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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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Google is testing cars that drive themselves. Why? Who else is doing this, and how close are we to kicking back and letting my “Chevy Google” do all the work?

It didn’t make sense at first. Google announced that they have been testing cars that drive themselves. This sent the tech world abuzz and, fittingly, the search engines ablaze. Everyone from New York Times to Computer World were writing about it. But…why?

Not “why have automated cars?” People have been dreaming bout that since the 1950′s.  Self-driving cars promise drastically reduced fatalities, increased convenience and mobility to many who would not otherwise easily have it. Why Google? Also, how close are we to really having automated vehicles? First, Let’s look at Google.

Google has been testing fully automated cars in California that do not require human interaction to drive. They modified a Toyota Prius with an array of cameras, radar and lasers to to enable the car to “see” and react to traffic and road conditions. They have mounted a rotating sensor on top of the car that generates a 3 dimensional map for 200 feet in all directions. According to their blog, they have logged over 140,000 miles with these cars. Don’t worry (too much). These cars are not left completely to their own devices. During the tests, they have a trained driver behind the wheel, ready to take over at a moments notice.

Not Exactly KITT, but getting close

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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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Dial By Hand (Photo: Lynn Barry)

MIT sees information as our sixth sense, and their goal is to integrate information with the real world in a much more effortless way than we do today. The SixthSense project at MIT Media Lab has developed wearable mobile technology that recognizes hand gestures and then projects information on to real objects. For example, if you want to call someone, you make a gesture and the device projects a phone number pad onto a wall, your hand, or whatever is close by. You then “touch” the number pad image to start dialing.

Sure, we carry around the entire Internet with our smart phones, laptops and tablets. But we still need to interrupt the flow of our interactions to go search for information. The SixthSense project looks to eliminate the phrase “hold on and let me look that up.” They are doing this by combining several emerging technologies:

• The device has a camera suped up with advanced recognition technology. The device takes in the world around you and recognizes words, objects and even faces.
• A mobile processor linked into the Internet so that it can search, analyze, upload and download the information you need.
• A projector to display anything from search results to pictures, movies and generated graphics onto object in front of you.
• The ability to understand your hand gestures. It does this by tracking different color caps on your fingers. In their demo, they use pen caps, but they also say you could just paint your fingernails different colors. (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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A few weeks ago we wrote about Evernote, an all-in-one note taking and information collecting software that neatly corrals all your fleeting thoughts. Evernote now has a way for you to access a bunch of apps that work nicely with its core software. Called “The Evernote Trunk” (appropriate, since Evernote’s logo is an elephant), it’s kind of an app store “light.” You click on an icon in your software and you’re taken to a full list of applications, organized into categories and easily searched. The applications are created by third party developers who have all sort of handy apps, widgets and gadgets that work with Evernote. Right now, Evernote only lists and links to these apps, but according to ReadWriteWeb, they will eventually turn it into a full blown app store, where you can purchase and download apps right from the Trunk.

What can you get with The Evernote Trunk?

The Trunk has all sorts of apps and gadgets, split into mobile, desktop, and hardware categories

• Business receipt scanning
• Voice transcriptions
• To-do list management
• PDF management and markup
• Team information sharing and white boarding

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote states, “Our vision has never changed: Evernote is here to help people remember everything.” With The Evernote Trunk, they want to make sure we don’t forget it…

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Ever forget a great idea because you didn’t write down? Or open up a Word document to write a quick note? Ever want to capture a web page, but don’t want to add another bookmark to your browser? Then you should look into Evernote.

Evernote is a handy little application that helps you capture all things noteworthy. Evernote receives just about anything you want to throw into notes: Text, photos, images, video, e-mails, web pages, thoughts, dreams (well, maybe not the last two). You then can file and tag these notes to call up later. The interface is pretty simple. You can create “notebooks” to file things and also quickly add tags to them; within a couple of clicks you can find anything you squirreled away. I’ve used everything from Microsoft Word to Sticky Notes on a Mac to do this, and Evernote is a million times easier.

The real power behind Evernote is its ability to be ever-present. Evernote works on PCs and Macs. You can get add a handy Evernote tool to any browser. (It’s an add-on for Firefox and Chrome, and it is automatically added to Safari and Internet Explorer when you download the software.) There are apps for most smart phones, and you even get a special e-mail address so you can forward important e-mails right to Evernote. This makes it very easy to start adding things to your notebooks. Out at a store? Take a quick picture of that shirt you want, and send it to Evernote. Browsing the web? Shoot Evernote that article you want to save. On E-mail? Forward that airline tick-it confirmation e-mail. Evernote exists in the haze of the Internet cloud, so all these locations are synchronized. That way, you can pull up your notes from anywhere, on almost any device (phone, computer, tablet, etc.). Another cool twist is that Evernote, converts most images that contain text, so printed and handwritten text inside your images become searchable. This comes in handy if you do things like take pictures of business cards and send them to Evernote.

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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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