Solar Energy Organization of Indian to create India-centric technology and products

CHENNAI: The state-run Solar power Energy Organization of Indian is planning to set up small, head power vegetation with powerful linkages with analysis and educational organizations to create systems and items appropriate for Indian.

"We need to put up display solar systems, say, of five MW of two or three adjustments in a solar recreation area and gather the data for climbing them up. The solar recreation area will be close to R&D (research and development) systems and educational organizations," Anil Kakodkar, chair of the business, informed correspondents in an appointment.

He, however, dropped to reveal the potential places where such recreational areas would come up.

Kakodkar said the business would put up solar vegetation on its own.

"We are looking at focused sun vegetation while there are other options also," said the former chair of the Nuclear Energy Commission payment.

He said there is a probability of having large solar enthusiasts that would move direct natural light to be lastly gathered into a photovoltaic or pv component. Another technology is having a variety of a structure and photovoltaic or pv showcases. The reflection would indicate the natural light on a structure which would stream the light back to a photovoltaic or pv section on the earth.

Kakodkar said Indian should have a long-term ideal strategy for maintainable growth of the solar market while being aware of the need to do value addition within the nation.

One of the components of such a ideal strategy is to reduce the cost by creating systems and items that are India-centric.

"For example in Indian the dirt fill on solar power sections are great. In Rajasthan, the sand contaminants on the sections are great. We have to see how the dirt fill on sections could be reduced," Kakodkar said.

On the items side, he said the nation should look at the likelihood of taking solar lantern production to the bungalow market level that would produce tasks in non-urban areas.

Motorola Xoom featured in ad packed with Apple references

After posting an ad teaser and a series of web banner ads promoting its new tablet, Motorola presented its entire full length Super Bowl spot for the Xoom tablet, packed with references to Apple in a bid to court iPad users.

The new ad mixes imagery from Apple's iconic "1984" ad, which first introduced the Macintosh as liberating technology breakthrough, as well as "Lemmings," a more pointedly competitive spot Apple aired in 1985, which portrayed non-Mac users as blind followers who needed to remove their blindfolds to avoid catastrophic consequences.

While Apple's "1984" is universally regarded as one of the best ads ever produced, "Lemmings" was immediately criticized as a failure for being perceived as negatively depicting the company's would-be customers as ignorant and misguided.

Motorola's new spot for the Xoom tablet works to balance the two ideas together, portraying Apple's customers as ubiquitous clones wearing the same white earbuds and blank uniforms, but injecting a sympathetic storyline where a Xoom-using man flirts with a girl using images presented on his tablet. The girl then responds to his advances by removing her white iPod earbuds.

Drones in white portrayed in the ad are depicted listening to small handheld iPods, but none are shown using an iPad. To a casual observer, the man using Motorola's Xoom might be mistaken for being an iPad, as all that's shown of the new tablet is its virtual page-turning in a nondescript ebook reader app (reading George Orwell's "1984"), Google Maps (featuring Android-only 3D building views that most viewers are unlikely to catch), and the camera app new to Android 3.0 Honeycomb.

A brief animated cartoon depicting a stick figure man giving flowers to a stick figure girl, and published to the man's own tablet via YouTube, perhaps using the Android-only Adobe Flash, is shown (as opposed to just giving her the flowers, something that doesn't require an $800 tablet), but it is not explained how the photo of the flowers the man takes was converted into the animation.

Apple's own iPad ads have focused on more obvious and practical applications of the device via its library of as Apple claims, more than 60,000 unique apps.

Recognizing the shots of the new tablet as being distinct from an iPad would require a technophile enthusiast's understanding of the differences of the two, which is never presented in the spot. Instead, the new tablet is only identified briefly by name at the end of the clip, "Motorola Zoom with Google, the world's first Android 3.0 tablet," with none of its unique features ever been expressly noted.

Xoom details

Motorola's new tablet boasts a slightly larger screen and resolution (10.1 inches, 1280x800) than Apple's existing iPad. It also uses a cinematic 16:9 display ratio aimed at watching movies, contrasted with the more computer-like 1024x768 resolution of the iPad's 9.7 inch screen and its portrait-oriented dock, aimed more at productivity apps like Apple's own Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

Internally, Motorola's Xoom tablet uses a faster dual core Nvidia Tegra 2 SoC, roughly similar to the new Texas Instruments chip used by RIM's PlayBook; both are a full generation ahead of the Apple A4 SoC used in last year's iPad and the similar Samsung Hummingbird chip used in the Galaxy Tab. Xoom also includes 1GB of RAM, four times as much as the existing iPad.

