Learnt from Anatomy...

By copying the human eye, scientists have developed what may be the world's smallest autofocus lens for mobile devices.  The majority of mobile phones today include built-in cameras, but these are not generally equipped with autofocus like most regular cameras.  This is because autofocus function requires cameras to move their lenses back and forth until they correctly focus on an object, which can prove a slow and energy-draining process, and energy is a paramount concern for mobile devices.  Instead of focusing cameras by using motors to move lenses, researchers have now hit upon having cameras that focus just like the human eye — by changing the shape of the lens. Human eyes squeeze or relax their flexible lenses to alter their curvature and thus how near or far they are focused.

In order to mimic the human eye, scientists needed a soft lens, as well as materials that could mimic the eye muscles that control the lens. The resulting device was a complex sandwich of four different layers. The end product is just a half-millimeter thin and as little as 3.5 millimeters across.  At the very top is a ceramic film made of lead zirconia titanate, which acts much like the muscle in an eye and responds to electricity. When voltage is not running through it, the film remains flat, and light can pass through. However, when a voltage is passed through the film, it flexes, bending the underlying glass membrane into a lens shape that focuses light-the higher the voltage, the greater the curvature.  Under that is a thin glass membrane that serves as the flexible lens. Beneath this membrane is a synthetic transparent rubber, which acts like a cushion when the lens flexes. At the very bottom is a glass support.

The new lens system also uses less than 1 percent of the energy to autofocus than a conventional motor-driven camera in a mobile device. The sharpness of the resulting images is also comparable with other mobile device cameras.  After creating a working prototype, researchers developed the lens further with the Norwegian optics firm PoLight. The company debut a mobile phone camera with the new lens in February at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Chromebook? Really? That's ALL I need?

Back in 2004, if you thought Gmail revolutionized the internet and how people communicated over the World Wide Web, think again!  The “father of Gmail”, Rajen Sheth has been at it again in what he does best - tweaking the existing technology to develop something better, and maybe even innovate something totally different, so it redefines the way an existing technology can operate.  After almost seven years after Mr. Sheth first pitched the Gmail concept to the senior leadership at Google, Rajen went on to build Gmail as the one of the largest browser based email services in the world.  Additionally, he has bitten off a large chunk of the online application (App) store market by conceptualizing, developing, and marketing the “Google Apps Marketplace” as a “healthy” alternative to Apple’s App Store, with a far more robust array of mobile and computer applications.  Now, he is urging businesses to move away from traditional hard-drive-equipped machines running local applications and embrace a new breed of stripped-down laptop that runs all apps inside a web browser: the Google Chromebook.  The concept behind the technology used in the Google Chromebook is a based on the premise that the web is ultimately more powerful than any native platforms – and may one day displace them all.  

Google bills the Chromebook as a kind of disposable laptop. If you lose the machine or trade it in for another, (most) all of your applications and data are waiting for you when you boot up a new one. Taking this idea to the extreme, the company is offering subscriptions to the machines, which are manufactured by Acer and Samsung. For $28 per machine per month, you get those continuous software updates, a web-based management console, Google tech support, and yes, hardware replacements.  ‘Apps’ moved traditional office applications into the browser, and Chromebook seeks to move everything into the browser.  The lightweight version of Google’s Chrome OS is the foundation upon which the Chromebook architecture will reside.  Like an ordinary browser, the lightweight Chrome OS can be readily updated over the wire. Most other software, including data, resides on the web. And each web application is confined to its own “sandbox,” so it doesn’t touch the rest of the system.  Ultimately, Sheth says, this means the machine is far cheaper to operate.