Andre Huard

Today at Google I/O, the company made the announcement that everyone was waiting for — Google TV. While some glitches in the demo (with the Bluetooth keyboard) prevented it from being a “wow” moment, the implications are pretty clear what Google is going for. That is, the 4 billion TV users worldwide. Or rather, advertising to the 4 billion TV users worldwide.

Google noted that while computer usage is huge with 1 billion users, and mobile is even bigger with 2 billion users, TV is the real massive medium with 4 billion users around the world. Further, Google notes that people spend 5 hours a day on average in the U.S. watching TV — and that’s more than ever before. Then the real stat came out. 70 billion dollars. that’s the annual ad spend on television in U.S. alone.

Video should be consumed on the biggest, best, and brightest screen in your house, Google says. And while they’re not the first to attempt this, Google thinks they can get it right. There are four things they’re focusing on:

• With Google TV, you’ll spend less time finding, more time watching
• We’ll also show you more ways to personalize content
• We’ll make existing TV much more interesting
• This is much more than a TV

“TV meets web. Web meets TV” is the slogan Google is going with for this new endeavor. It will work as a new box — you’ll just hook up your existing cable or satellite box to it. All the hardware will include a keyboard and a mouse — but it will work with Android phones too. And you can use multiple Android devices to control the same TV — no more fighting over the remote.

You can also use the Android devices to speak to your TV — voice search on the TV.

Google TV is built on Android (2.1 right now, but they’ll upgrade it later). It runs Google Chrome for the browser. And yes, it has Flash (10.1).

Also cool, since Google TV is Android-powered, Android apps will work on the TV. With the device, there will be two app frameworks: web apps and Android apps. A new SDK for the Google TV is coming as well. And YouTube has a new product they’re launching for Google TV: YouTube Leanback — this is an optimized way to use YouTube on a big screen.

Google TV will be open sourced in both the Android and Chrome source trees.

Google has partnered with multiple device makers to bring the product to market. There will be three Google TV devices. Sony will have TVs and Blu-ray players with Google TV built in. Logitech will have a companion box. Intel will be powering all the devices with the Atom processor.

Google has also partnered with Dish Network — there will be an enhanced Google TV experience with it. And they have a retail partnership with Best Buy.

These will all launch in Fall 2010. But the platform won’t launch for developers until 2011.

As a bonus, as Google showed during its demo, Google TV is one hell of a way to search for “MILFs” from your couch (see pic below).

To think, it was about this time last year that Google first unveiled its collaboration tool Wave, and today the company's taking out the invitational step and opening it to the public at large -- which begs the question, did anyone not have an invite that wanted one at this point? It'll also be now available in the enterprise-centric Apps suite for no extra charge. On the developer side of things, expect some more open source code be unleashed, including most importantly the rich text editor. Can't say we've really dug around in the service ourselves since its beta launched, but co-creator Lars Rasmussen tells us we should be giving it another go. He further acknowledged that they've got some work to do on educating users on the best ways to use the service, which at this point seems to be mid- and small-scale collaboration. To that end, expect some new tutorial videos, and with any luck, some amusing animation.

Google Wave opens doors to public, asks old friends for new chance originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 May 2010 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Onion posted a funny video about an imaginary Google service that whispers targeted ads into users' ears. The main benefit of the service is that it lowers the cost a phone, but the ads aren't very subtle.

As voice recognition software becomes more powerful, it's quite likely that phones will be able to convert a conversation into text in real time and offer related information, including links to maps, events, email messages and even ads.


In 2008, Google's AdSense blog posted an April Fool's Day joke about AdSense for Conversations, "a new type of monetization solution that puts the 'context' in contextual advertising. In just a few simple steps, you can begin displaying ads that are relevant to the topics you're discussing -- in an unobtrusive screen above your head. Anyone taking part in the conversation can hit the ad with their hand to immediately take advantage of the product or service being offered."

{ via Jérôme Flipo }

University researchers have taken a close look at the computer systems used to run today's cars and discovered new ways to hack into them, sometimes with frightening results.

