Filed under: Displays

E-Ink has a new display made available last week, based on segmented display cell (SDC) technology. Apparently the new screens are 40% thinner and have increased flexibility over E Ink's previous displays, and can now be formed in "organic non-rectangular unique shapes, including holes, curves, and other non-standard designs". Delphi's already picking up use of the display for future keyfob products -- always good to know there are consumer applications right around the corner.

[Thanks, Pat]

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I’m from Columbus, Ohio. I’ve been away for years and whenever we return to good old CMH we’re amazed at the pace of life. Everyone is in their cars, driving driving, and they move like whales through the deep, honking plaintive cries and gathering krill — AKA Rally’s — on the fin. This French fry cup holder is clearly from that storied flyover land and every time I see something like this I wonder how I survived my 18 years there without falling into a diabetic coma.

Incidentally this item is sold out. That’s right. People bought enough of these things to force the company to replenish the stock. Eli Eli Lama sabachthani

And the song’s even catchy. I have no idea how they put this together, but it’s pretty damned awesome.

We’ve seen the drum cozies for Rock Band, and we loved them. The idea of mixing crafty knits with hi-tech is a new one but certainly also a sign of the times. Electronics are homey now, and thus subject to cute hacks.

This is apparent with this knit Komputer Kord Kozy. Though I do take umbrage with the whimsical spelling, I want one. And yes, I’m a real manly man. What, I like crafts, OK?

It wasn’t very long ago that MySpace launched what are being dubbed the company’s South Korean and Indian “chapters.” So before MySpace gets entirely familiar with the region, the company’s chief operating officer, Amit Kapur, spent a moment explaining the company’s plans for South and Southeast Asian growth.

Kapur talked with Priyanka Joshi of India’s Business Standard, a partner of FT.com, and revealed some rather peculiar information that, if true, may cause an irregular markets to form upon News Corp’s primary social Web property.

As we reported last month, MySpace intends for there to be original television content broadcast via MySpace India as well as the promotion of an open platform for third-party developers. Yet Kapur has laid bare the company’s intention not to “mirror what it offers in international markets,” as Joshi shaped the question, but instead will “offer a host of third-party widgets created by Indian developers.”

Now, on its face, that seems like a sensible path to take. Indian developers know the Indian market, one would logically argue. Yet it seems almost completely antithetical to the idea of global competition that MySpace would segment developers focused on its main US-based operations to remain largely disconnected from foreign affiliates. If it is indeed the will of the worldwide market for competition to stretch across the seas in the sectors of manufacturing and some portions of the IT support and development structures of Western companies, would it not be appropriate to fully allow Western developers, some of whom are quite well connected with the trends and movements of Asian markets, to offer services to MySpace users wherever they may be located - China, South Korean, India, and elsewhere?

Of course, MySpace may not be intimating that it will provide a platform open only to Indian developers. But what Kapur may perhaps be suggesting is that the company’s Indian division will favor national engineering. That is troubling. Ideally, should not the competitive street be a two-way arena? I would imagine so.

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Filed under: Robots, Transportation

Maybe our robo-challenges speak something to our respective histories: Americans have spent the last few years driving intelligent vehicles through vast expanses of desert, but over in Europe, scientists and technologists are preparing for this fall's Microtransat, wherein machines must sail across the Atlantic propelled only by wind and artificial intelligence. The race, intended as a public proof of concept for long-range autonomous sea-faring scientific vessels, should take the, um, roboats three months to complete.

[Via Piquepaille]

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Earlier this week, TalkShoe CEO Dave Nelson did a pretty decent (and refreshing) post on reasons to still love audio podcasts. Of course Mashable Conversations listeners (and most Mashable readers) are pretty familiar with our love for the audio format, but there’s still a fair amount of naysayers out there who Internet video is killing the radio star.

It isn’t that we think one form is superior to the other - in fact, we’re pretty in love with both forms of Internet media entertainment. That’s why we’ve been working on a plan for putting together a number of consistent video podcast series here at Mashable. We’re not yet on a consistent release cycle, but we wanted to put a new feed in front of you so that you knew where to tune your podcast clients and DVRs over to once we flip the switch on it.

Get the Mashable Conversations podcast here.

If you tune into the feed now, you’ll presently be directed to Pete’s interview with Chamillionaire (embedded below). Keep it indexed in your readers, though, because more video interviews are in the pipe from Pete, Kristen, myself and Adam Ostrow. For those of you still in love with audio, don’t worry, that version of the show won’t be going anywhere, and will still contain a lot of unique content not found on the video feed.

Why are you in love with audio, though? Maybe you share some of Dave Nelson’s thoughts on the topic:

1) Voice is a much richer form of communication. Text does a poor job of conveying emotions, even with smiley faces. I want to actually hear that you’re enthusiastic, or sad, or sarcastic, or whatever. Hey, our DNA has been wired to TALK across 100,000 years, whereas text is a newfangled tool we haven’t yet fully mastered.

2) Voice is immediate and CAUSES new ideas. How many times have you been talking with a group of people and had totally new ideas emerge — ideas that were not from any ONE person? It’s the wisdom of crowds, to cite a great book.

3) It’s easier to talk than type. No explanation necessary, or at least I don’t have the time to write one out here.

4) (This is the most IMPORTANT one) There’s a big difference between our eyes and ears. When we read text or watch video, we can’t do much else, at least not competently. But when we listen, we can still do almost anything else.

For all my various criticisms of what goes on in podcasting, these are just a few of the reasons I keep at it. A couple more reasons? When I get great interviews like I did earlier this week.