The Xoom also includes dual cameras; a 2 megapixel front facing camera for video chat and a 5 megapixel rear-facing unit with 4× digital zoom and auto focus, capable of 720p video capture. Apple's existing iPad has no cameras, while the coming iPad 2 refresh is expected to add a much simpler VGA FaceTime camera and basic 1 megapixel rear camera identical to that being used in the iPod touch, rather than the significantly better 5 megapixel camera used by iPhone 4.

Xoom is, according to an Engadget report, expected to become available February 24, in a CDMA/EVDO 3G-only version sold by Verizon for $800. The unit will be accompanied by optional data plans that start at $20 per month for 1GB, but an ad from BestBuy also notes that "to activate WiFi functionality on this device, a minimum of 1 month data subscription is required." Unlike the iPad, there are no cheaper WiFi-only versions of the Xoom.

Toshiba is expected to release its own Honeycomb tablet with hardware very similar to Motorola's. Toshiba launched a product site for its new tablet using Flash, which blocked visitors using an iPhone or iPad, displaying a teaser message indicating that site required Flash, something iOS doesn't support.

However, the company also created a plain HTML mobile version of the site that works fine on iPhones and iPads, and simply made it impossible to accidentally discover.

Stereo satellites move either side of Sun

Two US spacecraft have moved either side of the Sun to establish observing positions that should return remarkable new information about our star.

An image of the far side of the Sun based on Stereo data from Wednesday. The black line indicates a data gap that will be closed in the coming days

Launched in 2006, the Stereo satellites have gradually been drifting apart - one in front of the Earth in its orbit, the other lagging behind.

On Sunday, Nasa said the spacecraft had arrived at points that put the Sun directly between them.

It will give solar physicists the first 360-degree view of our star.

Stereo is short for Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory.

The mission is studying the Sun's great explosive events that hurl billions of tonnes of charged particles at Earth - events that can disrupt power grids and satellites.

These Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), as they are known, can also be hazardous to astronauts in space.

Professor Richard Harrison of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, is an investigator on the project.

He told BBC News: "By being away from the Sun-Earth line, you can look back at the space between the Sun and the Earth and see any of these clouds, these coronal mass ejections that are thrown out of the Sun and are coming our way - you can even see these things passing over the Earth. Those are the key to what Stereo's all about."

The two spacecraft will continue to move further apart, heading toward each other on the opposite side of the Sun from the Earth; this means that the full view provided by the two craft will fade, leaving a growing region behind the Sun - on the Earth side - that they do not see.

However, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, launched in Earth orbit a year ago, will remain fixed on the Sun, providing the missing piece of the puzzle.

Achieving an all-round-view view of the Sun will be key to understanding what drives the complex processes in the Sun, believes Professor Harrison.

The Stereo satellites are already feeding data into space weather forecasts

"You really see it with these widely separated regions of the Sun's atmosphere that are connected magnetically, showing activity at the same time, or causing activity somewhere else," he explained.

"These things stress to us that you can't really study the Sun in great detail just by looking at a bit of it, any more than you could understand the brain by looking at a bit of it or study the Earth's polar regions by looking at the equator. You need this global view to really piece the jigsaw puzzle together."

Scientists suspect that activity on the Sun can on occasions go global, with eruptions on opposite sides of the Sun triggering and feeding off of one another. With the Stereo craft in their new positions, this phenomenon can now be studied.

Stereo is already being used to improve "space weather" forecasts for airlines, power companies, satellite operators, and other customers.

Flood of new iPhone buyers coming says uSamp survey

ViP Day is nearly upon us. That’s Verizon iPhone day this Thursday when the dreams of smartphone owners apparently will come true—availability of the popular phone on the most robust phone network in the U.S.

At last, app fans can own Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone on the Verizon (VZ) wireless network. Many consider Verizon’s network superior to that over at AT&T (T), which has had the iPhone exclusively since 2007.

By all indications, Thursday will be a very good day for Verizon. But just how good?

Research by uSamp (United Sample, Inc.), an online survey firm, suggests a land-office business at Verizon as users of Google’s (GOOG) Android OS phones from Google and Research in Motion’s (RIMM) Blackberry phones switch to iPhone. Lots of AT&T iPhone may queue up to make the switch too. uSamp surveyed more than 700 smartphone users with a 3.6 percent margin of error.

