Tag: Technology
CES 2010: Final Thoughts
The Consumer Electronics show, the behemoth of tech, the Valhalla of gadgetry, has come and gone for yet another year. But this time, rather than arriving with a bang, it slinked into sight with something more like a whimper. CES…
CES 2010: Day 3 Round-Up
Another day, another Tech Digest CES 2010 round-up. Fancy Tweeting hands-free in your car or controlling your PC by breathing? Check today's top stories below and find out how. Twitter coming to Ford cars The digital equivalent of drink-driving? Motorola…
Virgin launch gadget help service
It can be mighty frustrating, settling down for a marathon internet-trawling session only to be bombarded with error messages to let you know that, as ever, your Wi-Fi connection has gone up the creek. The ever-industrious Richard Branson and his…
Could 3D Blu-ray be ready by summer 2010? Nvidia think so
Nvidia's PR manager for the UK and Northern Europe, Ben Berraondo, has announced that 3D Blu-ray movies may be availalbe from as early as summer 2010. Berraondo confirmed that after months of heated talks, the Blu-ray Association had finally settled…
Share your visions of the future with Intel's Tomorrow Mural
So far, space travel and robots dominate the mural. Think you can come up with something a little more creative?
Gadget Ashes – are the Aussies rubbish at gadgets?
There's no denying that you have to doff your Outback Caps to the Aussies. They build beautiful cities in places where really no human should ever venture, boast some of the best cuisine (and coffee) in the world and dominate…
Should I buy an OLED TV or stick with LCD and plasma?
There’s a new display technology in town — OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) — and it could be coming to a large TV near you very soon.
Plenty of big-name manufacturers have already produced OLED TVs, and others are promising to have sets available within the next couple of years.
OLED has a lot of very attractive characteristics meaning it can has the potential to power large, bright, thin, energy-efficient televisions. Then again, LCD and plasma TVs currently rule the roost and are no pushovers when it comes to features.
Should you buy an OLED TV? Let’s take a look…
Behind the scenes at the British Music Experience
There are condom machines in the toilets of the British Music Experience at the O2 in Greenwich. I’ve no idea why – perhaps they think their visitors will be overwhelmed with emotion after seeing Ziggy Stardust’s ‘Thin White Duke’ outfit, or Dave Hill’s “Superyob” guitar. But in actual fact, it’s gadget fanatics that are likely to be the ones excited, because the BME is one of the most gadget-filled museums in the UK.
Almost everything in the museum is interactive. Your ticket comes equipped with an RFID tag that you wave in front of exhibits that interest you. These are logged in a central database, and after your visit you can go to the BME website and view all the exhibits that you looked at online.
There’s also the option to play along on real instruments with songs you know, or record a video of yourself dancing to one of several famous historical dances. That content will be stored and can also be viewed on the website later on, so you can share your embarrassment with people across the world. You get three free iTunes downloads too, to further investigate music that you don’t know very well.
Although it’s a great and well-connected experience, and anyone remotely interested in popular music since 1945 will find something interesting, there’s an ever so slight sense of a lack of use of the technology to its full effect. The tagging system is great, but it’d be nice to be able to explore extra content from home, rather than just reviewing the content you saw.
It’d also be great if you could do more with your recordings, getting the content out of the website. For copyright reasons, it’s impossible to do anything but stream the recording you make in the ‘Gibson Studio’ section. The British Music experience is technologically ahead of any other museum in London, but it’s still got unrealised potential.
Skype gives away its SILK speech codec for free
Skype has just announced that it’s giving away its SILK speech codec, which is the bit of software that processes your voice into a small enough stream of data for you to be able to communicate over a slow internet connection. A codec is basically a balancing act between file size and audio quality.
The SILK codec has been in development for three years at Skype and was finally bundled with the most recent release of the software – Skype 4. It’s a major step forward in audio quality and scales depending on the bandwidth available.
So if it’s so great, then why is Skype giving it away royalty-free to its competitors? Good question. My best guess is that Skype has the VoIP market so firmly tied up that it wants some competition to help grow the whole market. Then, I suppose, it’s confident enough that those users will switch to Skype thanks to its fantastic software.
It might also be a sign that Skype’s considering offering an API. Opening up the service, which is famously closed, would mean that other programs could be able to make Skype calls natively, without people having to open and install Skype itself. It could mean that you’ll just be able to highlight phone numbers on websites and right-click to call them from the browser.
More information’s available on the SILK website, and TechCrunch has an interesting take too.
Microsoft shows off in-development video version of Photosynth
We’ve already been awed by Microsoft’s Photosynth technology but now, rather impressively, the company has managed to extend the functionality to video. It’s not available to the public yet, but in the video above you can see Microsoft demonstrating the functionality to Techcrunch.
It uses services like Qik, which stream live video from mobile devices, to switch together multiple video streams of the same thing into one big picture. The obvious example is something like a festival or concert, where hundreds of people might be eagerly filming the same thing.
Given how long it took for Microsoft to release Photosynth, though, it might be a wee while before you and I are allowed onto the service ourselves. In the meantime, we’ll have to stick with the still-life version, available here.
