From the website:

"The BIF Innovation Story Studio isn't just an archive of cool videos, interviews, audio and narrative pieces. It is BIF's platform for helping our innovation community learn from each other, share their wisdom, and revel in the outcomes of our experiments, whether they succeed or fail. Take a look. Take a listen. And, if you have a good story to share, let us know ."

Link to BIF Innovation Story Studio Videos

The Austin Tech Happy Hour is for young technology professionals to relax and network with each other.

It is designed to facilitate adding new contacts to your network, for discussing current technology innovations, and even for finding a candidate to add to your team.

Link to Austin Tech Happy Hour

Courtesy Burjdubai

The Dubai tower, still under construction in the Gulf emirate of Dubai, is now world's tallest free-standing structure

The Burj Dubai tower is now 555 metres (1,831.5 feet) tall and has surpassed the 553-metre- (1,824.9-feet) CN Tower in Toronto, Canada, which had held the record for the world's tallest free-standing structure since 1976.

Link to the Dubai Tower

Microsoft TM


Adobe TM

The new Microsoft Silverlight video player can achieve 720p high-definition video rate - higher that the current Adobe Flash offering.

To counter this - Adobe is releasing "Moviestar", an upgrade to Flash that supports better-quality video than the current player.

Microsoft will also soon release a Linux version of Silverlight - to be called "Moonlight".

Microsoft has also released its Expression Encoder 1.0 software for designers to create Silverlight content.

Link to Microsoft Silverlight

Link to Adobe Flash

Courtesy CIO Magazine

The Difference Engine, invented in 1821, was an early precursor to the modern computer.

Today, IT is making a difference in every aspect of work, play, politics and life. This blog (edited by Abbie Lundberg, Editor, CIO Magazine) reports on interesting new applications of technology and the people behind them. It comments on the changes taking place and what they mean for decision-making around and management of IT.

http://advice.cio.com

Courtesy Codes and Ciphers Heritage Trust

From the UK National Museum of Computing website:

"The Rebuild by the Colossus Rebuild Project, Leader Anthony E Sale Hon FBCS, has taken 10 years and has involved over 6,000 man-days of volunteer effort. At a conservative daily rate of £200 this gives a value of £1.2 Million for the Colossus Mk 2 Rebuild.

The Rebuild is now working and can demonstrate most of the code breaking work against the German Lorenz cipher in WW II.

The Rebuild stands in its historically correct place, the room in H Block, in Bletchley Park, where Colossus No. 9 stood in WW II."

Link to the The Colossus Mk2 Rebuild Project

This wiki is intended as a resource for the Information Systems community for the development, maintenance, and archival of Information Systems model curricula. It was initiated and is currently administered by the Joint ACM/AIS Undergraduate Curriculum Revision Task Force. The planned community-led curriculum development process is described on this site.

The ACM/AIS Undergraduate Curriculum Revision Task Force is responsible for editing the actual content pages, but we invite all members of the IS community to register as users of this wiki and participate in the discussion.

Link to the IS Curriculum Wiki

IHPCRC Photo

The Iranian computer research center (IHPCRC) in Tehran claims to have built a supercomputer out of AMD's Opteron processors. It is a Linux-based system with 216 Opteron processing cores which is able to deliver peak performance level of 860 billion floating-point operations per second.

This is remarkable because the United States has imposed federal antiterrorism trade regulations that strictly prohibit the sale of any computer technology built in US or by US companies to Iran.

When Tehran's Amirkabir University of Technology posted the announcement on their webpage they also posted the above photo which shows stacks of shiping boxes from the United Arab Emirates where Thacker/Sky Electronics is located who is one of AMD's biggest authorized distributors.

The photo was quickly removed.

Link to the Iranian High Performance Computing Research Center (IHPCRC)

Courtesy Honda


Honda Research 3D CPU (to power the Asimo Robot)
Courtesy Honda

From the Honda Research website:

"The architecture of the brain is completely different from current computer systems. The ultimate brain-like computer will appear most likely with very specialized hardware. We will clearly build and explain its architecture by developing hypothetical brain models in parallel to creating potential hardware. We will then evaluate its interactive intelligence in a real world situation.

Brain-Machine Interface (BMI) – BMI is a new interface concept utilizing brain activities to control machines. To understand BMI, we will focus on the non-invasive measurement and decoding of natural brain activities that accompanies human states such as recognition, emotion, intention and motion. The anticipated results will provide fundamental novel man-machine communication technologies and novel algorithms for brain-like computing.

Human-Robot Interaction – Despite recent technological development of intelligent robots in areas such as speech, image, environmental understanding and behavior control, we are still far from building robots that can naturally, robustly, and adaptively interact with humans in real world situations. We are pursuing a novel intelligence model that will integrate individual technologies and learning techniques to achieve such human-robot interactions."

