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Wireless charging - the future for electric cars

It's electric, and like all battery-operated automobiles needs regular charging. "The charging is done wirelessly, you park up, turn off the key and voila... charging starts automatically," says Anthony Thomson, CEO of HaloIPT, a UK company that has installed the technology. The process uses electromagnetic induction to transfer power from a pad built into the ground to another installed in the bottom of the car. The system could be installed in a supermarket parking place, garage floor or the ground at a special charging station. When a driver parks the vehicle, the two pads line up and with a flick of a switch, the charging starts.

Katy Perry leads MTV nominations

US pop star Katy Perry leads the way at this year's MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs) with nine nominations. The singer's nods include video of the year for Firework, best pop video and best special effects. British singer Adele and Kanye West picked up seven nominations apiece. Other multiple nominees included Lady Gaga, Beyonce, and Bruno Mars. The VMAs are scheduled to take place on 28 August in Los Angeles and will be broadcast live in the US. Perry, who married comedian Russell Brand last year, was also nominated for best female video, best collaboration, best art direction and best cinematography.

Texas executes 9/11 'revenge' killer

A man who embarked on a shooting spree in what he claimed was retaliation for 9/11 has been executed at a prison in Texas. The lone survivor of Mark Stroman's attack on convenience store workers in late 2001, Rais Bhuiyan, originally from Bangladesh, unsuccessfully sued to stop the execution, saying his religious beliefs as a Muslim required him to forgive the man. Stroman claimed the shooting spree that killed two men and injured a third targeted people from the Middle East, though all three victims were from south Asia. It was the death of 49-year-old Vasudev Patel, from India, that put Stroman on death row. Stroman's execution was the eighth this year in Texas.

Mac OS X Lion pounces

As promised, Apple let Mac OS X Lion out of its cage this morning. Version 10.7 of the operating system has more than 250 new features, Apple said, but an installation disc isn't one of them: it's available today for $29.99 as a 3.49GB download only. Apple enjoys pushing the computing industry into the future by dropping technology it deems to be from the past-for example floppy drives missing from the first iMac-and those who want a real-world copy of the OS will have to wait until Apple releases it on a USB thumb drive next month for $69. The Mac OS X download, available through the Mac App Store, dovetails with Apple's new MacBook Air and Mac Mini Lion-based computers. These new models are updated with Intel's modern Sandy Bridge processors and a high-speed Thunderbolt data transfer port-and none has a DVD drive for the next OS upgrade.

Google+ For iPhone Now The Top Free App In iTunes

Google+ for iPhone hit Apple's App Store a mere 24 hours ago but it's being downloaded like wildfire as it currently sitting atop the heap as the most popular free app available from iTunes. This is big news considering Google+ is still invitation-only and only has 18 million users so far, compared to Facebook's 750 million. That said, Google+ users can now upload contacts from Outlook and Mac address books (not Facebook, though), which may result in even bigger Google+ adoption numbers.

Steve Jobs dismisses rumors of his successor

Apple CEO and cancer survivor Steve Jobs is not keen on discussing speculation about who will replace him when the inevitable happens. This week, the Wall Street Journal reported that the company's board of directors have been discussing plans about who will take over the position that has been held by Jobs since the late 1990s, and perhaps the title that some will always bestow upon Jobs and Jobs alone, once the man is no longer able to hold the position himself. The Journal said it had credible information that the board has already been meeting with headhunters and "at least one head of a high-profile technology company."

Showing posts with label Google Labs. Show all posts

Losing Google Labs is the Price for a More Focused Google

Last week during Google's quarterly earnings call CEO Larry Page laid out a new vision for the company that seemed to signal that the era of Google Labs was at an end. Page called the approach "more wood behind fewer arrows." This new level of focus will mean more support for major Google projects and ideas but it also meant the search giant trim away projects that didn't work. Page tied this new strategy to Google's recent decision to shut down Google Health and Google PowerMeter Services Google introduced to give users easier access to their health care and energy usage information respectively. Now Google Labs is the latest casualty of the "more wood fewer arrows" approach. It's hard not to feel like we've lost something great as the search giant shuts down Google Labs.

Labs launched way back in 2002 and in its almost 10 years of existence it's been responsible for some of Google's biggest services. Even if a lot of the projects from Google Labs never went beyond the test tube, it was still great for Google to establish a breeding ground for strange and wonderful ideas that didn't fit in anywhere else in the organization. But a second look at Google Labs shows that many of these projects didn't fit anywhere for a reason. Both Gmail and Google Maps originally started as humble lab projects. In recent years the experiments coming out of Google Labs have been less revolutionary and it's wise of the company to focus on the products that really could make as much of a splash as Gmail.

I agree that Google should give more time and support to some of its big name projects, and I can already see how that strategy has served them well on projects like Google+. If Google had been able to put more of its programmers on a project like Google Wave, for instance, then we might still be using it today. Who knows, a more focused Google might even have created something like Google+ right off the bat instead of surprising and annoying Gmail users with Google Buzz. If you still have a favorite project in Google's Labs all hope isn't lost. Google has said that while it will be quietly shutting down some of the projects currently in the Labs others will find a new life integrated into the search giant's other projects and services.

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