The lithium-ion battery in the average smartphone is capable of lasting a good number of years if it’s not exposed to overheating or some other form of permanent damage, but the same working assumption can’t always be made elsewhere. When it comes to electric vehicles, for instance, the risk of catastrophic power failure must be…
Year: 2015
Meet Sony’s upcoming biometric lifelog
In an industry where product leaks are a practically weekly occurrence, the fact that Sony managed to keep a lid on the features of its upcoming LifeLog Camera for nearly two years since the initial prototype was revealed to the public constitutes quite a feat. But regulatory disclosure requirements catch up to even the most…
Samsung is developing a fabric-like display for smart clothing
Now that the first curved and bendable displays are starting to enter mass production, Samsung is moving on to the next adjective with a new elastic diode arrangement capable of stretching like a fabric. The technology, which was revealed in a recently published patent application from the company’s monitor-making business, bears a close resemblance to…
Wearing a smartwatch could one day save your life
It appears that the vehicle-integrated smartwatch LG and Audi previewed at CES earlier this year is much more than the novelty driving accessory it has been made out to be. The South Korean electronics giant is seeking intellectual property protections for a new piece of homegrown software that can detect when an accident occurs and…
IBM is using analytics to encourage recycling
It appears that Big Blue’s interest in connected devices is much broader than what has officially been acknowledged. A new patent filing from the company published this week reveals the specifications for a smart recycling bin that harnesses the image recognition capabilities of its cloud-based analytics platform to try and encourage consumers to become more conscious about how…
Microsoft is trying to get into 3D printing
Look no further than a company’s patent trail to understand its expansion plans. If some moonshot technology suddenly comes up in a filing and never resurfaces again, it’s likely just the legal department trying to make the most out of employees’ overflowing imagination. But if that technology starts appearing in more applications over time, then you may have just stumbled…
Solar concentrators are finally becoming a viable energy source
Manufacturing follows a very basic economic principle. The easier a product is to make, the faster it can be assembled, which means that the production line is able to churn out more units and exploit the resulting operational gains to cut overhead. With luck, the savings are passed onto the consumer. But the axiom is…
Sony is developing an augmented reality headset for surgeons
It appears that Sony’s interest in augmented reality is no longer limited to gaming. A Japanese intellectual property registration request that found its way its way into the public records of the United States Patent and Trademark Office this week reveals that the electronics giant has quietly designed a specialized head-mounted display designed to help surgeons…
Microsoft has found a way to halve the size of mobile cameras
Microsoft’s mobile engineers appear to be paying close attention to the work of their peers over at its application development business. In that world, if a certain component is used multiple times throughout a project, you simply split it off into a standalone library that is shared among the other program files to avoid burdening…
Hong Kong university will use drones to fight bad Wi-Fi
The next time you visit Hong Kong, don’t be too surprised if you find miniature drones roaming about your hotel lobby. That’s part of a plan by researchers from the local public research university to combat one of the biggest impediments to tourism in the modern era and urban life as a whole: Poor Wi-Fi. You’ve…
Qualcomm has designed a touch sensor for holographic phones
One of the best measures of a trend’s progress in the consumer electronics world is the reaction of the component suppliers. If the suppliers start taking concrete steps towards addressing it, then they anticipate demand from their manufacturing clients, who in turn must be anticipating demand from consumers. That’s why it’s such an encouraging sign that…
New filing offers a rare glimpse into IBM’s offensive patent strategy
IBM has won more patents over the last two decades than any other organization thanks to a prolific research apparatus that takes the credit for such notable inventions as the HDD, barcodes and the Watson supercomputer. But not all of that intellectual property originates from its product development efforts. A large portion is the fruit of a…
LG is taking holograms mobile
Samsung is no longer the one only mobile holography game in town. Only a few short months after a patent application revealed that the Seoul-based electronics giant is experimenting with miniaturized projection technology that could allow its phones to display content several inches ahead of the screen, cross-city rival LG has filed over a dozen…
IBM is bringing the corporate world’s unbreakable encryption to your phone
As any first-year computer science undergraduate could tell you, the rigid programming of current software prevents applications from taking any truly random actions. That requires important corporate systems like the mainframes processing your payments to tap physical parameters such as light and background radiation to generate cryptographic sequences that hackers can’t theoretically predict. The technology has been around…