the ability for shoppers to interact more directly with brands and retailers through the site.

Couture Society functions more as a fashion marketing site. It does not sell goods but rather directs shoppers to retailers’ and brands’ sites for purchases the same as other search engines. It pulls items from about 40 high-end, budget retailers and brands that include Target, Charlotte Russe, Yoox.com, Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue and RevolveClothing.com, with more than 200 and additional brands and retailers under contract that will be added to the site soon. At the time this article was written there were over 250,000 items catalogued and made searchable on Couture Society site.

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My Take: Even though I am a window shopper at heart, I do not see the attraction in the site. I do understand the search engine is great for finding deals on clothing, but I was never one to go to shopping with the girls.

I know that many retail websites avail themselves of SEO services to get better placement on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Everybody knows that people usually pick someone from page 1 of the search engine when they search for something. And a SEO company can usually get them to page one in a short time. I do not know how the ranking is handled on this passion search engine.

I suppose it is the beginning of a new trend, industry specific search engines. Of course, that will mean they will have to figure out more specific keyword phrases to use in the searches because that is what people use to find businesses. For example, “name brand colognes” is a great keyword phrase for a business that specializes in fragrances. However, other retailers in the same business may be using that phrase. They could use designer perfume or even discount perfumes. There is not much more you can do with these phrases.

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