TechWatch

Sharing music with friends used to be intimate, even messy. We visited each other’s homes with stacks of records, and plundered album sleeves until vinyl littered the floor. Everyone negotiated song choices in real time, and when consensus proved impossible, DJ duties fell to whomever reached the turntable first.

Sometimes this led to the 40,000th playback of Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.” And sometimes you had to listen to that weird friend-of-a-friend’s freakbeat sitar jam. “It’s number one in Berlin!” he’d assure you, as if this flimsy bit of context could convert your musical faith.

Now Google wants to update this conversation-based music discovery system for the digital age. At its I/O keynote Wednesday, the company unveiled Nexus Q, a sleek streaming-media sphere that’s 4.6 inches in diameter and looks like pop art. Nearly devoid of outward-facing controls, Nexus Q is a puzzle — a satin-coated curio that begs to be touched and examined. But when you gaze into this mysterious black ball that crackles with light, you don’t see the future but rather blasts from the past: a return to speaker-driven audio, along with all the real-time social sharing that vinyl once inspired.

READ ALSO : http://reviews.cnet.com/digital-media-receivers/google-nexus-q/4505-6739_7-35339164.html

Playsurface addresses touch table design from both mechanical and electronic design trajectories, and includes:

- A new, application-specific closed-loop digital image processing module to provide touch detection and tracking functions apart from the gaming/application computer

- An open-hardware cabinet and surface design developed for cost optimization and flat-pack shipping

- A USB interface standard and driver that reduces implementation of the touch table to the same level as plugging in monitor and mouse peripherals

Conçue par Microsoft Research, IllumiShare est une lampe traçant une surface lumineuse sur votre bureau. En permanence guettée par un capteur Kinect, tout ce qui est intégré dans cette zone lumineuse est analysé et instantanément transmis à une ou plusieurs personnes disposant du même équipement vous permettant de mener à bien un projet en collaboration.

Our own Joshua Topolsky recently toured Microsoft's research campus, where the company's cooking up all kinds of crazy tech. Today we're pleased to share a look at Microsoft's Envisioning Lab, a space where the company shares innovations from its visions for the future.

IBM has made three breakthroughs that could help chips continue following Moore’s Law. Monday at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting, IBM showed off the first racetrack memory device that delivers an entirely new means to get electrons to hold data, as well as two materials breakthroughs that could lead to faster chips and even open up new spectrum bands that would be useful for delivering mobile

Lest storage vendors thought they were immune to disruption that open source hardware is having on the server industry, Netflix’s new Open Connect content-delivery network might make them think again. While Open Connect directly targets commercial CDNs, it’s based upon (or at least inspired by) open source designs first released by Backblaze almost three years ago. Backblaze’s design evolving and expanding its range into the data centers of a Fortune 1000 company is significant in the same way the evolution of modern man was for neanderthals.

Microsoft Research has shown off software that translates your spoken words into another language while preserving the accent, timbre, and intonation of your actual voice.

In a demo of the prototype software (starts around the 12 minute mark), Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s chief research officer, says a long sentence in English, and then has it translated into Spanish, Italian, and Mandarin. You can definitely hear an edge of digitized “Microsoft Sam,” but overall it’s remarkable how the three translations still sound just like Rashid.

Nouvelle concurrence pour Sony qui ne sera bientôt plus la seule marque à proposer des lunettes 3D immersives puisque que Sensics vient de présenter son casque Natalia doté d’un double écran OLED à connecter à vos consoles, votre PC, votre téléphone ou encore votre lecteur bluray pour regarder vos films préférés. Contrairement aux modèle HMZ-T1 de Sony, Natalia offre une résolution de 1280 x 1024 pixels et n’est pas simple écran puisqu’il est doté d’un processeur dual-core 1,2Ghz, de 1Go de RAM, d’un slot SD, du Wi-Fi, du Bluetooth et tourne sous Android 4.0.

At the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show, computer makers will be pushing a new breed of ultra-thin, ultra-light laptops amid a sea of razor-thin smartphones and tablets.

Last year, 140,000 people in the technology industry convened at the Las Vegas Convention Center to mingle and gawk at cutting-edge hardware. The organizers expect to welcome at least that many people next week.

Electronics makers use CES as a platform to show the types of products they plan to release in the coming year. The compact disc player, high-definition television and Blu-ray each debuted at past conventions. Decades since its formation, the yearly six-day event is a spectacle.

The 42nd fastest supercomputer on earth doesn’t exist.

This fall, Amazon built a virtual supercomputer atop its Elastic Compute Cloud — a web service that spins up virtual servers whenever you want them — and this nonexistent mega-machine outraced all but 41 of the world’s real supercomputers.

Yes, beneath Amazon’s virtual supercomputer, there’s real hardware. When all is said and done, it’s a cluster of machines, like any other supercomputer. But that virtual layer means something. This isn’t a supercomputer that Amazon uses for its own purposes. It’s a supercomputer that can be used by anyone.

- Add 3D to ANY TV, Monitor, Proj (even 60hz TV !)

- Display HDMI content on Digital and/or Analog display

- 3Dfury can output in both Digital and Analog Video/Audio simultaneously !

- Double and Triple frame 1080p24 material up to 1080p72

- 3D mode output up to 720p144

- Dual projectors setup using two 3Dfury modules and passive glasses.

- 7.1 Dolby® True HD & DTS Master Audio