India's Top 12 Tech Stories Of 2012

Here are the top 12 Tech Stories Of India in 2012

#12 Microsoft debuts the Surface

Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system was trending this year but what attracted Indians more is the debut of Microsoft’s first real hardware, the Surface. Eventhough the Windows operated tablet is not yet available in the country, the netizens literally clicked any news ‘surfaced’ on this, maybe it’s the love for a hardware from Microsoft, a company which defined the term ‘computer’ for India.    

#11 Facebook Blows Past A Billion Users

Facebook scored the 11^th position in Indian tech stories for the year. No wonder, according to the recant statistics, India has the second largest Facebook population in the world after United States. The country also tops the list of future growth opportunities for the social network. So how can it be possible for the world’s largest social network to touch the ‘1 billion’ milestone without an Indian thrust.

#10 Cloud computing

Cloud computing, the new face of IT made it to the top 10 tech stories in India. According to a recent study conducted by Vmware and Forrester Consulting, the cloud computing is witnessing a strong growth in the country with 25 percent over last year. Many Indian companies, who were hesitant to adopt cloud, are now planning to deploy it in the coming 18 months. Adding to it, people are also showing more interest on cloud based storage services instead of the traditional data storage systems. 

#9 Apple wins copyright infringement

Apple was always a hot grab for netizens.Eventhough the company had not yet shown much interest in India with its products, it has an amazing fan base in the country. So the Indians were keen to know about what’s happening with the Cupertino tech giant. Thus the historic patent victory of Apple on Samsung became one of the most sought out news in 2012.

#8 Pinterest

Pinterest, the third largest social network and the once hyped Facebook rival, is not catching up to the expectations lately. However Indians, who mostly welcome any social networks, haven’t avoided the pin-board site too. The stories related to Pinterest surfaced to the 8^th spot liked by people.

#7 Google driverless car

Google, the world’s most popular search engine is mesmerizing the world lately with its amazing inventions. The waves of its inventions reach every corner of the world from Silicon Valley. Among those,the driverless car, which was granted a license to run on the streets of Nevadainterested Indians a lot. Google had lobbied to pass the law for the car which according to Google "knew what they were doing” and the first ever license was issued to a Toyota Prius modified with Google's experimental driverless technology.

#6 SOPA Blackout

The SOPA blackout, which led the initiative to kill the Stop Online Privacy Act bill, received a warm reception in India. The tech news became one among the top 10 in India as the internet joined its hands together, including all the major websites like Wikipedia to protest against the law which contradictory to the proponents’ arguments, will limit free speech, invade privacy, and limit creativity.

#5 Crowdfunding comes of age

Crowdfunding- a platform where entrepreneurs raise money from public to fulfill their project, was not a popular term in India a couple of years back. But it gained traction this year and got placed in the top 5 tech stories for the year. Crowdfunding will perfectly fit a country like India As it progress in terms of tech innovations and more and more entrepreneurs being born every day.

#4 Facebook buys Instagram

One of the biggest technology acquisitions of the year, Facebook’s Instagram buyout, interestingly was under the watchful eyes of tech fans in India.   The social network had spent a whopping $1 billion to acquire the company, a process which got applause and criticism at the same time. With the changes in its privacy policies, Instagram recently is in topics with users threatening to abandon the product.

#3 Facebook IPO

Facebook’s historical IPO fiasco suppressed the hunger of tech followers in India for a long time, as it was one of the best tech stories that trended in the country according to Yahoo, for the first phase of 2012. The social network, which set out on a dream journey, had crumbled on its IPO day, inviting criticism from all around the globe and even getting sued by investors.

#2 Google glass

Google Glass, which can be called as the gadget innovation of the year, stole the heart of Indians, along with the rest of world. The news on this wearable computer from the tech giant, which can do un-imaginary things, was a big sensation among the gadget freaks.  According to recent reports, the gadget, which was expected to be delivered in December, will be hitting shelves on first half of next year.

#1 iPhone 5 and the iPad mini

Indians caught on with the world’s trend as Apple’s devices, especially the latest releasediPhone 5 and iPad invoked huge thirst among tech followers in the country. The tech stories related to these topics was the top one for the year 2012. To make things better,  Apple finally has taken initiatives to make its devices available in the country without huge delay.

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Modern robots are driven by brushless AC servo motors

Almost all modern Robots are driven by brushless AC servo motors but many of the robots existing in industry use other drives.

Pneumatics 
Many of the simple pick and place arms are driven by pneumatics. This makes them cheap but has the disadvantage of being difficult to control. Pneumatics are still used with a number of modern robots to drive end effectors.

Hydraulics 
Hydraulic drives were used on a large number of the early robots as it was more rigid and controllable than pneumatics and it could provide more power than the electric drives then available. The problems with hydraulics are that it tends to be fairly slow in operation and that due to the high pressures involved leaks can be very messy.

