Panasonic’s solar-powered table wirelessly charges your gadgets

It has happened to all of us: you’re running around town all day only to look down and realize your phone’s battery is in the red, but you don’t have your charger and you’re not going to be home any time soon. What do you do? Panasonic has the answer with a protoype it showed at the Retail Tech Expo in Tokyo of a solar-powered inductive charging table. The table is able to juice your phone, or any other device with a Qi battery, by just setting it down.
Inductive charging has been around for a few years now, but this is the first time we’ve seen a wireless version. Back in 2010 we saw the first inductive charging power mat, made by Energizer, but it needed external power to charge the devices. Panasonic’s table is unique, however, because it charges via solar power collected on the table’s surface.
Another unique aspect is that the table’s charging panel connects straight to the battery, so you don’t even have to have the battery in the phone to charge it. There’s no word yet as to how long your device would have to sit on the table before it is fully charged.
Needless to say, you can’t cover the solar panel with a nice flower arrangement or tablescape. No, you can’t even put your device on the panels. Obviously, that would block the light and deplete its energy source. However, there’s a pretty good amount of room around the panel, so we think you’ll be fine.
Seeing as many of us carry a few gadgets around each day – iPod, cell phone, camera, e-book reader, etc. – it would be nice to have a universal source of power instead of having to plug four devices in each time you need to give your gadgets a little more juice. As Japantrends.com pointed out, the table could be useful to have in restaurants and cafes so people could stop by and get a jolt of power in addition to their jolt of caffeine.
This certainly does look like a table from the future, and it seems the future of solar-powered wireless-charging tables is not far off. Panasonic said it would begin selling the table in Japan by the end of this year or early next year. No word on when the U.S. market will see it.

Article source : http://www.geek.com

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Chinese e-commerce giant opens furniture showroom

BEIJING – China's e-commerce giant is stepping up its heated rivalry with bricks-and-mortar retailers with the launch of a five-story home furnishings showroom in Beijing.
Alibaba Group's Taobao, an Internet platform through which an estimated 3 percent of all retail sales in China pass, opened the showroom Friday for customers to try out sofas, tables and other big-ticket items before placing an order online with one of its merchants.
The mall is a new intrusion into the territory of China's real-world retailers by e-commerce rivals that are growing so fast some suggest they could become the country's leading retail force — its version of Wal Mart.
"The dominant retailer in China someday may be an online retailer," said Morgan Stanley analyst Richard Ji.
Taobao says its Beijing mall is aimed at overcoming a hurdle hampering the growth of China's Internet commerce even though online retailers offer significantly lower prices: Customers don't like to buy furniture and other major items without examining them in person.
"It's hard for people to shop for home furnishings if they haven't seen them," said Justine Chao, an Alibaba spokeswoman.
Alibaba Group also includes Alibaba.com, a giant business-to-business Internet commerce platform. The company, in which Yahoo Inc. owns a 43 percent stake, operates Yahoo's China arm.
Global e-commerce outfits have struggled to gain a foothold in China in the face of aggressive local competition. eBay Inc. entered China by acquiring a local company but handed over control to Chinese managers. Amazon.com operates through a local partner, Joyo.
The Chinese industry has produced success stories including bookseller Dangdang Inc., traded on the New York Stock Exchange, consumer electronics retailer 360buy.com and Vancl.com, a clothing outlet.
Industry analysts expect China's online commerce to grow at explosive annual rates of 30 to 40 percent in coming years, defying early fears it might be hurt by low rates of credit card use and rudimentary delivery services.
A key part of e-commerce's appeal is lower prices in a society where many families get by on a few thousand dollars a year. With no need for an expensive chain of storefronts, Web merchants charge 30 to 50 percent less than traditional retailers.
Sales through Taobao alone totaled an estimated 400 billion yuan ($60 billion) last year, according to analysts. Taobao does not disclose its revenues from fees charged to retailers and other income.
Its platform has led to the emergence of a cottage industry of small retailers, many of them lone traders working from home, who sell clothes, shoes, toys, costume jewelry and other goods to a nationwide market.
Taobao says its 25,000-square-meter (250,000-square-foot) Beijing mall will display 22,000 items from some 300 suppliers. Orders and payment will only take place online. Taobao says it plans to open similar showrooms in other major Chinese cities.
Other Internet retailers such as jewelry seller Zbird.com also have opened showrooms to encourage customers to buy higher-priced items online.
Such outlets could help e-commerce sites compete even more aggressively with traditional retailers by boosting consumer confidence in a market where online sellers have an uneven reputation for quality, said Ji.
"By having a display room, it clearly will help raise the seller's credibility," he said.
On opening day Friday, shoppers at the Taobao Mall on the Chinese capital's east side were test-sitting sofas and flipping through channels on big-screen TVs.
"Compared with photos on the Web, I can really touch the things, so I can put more trust in them," said Yu Jingyuan, an engineer for a computer company who was looking at a stall displaying kitchenwares. "I can trust the sellers online."
China has by far the world's biggest population of Web users, with 457 million people online as of Dec. 31. But just 10 percent of them shop online, compared with the U.S. level of about 70 percent, leaving online merchants room to expand.
In contrast to the United States, Europe and other developed markets, China's online merchants enjoy the unusual advantage that they face no entrenched retail giants with decades of market dominance and strong brand names.
After decades of poverty and communist central planning, modern retailing began to replace drab, poorly stocked Chinese stores only in the 1990s. But that was followed just a few years later by the launch of online commerce.
Bricks-and-mortar retailing is fragmented, leaving competitors without the financial might of counterparts abroad. The top 20 account for less than 10 percent of China's annual sales, a far cry from the 50 percent market share of the U.S. top 20.
Alibaba and other companies have developed online payment systems to serve customers without credit cards. In response to concerns about product quality, some release the money only after the buyer is satisfied.
In big cities, delivery services that draw on China's abundant supply of low-cost labor can get purchases from local sellers to buyers the same day.
Taobao says it has no plans to open showrooms to display other goods, but the manager of its new Beijing mall had a warning for rivals.
"In the online world," said Ye Peng, "nothing is impossible."