Link to Honda Research

Courtesy SONY


Courtesy SONY

In Japan, SONY has announced its latest fuel cell. It is a device which does not use the more traditional ethanol or methanol, but instead it uses glucose extracted from fruit juice and sports drinks.

In a posted video, the four-cell device can be seen powering speakers attached to a Network Walkman. The fuel cell is filled with a squirt of juice extract as a power source. Also a small fan is powered using the sugar in a Gatorade-type sports drink.

According to SONY, enzymes break down the glucose, allowing the "Bio Battery" to generate an amazing 50mW of power.

Link to the SONY press release

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin will unveil Ranger, the world’s most powerful supercomputer that is available for non-classified scientific research. With a peak performance of 504 teraflops, Ranger is 50,000 times more powerful than today’s PCs, and five times more capable than any open-science computer available to the national science community.

“Ranger is an incredible asset for The University of Texas at Austin, for the national scientific community and for society as a whole,” William Powers Jr., President of The University of Texas at Austin, said. “That the National Science Foundation has entrusted us with this vital scientific instrument for research is a testament to the expertise of the staff at TACC, who are among the most innovative leaders in high performance computing.”

Ranger is the biggest HPC computing resource on the NSF TeraGrid, a nationwide network of academic HPC centers that provides scientists and researchers access to large-scale computing power and resources. With the ability to model complex systems on a scale never accessible before, scientists and engineers across all fields are expecting considerable advancements that will expand the research universe and solve “grand challenge” questions affecting the world.

“Ranger is so much more powerful than anything that’s come before it for open science research,” Jay Boisseau, director of TACC, said. “It will be the first time researchers in many disciplines will be able to conduct simulations they have been planning in some cases for many years.”

Ranger will provide more than 500 million processor hours of computing time to the science community, performing more than 200,000 years of computational labor over its four-year life span.

Funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF) “Path to Petascale” program, Ranger is a collaboration among TACC, The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Computational Engineering and Science (ICES), Sun Microsystems, Advanced Micro Devices, Arizona State University and Cornell University. The $59 million award, which covers the $30 million system and four years of operating costs, was announced in fall 2006. The investment marks NSF’s renewed dedication to leadership-class high-performance computing.

Ranger is housed at UT's J.J. Pickle Research Campus in North Austin and along with TACC, will provide the opportunity for university and national research communities to operate wide-ranging superior computing resources and services that allow meticulous research. TACC’s mission is to enable scientific discovery and enhance society through the application of advanced computing technologies.

Link to the Texas Advanced Comuting Center (TACC)

Courtesy Intel


Courtesy Intel

Intel's Fab 68 will join seven other Intel mega-plants in the world which will be capable of producing Intel 300mm wafers when it opens in 2010.

The new semiconductor plant will only produce chipsets in the initial phases. Actual microprocessors will not be produced in China at this time.

That was a key criteria that won the US government approval for the plant.

Previous Techweekly posting

Courtesy Mercury News

Pictured above is a stack of rebate applications found by a Mercury News reporter is a dumpster behind Vastech - a rebate processor for Fry's Electronics.

Is this really a surprise to anyone?

All of the envelopes were unopened.

Courtesy Hanson Robotics

Dr. David Hanson founded Hanson Robotics to design, develop, produce and distribute revolutionary, interactive bio-inspired conversational robots, including the Albert-Hubo (pictured above).

Hanson’s family of anthropomorphic robots display a unique, artificial subconscious, partly due to their cognitive understanding of language-based interactive speech, conversational capabilities and genuine eye contact, coupled with a full range of human facial expressions.

FrubberTM, or “flesh rubber”, is their proprietary spongy, structured elastic polymer that expertly mimics the movement of real human musculature and skin using 1/20th the power of other existing materials. Hanson's Character Engine software brings the whole system to life.

Link to Hanson Robotics

Courtesy Garrett Lisi

This is follow-on work to Albert Einstein. If found to be credible, it would be a big step toward an overall "Unification Theory".

From Garrett's website:

"All fields of the standard model and gravity are unified as an E8 principal bundle connection. A non-compact real form of the E8 Lie algebra has G2 and F4 subalgebras which break down to strong su(3), electroweak su(2) x u(1), gravitational so(3,1), the frame-Higgs, and three generations of fermions related by triality. The interactions and dynamics of these 1-form and Grassmann valued parts of an E8 superconnection are described by the curvature and action over a four dimensional base manifold."

An interesting video showing the concept:

Link to video

Link to the paper

Confluence TM


Courtesy Confluence

Confluence is an enterprise wiki that makes it easy for your team to collaborate and share knowledge.

- Enterprise security
- Simple installation and management
- Attractive, user-friendly WYSIWYG interface
- Powerful tools for structuring and searching your wiki
- Professional features such as PDF export and automated refactoring
- An open API for extension and integration

Link to the Confluence Product page

Founded in 1999, The Honeynet Project is an international, non-profit (501c3) research organization dedicated to improving the security of the Internet at no cost to the public. With chapters around the world, their volunteers are firmly committed to the ideals of OpenSource. They accomplish their goals in the following three ways.


