The latest version of Affectiva’s mood-sensing wristband combines its sensor with Bluetooth so the device can broadcast your emotions to a web site. Granted, the $2,000 sensor is used primarily in research and certain medical situations, but it doesn’t have to stop there. Read more »
Exclusive: There are lots of great summer internships at Silicon Valley startups. But top engineering students often pass them up for the money and name recognition companies like Google can provide. So Kleiner Perkins has partnered with InternMatch to attract top-flight students to its portfolio companies. Read more »
Several of the young entrepreneurs at this week’s MIT Emtech 2011 conference were executives from established companies but many more were academic researchers who said the divide between “pure research” and commercialization is bigger than ever as the lengthy recession persists. Read more »
Most of the entrepreneurial pitches this week at MIT’s Emtech 2011 focused on elevating high-tech for markets that are already pretty tech saturated. Folks talked about smart vehicular networks that will allow cars to share information. Two entrepreneurs went the other way. Read more »
Imagine if your car could know about a huge pothole just ahead. Or a traffic snarl. Or both. Would that be of interest to you? USC researcher Bhaskar Krishnamachari is working to enable a peer-to-peer network of “smart” cars that share information as they travel. Read more »
The Jetson’s Rosie the Robot is not reality yet, but new-age robots are getting smarter and more adaptive given new toolsets, artifiical intelligence and good old-fashioned training, according to robotics experts at the Emtech 2011 conference at MIT this week. Read more »
Smartphones are increasingly becoming the remote controls of our lives. Car owners can use theirs to check on the battery level and driving range and adjust the climate control system. An MIT project explores new ways to use smartphones to help drivers cut fuel costs. Read more »
We are moving from the information age to the insight age. So the computer industry is building chip with more cores to keep up with influx of data and the need to process it faster. But more cores means new ways of programming. Read more »
There’s nothing like a face-to-face conversation, but that hasn’t stopped businesses and technologists from bridging the distance that separates us using telephones, video conferencing, fancy robots, and now wormholes, to give the illusion of being there. So what do these services need to succeed? Read more »
As businesses rely more and more on analytics and data to make strategic decisions, they continue to struggle with some thorny issues, such as incorporating data into company culture and allowing employees to access the data they need, according to a recent study. Read more »
Thanks to the rating systems in place on such popular websites as Yelp, Amazon and eBay, many people are comfortable evaluating things in absolute terms: a two-star restaurant, a B movie and so on. But new MIT research says this approach is fundamentally flawed. Read more »
The Knight Foundation says it wants to help reinvent local and community-level media through the Center for Civic Media at MIT — the non-profit entity just announced new funding for the center, and a new director in online media pioneer and long-time Harvard University fellow Ethan Zuckerman. Read more »
The “uncanny valley”– the quality of an animation or robot looking close to, but not exactly like, real life — may be set to get even smaller. MIT researchers have developed new computing techniques for reproducing the slight natural blur of moving objects in animation. Read more »
A buzzy startup working on a battery that sandwiches molten salt between two layers of liquid metal, has gotten seed funding from Bill Gates. The company is called Liquid Metal Battery, and it’s the brainchild of MIT Professor Donald Sadoway. Read more »
MIT’s Media Lab is a hothouse of talent that helped usher in the digital revolution of the 1990s — but as the Internet has become dominated by large companies, its influence has waned. Now incoming director Joi Ito must help it regain its momentum. Read more »
People are complicated organisms that have evolved systems of feedback and governance to ensure our minds and out bodies perform well. As computers gain more cores, MIT scientists are building an operating system to create a similar system of feedback to ensure the machine performs well. Read more »
Silicon wafer production has been in existence for decades, yet there is stil room for improving the process. That’s the thinking behind a new venture undertaken by 1366 Technologies, which has raised $20 million to take its new technology out of the lab and into the factory. Read more »
MIT’s Technology Review magazine has released its annual list of the top young innovators under 35, a group that includes sociologist and Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd, Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp, telecom scientist Gabriel Charlet and David Kobia, co-founder of web-based emergency services network Ushahidi. Read more »
The “Internet of Things” (IoT) will likely be one of the most important technological advances of this century. The emergence of Cloud computing, meanwhile, has created the application and device management backbone needed to scale to and support billions of connected objects. Consumer, governmental and business trends are also pushing us toward the IoT. And despite inhibitors to growth, such as privacy issues and creating sustainable business models, we will see increasing benefits in our personal and community lives as the IoT takes hold. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
I have encountered executives who were balls of fire mid-morning, but turned into stone by 4 p.m.; I’ve coached creative types who rocked the house in the early a.m. but were slackers at lunchtime; and I’ve seen consultants whose best work got done after dinner. Read more »