Sick of silicon? It is getting a bit played, so maybe it's time to shift some paradigms, and Duke University engineer Chris Dwyer thinks that pure proteins deoxyribonucleic acids are where it's at. He's demonstrated a way to force DNA to create shapes all by itself, a process he likens to a puzzle that puts itself together:

It's like taking pieces of a puzzle, throwing them in a box and as you shake the box, the pieces gradually find their neighbors to form the puzzle. What we did was to take billions of these puzzle pieces, throwing them together, to form billions of copies of the same puzzle.

Right now the waffle-shaped structures he can form aren't particularly useful, but going forward the hope is that nearly any type of circuitry could be made to build itself in massive quantities at next to no cost. It sounds exciting, promising, almost utopian -- exactly the kind of research that we usually never hear of again.

Update: We've had a few people commenting on the inaccuracy of the word "proteins" above, so it's been fixed and we hereby invite all you armchair molecular biologists to get back to curing cancer already.

Self-assembling DNA circuits could power your next computer originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 May 2010 09:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As you can see in our gallery, last month at Milan Coca-Cola took the wraps off of a special variant of Emeco's Navy chair made from 111 recycled Coke bottles. The project has been a long time coming:

About four years ago, in 2006, Coca-Cola came to us at Emeco with a proposal. Their recycling plant in Spartanburg South Carolina was brand new and processing thousands of plastic bottles a day and they were looking for ways to show the value of recycled plastic. Everywhere else in the world people recycle about 80% of their bottles while in the US we recycled only about 20%.

Coke asked us to make the classic Navy Chair out of a new, unproven formulation of rPET (Recycled Polyethylene Terephthalate- recycled plastic bottles). They introduced us to the scientists at BASF the international chemical innovator and together we developed proprietary mix made of about 60% and a special combination of pigment combined with glass fiber for strength.

In Coke-Speak, "The goal of the 111 Navy project was to alter consumer behavior by illustrating the value of rPET with beautifully designed and everyday products - ultimately encouraging more recycling."

Hit the jump for some production-method-geek goodness about the special mold required to make the chair.

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Filed under: Safety, Technology, Volvo

Safety is expected when you're Volvo, and when something goes wrong it's particularly embarrassing. Such was the case this week when media were invited to a demonstration of one of Volvo's latest latest safety technologies. The collision warning system on the S60 is supposed to detect an impending impacts and then autonomously apply the brakes to bring the vehicle to a halt, like this. Except it didn't!

The S60 was launched at 30 mph toward the back of a parked truck and the crowd watched as it rolled straight into it without ever braking. Volvo representatives later claimed human error in the preparation of the vehicle for the test. On the plus side, the car showed no apparent damage to the passenger compartment, again demonstrating that, even if a Volvo does crash, it will protect its occupants. In the meantime, we'll just to go back to being active participants in the driving process. Check out the video after the jump. Hats off to all the tipsters!

[Source: Wired, YouTube]

Continue reading Volvo S60 crashes during safety demonstration with cameras rolling

Volvo S60 crashes during safety demonstration with cameras rolling originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 07 May 2010 12:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Top: Hospital room with sani-station and touch-point hardware: grab bar, faucet, and light switch. Bottom: Sani-station in hospital lobby.

Copper Touch is a system of antimicrobial touch-point hardware and sani-stations (alcohol gel dispensers) designed to be deployed in hospitals to reduce infection. The system kills germs in areas people are most likely to touch while addressing some of the behavioral challenges of infection control: hand-washing and cleaning surfaces. The products also showcase the newly-proven antimicrobial properties of copper alloys; the sani-stations act as communication points to brand the material at the place where germs are top of mind.

The project began when the Copper Alloy Association (CDA) approached us at Pensa with the problem of encouraging hospitals, CDA's target market, to adopt copper alloys. Studies proving that these materials kill microbes faster and more effectively than any other antimicrobial material on the market and an EPA registration permitting health claims about these properties were not enough, so the CDA asked that we identify and design compelling hospital products that would inspire designers and manufacturers to use copper alloys wherever there was a need to fight infection.

