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“A day in the life with the Nissan LEAF” is a video which shows how electric vehicles (EV) will change consumers’ daily lives. With an iPhone, users will be able to control their cars from their sofa. First, an email prompts them when the charging is done. Then, another application allows them to turn on the air conditioner or heater before the drive. Bye bye first miles driven in glacial conditions in winter! During the long drive (a shopping day in a suburban mall for example), consumers can find in advance where charging spots are located, so they can charge their car when they get there. Nissan shows us an interesting vision of our future, which could be here sooner than you imagine.

Since this weekend, inhabitants of California have been able to test the first US shopping center with charging stations for electric vehicles. Thanks to a partnership between South Coast Plaza, a mall situated near San Jose, and Coulomb Technologies, a company specialized in charging-station infrastructure, Nissan’s vision is already a reality. “Shopping centers are some of the perfect places for the installation of networked charging stations because people spend several hours shopping and dining,” said Richard Lowenthal, CEO of Coulomb Technologies in a press release. Coulomb markets an open driver system network: the ChargePoint Network. Via smartphone, drivers can manage their EV, receiving their charging status by SMS or localizing unoccupied charging stations, for example.

Between fiction and reality, electric vehicles are becoming a new way to move. Besides technological questions, environmental answers and design questioning, EV will definitively change the relationship between drivers and cars. Into this passionate relationship will enter a third party: the smartphone. Like a remote control, mobile will become a link between driver and machine.

Minput is especially designed for gadgets that are too small for physical input or for a lot of buttons. It uses optical sensors like those found in a mouse, which are integrated into devices, allowing users to input information by dragging the gadget across a surface or with gestures.

If the name evokes something familiar, it is because Carnegie Mellon’s Chris Harrison also developed Skinput, with which the new project shares a few phonemes.

Users can also use different motions to interface with the device, for example twisting it to control the volume on an mp3 player or on an image viewer to zoom in or out on a photo. And of course, Minput has the accuracy of a mouse, so it can be used to control a cursor on tiny screens.

“Minput turns out to be a fairly intuitive way to navigate through menus or photo galleries on a device’s display without fumbling with tiny buttons or obscuring a small touchscreen with your fingers,” said Chris Harrison, a third-year Ph.D. student who developed the method with his faculty adviser, Professor Scott Hudson. “Because we use a pair of sensors, it can respond to a wide range of gestural commands, much like an iPhone or other multi-touch device.”

We definitely recommend checking out Harrison’s video demo of Minput, available on his site.

The U.S. will account for 54 percent of worldwide electric-charging stations by 2015, according to ABI Research. ABI predicts that global revenue from chargers will reach $11.75 billion for the installation of 3 billion stations by 2015.

In 2010, there will be only 20,000 charging stations worldwide, but ABI expects 2011 to be the breakout year. Following the U.S. will be China, which will account for 23 percent of the world’s charging stations by 2015. The rest of the world will make up the other 23 percent.

“Infrastructure supporting electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles is on the cusp of a rapid and sustained growth curve,” says ABI research director Larry Fisher. “The charging infrastructure technology is here. We’re just waiting for the release of these vehicles into the market. Given the limited range per charge, however, early adopters will need to keep their journeys relatively short.”

San Francisco has been one of the most active cities in promoting vehicle-charging stations. This February, the city revised its building codes so that all new homes and offices will be wired for chargers. The city also announced a “sustainable financing program,” which offers citizens low-interest loans for the purchase of electric cars.

In a rather old-school show of civic symbolism, the city has installed chargers outside of city hall. San Francisco is currently looking at 22 garages where additional stations can be set up.

A business’s ownership of a charging stating is doubly beneficial. First, there’s the social cachet that comes with being one of the first to offer such a cutting edge and sustainable service. It’s good for PR. Secondly, charging electric cars takes time, anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours, so retail, dining or entertainment venues can benefit from extra customers while cars are charging.

Nano-based RFID tags might one day allow you to walk into a brick-and-mortar, put everything you want in a cart and leave without stopping at the register to pay.

The RFID system will total up the items, charge your account and instantly adjust the store’s inventory, radically simplifying both shopping and inventory control.

Researchers at Rice University in Texas and Sunchon National University in Korea are developing these tags, which would be embedded in every product’s packaging, as bar codes are today.

