Snap2Tell gives information about your location

If you've ever been on a free-and-easy holiday and want to know more about the area you're in, what do you do? Looking for brochures near the tourist center is a possibility, but in the near future you may be able to take a picture of it with your camera-phone and have the information delivered to your handset.

The Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) demonstrated its Snap2Tell, an image recognition system, at the CommunicAsia 2009 tradeshow held at the Singapore Expo. To use it, just activate the application, take a picture, and send it on to the system's server. It will return with the relevant information.
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Highly accurate indoor GPS for navigating buildings

Navigating the crowded maze halls of CommunicaAsia out at the Singapore Expo isn't for the faint-hearted, but this is also where the A*STAR Ultra-Wideband (UWB) localization system comes into the picture. Hailed by the Singapore research institute as an indoor GPS, this system has an amazing accuracy of up to 10cm. Unlike other comparable solutions, the proof-of-concept prototype requires only a single UWB reader and a tag which is really a battery-powered radio transmitter in disguise. The system currently has an effective range of 15m and uses range and angle-of-arrival information to track objects.

Some key deployments of the UWB localization system include indoor robot navigation, smart supermarket trolleys, as well as exhibition visitor tracking and data collection.

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OLED data glasses: Let your eyes do the walking

Coming from a bespectacled nation of Singaporeans with built-in myopia, I'd have to say it's a distracting sight to have data flit across the lenses even it does sound Minority Report cool. Just imagine if this little invention of some students from Fraunhofer Institute in Germany were to hit mainstream usage.

We'd have a global epidemic of distracted users plugged into their eyewear, busily accessing the day's news, emails, instant messages and miscellaneous data on their glasses, barely paying attention to where they're going. If you thought there are enough menaces on the road yakking away on Bluetooth headsets and texting on phones while driving, the OLED data eyeglasses just upped the ante.
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Flexible memory developed for chips

A flexible memristor has been developed by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, opening the door to new memory technologies.

It is the first time this kind of memory device, demonstrated for the first time last year, has been shown in flexible form.

The memristor (from "memory resistor") was made by setting titanium oxide, one of the common ingredients of sunscreen and toothpaste, onto flexible transparent polymer sheets, NIST announced Tuesday. By adding electrical contacts the NIST research team created a flexible memory switch that operates on fewer than 10 volts, maintains its memory when power is lost, and still functions after being flexed more than 4,000 times.

"We wanted to make a flexible memory component that would advance the development and metrology (the science of measurement) of flexible electronics, while being economical enough for widespread use," said Nist researcher Nadine Gergel-Hackett, in a statement. "Because the active component of our device can be fabricated from a liquid, there is the potential that in the future we can print the entire memory device as simply and inexpensively as we now print a slide on an overhead transparency."
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CrunchPad gets new, near-final design

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, who last year boldly proclaimed TechCrunch would break every embargo it agreed to, apparently has broken his own embargo and leaked some news about his little consumer electronics side project, the CrunchPad.

OK, maybe he didn't really break his own embargo, but we wouldn't put it past him. The fact is Arrington says he's "just about nailed down the final design for the device" and that he'll have "first working prototypes" in a few weeks.
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