#CLOUD: "World's Largest Academic Cloud"

Not to be left behind in the dust of industry marching forward, academia recently unveiled their largest cloud computing platform, aimed at providing the petabytes of storage required for giant scientific simulations and big-data analytics.



The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) Cloud is connected to 10 other supercomputer sites nationwide on the high-speed TeraGrid network.

The world's largest academic cloud, the SDSC Cloud, serves University of California at San Diego researchers and their associates, including 10 supercomputer centers nationwide connected by the high-speed TeraGrid.
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#3D: "3D Pico Projectors Grow at Double Digits"

As sizes shrink down to palm-size pico projectors, and with a new injection of interest from 3D, double-digit market growth in projectors offers a beacon of hope that global economic uncertainty cannot dim.



Despite worldwide economic volatility, the growing markets for pico-size projectors as well as growing interest in 3D will enable double-digit growth for front projectors from 2011 to 2015, according to Pacific Media Associates.
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#OPTICS: "World's First Nanoscale Optical Fibers'

Photonic chips that compute with light instead of electricity--the holy grail of optics--will enable a faster, more sustainable Internet, by virtue of lowering its power consumption with the world's smallest optical fibers.



Researchers have created nanowires generated by direct laser writing, here stacked to form a three-dimensional woodpile photonic crystal with a pronounced stop gap.

At its current rate of growth, the Internet is on track to consume half the world's energy in the next decade, according to professor Min Gu, the Director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics at Swinburne University of Technology. To head off the debacle, Gu's research group has created the world's smallest optical fibers, which he claims will enable not only a faster, but a more sustainable Internet, by virtue of reduced energy consumption.
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#SPACE: "NASA'S Planet Hunter Bags a First"

NASA's Kepler spacecraft is logging planet after planet, finding more potential exoplanets in its first month than all of the previous terrestrial efforts in history. Recently Kepler found the first planet orbiting two stars simultaneously, and it only just beginning...
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#MEMS: "ICs entering mass consumer markets"

As MEMS enters the mainstream, the high-volume markets will favor mergers and acquisitions over the next five years, as the larger player fill in the gaps of their integrated solution for OEMs, who must fuse the outputs of multiple MEMS sensors for a wider variety of applications than just tablets and phones.
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#CLOUD: "Enterprise Telecom Migrating to Cloud"

Telecommunications infrastructure is the latest enterprise asset to begin the move to cloud-based solutions. And over the next five years ABI Research predicts a mass migration of enterprise communications applications to the cloud.Premises-based communications and telecommunications capabilities including email, telephony, as well as audio-, video- and Web-conferencing, are steadily shifting to cloud-based solutions, according to ABI Research, which predicts that 41 percent of all enterprise communications application users worldwide will migrate to the cloud by 2016.
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#WIRELESS: "Subconscious Smartphone Extends Battery Life"

A new subconscious mode for smartphones, announced at this week’s Mobile Computing and Networking conference, can improve battery life by more than 50 percent using the smarter algorithm. Savvy smartphone users know they can save battery life by switching off WiFi, but few take the trouble since it’s so convenient to just leave it at the ready to speed up Internet access. Now a new subconscious-mode could let smartphone users have their cake and eat it too.

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#MEDICAL: "Dr. Watson Diagnoses Medical Maladies"

IBM's Watson technology has put on its white coat and stethoscope at WellPoint in order to simplify and speed up the diagnosis of diseases by matching symptom sets in real time with millions of medical records, journal articles and research results. IBM's Watson was demonstrated to the world earlier this year as able to beat the most talented human contestants in the TV game show "Jeopardy." Nevertheless, Watson's artificial intelligence (AI) was always intended to improve the human condition rather than leapfrog it. As the first major step toward that goal, WellPoint, the nation's largest health benefits provider, is using Watson to help make more accurate and informed medical diagnoses.
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#ENERGY: "Nuclear Generators Go Green"

Nuclear "generators" for the home, car, and industry are claimed to be truly green, unlike faux-green nuclear "reactors" which emit no greenhouse gases, but create dangerous nuclear waste. Called nuclear-powered laser-turbine electricity generators, they harness harmless thorium ore instead of radioactive uranium.
Nuclear power from reactors nudges enriched uranium into a critical mass that unless controlled can create a chain reaction that produces dangerous radioactive byproducts that must be kept safe from humans for thousands of years. Nuclear-powered laser-turbine electricity generators, on the other hand, harness the harmless radiation from the natural decay of thorium--an abundant natural ore.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Motions lifts MEMS-based remotes"

Armed with a new deal to integrate its MEMS sensor algorithms into Texas Instruments Inc.'s ZigBee-based radio frequency for consumer electronics (RF4CE) hardware platform—RemoTI—Hillcrest Laboratories Inc. hopes to penetrate further into the fast growing markets for MEMS-based motion-control interfaces for Smart TV, streaming video, motion-based gaming and 3-D gesture control.
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#WIRELESS: "Smartphones' Downward Push Going Over Top"