Article source : http://news.yahoo.com

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MIT develop Wear Ur World, 6th sense hand gesture gadget

MIT researcher Pattie Maes demonstrated a new gadget earlier this week at a technology conference in South California. It is called Wear Ur World (WUW), or 6th Sense and allows you to access information as though you always have a PC in front of you, but controlled by hand gestures.
What the researchers have done is combine a number of standard gadgets including a webcam, projector, and mobile phone, to form a brand new interaction experience. In its current form the battery-powered projector is attached to a hat, the webcam is hung around the neck (or also positioned on a hat), and the mobile phone provides the connection to the Internet.
The wearer uses hand gestures combined with the gadgets to perform actions. So, for example, they could make a circle over their wrist with the fingers of one hand. WUW would recognize this action and project a clock face on to their wrist. Make a picture frame with both your hands and WUW will take a picture as if it was a camera. Stand near a wall and you can get a projected desktop allowing you to open applications, view the pictures you’ve taken, or surf the ‘Net.
At the moment it is just a prototype system, but because it uses off-the-shelf components the cost of creating one is just $300 for the hardware involved.
Patty Maes commented:
Other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in ‘Minority Report’ it can really let you connect as a sixth sense device with whatever is in front of you … You can use any surface, including your hand if nothing else is available, and interact with the data … It is very much a work in progress. Maybe in ten years we will be here with the ultimate sixth-sense brain implant.

 Article source : http://www.geek.com

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Posted in: Gadgets,Technology

Japan, the Twitter nation

By AKKY AKIMOTO

According to Twitter's official blog (blog.twitter.com), when the clock stuck midnight last New Year's Eve, Japanese Twitter users went crazy, recording 6,939 tweets per second—a new record at the time. In fact, globally 14 percent of all tweets are in Japanese—second only to English, with 50 percent—which explains why Japanese was the second language to be added to twitter menus. And according to Virginia-based research firm ComScore, 20 percent of all Japanese are using Twitter, while only 8 percent of people in the United States are users. Twitter has grown so much in Japan that it now has more visitors than Japan's most well-known social network service, Mixi. And last month, Twitter appointed their first international manager outside the U.S—in Japan. But why has Twitter been embraced so rapidly here?

The first wave of Twitter users in Japan was basically limited to influential people/bloggers who knew about the buzz generated by Twitter at the South by Southwest music and technology conference in Spring 2007 in Austin, Texas, who suggested that their readers should give Twitter a try.

Because Twitter was such a simple service and did not have much text (at the time only in English), it was fairly easy for non-English speakers to pick up. In those early days, however, to actually tweet in Japanese script you needed to add two specific characters—one space and one period—at the end of your tweet so it would be accepted by Twitter's system. But rather than being an obstacle, the first Japanese people fascinated by Twitter enjoyed such a silly obstacle. Also, if the people you chose to "follow" were all Japanese, you wouldn't see much English except for a few menu texts like "login" and "submit." All these things made it fairly easy and attractive for people to use Twitter, even though there was no localized Japanese version.

Historically, Japanese web services that are similar to—and sometimes copies of—U.S.-based web services, often end up becoming more popular than the originals because the locally produced ones are in Japanese and designed to fit Japanese culture. Also, many web services wait a few years until they are established before moving into the Japanese market—by then it often too late (e.g., eBay vs. Yahoo! Auction; Google vs. Yahoo! Japan; Facebook vs. Mixi).