“The uSamp survey affirms initial reports of widespread defections from AT&T,” said uSamp. “(A) majority of Verizon’s current Android and BlackBerry users already have iPhone fever, reporting that they intend to head to Apple as soon as the iPhone hits the shelves: 54 percent are very likely (25 percent) or somewhat likely (29 percent) to go iPhone on Feb. 10.”

Meanwhile, uSamp reports that many AT&T iPhone users claim they are making the break to a VZ iPhone, but perhaps surprisingly, despite gripes about dropped calls, coverage, etc., many plan to stick with Ma Bell.

“The uSamp survey affirms initial reports of widespread defections from AT&T. According to the survey, more than a quarter of current AT&T customers (26 percent) intend to switch to Verizon’s iPhone on the day it becomes available. For now, however, the remaining 74 percent would rather wait than switch,” uSamp said.

Conversion fees aren’t cheap after all. And there was concern about a decline in service.uSamp also found:

--Men are more likely than women to switch to Verizon’s iPhone.

--Younger customers are not only more willing to wait in line for Verizon’s iPhone on Feb. 10 but, in general, they are more likely to make the switch.

--Midwestern Verizon users of BlackBerry and Android are least willing to wait in line for the iPhone on Feb. 10.

Google and RIM should be following developments closely.

Philip Elmer-DeWitt observed in Fortune that if the survey is accurate: “Research in Motion is in trouble and the run on Google Android phones is about to hit a wall.”

Will iPhone be as big a hit on Verizon as uSamp’s sample suggests? We may know more later this week.

Google calls Microsoft a copycat (week in review)

Google has a harsh word to describe Microsoft: plagiarist.

After noticing curious search results at Bing, then running a sting operation to investigate further, Google has concluded that Microsoft was copying Google search results into its own search engine. The story began with Google's team for correcting typographical errors in search terms, which monitors its own and rivals' performance closely.

Next came the sting, which featured a one-time code that manually ranked a page for a specific term. Google then had employees type in those terms from home using Internet Explorer with both Suggested Sites and the Bing Toolbar enabled, clicking the top results as they went. Two weeks later, Bing showed the Google results that had been hand-coded.

A Bing executive acknowledged monitoring what links users clicked but essentially described it as letting humans help gather data through crowdsourcing.

However, another executive was adamant that Microsoft was not using Google's search results.

"We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop," Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's senior VP of its Online Services Division, wrote in a post on Bing's community blog. "We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting."

F.C.C. to Propose Expanding Broadband Service to Underserved Areas

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday will propose the first steps toward converting the $8 billion fund that subsidizes rural telephone service into one for helping pay to provide broadband Internet service to underserved areas, according to commission officials.

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News

Julius Genachowski, chairman of the F.C.C., is expected to call for a consolidation of existing methods of supporting rural phone service into a new pool of funds.

The F.C.C. chairman, Julius Genachowski, is expected to outline the proposal in a speech on Monday, the officials said.

Most of the money under discussion involves a longstanding subsidy known as the Universal Service Fund, which is paid for through fees tacked onto most consumers’ phone bills and distributed among telephone companies to subsidize the high costs of providing service to rural areas.

Mr. Genachowski will propose phasing out the payments between phone companies, which he says create “inefficiencies and perverse incentives” that result in waste in the fund. The F.C.C. will also propose consolidating existing methods of paying for rural phone service into a new pool to be called the Connect America Fund, to be used for helping pay for making broadband available to underserved areas.

The current Universal Service Fund and its spending methods are “unsustainable,” according to a draft of Mr. Genachowski’s remarks prepared for Monday. “It was designed for a world with separate local and long-distance telephone companies, a world of traditional landline telephones before cellphones or Skype, a world without the Internet — a world that no longer exists.”

“At the end of this transition, we would no longer subsidize telephone networks; instead we would support broadband,” which then could be used for phone service, Mr. Genachowski plans to say. He will make the remarks in a speech to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan research institute in Washington.

In some cases, the Universal Service Fund pays more than $20,000 a year just to connect a single rural household to telephone service. But in some local markets that still receive such subsidies, four or more companies are competing to provide service — indicating that it would be economically feasible to serve those areas without tapping the fund. Mr. Genachowski says that more than $100 million a year from the fund now goes to such areas.

