Microsoft Plus Yahoo vs. Google, So It Begins

The Microsoft and Yahoo marriage has been blessed by antitrust regulators both in Europe and over the pond, giving the two companies green light to implement their anti-Google search alliance. On the morning of February 18th, 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Antitrust Commission have wrapped up their reviews of the Microsoft-Yahoo search agreement. With the alliance between the two giants cleared without restrictions, the duo will now move to implement the deal.

“Although we are just at the beginning of this process, we have reached an exciting milestone,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer. “I believe that together, Microsoft and Yahoo! will promote more choice, better value and greater innovation to our customers as well as to advertisers and publishers.”

Microsoft claims that the search agreement was announced in late July 2009, but the company has been flirting publicly with Yahoo for a total of over two years, but there’s no way of telling just how much time had Ballmer actually spent on this deal ahead of the start of 2008. The debut of February 2008, brought with it an unsolicited offer of $44.6 billion from Microsoft, which at the time was trying to acquire Yahoo. Making sure that the deal fell through was Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, then occupying the position of CEO. Read more

Intel Six-Pack

It’s called Dunnington and it’s Intel’s latest Six-Core (count-em…) microprocessor chip. Now why on earth anyone would want a six-core chip remains to be seen, dial-core chips have hardly set the computing world alight. It’s all very well having multiple cores, but without the fancy software to take advantage of the extra power you might as well not bother. Nevertheless, there’s clearly a market for such devices way above the heads of us mere mortals, at the top end of the market, in graphics processing in particular and Dunnington will there to help at the back end of this year, and with around 1.9 billion transistors buzzing away inside, it’s bound to do whatever it does really quickly!

3D Camera with 12,616 Lenses

No, it’s not a get rich quick scheme by a company manufacturing lens cleaning tissues, but an idea for future camera technology from the brainy folk at Stanford University. A team led by Professor Abbas El Gamal are working on a camera with a multi-aperture image sensor. This is basically an image sensor with super-small pixels – several times smaller than the pixels on a regular camera. They are clustered together on the sensor chip in groups of 256 pixels, and each group has its own micro lens. It is like having a lot of cameras on a single chip; in effect the 3-megapixel chip the researchers are working on is equivalent to 12,616 separate cameras.

So far so good, but the really clever bit is that by selectively defocusing images captured by the cameras, the data can be processed to produce detailed 3D image maps of whatever it happens to be pointing at. Read more

A Really Bright Idea

Californian company Luxim has developed a new ‘LIFI’ plasma light bulb. It’s not much bigger than a Tic-Tac, according to a report on CNET News, yet it gives off the same amount of light as a streetlamp. The bulb is driven by a RF generator, which creates a high frequency field around it that vaporises a mixture of gasses that changes to a plasma. The result is an intense light, available in a spectrum of colours. The bulbs are long lasting – up to five times longer than conventional lamps and they’re energy efficient too. Applications include street and stage lighting, video projectors, endoscopy and numerous industrial processes.

Sunny Side Up, Again

One day I will check my archives but I suspect that I have been writing about the imminent arrival of low cost, flexible photovoltaic solar cells for at least the past 20 years. The idea seems simple enough. Instead of making solar cells out of expensive and fragile silicon and glass and in the process using more energy than they’ll ever generate in their useful lives develop a chemical cocktail that turns light into electricity and coat or print it onto other materials.

Well, here’s another one, and I’m no longer holding my breath, but as usual it all sounds very promising. Konarka, the company behind the technology has come up with a flexible ‘Power Plastic’ film using inkjet printing techniques. Read more