To develop a solution, we first had to understand the challenges of infection control in hospitals and the experiences of a range of hospital stakeholders, including infection control officers, cleaning staff, administrators, doctors, nurses, patients, architects, and facility managers.

Antimicrobial effectiveness: copper vs. the competition. Copper alloys have also been proven to kill Staphylococcus aureus, Enterobacter aerogenes, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and E. coli, in under two hours.

Design and medical science
The number of Americans who die every day from hospital-aquired infections (HAIs) is equivalent to one jumbo jet plane crashing every day, according to Donald Wright, MD, MPH, of the US Dept. of Health and Human Services. Surely, there would be an uproar if our society allowed for such continuing aviation disasters, but HAIs just don't have the same prominence in public awareness. Hospitals are under a lot of pressure to rectify the situation—pressure that includes the cessation of Medicare payments in cases of HAIs and several state laws mandating transparency or reporting of HAIs—but fixing the problem is a struggle. The problem of the quantity of infections is compounded by antibiotic resistant "super bugs," created by the overuse of antibiotics.

In a real hospital room, it's quickly obvious that microbes on surfaces aren't the only issue. How many people touched this table? How does it get cleaned?

"The tasks of medical science fall into three buckets. One is understanding disease biology. One is finding effective therapies. And one is insuring those therapies are delivered effectively. That third bucket has been almost totally ignored." —Peter Pronovost, pioneer of medical checklists

Through the work of Peter Pronovost, we came to understand that infection control is largely an issue of effective implementation. The medical establishment already knows how to prevent infection in an ideal world (hand-washing, for example), but they struggle to implement that knowledge effectively in the real world. Even beyond infection control, the issue of effective delivery is one of the major challenges in healthcare today. Consistency, patient compliance, and error avoidance are all crucial factors in effective delivery of a therapy. Fortunately for designers, this is the space where we excel: applying an understanding of human behavior to create solutions that work within our imperfect world. This is what we needed to achieve with copper: the CDA has already shown it kills microbes (effective therapy), but the key issue for us was effective implementation.

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Earlier today we showed you the Chopper 2 iPad game that uses your iPhone as a controller over Bluetooth, the game hasn’t been approved by Apple, and we weren’t sure if it was going to be.

Now it turns our there is actually a game already available in the App Store that uses your iPhone as its controlled, and it is called PadRacer.

As you can see in the video above, you use your iPhone to move the racing cars around the track. The game is available now from iTunes for $4.99, and you can have up to four players playing at once.

I guess these sort of games will end up turning the iPhone into the world’s most expensive gaming controller, and we can expect to see many more games for the iPad that uses the iPhone as its controller.

via Slash Gear

Filed under: Safety, Videos, Peugeot, Citroën

We've recently had two shining examples of the importance of having a properly functioning electronic stability control system (ESC) in new vehicles. The instability of the 2010 Lexus GX 460 is a known problem and Toyota is working to address it. The Lexus was equipped with ESC, it just wasn't effective enough. Over in Europe, the Citroën Nemo failed miserably in a test conducted for a British consumer magazine because it lacked ESC entirely.

Which? is something of a British counterpart to Consumer Reports and had recently worked with German auto club ADAC to evaluate a trio of compact MPVs from Fiat, Peugeot and Citroën. The Qubo, Bipper Teepee and Nemo all share the same basic design, but only the Italian variant offers ESC as an option (and then only on diesel models). The Peugeot and Citroën do not offer ESC at any price. Needless to say, the results on the dreaded "moose test" (also known as the "elk test") were not good. This particular test is a double lane change obstacle avoidance maneuver at 50 miles per hour.

After the Citroën Nemo flipped over in this test, the remaining testing of the Peugeot was abandoned. PSA, the parent company of the automakers, has announced that it will start installing ESC on the Nemo and Bipper diesel models in July of this year. A version for gas engined will have to be developed and installed starting in fall 2011. Video of the test is after the jump.

[Source: Which?]

Continue reading Video: Citroën Nemo fails European "moose test," highlights value of stability control

Video: Citroën Nemo fails European "moose test," highlights value of stability control originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 28 Apr 2010 10:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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