Electric 
There are three major types of electric drive that have been used for robots. Stepper Motors These are used mainly for simple pick and place mechanisms where cheapness is more important than power or controllability.

• DC Servos 
  For the early electric robots the DC servo drive was used extensively. It gave good power output with a high degree of control of both speed and position.
• AC Servos 
  In recent years the AC servo has taken over from the DC servo as the standard drive. These modern motors give higher power output and are almost silent in operation. As they have no brushes they are very reliable and require almost no maintenance in operation.

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HydroBOB Puts the Scooter Underwater !

For those with no diving experience, or who don’t know how to swim, Andrew Sneath has created an underwater vehicle just for you. Offering a controlled environment, and the ability to breathe regularly thanks to a bubble around the rider’s head, the HydroBOB underwater scooter is perhaps not the most graceful device to ever descend beneath the waves, but it does look like a somewhat safe method to experience the joys of being underwater.

The HydroBOB is consisted of three parts: the scooter, a viewing bubble that has a 180 degree view, and an oxygen tank. The rider sits on the seat and holds onto the handlebars, where triggers can be used to control the thrust. As we said above, the ride doesn’t seem to be all that smooth, but we imagine that it could probably be a lot worse. The ride is slow, but for those who can’t swim, that may be a good thing.

The underwater scooter is connected to a support structure above the surface of the water. Considering the large tether that connects the scooter and the support structure above, the HydroBOB probably can’t go very far. The BOB in HydroBOB stands for Breathing Observation Bubble. If you’re interested in taking a ride on the scooter, you’ll have to head to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where you can rent your very own for $25 per hour. Or you can rent one for a private event. Check out the HydroBOB in action below.

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Dubai to Build Underwater Hotel

Dubai’s thirst for crass civic projects and buildings cannot, it seems, be quenched. In the last decade, the emirate has cultivated an utterly strange landscape of isolated icons, each one more “spectacular”,”daring”, and “different” than the last.  From the vacuous iconicity of the Burj Khalifa to the ludicrous ambition of ”the World“, Dubai’s tolerance for an asinine and radically depoliticized architecture has yet to be exceeded. See the latest conceptual project, Deep Ocean Technology’s proposed Water Discus Underwater Hotel, another “diamond in the rough (waters)” scheme that envisions a partially submerged object of vage sci-fi origins. And, by vague, we mean Star Trek.

According to the sleek initial renderings, the hotel is to be stranded in a reef, with lodging above and below the waterline. The structure consists of a system of modular programmatic discs, anchored to the seafloor by steel legs capable of withstanding tsunami-scale conditions. The discs can be moved, replaced, and multiplied to alter the hotel’s composition and respond to the vagaries of sea life.

The skyward discs suspended above the waterline will be programmed with a helipad, spa, gardens, and terraces that reveal vast panoramas of the shore beyond, while the underwater accommodations will extend twenty-one stories down into the water to open up intimate views of the diverse marine habitat. The project presents an advancement for housing and tourism in coastal off-shore areas, according to the hotel’s investors, who also claim that the hotel’s modular structure can double as a “laboratory tool” with which to further oceanographic research in the region and work towards creating “new underwater ecosystems and activities on underwater world protection.”

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Laptop Kitchen: Portable Notebook Computer Cooks Food !

Desktop (or would that be counter-top?) kitchens are so 2000s. Drawing design inspiration from that most familiar of everyday portable devices, this conceptual kitchen-to-go contains a four-tier induction cooking element, built-in cutting board, ingredient grater and, of course, a touchscreen interface and wireless connectivity. 

A few button touches bring up favorite recipes or new cooking ideas and nutritional information on ingredients or menus. Bluetooth, wifi and camera included, of course (what device doesn’t come with those these days?).

It may yet be a bit of a daydream, though, to suppose that such a thing would really work – there are issues such as safety (including separation of the heating element), power requirements and, maybe most of all, cleaning that need to be contended with before this work by Dragan Trenchevski could become a reality. And, alas, food means weight and space, as do pots and pans, so the portability needs some additional thought as well.

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Will we ever create intelligent robots?

Walking, talking androids have been a sci-fi staple for decades, but as John Pavlus reports building one in reality is still a matter of getting the right parts and smarts.

-We made you ‘cause we could.

- Can you imagine how disappointing it would be for you to hear the same thing from your creator?

In Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s film about a space expedition searching for the origins of human life, the elegant, Lawrence-of-Arabia loving android David discovers from a crew member the possible motives behind his own creation – and understandably finds this less than inspiring.

But the idea of creating intelligent robots has fired human imagination for decades. These robots have taken many forms in speculative fiction, from the seductive charms of Futura in Fritz Lang’s masterpiece Metropolis to the urbane, existential angst of David in Prometheus. In reality, though, how far have we progressed towards being able to create an intelligent robot just “’cause we could”?

