Bosch and Fjorg the design company recently unveilved thier "plug and play office" for  Copenhagen IT University . We Make Money Not Art says, "Premised on the condition of moving, the system considers possibilities for rearranging rooms and combining elements and is intended for an innovative organizational structure in constant change.

It consists of big shipping crates that work as modules with different things on the inside, e.g. a workstation, part of a conference room or a kitchen. The crates are designed to fit into any standard building. When the crates are brought into the building from the truck, they are placed in a room and opened. Each function has its own crate with its own explicit identity and design.

The crates include three different kinds of workstations, enabling individual Lab Agents to choose their own place according to character, need or mood. There is a small, intimate meeting room with a green lounge sofa and a video-conference room built as a light green ‘blue-screen film studio’, enabling choices between backgrounds for video conferences. There is also a pink kitchen box, as well as a big biomorphic worktable with a palm tree in the centre. The crates can be combined into rooms with closed doors or left open.

See Bosch & Fjord

Moores Law deals with the doubling of transistors on an IC every 16 months but for modern devices, the IC is only ten per cent or less of the total product. The remaining 90% is resistors, capacitors, inductors, antennas, filters, and switches. Students at Atlanta's Georgia Tech have made breakthroughs in miniaturization of these components that allow for increased performance well beyond Moore's Law.

GROWING FASTER: System integration using system-on-package (SOP) technology from Georgia Tech's Microsystems Packaging Research Center will see "More Than Moore's Law" take hold, as measured by component density. From about 50 components per square centimeter in 2004, component density will climb to about a million per square centimeter by 2020. Functional system density will escalate similarly.

IEEE Spectrum   has a huge spread on the SOP approach and its ramifications saying "This last application will see the convergence of biology, chemistry, and digital technology to produce capsules small enough to be introduced into the human body to monitor personal health daily. A capsule could be used, for example, to check vital signs and monitor parameters such as glucose levels, blood pressure, and even signs of cancer. The capsule would then wirelessly communicate the person's health status to a Web terminal outside the body or, via the Internet, to a physician (or to anyone, anywhere). Fitted with a reservoir, the capsule could also deliver drugs at programmed intervals to selected places within the body.

That tiny body capsule is certainly a compelling product, and we can expect many others. Imagine, for example, a home entertainment and control hub—a device that combines voice, video, data, sensing, and control functions. It could include a home computer, a cellphone, environmental and other sensors, a health monitoring device, and a satellite TV receiver, to name just some possibilities. A wireless broadband connection would link the system to the Internet, and the hub would serve as the remote control for all the home's appliances.

Yet the hub would be as small as a credit card.

These radios were made by Jeff Duntemann in his home workshop. His blog is quite technical for those interested in radio technology and the different  electronic components used in his projects but what I and others have loved are the photographs of what he has created. 

In InfoBreath, the participant is presented with a cybernetic flower arcing from a frosted pane of glass. Rigged with a breath sensor and connected to Carnivore, an internet packet sniffer, the flower is cued in to the wireless network flowing in the space immediately surrounding it. Breathing on the plant triggers a flurry of text that makes visible the wireless internet traffic passing through the air around the viewer. The plant absorbs this information, analyzing the bytes of data for those aspects that seem more ‘alive,’ or human-generated, and releases those packets in a form comprehensible to humans.

It's been a long time coming, but Japan's Toppan Printing has finally produced the prototype of a flexible thin film transistor (TFT) display. The display, which boosts a resolution of 4,800 pixels and is only 320 microns thin, consists of lightweight, bendable backplanes, making it possible to create future reading devices that use little power, provide higher screen quality under all lighting conditions and from all angles, and can be folded and rolled like a daily newspaper. Only caveat: don't expect to see anything like this in your store before 2008.

Source: MobileReadNetworks  

Douglas Bagnall's Filmmaking Robot can edit short films. The computer software programme can select from a range of video footage, and even has an in-built ability to make aesthetic decisions. The robot is programmed to "get bored" and it endlessly shifts its decision-making, choosing footage based purely on the colour blue, for example, or focussing on people and movement.

Product Overdose featured the top ten geek watches along with beautiful images and and links for anyone interested in  buying these gems! Certainly not something I could afford this week but still wonderful to look at. Take a look at the selection below and click through for the original content.

Mr. Gadget 1.0 GB USB Watch

The probe is similar to action taken by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who last month continued an investigation of digital download collusion and price fixing.

The investigations are in the early stages, and a long way from any formal charges being filed, industry observers noted. However, even the possibility of price-fixing, and the potential for any resulting action against them may aid those negotiating with the industry on music downloads, including Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL)

What is certain is that the industry's four major recording labels -- EMI, Sony BMG, Vivendi-Universal and Warner -- are extremely sensitive to being perceived as colluding or conspiring on prices, Yankee Group Senior Analyst Mike Goodman told the E-Commerce Times.

Such a perception would have an impact on "anything and everything the music labels do," he said. "They are extremely cautious about trying to prevent the appearance of collaboration."

Goodman stressed, however, that the results of any investigation are likely a long way off.

"Right now, whether there are subpoenas or not, it's kind of just smoke and not fire," he added.

Source: Technology News