Category: Business

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From Droid Life: Lytro Camera Technology in Smartphones? Yes, Please.

 

If there was one new tech invention of the last year that will actually change the game and can blow the minds of even non-techies, it is easily the Lytro camera. Not familiar with Lytro? I’ll do my best to sum it up.

The Lytro camera takes “living photos” that can be manipulated well after they have been taken. And when I say “manipulated,” I’m not talking about some Photoshop trickery or a hipster filter. I’m talking about refocusing it on a different area over and over again. This camera captures the entire light field “which is all the light traveling in every direction in every point in space” or dimension. The camera itself takes instant photos with no shutter lag and no need to deal with an autofocus. Since the focusing happens on objects of your choice after the photo has been taken, you don’t have to worry about it during the shot. So, you get insanely fast photos and the perfect shot that you decide on afterwards. Make sense?

In an interview with PCWorld, the Lytro executive chairman Charles Chi talked about the future of their product and where they could see it headed. Smartphones are obviously on everyone’s minds these days when it comes to new technology, so Chi provided some thoughts saying:

If we were to apply the technology in smartphones, that ecosystem is, of course, very complex, with some very large players there. It’s an industry that’s very different and driven based on operational excellence. For us to compete in there, we’d have to be a very different kind of company. So if we were to enter that space, it would definitely be through a partnership and a codevelopment of the technology, and ultimately some kind of licensing with the appropriate partner.

So no definitive confirmations on Lytro coming to a cell phone near you any time soon, but can we start a campaign to help make it happen? Some of the top complaints we see time and time again when it comes to smartphones, have to do with cameras. And when it comes to cameras, we see a lot of issues with shutter lag and focusing, something the Lytro bypasses.

Overview of Lytro:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Demo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Via:  PCWorld | More on Lytro

from Droid Life

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From Droid Life: Web of Tech Patent Lawsuits

This needs to stop. NOW! Do you see Ford (while not the first car maker, it was first to automate the process) suing all other makers for copying its form factor of body, engine, and 4 wheels now, do you, Apple?!  Sheesh…

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It seems every other day that we hear Company A is suing Company B over patent infringement. Thanks to PCMag, we can keep track of them all through a set of infographics. These graphs give us a solid representation of the amount of firepower each company holds with their number of patents. As we can see, a lot of these companies have in the tens of thousands of patents – how they keep track of them all, don’t ask us. In the above chart, there are the major filings along with their dates, but we sort of wish they also had the outcome. We love a good Fortune 500 drama, but can’t we all just get along?

Via: PCMag

from Droid Life

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From Wired Top Stories: Intel Sees Exabucks in Supercomputing’s Future

Infiniband, for those who know it and use it, is crazy cool stuff… parallel computing wouldn’t be possible without it!  It beats Gigabit Ethernet hands down!  So Intel buying one of the 2 major companies in that market is huge!

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On Monday, Intel shelled out $125 million to buy Infiniband from Qlogic, a little-known maker of data center networking switches and cards. It seems like an odd move. Infiniband is a networking fabric technology, similar to Ethernet, but not nearly as widely used. So why is Intel paying millions for technology that lost out in the business world? Because supercomputing systems are now turning into big business.

from Wired Top Stories

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From Engadget: Dutch court rejects Apple appeal, says Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is legal

Finally!!!  I hope this is a sign back to normalcy for business… Apple needs to quit it!
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A court in the Hague has just cleared the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 for sale in the Netherlands, rejecting Apple’s requests for a nationwide ban. As NU.nl reports, a different Dutch court had already issued a similar ruling in October, which Cupertino promptly appealed, claiming that Sammy’s slate was too similar to its own iPad 2. Today, though, the Court of the Hague shot down Apple’s arguments, determining that there are enough differences between the two products to legally justify their coexistence. Granted, this is only one of manypatent battles that the two companies are currently waging, but for today, at least, it looks like Samsung has come out on top.[Thanks, Rolfski]

 

from Engadget

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From Engadget: RIM stock falls eight percent following CEO transition

Ouch. RIM, the maker of Blackberry, just can’t seem to catch a break…
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We rarely meddle with stock news around these parts, but this was a pretty significant piece of meat to chew on. After Research in Motion introduced Thorsten Heins as the new CEO last night and again in a conference call this morning, the company’s stock price tumbled a whopping 8.47 percent. When it comes to what kind of difference the transition will make for the struggling company, we haven’t had a high amount of confidence; while we hope for the best and want to see RIM turn things around, the falling stock appears to indicate that we’re not alone in expressing concerns about this morning’s events. Here’s some food for thought: when rumorsthat Samsung was interested in purchasing RIM flooded the internet, the latter company’s stocks spiked by nearly ten percent.

 

from Engadget