Awareness

They raise awareness of the threats and vulnerabilities that exist in the Internet today. Many individuals and organizations do not realize they are a target, nor understand who is attacking them, how, or why. They provide this information so people can better understand they are a target, and understand the basic measures they can take to mitigate these threats. This information is provided through the Know Your Enemy series of papers.

Information

For those who are already aware and concerned, they provide details to better secure and defend your resources. Historically, information about attackers has been limited to the tools they use. They provide critical additional information, such as intruders motives in attacking, how they communicate, when they attack systems and their actions after compromising a system. They provide this service through the Know Your Enemy whitepapers and our Scan of the Month challenges.

Tools

For organizations interested in continuing their own research about cyber threats, they provide the tools and techniques they have developed. They provide these through their Tools Site.

Link to the Honeynet Project

On October 12, 2007, the Austin chapter of the Association of Information Technology Professionals (AITP) presented the tenth annual Austin IT Executive of the Year Awards in conjunction with the Austin InnoTech - the region's largest gathering of IT executives, educators & vendors - and the Austin Technology Council.

Pictured above:

Jay Hallberg of Spiceworks - IT Solution of the Year

Mike Hoskins, CTO of Pervasive Software - Information Technologist of the Year

Jim Weatherby, Director of Information Systems, Texas Legislative Council - IT Executive of Year - Public Sector

Sam Coursen, Vice President & CIO of Freescale - IT Executive of Year - Private Sector

Link to the full details of the awards

Courtesy Spiceworks

Spiceworks is a free IT Desktop and Community used by 250,000 IT pros in 194 countries. Spiceworks provides a considerable number of important IT administrative features:

- Automatic PC and software inventory and IT asset reporting.

- Network monitoring and troubleshooting.

- An easy to use IT help desk for your company.

- IT answers, product reviews, and advice from SMB IT pros.

It takes less than 5 minutes to get started. No agents. No scripts. No manual. Just download Spiceworks and go.

Spiceworks is really free thanks to sponsorships by top technology vendors.

Link to Spiceworks.com

The first channel to launch on the Austin, TX based Web2point0.TV is Web 2.0 Technology, a channel dedicated to "the effects of web 2.0 on business, marketing and the world economy".

The first user generated content added to the channel was filmed at the InnoTech Conference in Austin, TX on October 11, 2007. Business and marketing leaders shared their insights into technology changing their business, our economy, and the world.

Link to Web2point0.tv

Courtesy AMD

AMD has announced nine versions of their new Quad Core Opteron (running at speeds of 2 GHZ to 1.8 GHz).

All of these chips are being manufactured using a 65nm process. These are the first quad core chips from AMD made using this technology. Their previous server chips were made using a 90nm process.

All of the Quad Core Opteron chips have 512KB of level two cache per processor core, and 2MB of level three cache shared by the four cores.

The new chips are faster than previous Opterons, with a 2 GHz Quad Core Opteron running 79 percent faster than a 3 GHz dual core Opteron.

Five single-core Opteron processors are required to match the performance of a single Quad-Core Opteron.

Link to Amd

Dell TM


Courtesy Dell, Inc.

In a very quiet move, industry veteran Stephen F. Schuckenbrock had his responsibilities recently shuffled at Dell where he now serves as senior vice president of Global Services as well as Dell’s new CIO.

According to Dell, his involvement with both Dell’s multi-billion dollar services business as well as his role as CIO should provide greater insight into how to architect services and solutions that will help to simplify IT for customers and for Dell.

Prior to joining Dell, Schuckenbrock served as co-chief operating officer and executive vice president of global sales and services for EDS. Before joining EDS in 2003, he was chief operating officer of The Feld Group, an IT consulting organization.

He also served as global chief information officer for PepsiCo from 1998 to 2000. Schuckenbrock also served as global chief information officer for Frito-Lay from 1995 to 1998.

Schuckenbrock replaces Susan Sheskey who became Dell's CIO less than two years ago and who has now left the company.

She follows both Randy Mott who became the CIO of HP and LaVerne Council who became CIO of Johnson & Johnson.

InnoTech is the region's premier annual one day conference & exposition highlighting Austin's innovation & technology development opportunities.

InnoTech is built for Business and Technology Executives, guided and directed by executives in Austin and throughout Central Texas.

a href="http://www.innotechaustin.com/">Link to the InnoTech Austin Conference website

InnoTech is the region's premier annual one day conference & exposition highlighting Austin's innovation & technology development opportunities.

InnoTech is built for Business and Technology Executives, guided and directed by executives in Austin and throughout Central Texas.

Link to the InnoTech Austin Conference website