To understand where we are now, we have to go back about twenty years, to a time when artificial intelligence research was in crisis. Rodney Brooks, then a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a landmark paper in 1990 stating: "Artificial Intelligence research has foundered in a sea of incrementalism… small AI companies are folding, and attendance is well down at national and international Artificial Intelligence conferences... What has gone wrong?"

The problem, as Brooks saw it, was that the type of research inspired by Alan Turing’s famous artificial intelligence test had hit a dead end. The Turing test directed decades of AI efforts towards devising computer systems that “thought” by solving logic problems –focusing on the "sea of symbols", as Brooks put it, that were believed to undergird intelligence. These systems could shuffle and sort information with dizzying speed, giving them the appearance of intelligence when performing certain abstract tasks (like playing chess). But when it came to “common sense” intelligence – the kind we rely on when selecting a book from a bookshelf, distinguishing a cat from a dog or a rock, or holding a glass of water without dropping or crushing it – this symbolic, Turing-style AI couldn’t cope.

Get smart

A better alternative for AI was to take a “situated” route, as Brooks called it. The first order of business: forget about building brains that can solve logical problems. Instead, focus on building bodies that can deal with and respond to the physical world. In other words: build robots.

There's something about an embodied agent that seems more "intelligent", in a general sense, than any algorithm. IBM's Watson system may be able to beat humans at Jeopardy! with its deep reservoir of facts – an impressive simulation of "book smarts". But Boston Dynamics' Big Dog robot, manoeuvering itself sure-footedly up hills and around unfamiliar obstacles, and even maintaining its balance when shoved by its human companion, actually seems to be smart – at least, in the same way a dog or horse is.

"One kind of smart has to do with knowing a lot of facts and being able to reason and solve problems; another kind of smart has to do with understanding how our bodies work and being able to control them," says Marc Raibert, CEO of Boston Dynamics. "That kind of smart helps people and animals move with remarkable mobility, agility, dexterity, and speed."

 

When Brooks wrote about this new kind of artificial intelligence in his 1990 paper, he introduced half a dozen robots who look like Big Dog's evolutionary ancestors. One of them was Genghis, a six-legged insect-like robot that could autonomously negotiate unfamiliar terrain in an eerily lifelike way, without any high-order processing or centralized control system. All it had were lots of simple sensors "tightly coupled" to motor controllers in each leg, loosely connected in a “nerve-like” network to pass sensory information between the motors, "without any attempt at integration".

This primitive-seeming architecture, wrote Brooks, was the key to someday building artificially intelligent robots: Parts before smarts.

Brooks's insight paved the way for Boston Dynamics' lifelike robots, as well as Brooks's own iRobotcorporation (which manufactures Roombas and bomb-defusing robots for the military). And yet a truly intelligent robot – with parts and smarts equivalent even to that of a domestic dog – has yet to be built. Why? Not because situated AI turned out to be yet another dead end, but because it addressed a newer, harder problem, known as Moravec's Paradox. "It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old [human] when it comes to perception and mobility," roboticist Hans Moravec wrote in 1988.

Acting human

So how can we solve Moravec's Paradox? One approach is to take the assumptions of situated AI to their logical endpoint: If we want to build a robot with human-like intelligence, first build a robot with humanlike anatomy. A team of European researchers has done just that: their ECCERobot (Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot) has a thermoplastic skeleton complete with vertebrae, phalanges, and a ribcage. Instead of rigid motors, it has muscle-like actuators and rubber tendons. It has as many degrees of movement as a human torso; it flops into a heap when its power is turned off, just like an unconscious human would. And most importantly, all of these parts are studded with sensors.

"The patterns of sensory stimulation that we generate from moving our bodies in space and interacting with our environment are the basic building blocks of cognition," says Rolf Pfeifer, a lead researcher on ECCERobot. "When I grasp a cup, I am inducing sensory stimulation in the hand; in my eyes, from seeing how the scene changes; and proprioceptively [in my muscles], since I can feel its weight.”

These sensory patterns are the raw material for the brain to learn something about the environment and how to make distinctions in the real world, says Pfeifer, and these patterns depend strongly on the particular actions we perform with our particular body parts. “So if we want the robot to acquire the same concepts that we do,” he says, “it would have to start by generating the same sensory patterns that we do, which implies that it would need to have the same body plan as we do."

For now, ECCERobot's humanoid physiology is so difficult to control that it can barely pick up an object, much less exhibit intelligent behaviour. But Pfeifer and his team aren't the only ones exploring this "anthropomimetic" strategy: Boston Dynamics, the same firm that created Big Dog, is working with DARPA, the US military's research wing, to develop a humanoid robot called ATLAS which will "use the arms in conjunction with the legs to get higher levels of rough-terrain locomotion," says Raibert.