One of the major factors delaying the adoption of RFID technology on a large scale is the current price of RFID tags, which are mainly silicon-based. But nano is cheaper than silicon. Rice’s tags are based on a carbon-nanotube-infused ink for ink-jet printers developed at Rice, which makes it possible to print rolls of cheap RFID emitters. The nano-based tags would cost about a penny each, which the researchers believe is sufficiently inexpensive to drive industry adoption.

The two barriers to commercialization, the researchers say, are size and range. The RFID tags need to be reduced to the size of a bar code (at the moment, the tags are three times that size).

The second problem, range, is an obstacle for the RFID industry in general.

“Right now, the emitter has to be pretty close to the tags, but it’s getting farther all the time,” said James Tour, Rice professor of mechanical engineering, materials science and computer science.

“The practical distance to have it ring up all the items in your shopping cart is a meter,” Tour said. “But the ultimate would be to signal and get immediate response back from every item in your store – what’s on the shelves, their dates, everything.”

To be able to read the entire store, the range would have to expand to 300 meters, the researchers say.

While there are still plenty of hurdles for RFID, it will be one of the most disruptive technologies of the next five years.

The internet has made users accustomed to a streamlined set of actions that are difficult to replicate in the physical world, but following that model with RFID and the eventual internet of things, our interactions with the built environment will be as fluid and as informationally rich as they are online.

U.S. e-commerce will reach nearly $249 billion in revenue by 2014 at an annual compound annual growth rate of 10 percent, Forrester predicts.

2009’s U.S. e-commerce sales totaled $130 billion. Analysts predict between 8 and 15 percent growth for 2010.

Forrester predicts that, while has e-commerce matured, it will continue to drive overall retail growth.

“Much of the overall retail sector’s growth in both the US and the EU over the next five years will come from the Internet,” said Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru.

“To maximize that growth, eBusiness professionals will have to help enable a multichannel strategy that responds to consumers’ increased desire to hop between the offline and online worlds and their increasing mobile and social behaviors. The retail innovators over the next five years will demonstrate customer enablement across all touchpoints, not just via a PC-based Web browser.”

The top categories for U.S. online retail, accounting for 40 percent of total sales, are apparel, footwear, and accessories; consumer electronics; and consumer hardware, software, and peripherals.

Forrester predicts that e-commerce will account for 8 percent of overall retail sales by 2014, and that 53 percent of all retail sales will be influenced by online research.

What would be interesting to see is the difference in growth between mobile and PC-based e-commerce. While consumers are slowly adopting mobile shopping, many are taking advantage of smartphones to comparison shop within brick-and-mortar stores. Forrester notes that shoppers who begin shopping online and finish in the store are less satisfied than those who do both in the store. Wonder how smartphones play into that equation?

We’re simplifying the ways we interface with technology. Touch computing will hopefully once and for all get rid of the mouse as pointer, but we still have to hold the device in one hand and manipulate the screen with the other.

What if the screen was our body?

That’s a scenario that Carnegie Mellon’s Skinupt offers.

The goal of Skinput is to compensate for the small screen spaces on mobile computing devices.

“In my research I think about clever ways to appropriate surfaces that are already around us, like tables and walls,” said Skinput’s designer, Carnegie Mellon’s Chris Harrison.

Skinput uses bio-acoustic sensing technology that makes the human body the input source.

Parts of the body are acoustically distinct: different parts make different sounds due to size mass, bone density, as well as from filtering effects such as joints and soft tissue. The sounds are read by a device worn around the upper arm. Skinput’s software classifies the impacts, making the body an input device. A pico projector can be attached to the device to project a graphical interface onto the user’s body (see video for some really cool examples, including playing Tetris on your hand).

“Appropriating the human body as an input device is appealing not only because we have roughly two square meters of external surface area, but also because much of it is easily accessible by our hands (e.g., arms, upper legs, torso),” Harrison writes on his blog. “Furthermore, proprioception (our sense of how our body is configured in three-dimensional space) allows us to accurately interact with our bodies in an eyes-free manner.”

Just watching the demo video is enough to make it obvious how useful this technology could be, and how computing paradigms are in the process of radically changing. Functionalities are improving so fast these days, but until the last few years, the ways we interface with technologies have remained clunky.

Technology like Skinput makes sense for the evolution of computer interfaces. And how can you beat playing Tetris on your hand?

