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…
Month: November 2015
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…