At first it seemed that Twitter too would be easy to copy, and there have been lots of Japanese clones by small startups. However, the speed with which Twitter was accepted did not give the competition much chance.

Another factor in Twitter's success in Japan could be that, at first, the Twitter head office in the U.S. didn't seem to know what was going on in Japan. With no Japanese-language support on searches, trends and hashtags (#) the Japanese twitterverse was largely unseen from HQ. Because of that, Twitter became a the place where Japanese Internet users—using pseudonyms—could enjoy saying whatever they wanted. In particular Twitter became popular with 2-channel users despite having less anonymity than that huge anonymous Web-forum service.

This loose control may also have allowed "bot" culture to flourish in Japan. Twitter-bots are small software programs that are designed to mimic human tweets. Anyone can create bots, though it usually requires programming knowledge. Some bots reply to other users when they detect specific keywords. Others may randomly tweet preset phrases such as proverbs. Or if the bot is designed to emulate a popular person (celebrity, historic icon, anime character etc.) their popular phrases will be tweeted.

Not all bots are fully machine-generated, however, and interestingly the term "bot" has also come to refer to Twitter accounts that are simply "fake" accounts, much like the fake Steve Jobs account (see a list of popular Twitter-bots below).

It's hard to say exactly whether bots are more prolific in Japanese than elsewhere, but I would guess that they are—especially as one bot-generator alone serves more than 200,000 Japanese bots, which tell fortunes and tweet proverbs and random quotes. There is even a book published in Japan on how to make Twitter-bots.

Not surprisingly perhaps, the most popular fully automated bot these days is @earthquake_jp which tweets earthquake alerts, and was part of the huge surge in popularity of Twitter just after the Great Eastern Japan Earthquake on March 11.

Up until then the Japanese media was really fond of Facebook, which had been gaining ground in Japan as more and more Japanese users signed up. The Facebook movie "The Social Network" released in January assisted that trend. However, at the time of the megaquake and tsunami only about 2 percent of the population were using Facebook.

As mobile phone networks went down after the quake, people turned elsewhere to contact each other, and Japanese TV and newspapers suggested that social media, which by then basically meant Twitter, was a good alternative when disaster cut off other communication channels.

The Prime Minister's Office, the Ground Self-Defense Force, Tokyo Electric Power Co. and many other public organizations opened Twitter accounts after the quake. The government even issued a "social media guideline" for local governments who wanted to join, and the "social media" quoted in the document meant Twitter. In the long run, Japanese will probably jump onboard Facebook, the way people have around the world. But until then, Twitter has established a solid bridgehead in Japan.

article source : www.japantimes.co.jp 

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Walkman's latest version and a new camera from Panasonic

By RICK MARTIN

It was not without a little sadness that we witnessed the end of Sony's Walkman cassette model last year. Sure it was a long time coming, but the Walkman brand is only rivaled by the iPod in the history of portable music. Thankfully, the brand still lives on in more modern Sony products. The latest of these was revealed earlier this month, as the company announced its new Walkman B Series.

This new Walkman series (the NWZ-B160/B160F) of mp3 players is very reminiscent of Apple's popular iPod Shuffle line. They're tiny, they're available in a wide range of bright colors, and they have a convenient clip on the back.

The B Series is an elongated player nearly reaching 10 cm in length, and weighing just 28 grams. Sony claims the player has an 18-hour battery life, and that a three-minute quick-charge will result in 90 minutes of playback time. A full charge requires about 70 minutes. The player also features a backlit LCD that pulses in time with the music it's playing.

The player connects to your PC using a built-in USB connector, and from there you can just drag and drop your music files. The B Series comes in both two- and four-gigabyte capacity models, so they can store nearly 500 and 1,000 songs respectively. Sony has also implemented something called "Zappin" search technology, which should help when sorting through your music library.

This new B Series looks far better than the earlier W Series, which was probably an attempt at differentiation gone awry, with the mp3 player built into the headphones themselves. Besides the B Series' more logical design, it has a number of other features that make it a decent Shuffle alternative.

The B Series will be released first in the United Kingdom, with the two- and four-gigabyte models selling for about ￡29 and ￡35 respectively (or $47, $57).

Continuing with its successful G Series of Micro Four Thirds (MFT) cameras, Panasonic this month announced its Lumix DMC-G3, following on the popular G2 and G1 models before it. Filling that middle ground between full-size DSLR and compact point-and shoot cameras, Panasonic's line of relatively compact, interchangeable-lens cameras has hit a sweet spot among many photographers.

The new G3 features a 16 megapixel sensor, and according to Panasonic the Venus Engine FHD image-processor brings 66 percent more noise reduction. It can also shoot full HD video at 1920 x 1080 pixels, in AVCHD format, a standard jointly developed by Panasonic and Sony.