Keith Richman, the CEO of Break.com, last week and speak frankly about the state of the business and where things are headed. This is a very valuable chat to listen to, no matter which side of the online video production business you aim to be on. While the business of online video remains very lucrative for a lucky few producers and a wonderfully successful place to put your advertising dollars, for the vast majority of producers and advertisers, it remains a very difficult minefield to navigate.

Keith and I talked not only about the goals and aim of the ROI council, but the state of the indie producers, and when we’ll start to see that boom for them that bloggers see today. For some, that boom is now, with some of the top paid producers on Break earning several thousand a month.

The embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

In one of the more popular podcasts in recent memory, I had a chance to speak to founder and CEO of New Relic, Lew Cirne, a bit about his organization and exactly where these rumors of unscalability for the Ruby on Rails platform come from.

Rails is known for it’s succinct programming style, where one line of code can be very powerful, and perform very complex tasks. It’s this simplicity that can also be a trap for developers who accidentally can trigger enormous processing tasks with what look like very efficient lines of code.

New Relic’s software as a service offering can analyze these code bits and give exact and graphed out details about what sort of computing time-sinks may exist within the code, and offer suggestions of more efficient ways of executing that same statement.

All in all, it’s a very interesting proposition - if you’re a developer in the Rails environment (or anyone curious about how Rails applications work behind the scenes), you definitely want to catch this episode, as Lew drops some very interesting knowlege on the topic.

The embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

Another great conversation was one that I had with Canaan Ventures partner Izhar Shay. I was contacted excitedly by the PR folks over there about a company they’d just invested in, something called Prime Sense. This precocious company seems intent on bringing into existence that technology seen most prevalently in Minority Report - that gesture based stuff.

The way it was described to me was that their intention was to make interfacing with entertainment consoles and personal computers as seamless and natural as interfacing with other human beings (think Minority Report, without the goofy Nintendo Power Glove).

I’ve seen a number of attempts at gesture based interaction, though, and most of them fall flat. The problem, generally, is in the object recognition. To fix this, Prime Sense has done a lot of work in what is essentially compositing and green screen technology. During the development process, they’ve as a side-effect of their work created what Shay described as professional level green-screen technology that will be made available for consumer level prices.

This has the net effect of putting in the hands of independent video producers the technology that has generally been only available to folks with the budget for a $10,000 lighting set-up and a $5,000 Tri-Caster. This is definitely one company to keep an eye on, and definitely one you want to hear more about.

The embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

Twing is a relatively new forum search tool that launched back in mid-March. Kristen recently reviewed them, and came to a lot of the same conclusions I did this week, as I sat down with Scott Germaise on an episode of Mashable Conversations this week and gave it a good once over:

As I said at the beginning of our conversation, too, I’m not typically excited or enthralled with vertical search offerings in general, but just sitting down and playing with some ego searches and some brand searches for Mashable, I was able to find a wealth of conversation that previously had been undiscovered by any of my present brand-management feeds I have set up.

Interestingly enough, through their category selection process and the natural self-policing nature of forums, they’ve also a remarkably spam free set of results.

Scott explained a bit of why that is, and gave me an in-depth tour of the features and history of the website, which you can hear in the embed is available below, or you can download the MP3 file directly here.

Get the Mashable Conversations podcast here.
Add directly to iTunes here (or give us a rating).
Add directly to your Zune here.

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The cyclone which hit Myanmar (Burma) last weekend caused an indescribable amount of damage to the nation’s people; the ill effects of the storm have been vast extended by the ruling military junta’s resistance to both substantive and logistical aid from outside sources.

View Larger Map

And while Google has spend the past few days offering its users quick access to two financial drop-boxes established for a duo of international relief organizations, UNICEF and Direct Relief International (to which Mountain View has pledges a $1m donation, presumably to be made through it’s philanthropic arm, Google.org), the company has gathered a collection of Google Earth layers through its Outreach program to help any and all interested to observe visual data of the region in the aftermath of the disaster.

The information comes by way of organizations that Google purports to work with, including ReliefWeb. They’ve chosen to publish their materials in the Google Earth-friendly KML format, to be easily distributed to as many people as may choose to run the software program. While Google has made available any data it has garnered through affiliate sources, it has already collected a number of revealing layers, which include:

- Myanmar Ministry of Health Facilities
- Satellite imagery from a selection of providers
- Satellite flood analysis from MODIS
- Satellite flood maps from ZKI/DLR
- An animated storm track with category designation and wind speed
- Animated storm clouds

While some may understandably feel that observing the results of Cyclone Nargis dealt upon the people of Myanmar from afar is disturbingly voyeuristic, the fact of the matter is this: the more knowledgeable and aware the world is of what has happened and will happen henceforth, the better. No option in this case is good, but one can certainly make out the differences between bad and worse.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

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Filed under: HDTV

Not that there was any doubt that OLED is on its way to larger sizes (hasn't it been since like 2005?), but Japanese firm Sumitomo Chemical announced its plans to produce 40-inch OLED panels for HDTVs some time in 2009, meaning Sumitomo-based TVs could hit the market in 2009 or 2010. Samsung's old-skool 40-inch OLED HDTV prototype shown above for scale.

[Via OLED-Info]

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Honoring mother’s day, we thought it would be nice to do another round up. This time, we have some of the most popular social networking sites for women. This is not a definitive list, but rather our choice of what’s good out there; feel free to add your favorites in the comments.

Also don’t forget 20+ tools for the best Mother’s Day ever.

(...)
Read the rest of Top 10 Social Networking Sites for Women (778 words)

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Report: Online Video Traffic Doubled in 2007
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And the Number One Site for Women is … CafeMom
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Yahoo Shine - Men Need Not Apply