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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!

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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.

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Help Me Obi-Wan...Win This Game

Ever since we saw Princess Leia pleading for Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, we’ve been entranced with the idea of mobile holographic communications. Samsung’s new B710 phone does its best R2D2 impression, by bring 3D to mobile devices. The best part? No funny glasses required.

While it’s not a full hologram, the B710 does make image appear to be popping out of the phone (Samsung is also releasing W960 3D Smart Phone, but the B710 was first to market, so we’ll give it credit). Software created by Dynamic Digital Depth, converts 2D content to 3D in real time. According to MIT’s Technology Review, you simply tilt the phone and it “creates pairs of slightly different images that the viewer’s brain combines to produce the sensation of depth.” It even automatically interprets depth by synthesizing visual cues. For example, if it recognizes a image of the sky it will put that in the back ground. (more…)

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There are three steps to disaster preparedness. We’ve talked about the first two…Make a Plan and Get a Kit. The last one is Be Informed. It is essential to know what disasters are likely for your area and prepare accordingly. Your preparations may be different depending on the disaster. For hurricanes, you may need to plan for an evacuation. Snowstorms? You’ll need to be ready for days without power. Understanding the likely events in your area will make your plan better and easier to implement.

Before, during and after a disaster, you need to know how to get information. How will you know if a disaster is coming and how serious it’s likely to be? How will you know what help is available? Where to go if you need a shelter? Luckily, many locales now have alert systems set up, including e-mail, text and other technology to get the word out quickly. You’ll need to do some poking around because the information isn’t always heavily publicized, but start by checking with the emergency management resources in your state. You can find state emergency management information on ready.gov/america.

For example, residents of the Washington DC area can sign up for capitalert.gov, a messaging service that covers the entire national capital region and taps into state and local information in the same stream. Likewise, the San Francisco area offers the AlertSF notification system offering text and e-mail messages with emergency related traffic and weather warnings. (more…)

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What if the Earth could Twitter you? HP is lacing the earth with over 1 trillion advanced sensor nodes and interconnecting them into an immense environmental network. Called Central Nervous System for the Earth (CeNSE) project, HP Labs plans to cover cities, towns and key environmental sites with specialized, very small sensors that collect a myriad information ranging from vibrations, movement, light, sound to air quality. Each of these bundles of sensors (nodes) are connected to each other, casting a virtual net over the earth.

The applications for an environmental sensor network are almost endless. Imagine a system that could identify structural damage on buildings before they fall, find pathogens in the air, warn of earthquakes or track outbreaks in real-time across the globe. HP says it could put about 10,000 of these nodes on the Golden Gate Bridge to monitor its integrity and warn of any potential disasters. HP is already partnering with Shell Oil to create a wireless sensor network to measure high-resolution seismic data that will more effectively map the subterranean topography and search for pockets of oil. “This project is designed to gain a competitive advantage for us onshore.” said Wim Walk, manager of novel geophysical technologies for Shell.

Peter Hartwell from HP labs puts it best, by stating “With a trillion sensors embedded in the environment – all connected by computing systems, software and services – it will be possible to hear the heartbeat of the Earth, impacting human interaction with the globe as profoundly as the Internet has re (more…)

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Start watching shows at home, then send them to your iPhone or iPad – very cool. Do this and much more with Apple TV.

The race for your living room is on! Google, Amazon and now Apple are scrambling to marry web and TV, which will make for some great new applications. We wrote an article a while ago about how the new generation of “Smart TVs” are going to change how we experience home entertainment. This week, Apple is throwing its hat officially into the ring by announcing a new, much cooler, version of their Apple TV.

The announcement came with relatively little fanfare; Apple bundled the announcement with new versions of its iPod Touch and the announcement of Ping, their new social network offering that they describe as Facebook meets Twitter for Music. Never-the-less, it marks a significant step forward for Apple into the TV market. Once describing Apple TV as a “hobby,” Steve Jobs, founder and CEO of Apple, now is looking to ramp up Apple’s TV muscle. At the moment, Apple is mostly positioning Apple TV as a television and movie rental device. Smaller, cheaper and much more powerful than it’s predecessor, Apple TV has some great features, including:

• Get your Netflix through Apple TV -  Apple and Netflix have teamed up to deliver movies to your home. For $8.99 a month, you can watch unlimited movies and TV shows. You have full controls over the movies, so pause, fast forward and rewind to your heart’s content — sure beats snail mail (although you can still get Netflix via post, if you’d like)…
• Download and rent movies on demand – You can also dial up TV episodes and movies A-La-Carte via iTunes. They even give you some handy tools to track episodes you love, see how many episodes you haven’t had a chance to watch yet, and even see reviews via Rotten Tomatoes.
• Send your shows (in progress) to iPhone or iPad – On the run? Can’t finish that episode? No sweat. Use Apple’s new service, called AirPlay, to send your show to your iPhone or iPad and continue watching where you left off. We actually predicted this one (we called it “Grab and Flick” – although our idea has a cool interface).
• Use your iPhone/iPad as a remote control – Apple TV comes with a remote, but you can use your iPhone or iPad  to surf, tap and “flick” through flicks….
• HD included – All Apple TV offerings are also available in HD
• Wirelessly stream stuff from your Mac laptop to your TV – Beam digital content to your TV–without any cords.
• Bring the Internet to your TV – Apple TV lets you pull content from the Internet into your TV. Watch YouTube, Flickr and listen to Internet radio right from your home entertainment system.

AppleTV slimmed down its price tag to $99 to help get it on your console. This should help them get a foothold in the market, not to mention sending a message that they are serious about TV. Ashok Kumar, an analyst with Rodman & Renshaw LLC, agrees by saying “longer term, I do think they have more ambitions in the living room.”

The SmartTV market is starting to heat up and I’m on the edge of my seat…

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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.

(more…)

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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…)

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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…)

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Ring! Buzz! Crash! Bang! Dad!!!!

My life seems to be in a perpetual state of motion…or more appropriately – a perpetual state of commotion. There always seems to be a background buzz of things to finish, people to call, project fires to put out, kids to put to bed, or messes to clean up. As soon as I get a chance to sit down to read something, there’s a ring, buzz, cry or tap on my shoulder (with a five year old, I need to look out for the occasional body slam). I never get the chance to read something straight through, and I always forget what I was reading by the time I get back. I tried to bookmark articles, but that just gets way too cumbersome. Solution – Read It Later.

Read It Later is a free application that lets you create a personal reading list that you can read either online, or download articles and read them when you’re not hooked into the web. It works both with web browsers and on mobile devices. After you create an account (just a user name and password), you can synchronize all browsers and mobile devices – so you have one reading list no matter where you are. For example, if I see something I want to read when surfing on my computer, I can mark it for my reading list and view it on my iPhone when I’m waiting for my car to be done…or on the commute…or any of the million other times that I have a pocket of time to kill. (more…)

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