The latest release from Acer offers the potential for a 3D experience and a high def picture, all at a reasonable price.

Projectors are a great way to get that theatrical experience at home. Acer’s H5360 is a great example. It’s a slick projector that does just enough to be useful, but not so much that it’ll break the bank. 
 
The Acer H5360 is a 3D ready projector designed to be used with NVidia’s 3D Vision. It’s got an impressive brightness rating of 2500 ANSI lumens and a contrast ratio of 3,000:1. The H5360 has a native 720p resolution and a 16:9 aspect ratio.

It’s got an HDMI input of course, as well as jacks for component, composite and S-video signals and a VGA input. It sports a 3x color wheel design, and aims to recreate colors accurately thanks to Acer’s own ColorBoostII+ technology.
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IBM is opening a multi-million dollar lab to develop technologies for China’s burgeoning smart grid market.

Technology giants including Google Inc, Cisco and Microsoft are investing heavily in smart grids, intelligent power-distribution systems designed to be more responsive and interactive than today’s traditional power grids.

In terms of countries, China, the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitter, is investing the most. Beijing plans to invest USD 7.3 billion in smart grid projects in 2010, more than the United States, according to Zpryme, a market research firm in Austin, Texas.

China is far behind the United States and Japan in terms of its smart grid development.

“China is pursuing smart grids as aggressively or more aggressively than any other country in the world right now,” Brad Gammons, vice-president of IBM’s Global Energy & Utilities Industry, told Reuters in an embargoed interview last week.

“They’re very focused and have a very strong commitment to move in that direction,” he said.

IBM — which counts State Grid Corp. of China, the nation’s leading power grid operator, as one of its customers — unveiled its Energy & Utilities Solutions Lab in Beijing this week.

Smart grids include computerised monitoring of the electricity flowing though a power grid and allow utilities to manage electricity usage automatically.

IBM’s products span the range of smart grid systems, including the automation of power stations and electricity distribution networks with the use of digital sensors and communication networks.
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IBM researchers are a step closer to developing chips that use pulses of light instead of electrical signals to carry information between them.

The company has created a low-power device that can transfer information at high speeds using light.

“The device, called a nanophotonic avalanche photodetector, is the fastest of its kind and could enable breakthroughs in energy-efficient computing that can have significant implications for the future of electronics,” IBM said in a statement, which included a video that details how the device works.

The device announced Wednesday, which was detailed in an article published by the journal Nature, is capable of transmitting data at speeds up to 40G bits per second, using a 1.5 volt power supply, IBM said. The light signals are carried over silicon circuits instead of the copper wires that are now used to carry electrical signals between chips.

The device, which is made using existing semiconductor technology, is particularly significant because it uses roughly 20 times less power than previous devices, IBM said.

The goal of researchers is to build an on-chip optical interconnect that would allow the construction of computers capable of exaflop performance, equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 floating point operations per second (flops).

To put that in perspective, a 1 exaflop computer would be nearly 600 times faster than the world’s most powerful computer, a Cray XT5 called Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which is was benchmarked at 1.75 petaflops, or 0.0175 exaflops.
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Sony has introduced a new series of style-conscious headphones with integrated microphone suitable for online gaming and VoIP. The DR-350USB has a USB connection, and features a 30mm driver unit in the headset for extra bass, a detachable boom that Sony calls a “voice tube,” and inline controls for volume and mute. It will be available in black as well as uncharacteristically bright colors like gold and red.

The DR-320DPV is similar, but uses a 3.5mm jack and lacks a mute button. It will be sold in blue, black, gold, and red. The DR-310DPV has separate inline volume and mute controls. It will be available in soft fashion tones of green, pink, silver, and white.

Sony will introduce the new headphones to Asian markets in March. The company has not announced prices, or when they will be sold in the US, but often sells its audio peripherals worldwide.
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In January Skype had an idea to go beyond computers and mobile phones. During CES in Las Vegas, the company unveiled plans to integrate its VoIP service into TV sets and right from the bat, it found partners in Panasonic and LG.

Samsung is joining the game, but not in a “native way,” at least not for now. THE LED 7000 and 8000 Series will feature Skype capabilities once they are equipped with the Freetalk TV camera, which is available from the Skype Store. When that is set, users will be able to make and take Skype audio and video calls right from the comfort of their big-ass chair, navigating though menus using Samsung TV’s remote control.

It’s great to see all modern devices adding new functionalities, and I’ve no doubts that in a not that distant future we’ll be able to perform many of the functions a PC is required today on a TV or smartphone (which on its end could be connected to a larger screen). In the meantime, we still need multiple devices.
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Fujitsu’s services strategy has entered a new phase following the availability of its first cloud-based solution.

Previously announced as a core strategy for Fujitsu in 2010, the Infrastructure-as-a-Service offering is designed as a flexible environment allowing customers to retain control of servers, storage systems and applications. Organisations can manage their own usage, add and remove services and change capacity through an interactive portal.

