Posts Tagged ‘Android’
Get Some Green for Going Green – ecoATM
Quick. How many old cell phones do you have lying around the house? I must have four or five. Some are stuffed in drawers, while my daughter uses others as toys. The reality is that most phones don’t get recycled. In fact only 3 per cent of mobile phones worldwide get recycled. That’s a lot of landfill and digital waste. It’s also a business opportunity for a company called ecoATM. They have built a nifty kiosk that takes in your old cellphone and gives you money for it.
The ecoATM kiosk has visual recognition technology and other sensors to check the type of phone as well as inspecting it for damage. With over 4,000 phones in its database, the ecoATM matches and inspects your phone, and then determines how much it’s worth (the average payout is about $9 per phone). EcoATM has already recycled over 33,000 handsets and they are deploying their kiosks in malls, electronic store and college campuses across the US.
Look for many more ecoATMs to spring up, since Coinstar has invested an undisclosed amount of money in the company. Coinstar, as you might now, puts out those convenient kiosks that take your spare change, counts it, and converts it to cash and store credit. However, it’s Coinstar’s other kiosk endeavor that has really taken hold. Coinstar is behind Redbox, the popular DVD kiosks that all but doomed Blockbuster and the local DVD rental stores.
To further sweeten the pot, ecoATM is expanding its business model to accept a wide variety of electronics, including video games and iPods. If they get around to selling electronics in their Kiosks, RadioShack better watch out.
Another Green Idea
While on the topic of going green, Stanford University students have come up with a laptop that you can break down into recyclable parts in about 30 seconds. Called the Bloom laptop, it’s designed to take the hassle out of reducing e-waste. Today, the process for recycling computers either does not happen or is pretty inefficient. Aaron Engel-Hall, one of Bloom’s designers, states “They spend 90% of their time prying 250 screws out of every device that comes in the door–it’s very expensive and time-consuming.” With the Bloom laptop, you just turn a couple of knobs to pop out the parts not easily recycled (e.g., motherboard, battery, mixed materials) and toss the rest into the recycling bin. It even comes with a postage-paid envelope behind the screen to send in the parts you can’t put in your recycling bin.
The Bloom laptop has one other very cool feature that’s very handy while you are still using your computer. Its modular design allows users pop out the keyboard and use it remotely. Why didn’t someone think of that before!
Your Next Phone Battery Could Be…You
Nokia's Hot New Phone
Every time I need to make an important call, I always seem to be low on battery. When I had my old Blackberry, I used to carry around a couple of extra batteries in my bag. Now that I have an iPhone, I lug around an external battery. I keep wondering, “why can’t they come up with a better way.” Now they have…
Nokia has come up with a concept phone called the E-Cu that comes with a built-in thermogenerator that converts any heat source into electrical energy to power the phone. According to Concept Phones.com (a great website for future-looking mobile devices), the Nokia E-CU can be charged while in your hand on even in your pocket. Although the idea sounds a little too much like “The Matrix,” the idea of using your body heat to power your phone falls under the “why didn’t we think of that earlier” category. The E-CU gets its name from “E” for environment and Cu, symbol for copper. This is because the casing for the phone is made of copper “heat sinks” that collect the thermal energy.
Sunny outlook for solar powered phones
Although thermal energy is relatively new to the phone industry, companies have been playing with solar powered phones for a while. For example, in 2009, Samsung released its Blue Earth phone, which was the first solar powered full-touch screen phone. It has solar panels on the back that recharge the battery and Samsung even went the extra “green” mile by making the Blue Earth phone out of recycled plastic bottles. More recently, Dutch technology company Intivation, released its V206, which sports a SunBoost chip that makes it practical and cost effective to market solar powered phones.
Some companies are even experimenting with kinetic energy for cell phones. Companies are playing with phones that recharge when you run, yo-yo and even swing a golf club.
Dark Silicon and GreenDroid to power the future?
One of the core challenges with alternative energy phones is that they do not offer the massive number of features to which we have all become accustomed; all that brain power in our smart phones sucks too much energy.
University of California is working on an answer. They have developed a smart phone chip that requires much less energy than the ones we use today. Called a GreenDroid, the chip uses a technology called Dark Silicon that uses about 11 times less energy than a typical processor.
Aside from being more convenient, these alternative power promise to make a big impact on conservation. Currently, unwanted phone chargers produce 51,000 tons of waste a year. In India alone, solar powered cell phone towers could all but eliminate the use of 530 million gallons of diesel per year.
No matter how they do it, I can’t wait to say goodbye to my “low battery” light.
Preparedness: Your Kit Is Key
FEMA/Michael Raphael
When a disaster hits, don’t think you can just grab some cans from your pantry and go. You may not have time. Next up on our list for disaster preparedness during National Preparedness Month: the emergency supply kit.
Many disasters happen with little or no warning. Earthquakes and tornadoes pop up without any advance notice. Even for those emergencies that offer some warning, such as snowstorms and hurricanes, it is so much easier to pick up your two bins of supplies and head out, rather than scurry around the house trying to gather everything you need at the last minute. Whether you evacuate or stay: Easier=quicker=saves lives.
