From Ipod to smart thermostats

iPod creator switches attention to 'smart' thermostats

The man known as the "godfather" of the iPod has invested his energy in a home appliance: a thermostat.

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Tony Fadell caused surprise when he quit Apple in 2008 after heading its music player division. Fortune magazine once tipped him as a successor to former chief executive, Steve Jobs.

Mr Fadell has now revealed his efforts went into the Learning Thermostat.

The smart device adjusts the temperature based on the presence of people and their habits.

It can "learn" about a house's cooling and heating patterns to optimise its performance, and adjust itself to the weather conditions.

Mr Faddell said the device could cut 20 to 30% off the average household's energy bill.

He said it is also possible to control the $249 (£156) thermostat remotely via a smartphone app.

The price is around fifteen times higher than what basic thermostats sell for in the US.

Virgin goes green!

Virgin Atlantic Squeezing Jet Fuel Out Of Industrial Waste

BY ARIEL SCHWARTZFri Oct 14, 2011

Even though airlines are just starting to adopt traditional biofuels, Virgin is already ditching them for a new fuel made from the leftovers of steel manufacturing.

A number of commercial airlines have started to explore the possibility of using biofuels to both save cash and decrease emissions; Virgin Atlantic led the pack in 2008 with the first biofuel-powered test flight. As its competitors catch up, Virgin is already leaving them behind--this time, with a plan to fly commercial routes using synthetic fuel made out of industrial waste.
The airline is using technology from LanzaTech and Swedish Biofuels that captures and chemically treats industrial waste from steel mills and turns it into ethanol that can be converted into biofuel (see the video below). Virgin claims that LanzaTech's process has major potential--the technique could be retrofitted onto 65% of the world's steel mills, which could produce around 15 billion gallons of jet fuel, or 19% of the current world aviation fuel demand.

LanzaTech's process is adaptable to other kinds of industrial waste, but Virgin is sticking with steel for now, simply because there is so much of it produced every year (1.4 billion tons annually). "The wholly owned and patented unique gas fermentation technology uses a microbe to convert gas (rich in CO and CO2) into fuels and chemicals," explains Joanne Foster, Senior Press Officer at Virgin Atlantic, in an email. "This microbe can utilize a range of gas streams as a carbon source and so it’s likely that there will be a range of solutions--more sustainable drop-in fuels are likely to come from a number of sources and we believe that prioritising waste streams for conversion into fuel is likely to be a sensible way to progress for the time being."

It's not that Virgin is abandoning more traditional biofuels. In fact, LanzaTech's process technically creates biofuel--it just doesn't use biomass as an input (though it could).
As Foster explains, "What's important is that 'biofuels are done well'--taking into account the full range of environmental, social and economic impacts--for example, by making sure that fuel feedstock production doesn't cause food or water to be diverted away from communities, or doesn't cause rainforests to be felled, and that total lifecycle carbon emissions really are lower than those associated with the fossil fuel alternatives." LanzaTech's process doesn't require any arable land, it grabs waste from already-occurring industrial production, and it's less carbon-intensive than traditional jet fuel. Does it get much better than that?

Virgin expects to run test flights using the fuel in the next 18 months and begin commercial operations in China by 2014, at which point the fuel should be cost-competitive with standard kerosene jet fuel.

Plan to create 1,400 Steve Job 'clones'

The Chinese city of Ningbo is aiming to do the unthinkable: it has launched a new training programme that it claims is capable of producing 1,400 new Steve Jobs in the course of five years.
 
The Business Insider reports that the city is investing 50 million Yuan (RM24.6million) in the Ningbo Innovative Talent Training Programme.

Candidates will be chosen from government-affiliated companies and organizations in Zhejiang Province.

BI said the programme is searching for people “young and middle aged who are experts or specialise in emerging technologies, traditionally superior industries, or a field critical to economic and social development.”

The city's Human Resources and Social Security Bureau Director Jin Junjie said that from now through 2020, the programme will turn a group of intelligent people into an army of "innovative leaders."

Applications are already being accepted for the first class of 700 trainees, which will be divided into three tiers. Applications are due by October 31.

Ningbo estimates that it will have produced 2,800 Steve Jobs clones through the training programme by 2020.

Steve Jobs died last week at the age of 56. Beyond this odd "Steve Jobs factory" in China, his death has prompted a flood of tributes online, in print, and in person across the globe.

Hordes of people including world leaders, celebrities, and tech icons have spoken up to pay respects to jobs.

Although Jobs is gone, his influence will likely be felt for many years to come.

One report claims that he left behind four cycles worth of plans for products including iPads, iPhones, and iPods.

Additionally, there is a wealth of Steve Jobs material planned.

The biography, Steve Jobs, written by Walter Isaacson, is due out October 24, and it’s rumored that Sony is trying to buy the rights to the book to adapt it into a biopic.
Source: pcmag.com

Published Oct 13 2011

Steve Job: Connecting the Dots

The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college. And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting. It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

Steve Job : Creativity from Painful Lesson

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life. During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle

Steve Job : Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes. I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now. This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept: No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Thank you all very much

Cypark teams up with LG Electronics in solar tech

Written by Joseph Chin of theedgemalaysia.com

Friday, 23 September 2011 12:45

KUALA LUMPUR: CYPARK RESOURCES BHD is teaming up with LG Electronics to venture into solar TECHNOLOGY , which includes collaborative solar projects within Malaysia and Southeast Asia.

Cypark said on Friday, Sept 23 the initiative was to make Malaysia the centre for the solar business hub in the region, by tapping into LG’s long history in solar photovoltaic (PV) technology.

Under the plan, Cypark and LG would undertake joint research & development in solar technologies particularly designed for the Southeast Asia’s tropical weather conditions. They would also undertake a study to set up a solar PV manufacturing plant in Malaysia, particularly in Negeri Sembilan.

Cypark said  LG was its technology partner and the engineering, procurement and CONSTRUCTION [] contractor in the installation of its large solar farm project in Pajam, Negeri Sembilan.

"The collaboration will further strengthen Cypark's position as the leading Renewable Energy company in Malaysia,” said Cypark chairman Tan Sri Razali Ismail in Pajam where Cypark and LG inked an memorandum of understanding (MoU) for the strategic partnership in solar technology.

Negeri Sembilan Menteri Besar Datuk  Seri Utama Mohamad Hasan, who witnessed the signing of the MoU, also launched the “Renewable Energy Development Policy Master Plan” to transform the state to be the leader in Malaysia’s renewable energy development.

The RE Policy Master Plan is to enable Negeri Sembilan help achieve the government’s target to reduce national carbon emission by 40% by 2020 and the National Energy Policies on renewable energy.

Also present at the signing of the MoU were LG Electronics vice president for solar worldwide C.S. Chung and HSBC Amanah Malaysia chief executive officer Rafe Haneef.

Cypark also received the land lease offer letter from the Negeri Sembilan Government which gives rights to a 21-year leasehold land title. The land is used to develop the 10 MW Integrated Pajam RE Park project.

Cypark also signed a RM75 million financing agreement with HSBC to finance the development of the Pajam Integrated RE Park.

Cypark's chief executive officer Daud Ahmad said securing the funds for the project reflected the  bankability and viability of the project.

"We expect the implementation of the 8MW solar plant will be completed smoothly and operational by end of this year,” he said.