Japan Today is reporting today that the on-again and off-again pending launch of SED TV is off again, at least for the time being. The problem appears to be that Nano-Proprietary Inc who is one of the technology patent holders, refuses to extend intellectual property rights to Toshiba, who happens to be Canon’s partner in [...]

The gadget formerly known as the iPhone seems to be the most unannounced product of all time. And despite the fact that no product details are known, many are expecting an Apple-branded cellphone to be a flop or to be a so-so performer.
 The Register says it all in their article entitled “Why the Apple phone will fail, and fail badly” [...]

CNet staged another Prizefight recently - this time challenger Zune when up against the current MP3 champion the iPod. At stake the title ‘World’s Best MP3 Player’. CNet’s Veronica Belmont played referee in a 5-rounder. 
The contestants were evaluated on the basis of their design, interface, compatibility, features and performance. The Zune won the interface round, but [...]

A Music Recommender System works like a search engine for music but on a personalized basis, with collaborative filtering, drawing on social networking, network analysis and Fourier transforms so as to select songs that you are likely to like and then to play them for you on streaming radio.
One of the newer MRS’s out there is musicovery [...]

Just when it seemed that flash memory was going to be the next big thing, IBM and some of their henchmen, er business partners, up and announce some advances in phase-change memory, which seems to directly challenge flash in the computer memory market. Their version of PCM memory, according to IBM, is non-volatile, 500x faster than flash, uses [...]

The New York Times questions the raison d’etre for the International Space Station in a new article that suggests that the ISS is a kind of technological dead-end not unlike the Zeppelin. The International Space Station will end up costing about $100B, is currently less than half-built and will require 15 more space shuttle flights [...]

Vladimir Kramnik, the current (human) world chess champion has just been beaten by Deep Fritz, a chess-playing computer program. Fritz won 2 of the 6 games held in Bonn Germany, with the other 4 ending in a draw.
Before the match, Kramnik prophetically stated: “The day will come when we will no longer have a chance against [...]

NASA today announced plans to return to the Moon and set up a permanent base by 2024, as per the goals and objectives laid out in “A Renewed Spirit of Discovery” issued by the White House in 2004. That document directs the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to undertake various initiatives in space to include [...]

Well, the results are in for the 2006 L’Automobile Piu Belle del Mondo, aka the World’s Most Beautiful Car, with the winner in the sports car category being the Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano. The Fiorano is a nice looking car, albeit excessively Corvette-like.
In a field of questionable & mildly-disappointing appointees, such as the Renault Twingo, we [...]

Hummer & ‘green’ in the same sentence? … apparently so…
The 2006 Los Angeles Auto Show which ends Dec 10 produced a number of concept cars, including the General Motors Hummer O2. The GM Hummer O2 won the Design Challenge portion of the show in the category of environmentally friendly cars by virtue of producing more [...]