72-Hour Kit
The emergency supply kit is 72-hours worth of supplies to keep your family safe and alive — from food and water, to an emergency radio and flashlights, to even a tent and extra clothing — set aside and gathered in one, easy to access place. You can find lists and suggestions for a standard supply kit at redcross.org, ready.gov, and many other places. There are also a few apps that seem handy. One Android app that looks promising is the Emergency Kit Organizer. You can use the checklists in this app while you shop to keep track of your purchases; it also stores expiration dates and reminders so that the supplies in your kit will still be usable when you need them. Depending on where you live, there may also be more targeted apps available, such as the Hurricane Web App developed for Flor (more…)
Hang On To Your Id…Here Comes Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality is looking to explode into our lives and change how we experience…well…almost everything. But the real power will come when Augmented Reality converges with other emerging technologies.
If you can barely handle the reality you have, you better hang on to your id, superego, and basic hold on the world. Here comes Augmented Reality and it looks to change a how we relate to everything around us. At its core, Augmented Reality isn’t that weird of a concept. It basically means that you take a real video or image and you overlay computer generated images. We’ve seen this in movies, commercials and advertising for years. Heck, I can do this on my Mac without too much trouble.
Where it starts to resemble something that would have made Gene Roddenberry proud is when you start adding technologies like mobile, GPS and the power of the internet to give you instant, personally relevant information. For example, a company called Layar created an application that lets you look at city streets through the view finder in your mobile phone and overlays icons of local shopping, restaurants and point of interest. So, if you’re hungry, pull out your phone, pan the street and look for the pizza and hamburger icons to lead you to lunch.
Boob-Tube No More: Smart TVs will Make Us Rethink Home Entertainment
TV and the Internet have been flirting with each other for years. Yet, these two crazy kids haven’t quite been able to get together in a way that would make it worth tuning in. That’s all changing, and there are some very cool Internet powered TV (also called Smart TVs) applications coming soon to a living room near you.
Imagine sitting in your rec room, watching the big game but having to run off to the in-laws. You peel yourself off the couch, wave your mobile phone in front of the TV and “grab” the game while in mid-stride towards the door. You catch the rest of the game on your phone while riding in the car – no logging in, no special equipment. Just wave and go (also good for bathroom breaks!). When you get to the in-laws, you “flick” the phone and send the game to their TV. This is the kind of stuff you will eventually be able to do with Smart TVs.
Think about how the Internet changed cell phones…oops, I mean “mobile devices” – they no longer like it when you call them cell phones. We now have armies of iPhones, Blackberries and Androids that scour the web and deliver us countless useful little apps. They’ve changed the way we work, play, flirt and kill time (see our post about the App-A-Lanche and how much we’ve changed). Yet, TV has been relatively untouched. Sure, there’ve been a few fledgling attempts to merge TV and the Web. Apple’s first foray into this market, a device called Apple TV, has been around since 2006. It was expensive, quirky and didn’t do anything that made people want to rush out and get it. By 2008, Steve Jobs started to refer to Apple TV as “a hobby.” Some gaming systems, such as Wii, let you do some rudimentary web surfing, but those are pretty clunky. (more…)
My first week on Android
So I finally got rid of my old Blackberry last week. I had been planning on doing so for a while, but kept putting off the change – primarily for financial reasons. Smartphones aren’t cheap. But after spending a week with my new Motorola Droid, I am not sure why I waited so long.
Now I know what you’re thinking – “Mr. Early Adopter” just got a Droid? It’s true, I’m a little behind the curve on this one. Yes, I know the Droid X is coming out in a matter of weeks, and that newer and better phones like the Droid Incredible and HTC Evo 4G are already on the market. But, in these challenging financial times, I couldn’t justify the outlay of $400 for both my wife and I to get the “latest and greatest” in Android smartphone technology – especially when Verizon gave me two droids for $100. (more…)
Making Sense of the App-A-Lanche
Three short years ago Apple changed the rules when they opened up their phones to the universe, letting third party vendors write programs. Although there were technically apps before that, developers and companies were free to develop their own, branded apps on iPhones platform (something virtually unheard of at the time). Since then, over two hundred and twenty five thousand of those handy little programs are in Apple’s App Store alone (and that’s not counting places like the Android Market and Blackberry App World). The market isn’t slowing any time soon. According to a recent Nielsen report on mobile apps, smart phones are expected to overtake feature phones in the U.S. by 2011. You can now do anything with apps from manage your bank account to put a voodoo curse on your boss. I can almost see Apple’s campaign slogan “There’s an app for that” on a Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture edition. At first, this just looks like an “App-A-Lanche” of mind boggling amounts of new programs crushing into the market. But take a closer look, and you can see that there has been a impressive evolution in the app world.
Early apps were very simple. They were like single-cell programs, letting you calculate a tip or see what time it was in China. Not many frills, and conventions were still being hammered out. Developers were like nervous teenagers on a date, not sure how far to push things. Should they charge for apps? Should they give them away for free? How complex should they be? Apple had given them they keys to the iPhone Ferrari, and they weren’t sure where to go. As developers got more comfortable with this new medium and companies and start-ups started waking up to their potential, these simple apps soon began to multiply. Apple also helped things by opening the App Store in July 2008 and allowing users to download apps directly to their iPhones (ten million apps were downloaded the first weekend the App Store was opened). From July 2008 to January 2009 the Apple App Store went from 500 apps to 15,000. (more…)
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