New Florence. New Renaissance.

Avatar: The Movie

Social Media, 3D, Singularity – so many sci-fi and tech angles to the movie

“Avatar" is set on the planet Pandora, where an ex-Marine, played by Sam Worthingthon, is one of a group of humans who have their brains linked to the native alien species so they can explore the environment. “

“The movie, which cost more than $200 million to make, is scheduled for general release Dec. 18, but more than 100,000 people in 58 countries got the chance to see a 16-minute preview after scoring free tickets online. It was a stunt designed to create buzz around the film - Cameron's first feature since "Titanic," which holds the box-office record after grossing $1.84 billion worldwide.”

"The only way to experience 'Avatar' will be to watch it through a pair of high-end 3-D glasses on a screen 50 feet high."

NY Daily News

Movie trailer courtesy of YouTube

"The Century of the Brain"

Three of PCWorld Canada's correspondents put their reputation on the line with a simultaneous review of Brain Age 2, the brain building game from Nintendo.

The Dallas Morning News

""I'm a scientist," says the 70-year-old Hunt Oil executive, jogging my memory that he was a physicist before becoming a businessman and lawyer. "We're slowly figuring out the body, but it's been from the neck down. This is the century of the brain."

The BrainHealth center, part of the University of Texas at Dallas, has no doubts that this is true."

Spam Blockers and HIV

Courtesy of Thomas Otter I saw this BusinessWeek article on a team at Microsoft focused on spam mutations as also potentially helping with rapid mutations of the HIV virus.

"While Heckerman has high hopes that his tools will lead to vaccines that can be tested on humans within three years, his research sits outside of Microsoft's business plan. "It has nothing to do with Microsoft," he says, "except that we can help." From the company's perspective, the sums invested in HIV research amount to a rounding error--only a couple million dollars per year in a research and development budget of $7 billion. The potential payoff would be to contribute to the holy grail of AIDS research, successful vaccines."

iBody

New Scientist (sub required)

"Researchers are working hard to harness the body's inner power - not some mystical life force, but the chemical energy locked up in the body's own food stores - and convert some of that into electricity. The hope is that medical devices can be made to behave like benign parasites, stealing just enough of this energy to run themselves without you, the host, even noticing. We're talking about a matter of tens of microwatts to a few milliwatts for many applications. The same could be done with the waste heat energy that our bodies pour out, or the kinetic energy of our pulsating muscles. Several of these so-called energy-scavenging systems have already reached the prototype stage, and more are under development. It is possible that within a few years many medical devices will be able to do away with batteries entirely. Eventually, your body (or should that be iBody?) might even deliver enough electrical power to run gadgets like your cellphone or MP3 player"

Walk like a ....gait-analysis technology

New strides in radar and gait-analysis software show that it's possible to detect when someone is carrying a bomb well before he or she reaches a security checkpoint - read more at MIT Technology Review

Hyperlinking to Reality

A "Nokia research team has demonstrated a prototype phone equipped with MARA software and the appropriate hardware: a global positioning system (GPS), an accelerometer, and a compass. The souped-up phone is able to identify restaurants, hotels, and landmarks and provide Web links and basic information about these objects on the phone's screen."

Read more at MIT Technology Review

Improved Video Searching

"A combination of face recognition, close-captioning information, and original television scripts to automatically name the faces on that appear on screen, making episodes of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer searchable." Read more here.

The Disruptors

Business 2.0 lists 11 "disruptors"

- NetVibes with personalized web pages and the threat to Yahoo and other portals
- salesforce.com and plans to offer database, not just applications as a service
- BlueLithium and highly targeted web ads
- Coghead's easy to use development tools
- Clearwire and WI-MAX based broadband
- Jajah - free calls with no downloads, adapters, headsets
- NextMedium's exchange for product placement in movies and TV shows
- EEStor - a power store for electric cars which could blow away the combustion engine
- NanoLife Sciences - better cancer treatment
- Zopa - Peer to Peer Landing
- Applied Location - Satellite based solution for toll collection, traffic congestion management

What's a Keyboard?

Brain wave controlled computing reported by Business 2.0

and dancing to the sound of your brain waves reported by New Scientist

also New Scientist reports on computing via "haptic devices" to take advantage of our sense of touch (like vibrating cell phones) 

The future of Authentication

InfoWorld "Cards and tokens are still the name of the game for many companies, and the smart-card industry expects 2007 to be one of their best years ever. But behind the scenes, there’s plenty going on in the once-staid market for user authentication technology". It then talks about biometrics, risk based authentication and other advances.