Posts in Future Tech

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Fuel cell power for your gadgets

Candace Lombardi | Dec 11, 2008

MTI Micro, a subsidiary of Mechanical Technology Incoporated, unveiled a portable charger recently that uses replaceable fuel cartridges.

MTI Micro is not the first, and hopefully won't be the last, company to go to the fuel cell for portable convenient power. (People refer to these new tries as "fuel cell gadget chargers," though to me, that seems like it refers to a charger for powering fuel cell gadgets.)

Just this past September, Medis came out with the 24-7 Power pack, a charger powered by a liquid fuel cell, for only US$40 with replacement packs for about US$20.

The MTI Micro Mobion prototype works with cartridges of the liquid fuel methanol. Each cartridge offers about 25 hours of power. When it's depleted, users just pop it out of the charger and replace it with another one.

Sounds promising, but we're still waiting to hear back from MTI Micro on the pricing of the charger and those cartridges. The company says the MTI Micro Fuel Cell Charger will be available as a product toward the end of 2009.

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HP and ASU roll out prototype bendable e-display

Damian Koh | Dec 10, 2008

The image above shows how a flexible display could look like in the future.
(Credit: HP and FDC)

If you have ever been on a long overseas vacation, you'd know that dealing with foldable paper maps can be a hassle and they tear easily at the creases over time, too. A bendable, electronic map could be the solution in the near future.

HP and the Flexible Display Center (FDC) at Arizona State University recently demoed the first prototype unbreakable e-display which is purportedly more energy efficient than the computer panels currently in the market and, of course, are more easily portable. These paper-like displays which use the self-aligned imprint lithography (SAIL) technology could also find its way into notebooks and smart phones in the future. The release mentioned that mass production of these displays could lower the costs of electronic devices, but until that happens, we'll have to adopt the wait-and-see attitude.

However, considering that it took the FDC nearly 4 years to build this prototype, chances are we probably won't see these flexible displays going commercial in the immediate future.

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Google brings old magazines back to life, online

Josh Lowensohn | Dec 10, 2008

Google now offers full copies of old magazines. The selection is limited, but it will hopefully grow to encompass many titles. (Credit: CNET Networks)

On Tuesday Google announced a partnership with several publishers to bring complete catalogs of old magazines online.

By using the same scanning process that has been implemented for Google's Book Search product, these titles undergo optical character recognition and are indexed into Google's search engine. In a post on the company's official blog, Google said that the scanned works will first be available in Book Search, with integration into regular Google search results to follow.
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