In any case, says Pfeifer, building an intelligent humanoid robot – one that "can smoothly interact with humans and human environments in a natural way" – will require breakthroughs in computing and battery efficiency, not to mention a quantum leap in sensory equipment. "A really crucial development will be skin," he says. "Skin is extremely important in the development of intelligence because it provides such rich sensory patterns: touch, temperature, pain, all at once."

A robot with skin and human-like internal anatomy starts to sound less like a robot at all, and more like a synthetic organism – much like David in Prometheus. Which takes us back to the question he asks in the film. Or as Pfeifer more pragmatically puts it: "Why build a robot which is a very fragile and expensive copy of a human being?"

It is a very useful goal, Pfeifer argues. “Even if we still mostly want robots to do specialized tasks, there will be tons of spinoffs from an understanding of humanoid, intelligent behaviour. Yes, we'll draw inspiration from biology. But that doesn't imply that we won't go beyond it."

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Its future electric roller skates

Because Americans are too damn lazy and uncoordinated to regular roller skate, Peter Treadway is trying to get these Electric Roller Skates into production. Just kidding, Peter. I mean, yes we absolutely balk at the idea of any kind of physical activity, but we want this because we f***ing love futuristic kinda shit! The spnKiX are controlled by a small wireless remote and can go up to 10 miles per hour. You can contribute to the cause on KickStarter. By donating $375 you can receive a pair if their goal of $25k is met. Me? I’m just gonna hold out for that jetpack I always dreamed of. $375

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Anti-gravity platform

 

This is one of the things that make you feel like you’re in a science fiction movie. In fact there is nothing magical or unbelievable but it makes a great effect. It is based on magnetic levitation of a magnet placed above another one. Power supply comes to the base platform. Once it is turned on, you can place the supplied globe in the air above the platform. It will hover almost an inch above the powered base and will rotate slowly. When you open the globe, you will discover a magnetic disc inside. You can put this disc above the platform and then balance stuff of your choice on it. There is a weight limit: you can use objects not heavier than 85 gr and levitation may not proceed properly if the object is made of iron or any magnetic material. Platform has eight LED lights which gives great light effect to the floating object.

For preventing incidents, be sure to keep the platform away from computers and other similar technology because it is possible to be damaged from the strong magnets. However the platform has comparatively small sizes: 18.5 cm long side and 3 cm height, thus making it easy to fit in some corner.

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Touch Life In Future:

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Top 10 High Tech Gaming Headsets

Top 10 High Tech Gaming Headsets

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Being  a hardcore gamer I decided to introduce something unique with addicted gamers like me, the world’s top ten high tech gaming headsets that will take your imaginations beyond the limits in the field of gaming.These gamingheadsets have been carefully selected according to their popularity rank and price ,lets have a close look.

Plantronics GameCom 367 Closed-Ear Gaming Headset

Source : plantronics

Logitech Wireless Gaming Headset G930 with 7.1 Surround Sound

Source : amazon

Tritton TRIAX-720 AX 720 Dolby Digital Surround Sound

Source : amazon

Razer Banshee StarCraft II Gaming Headset

Skullcandy Com Ti Multimedia Headphone (Black)

Skullcandy GI Xbox Gaming Headphones with Boom Mic S6GIBX-WG (White/Green)

Thermaltake Tt eSPORTS SHOCK Foldable Professional Gaming Headset

Source : powerdrive

Psyko PC51V1 5.1 PC Gaming Headset

Source : amazon

SteelSeries Spectrum 5xB Gaming Headset (Black)

Razer Megalodon 7.1 Surround Sound USB Gaming Headset

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Windows Unveils Phone of Future

Whenever you’re finding Windows Unveils Phone of Future pics, information or review we take them here for you to use. We exclusively collect the highest quality Windows Unveils Phone of Future pics, features or reviews for our viewers to use. Sclick staff and users continually add new fun or electronic gadgets news.

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The new Windows Future Phone takes the look and feel of upcoming future mobile devices . To be released , the latest Windows Phone’s intuitive user interface makes it one of the most amazing devices I have seen all these years . It is something like some ultra-terrestrial gadget from the space. This Windows Phone will change the entire ecosystem. This new device of the future concept cell phone has surfaced recently , and it’s truly impressive. Features the latest Windows Mobile user interface, 3D video calling & much more.

Touchscreens may have completely changed the cell phone interface today, but tomorrow’s mobile devices will go even further, even responding to grip & other forms of user action. It’s not everyday that you see a phone that can “bend and twist” at your command , but future phones will. Mobile phone technology is advancing so rapidly, that people can expect to be using what is thought to be impossible by 2015 .

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