Due to dropping prices of hitherto pricey components plus 3G network availability in developing countries, touch-screen smartphones are expected to dominate all cellphone sales by 2015. Smartphone sales will double their unit shipments by 2015 making them the largest cellphone market segment, according to IHS iSuppli, which predicts sales exceeding one billion units. In addition, the vast majority of those smartphones will use touch screens, as costs plummet for the previously pricey component, according to ABI Research. In fact, ABI predicts that 97 percent of smartphones will have touch screens by 2016.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Analytics Weighs Costs, Benefits of Cloud"

Manufacturing resource planning (MRP) tools have become routine for many industries, but now IT executives have their own decision-support tools for deciding when and how to make best use of cloud computing resources. Instead of lashing together handmade spreadsheets chock full of estimates and outright guesses, IT executives can now make use of a standardized set of business analytics that compares the cost of implementing services with dedicated, virtualized, private or public clouds.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Client hosting takes virtualization mobile"

Virtualization has been a boon for multiuser systems, letting them run the Windows operating system and applications on servers. Each user’s state is saved as a virtual desktop that can be remotely accessed from PCs, laptops, netbooks, tablets, smartphones and even dumb “thin clients” (terminals costing as little as $200). The downside is that remote users of server-hosted virtualization need to be online to take advantage of the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)—a show-stopper for highly mobile workers. That limitation has provided the motivation for a new paradigm called client-hosted virtualization, which runs on laptop computers.

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#ROBOTICS: "Robotics Growing, Diversifying, Taking Charge"

The robotics market is experiencing healthy growth after a slowdown during the recession, with several new categories leading the charge including service, military, and security robots.



Robotics is breaking out of the niche markets it had been shunted too, promising to grow to $30 billion by 2016. The significant uptick is mainly due to explosive growth in commercially viable professional service, military, and security robots, in addition to its tradition strengths in manufacturing, medicine, surgery, planetary exploration, and the handling of hazardous materials.
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#MARKETS: "NTT sees growth in South America"

The next big growth market in connected electronics is South America, according to Japan's NTT Communications Corp. (NTT Com,) which announced Monday (Sept. 12) that it expanded the reach of its tier one global IP network there with a new point of presence (PoP) location in São Paulo, Brazil's most populous city.
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#SECURITY: "Simulations Guarantee Earthquake-Proof Stadium"

California Memorial Stadium was slowly being pulled apart by a fault line that runs down its middle, but computer simulations have enabled a face lift that secures fans even if "the big one" hits during a game.
If a seismic fault was discovered to be splitting a sports stadium in half even without a quake, would the smart thing be to relocate the stadium? Not according to California engineers who claim to have validated a $321 million renovation of California Memorial Stadium with detailed computer simulations which "allow the fault to rupture without endangering life," according to David Friedman, a principal with Forell/Elsesser Engineers, which did the structural engineering design.
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#MEMS: "Movea enlists MEMS to bring pay-TV into Internet age"

Cable and satellite television providers have lagged behind in their exploitation of the opportunities being taken advantage of by Internet protocol television (IPTV), which today is being watched on computers, gaming controllers and a new breed of Internet-connected smart TVs, all of which encourage consumers to "cut the cable." MoveTV, on the other hand, is designed to put cable and satellite TV back in the driver's seat by enlisting advanced motion control with MEMS sensors that is integrated with a deep software infrastructure which brings pay-TV into the Internet age.

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#SPACE: "NASA Space Laser to Make Radio Obsolete"

Radio-based space communications could be made obsolete by a laser-based long-haul optical connection that runs 10 to 100 times faster.
NASA will demonstrate a long-haul optical network by connecting California and Hawaii with a laser communication link that works similarly to fiber optics, sans the fiber. Called a free-space optical connection--as opposed to within a fiber--the first demonstration will show that long-haul lasers can communicate with pulses of light at 100M bps.
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#WIRELESS: "Unstoppable iPad's Only Competition Is iPhone"

With HP's quick exit from the tablet market, and lackluster sales of other tablets, Apple's main competition for the stocking-stuffing Christmas 2011 market is predicted to be the iPhone.



Even with HP announcing that it would briefly dip its toe back into the tablet production market, the iPad seems unstoppable. Specifically, the iPad is gaining from HP's quick exit from the touch-screen tablet market, with forecasters increasing their predictions for Apple's dominance. With burgeoning iPad sales to the education market just kicking off this month, and clear-sailing from its previous supply chain woes, Apple's main competition for the lucrative Christmas 2011 market may be the company's own iPhone 5, which IHS iSuppli predicts will be released this fall.

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#ENERGY: "Gap Being Filled by Social Media"

A lack of understanding of their energy bills is prompting consumers to depend on the advice of friends and family, opening opportunities for new avenues for education, according to the "2011 IBM Global Utility Consumer Survey."



IBM helped Malta build the world’s first national smart utility grid, replacing 250,000 analog electric meters with smarter meters that track usage in real-time, identify sources of loss, set variable rates, and is being integrated with a new smart water metering system.

Energy consumers worldwide want to conserve and take advantage of smarter technologies but lack a basic understanding of how to do so. Consumers surveyed by the "2011 IBM Global Utility Consumer Survey" say they need smarter ways of making their energy decisions.
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