From left to right: Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith. (Reuters)

Three scientists who harnessed the power of light in ways that helped turn the Internet into a global phenomenon and launched the digital-camera revolution were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics on Tuesday.

Charles Kao, who received half the total prize money of $1.4 million, was lauded for a breakthrough that led to fiber-optic cables, the thin glass threads that carry a vast chunk of the world’s phone and data traffic and make up the circulatory system of the Internet.

The other half of the prize was shared by Willard Boyle and George Smith for work that led to the charge-coupled device, the “electronic eye” of a digital camera that turns light into electrical signals. The device, which eliminates the need for capturing images on film, paved the way for both today’s point-and-shoot digital cameras and the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Nobel committee described the three physicists as “masters of light.”

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB125481670211367051-lMyQjAxMDI5NTA0NzgwMTc2Wj.html

by Nat Ives 

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=139387

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Traditional publishers — concerned that Apple’s anticipated tablet computer could affect their business the way the iPod disempowered music publishers — are discussing possible strategies, including an industry-wide digital storefront where tablet users could buy digital issues or subscriptions without going through iTunes or the App Store.

Photo by Jesus Diaz©

Excerpt from “The Chaos Scenario” – Bob Garfield

http://thechaosscenario.net/blog/

Book Excerpt: The Death of Everything (from Chapter 1, pg. 22-23) 

There was a time, essentially the six centuries since Gutenberg gave the world moveable type, when various political, clerical and commercial elites could speak to the masses and feel confident of having an attentive audience. For the past four centuries, mass media were funded or at least subsidized by mass marketing, which piggybacked on what we now call “content” to issue messages of its own. Like the eternal co-dependenceof flowers and bees, this was an extremely convenient symbiotic relationship for those involved. Or if you prefer a more spiritual analogy, imagine the media yin coupled snugly with the advertising yang, a transcendent oneness yielding cheap or free content for all. Well, that’s over — or damn near.

In the digital age, that time-honored symbiosis is coming apart. It’s happening slowly enough that most consumers haven’t really noticed. But it’s happening quickly enough that media and marketing are in big trouble — trouble that I believe will send the world spinning into a post-apocalyptic post-advertising age. In this chapter and the one following, I intend to prove that to you. Meantime, just think about what’s happening all around us.

The Chaos Scenario is the new book by Bob Garfield of Ad Age and NPR that predicts the end of the mass media/mass marketing era, the rise of Listenomics and the post-advertising age, and the period…

http://gizmodo.com/5365299/courier-first-details-of-microsofts-secret-tablet

Courier: First Details of Microsoft’s Secret Tablet

By The Paperboy, 7:30 PM on Tue Sep 22 2009, 712,740 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

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It feels like the whole world is holding its breath for the Apple tablet. But maybe we’ve all been dreaming about the wrong device. This is Courier, Microsoft’s astonishing take on the tablet.

Posted Sunday, September 27, 2009 10:59 AM

Don’t Bail Out Newspapers–Let Them Die and Get Out of the Way

Nobody in their right mind believes the future of the news business involves paper and ink rather than pixels on a screen. We all know where the news business is headed, and what’s more, we’ve known it for at least a decade. So why on earth are people talking about a bailout for newspapers? Why is President Obama saying he’d consider it? Why is Congress holding hearings and considering “The Newspaper Revitalization Act” in a bid to save these ailing old rags with tax breaks and other handouts? It’s like introducing legislation to save horse-drawn carriages, or steam engines, or black-and-white TV. It’s stupid. It’s pointless. It won’t work….

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/techtonicshifts/archive/2009/09/27/don-t-bail-out-newspapers-let-them-die-and-get-out-of-the-way.aspx?GT1=43002

http://gizmodo.com/5370005/hanvon-slate-packs-windows-7-mulit+touch-into-a-shiny-aluminum-shell

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2353365,00.asp

From PC Magazine

10 Reasons Why Tablets Will Succeed

by Lance Ulanoff

Tablets are suddenly the talk of the tech space, despite the fact that none of the major rumored and actual products have actually hit the market. Apple, Microsoft, and CrunchPad are all, apparently, gearing up to deliver brand new devices, though it’s not clear when or if any of them will arrive. Yet, their very absence appears to be fueling the excitement for a category that, if we’re being honest here, has had a pretty spotty past.

I’ve noticed how virtually everyone—those who write about these products and those that are actually producing them—are going to great pains to call them “tablets” and not “tablet PCs.” Why is that? Why are people so afraid to call them tablet PCs or tablet computers? Let’s let history be our guide.

Tablet PCs emerged in the first part of this century, roughly 8 years after the first wave of pen computers crashed and burned in the mid ’90s. Those very early products, from companies like Go and NEC, were essentially monochrome LCD panels that could accept some pen-driven gestures and even handwriting. They ran on proprietary operating systems, were woefully underpowered, had terrible screens, and were ignored by the general public.

In 2001, pen computing reemerged under the tablet PC umbrella with a new champion: Microsoft‘s Bill Gates. He showed off a prototype at Comdex in 2001. Unlike previous pen computers, this one had the guts of a laptop. The OS was the familiar, if augmented, Windows XP, and the digitizing technology came courtesy of Wacom. Gates made some bold pronouncements back then about the future of tablet and convertible PCs.

In a 2002 interview with InformationWeek, Gates said many laptop users would want one “right away,” adding, “By the end of 2003, you can expect to see one-third to one-half of the ultraportable market move to the tablet PC.”

Microsoft did everything it could to excite the public and developers about the opportunities and benefits of tablet PCs. It launched an SDK and held app development contests. It had major partners building keyboard-less tablet PCs and convertibles, the latter of which looked exactly like laptops, except you could flip the screen around so it faced up and fold the back of the screen right on top of the keyboard. Ultimately, though, tablets never rose above a niche market—popular in inventory departments and especially the healthcare and education markets, but marginalized everywhere else.

Based on this history, you might assume that this third coming of the tablet would be equally doomed. You’d be wrong. Things are different now. There are a number of technology advancements and changes in computing behavior that could spell success for this latest generation of portable devices. Here are a few:

Battery Life
Back in 2002, Bill Gates insisted that we had portables that could function for a full work day on one charge. I never saw it. Early tablet PCs were notoriously hot and drained batteries faster than your average laptop. Today, we have netbooks and, now, CULV (consumer ultra-low voltage) laptops that sip battery life and can run 8 to 10 hours on a charge. Tablets should easily run a day or more on a single charge.

Better Display Technologies and Options
Early tablet PCs had two display choices: monochrome or color LCD. Because the backlighting was always fluorescent, displays could only be so thin. The first monochrome pen computers were nearly an inch thick, and early tablets were usually at least as thick as standard laptops, which meant they weren’t very comfortable to hold. Today’s tablet makers can choose from thinner LCD technologies—those powered by LED lights, even thinner OLED displays, or e-ink technologies. LED backlighting allows for thin, super-bright displays that consume less power than traditional fluorescent backlighting. OLEDs are thinner and eat even less power, but tend to be prohibitively expensive at larger sizes. E-ink, which has been popularized by the recent flood of eReaders, differs from LCDs in a number of important ways: It’s a reflective technology and needs no backlighting and, once an image is generated, it needs little power to maintain it on the screen. That said, e-ink is still impractical for the needs of a portable computer screen where images will change many times a second