The integrator expects to have its first customers on-board by the end of May. The outsourcer will focus strongly on its traditional large corporate and government customer base.

Fujitsu has broken its cloud strategy into four levels of consumption, aiming to making the transition to the cloud as minimally confusing as possible. Initially, infrastructure consumption will be the first step, and limited to the number of applications customer take onto the service to minimise complexity.

Application consumption becomes the second phase through Fujitsu’s cloud adoption model, followed by higher-level activity consumption. Finally, the outsourcer sees its cloud services moving into content consumption, which focus on media usage in the cloud.

Fujitsu CEO, Rod Vawdrey, said the biggest initial inhibitors to adoption, especially in the initial stages, would be customer confidence in cloud technologies.

“There’s still a long process ahead in terms of building confidence, with government agencies around security,” Vawdrey said. “It’s not a technical constraint, but at this stage it’s a policy constraint.

Vawdrey said initial adoption would likely be around relatively simple applications like mail. But as a major partner of organisations like SAP, Fujitsu sees the scale of its cloud applications expanding substantially.

Fujitsu’s solutions is being rolled out first in Australia and the UK, pioneering the start of a global strategy that aims to leverage off the company’s 97-strong datacentre network.
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Panasonic Australia’s Director, Consumer Electronics Group, Paul Reid, said, “We have created this new position within the Group to provide strategic leadership to our product marketing team across all our CE product categories—including Viera, Blu-ray, Home Theatre, Lumix, Air Conditioning and Home Appliances.

“Richard was previously our National Channel Sales Manager, and his market knowledge and experience will ensure excellent support, with a strong customer focus and understanding,” added Mr Reid.

Grant Sforcina will take up the position of National Channel Sales Manager and will work together with National Sales Operations Manager Steve Sutherland to develop and implement sales strategy for Panasonic’s CEG business nationally.

“Grant has been with Panasonic for around 15 years and is well-respected in his role of State Sales Manager, South Australia.  We look forward to him joining the Head Office team,” Mr Reid added.

Both appointments are effective from April 1, the start of Panasonic’s new financial year.

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IBM has come up with an algorithm that would allow a laptop in minutes to analyze terabytes of raw data — a process that now requires days on a supercomputer, reports PCWorld.com.

Two of IBM’s researchers based in Switzerland are to present the algorithm Thursday at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference in Seattle.

The thousand lines of code can sort, correlate and analyze millions of random data sets, potentially finding relationships such one that’s largely myth between buyers of diapers and beer in supermarkets, according to Forbes.

In addition to speed and better analysis, IBM is touting that the algorithm can save energy that would have been required to run the supercomputers.

Now that the algorithm has been proven to work scientifically, the research lab is collaborating with IBM’s Global Services unit to use it for specific services, Pratsini said. Ultimately, the algorithm could make its way to IBM applications such as the SPSS statistical analysis software, but the company didn’t provide a specific time frame for that.
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IBM is bringing data deduplication to its System z mainframes.

Big Blue is taking the dedupe technology from its Diligent acquisition and porting it to z/OS mainframe environments with the new System Storage TS7680 ProtecTIER Deduplication Gateway for System z. IBM claims as much as a 25 to 1 deduplication ratio for the new offering.

EMC’s Data Domain unit and Bus-Tech are two other data storage vendors that have dabbled in mainframe deduplication.

The TS7680 combines a virtual tape library (VTL) solution with an inline data deduplication algorithm called HyperFactor, which IBM said indexes the complete content of a repository and can be permanently hosted in the RAM because of its small size. The TS7680 also features two-node clustering and up to one petabyte of physical storage capacity per system.

IBM says the combination of virtual tape and data deduplication can speed backup and recovery operations and reduce the costs of tape processing operations by using disk storage as a repository for the deduplicated data, so applications can complete faster and speed the batch-processing window.

Virtual tape systems will be seen by the mainframe as a standard tape library, so existing backup processes don’t need to change to accommodate the systems.

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Intel Corp. CEO Paul Otellini announced an alliance by tech companies to spur the hiring of new college graduates in technical jobs this year. The group includes Dell Inc., one of Intel’s leading customers.

The Invest in America Alliance aims to enhance the nation’s competitiveness in technical fields including clean technology, information technology and biotechnology.

As part of the plan, Intel plans to join with 24 venture funds to invest $3.5 billion in new tech-based companies over the next two years.

It also has joined with a group of companies that have committed to increase hiring of college graduates this year.

“Dell is among a number of companies that are committed to the pledge of increasing college hiring this year,” said Dell spokesman David Frink.

Dell expects to hire about 200 engineering and technical workers in the U.S. this year, up from 150 last year. It also expects to hire college graduates with finance and marketing degrees, Frink said.

Other companies who have pledged to increase college hiring as part of the effort include: Accenture, Adobe Systems Inc., Broadcom Corp., CDW LLC, Cisco Systems, eBay Inc., General Electric Co., Google Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Liberty Mutual Group, Marvell Semiconductor Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.
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