Zenph Sound Innovation currently uses music analysis technology to create new recordings from deceased musicians. As reported this week in Wired, the process analyzes aged, damaged recordings for a musician’s style, and creates a virtual personality that can replay the piece just as the original person would have.

Zenph has already succeeded in creating new versions of previous pieces that are too distorted to appreciate, as if these musicians had access to contemporary recording technology. These new, clear recordings can be licensed to films, and software could let musicians play virtually with famous artists on a level way past Guitar Hero.  In Buskirk’s example, a guitarist could one day run his solo through an Eric Clapton program that would shape it to sound as if it were played by the latter.

Once the tech has evolved enough, it should be able to take an analyzed style, and feed a new composition through it, one that the original musician never played. In effect, a virtual artist could play any available song, whether he was alive or not when it was composed. The artist, or the estate of an artist, would give permission for the style, not the work, of a song to be licensed.

Additional concerns manifest when industry professionals try to define the new licensing terms. While musicians have been influenced by others for as long as the art existed, the imitation was done with a human brain. Now, style is being analyzed by a computer, and the machine must license that particular person’s personality in order to do so.

Eric Singer, creator of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) is not in favor of extending copyright, and even less in favor of extending copyright to style. “It basically means that the entire history of music, where people have listened to other musicians and been influenced by their style is basically up for grabs. Whether a brain is doing it or a computer is doing it, how are they going to make that distinction?”

Tuesday night, Atelier hosted our latest TechRadar event, which focused on the latest in mobile innovation.

From location-based gaming and discovery to real-time traffic analysis (and new models of crowdsourcing) to mobile app design, the companies presenting at Tuesday’s TechRadar highlighted some of the many computing innovations brought about by the mobile revolution.

We thank Booyah, Aloqa, Waze and Bamboudesign for presenting their wonderful products at the event. A huge thanks goes out to Cathy Brooks for moderating the event, as well.

We’ll follow up with posts on each of the presenting companies.

Atelier’s TechRadar series explores the latest computing innovations, presenting companies that we believe highlight the best of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

The theme of our next TechRadar will be payments. Please check back – or feel free to contact us – for more info.

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The abundance of location features in social networks, such as FourSquare, Brightkite and more recently Twitter and Google, raise the problem of privacy. Many experts think that these privacy issues will disappear as the localization trend becomes more and more common. Defenders of localization features claim that they don’t raise any privacy problems as users themselves made the choice to participate and share private data with their friends.

This is where Google may be crossing the line, as it chose an “opt-out” solution rather than an “opt-in” solution. Meaning that users are automatically enrolled without being asked and have to “opt-out” if they don’t want to participate.

Indeed, when enrolling in the location-aware mobile app Google Latitude, all of your Google contacts will receive notifications about where you are even though they didn’t sign in to get them. Google sends these alerts automatically if one of your contacts opts in for the service launched early February 2010. As Google explains on its website:

“Alerts are sent to both nearby friends if they are sharing their location with each other, even if only one of them has enabled alerts.”

To prevent being harassed every minute by these kinds of notifications, Google will notify you only when your friends are in “unusual places.” In Google’s words: “Location Alerts are only sent when your friend is at an unusual place during a given time of the week based on their location history, filtering out routine locations such as a daily commute.”

Google Latitude is so intrusive that if you refuse to receive this kind of notification you’ll have no choice but to opt-out of these emails by visiting its website.

The intrusiveness of Google is even more worrying when remembering last week’s Google Buzz, again an “opt-out” solution in which people saw themselves following friends and being followed without being asked. Consequently they were sharing private information with people they didn’t want to.

These new and intrusive products don’t seem to match Google’s corporate motto of “don’t be evil.” On the contrary it makes the giant of the Internet industry even more disturbing…

Brain-wave computing is most likely two or three tech generations down the line but it looks to have other implications beyond just making computing faster and more streamlined.

It might also strengthen your brain signals, believes a team of researchers from the University of Washington. Stronger than day-to-day activities do.

“Bodybuilders get muscles that are larger than normal by lifting weights,” said the study’s lead author Kai Miller, a UW doctoral student in physics, neuroscience and medicine. “We get brain activity that’s larger than normal by interacting with brain-computer interfaces. By using these interfaces, patients create super-active populations of brain cells.”

In experiments in which epilepsy patients were asked to imagine that they were controlling a cursor, scientists found that in less than 10 minutes the brain signals were stronger than if the patients had been doing the actual physical gestures.

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