Still, in an interview last Thursday, Mr. Genachowski said he rejected the idea, supported by some members of Congress, that the fund should simply be eliminated. Doing so, he said, would let the broadband revolution bypass a substantial portion of the 24 million Americans who the commission says lack access to high-speed Internet connections.

The F.C.C.’s proposed changes would deal with one portion of the Universal Service Fund known as the high-cost program, which typically accounts for about 55 percent of the fund’s annual disbursements, which totaled an estimated $8 billion last year.

Some other portions of the program already have been partially updated, including the E-Rate program, which helps provide faster Internet connections to schools and libraries, and the rural health program, which provides high-speed Internet connections to rural clinics so they can establish remote consultations with medical specialists.

Next month, the commission is expected to recommend changes to the Lifeline and Link-Up programs, which provide assistance to low-income households to help them pay for installation and monthly charges for telephone service.

But the F.C.C. is several months away from addressing what could be one of the toughest aspects of the fund to revamp — its financing. The program currently is paid for by telecommunications companies, which are required to contribute a percentage of their long-distance revenues to the fund. Telephone companies have long passed on to customers the cost of those mandatory contributions.

The contribution rates have risen sharply in recent years, as long-distance prices and therefore revenues — which are the benchmark measure for determining contribution rates — have fallen.

The contribution factor, as the rate is known, has increased to 15.5 percent, up from 7.3 percent at the beginning of 2003. Trying to thwart misuse of the funds, Congress has introduced bills in the last two sessions to overhaul the program — some of which would expand universal service and others that would limit its growth. Those efforts are expected to be revived in the current session.

So far, the F.C.C. has outlined efforts to expand broadband availability only though wired connections. But commission officials say that they will almost certainly look at whether it makes sense to try to use the growth of wireless Internet service as a spur to expand high-speed Internet access for underserved areas.

Google Releases Chrome 9, Now With New Features, WebGL GoodiesGoogle Releases Chrome 9, Now With New Features, WebGL Goodies

Google launched the latest version of Chrome late last week with support for multiple new features. While Google no longer labels Chrome with a version number or admits such a thing exists, information under the "Stats For Nerds" link in the browser's task manager confirms that this is Chrome 9.0.597.84. There are no default UI changes, at least not when updating from Chrome 8.2.

One of the new features Google is introducing with Chrome 9 is disabled by default. It's called Chrome Instant and it extends Google Instant functionality across the entire browser. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Google Instant refers to the search engine's relatively new ability to return search results on the fly while the query is still being typed. This can make the list of results shift rather confusingly, but it can also be handy when testing search queries; two terms out of a planned set of three may actually return the desired link while adding the third removes it.


When Chrome Instant is enabled, the browser attempts to guess your intended destination and preloads it while you type. An example of this functionality is displayed below.

Note that the web address is only partly typed but the site is already loaded.

If the browser can't guess your intended destination—if you're headed to a site you've never been before—it displays Google Search results for your intended location. Anyone with concerns about how Google logs and uses this information is advised to consult the company's logging policies (a link to these policies is displayed in the same window).

The other new browser feature is support for WebGL. WebGL is the OpenGL-derived standard for in-browser 3D hardware acceleration; we've previously discussed it as a major upcoming feature of IE9. Google has created a small library of WebGL demos to feature as part of Chrome 9's release, available here. We found no issues or errors when we tested multiple demos using Opera 11.01 and Firefox 4.0 Beta 8 to ensure cross-browser compatibility.

We'd recommend the CoolIris demo to anyone who wants an example of how WebGL support can improve traditional Internet search functions. CoolIris is a browser plugin that allows users to search image repositories and displays the results in a near-infinite panoramic window that the user can pan as desired. The WebGL demo preserves this functionality (despite the demo's wording, you can search for any type of photos you like), but images resolve more quickly and pan more smoothly using 3D acceleration.

Finally, Chrome 9 integrates Chrome Web Store access into the browser and patches a number of security issues / miscellaneous bugs. There's even a humorous note where the Chrome developers write: "Special thanks to the Reddit community, for playing so much of the game “Z-Type” that they uncovered a Chromium audio bug -- see below!"

If you're a typing geek, Z-Type is more fun than it deserves to be. It's compatible with all the latest versions of Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. If you take a crack at it, post your scores below.