In addition to an eye-level viewfinder, the G3 has a convenient 3-inch LCD touchscreen on the back but, unlike the G2, this panel is articulating, with the capability to rotate and tilt. This should certainly come in handy if you need to reach over a crowd to fire off a shot. When you need to adjust focus on an object, simply give a tap to the desired object on the screen and the Auto Focus (AF) will track that subject.

The touchscreen also features a slider-enabled background defocusing and white balance, as well as touch-enabled exposure control compensation,

The external dial controls include familiar modes such as Program, Shutter or Aperture Priority and Manual, but also include custom setting for Scene Mode and Creative Control Mode. There's a video button included as well for easy switching to video mode.

The new Lumix is made of aluminum and will be available in black, red, white, and brown (yes, brown!). The camera body with the 14-42mm zoom lens kit will retail for $699.99 this June. No word yet on a date for a Japan release.

article source : www.japantimes.co.jp

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Posted in: Gadgets,Technology

Exposure of Tepco pair exceeds limit "Cumulative dose of workers over new crisis cap of 250 millisieverts"

Two Tokyo Electric Power Co. employees working at the stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant may have been exposed beyond the 250-millisievert limit set for the crisis, Tepco and the government said Monday.

The two men, one in his 30s and the other in his 40s, have been at the plant since the March 11 disasters triggered the crisis. Both may have a cumulative exposure of several hundred millisieverts, a company official said, while adding the two are "not at a stage that would require emergency medical treatment."

To cope with the country's worst nuclear plant crisis, the government raised the legal limit on the amount of radiation a worker can be exposed to in emergencies to 250 milliseiverts from 100 millisieverts.

The National Institute of Radiological Sciences is expected to conduct a detailed assessment of the workers' internal exposure to determine their total exposure, said Hidehiko Nishiyama, spokesman of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency.

The two workers were involved in work at reactors 3 and 4. In a measurement on May 23, their thyroid glands were found to have absorbed 7,690 and 9,760 becquerels of radioactive iodine-131, respectively, 10 times more than other workers.

Their external exposure levels were between 74 and 89 millisieverts, Tepco said.

The two were working in the plant's reactor control room, a building where the headquarters for the crisis is located, and outside in the compound.

They ingested stable iodine on March 13 to prevent radioactive iodine from accumulating in their thyroids and increasing their risk of thyroid cancer.

Tepco said it plans to check some 150 other workers who were engaged in similar work.

The utility is meanwhile coming to believe that it will be impossible to stabilize the crisis by the end of the year, senior company officials said Sunday. This could effect the evacuees' chances of returning to their homes near the plant.

The recent confirmation that meltdowns had occurred in reactors 1 to 3 and probably breached the pressure vessels encasing the fuel, have led officials to believe "there will be a major delay to work" to contain the situation, one of them said, adding that they will try to close the breaches.

Tepco announced April 17 that its time line for bringing the troubled reactors into cold shutdown was six to nine months.

Source Article : http://www.japantimes.co.jp

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2012 Release For Windows 8, Ballmer Reiterates

At a Microsoft Developer Forum in Japan today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed what we’ve all been assuming: the company plans to release Windows 8 in 2012, just about three years after the release of Windows 7.
Unfortunately, that’s as specific as the famously enthusiastic CEO cared to be, and no new features or details about the release were discussed, though we can glean some tidbits from his remarks.
First, as evidenced by the upcoming ARM port of Windows, one of Windows 8′s focuses is adaptability and modularity – more than any previous version of the OS, Windows 8 will be written to power everything from tablets to netbooks to high-end workstations, or as Ballmer put it, ”Windows 8 slates, tablets, PCs, a variety of different form factors.”
Ballmer went on to talk about the need for more intuitive computing, in the form of hardware and software that can more accurately respond to natural input instead of arcane search terms: “Today on a PC, it’s file open, blah, blah, blah, respond, reply, forward. I can’t just say to my device, get me ready for my trip to Tokyo,” Ballmer said. ” We ought to make it so that the search engines, and the user interface of the device can take actions on our behalf.”
This is a theme that Microsoft has focused on before, especially in some of its ads for the Bing search engine. In Windows 8, it’s possible that these innovations will come in the form of more reliable and pervasive voice recognition, or perhaps through tighter integration with Bing itself (though this sort of cross-pollination could draw the ire of antitrust regulators).
So, there we have it: More proof that Windows 8 is on its way, right from the horse’s mouth. If the Windows 8 development cycle continues to mirror that of Windows 7, we should get an increasing amount of official information this summer (perhaps beginning at the All Things D conference) leading up to a public beta later in the year or in early 2012.
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Source Article : http://windows8news.com/

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Posted in: Invention and Innovation,Technology