Own Tech

Die-hard entrepreneurs have to be prepared to turn on a dime, hedge their bets and prepare for all contingencies. These are lessons brought to the business model at Global Clean Energy Inc., a U.S. company with its headquarters in Montreal and offices in Houston, Texas, and Las Vegas, Nevada.

GCE is a “waste-to-energy conversion solutions company,” founded in 2006 by president and chief executive Earl Azimov. It had been developing technology to convert tires and plastics to diesel and gasoline and build and run pyrolysis plants, with minority partners.

But when Brian Levine came on board as chief operating officer two years ago, he realized the business had to make an abrupt shift. Despite initial success in developing its technology, to continue down that path would require at least an additional US$10-million to US$20-million and many months, if not years, to perfect.

As well, the company had been in a development stage for nearly six years and needed revenue to make it more attractive.

“The investment community is looking for no technology risk,” Mr. Levine wrote in an email. “Too many companies have tried to create … their own proprietary technologies. … Rather than waste tremendous time and money … we opted to develop and lockup top North American sites, the precious real estate and feedstock, focusing on those … with proven ‘package’ technology rather than tolerating technology risks as so many have done and failed.”

GM Connected Car

General Motors Co (GM.N) will introduce in two years its first car that can communicate with other vehicles to help avoid accidents and ease traffic congestion, Chief Executive Mary Barra said on Sunday.

In the same time frame, GM also will introduce more advanced technology allowing hands-free driving in some cases, she said.

"I’m convinced customers will embrace (vehicle-to-vehicle) and automated driving technologies for one simple reason: they are the answer to everyday problems that people want solved,"

Auto companies, academics and government agencies globally are working to develop cameras, sensors, radar and other technologies that allow vehicles and surrounding infrastructure like stoplights to alert each other about nearby driving conditions.

The industry is rolling out such features as adaptive cruise control, crash-imminent braking and semi-automated, hands-free driving like GM’s ‘Super Cruise’ feature to make roads safer.

However, GM and other automakers have emphasized that even with hands-free driving, drivers will be responsible and need to maintain attention on the road. Meanwhile, Internet search company Google Inc (GOOGL.O) is working to develop fully autonomous vehicles.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has made developing connected car technologies a high priority, a view shared in Japan and Europe. And when cars can also talk to surrounding infrastructure, the gains will be exponential, Barra said.

However, she said commercializing a fully automated vehicle may take until the next decade.

Congestion causes urban Americans to travel 5.5 billion more hours and purchase an extra 2.9 billion gallons of fuel each year, she said, citing outside data.

In 2016, GM will sell a 2017 model Cadillac CTS sedan standardly equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle technology. However, the car can only communicate with similarly equipped vehicles and it will take time for the industry to introduce the technology broadly, GM officials said before Barra’s speech.

iWatch to use NFC

Apple Inc plans to include near-field communication (NFC), a technology that can be used to make payments wirelessly, in its upcoming smartwatch, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The company is also expected to add the technology, which is used to transmit data wirelessly over short distances, to the next version of its iPhone, the paper reported.

The smartwatch will be offered in two sizes and will have sensors to track and monitor health, people familiar with the device told the paper.

However, the smartwatch is unlikely to go on sale this year, the people said.

Apple did not immediately respond to calls and emails for comment.

NFC will allow users to make payments for goods and services with credit cards stored with Apple’s iTunes digital content store, the report said.

Apple has invited media to a “special event” in its hometown of Cupertino, California, on Sept. 9, when the iPhone maker is expected to unveil the latest versions of its best-selling smartphones.

NASA 3D Experiment

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is experimenting with 3D-printing technology and has created complex rocket parts.

Additive manufacturing, more commonly known is 3D-printing technology, is getting very popular in various fields and being lauded by many as a futuristic technology. In the medical field, 3D-printing has helped surgeons reconstruct a person’s skull and scientists are also looking at bio-printing blood vessels. Disney is also experimenting with 3D-printing to create toys for children.

3D-printing is also being experimented in the aviation and space industries and the U.S. space agency has recently announced that it has successfully tested an injector of a rocket engine, which is responsible to direct propellant to the spacecraft’s engine. NASA recently revealed that to create such a complex component it had to input the design details of the part to a computer connected to a 3D-printer.

The 3D-printer was successful enough to build the component layer-by-layer using metal powder, which was put together with the help of laser. NASA explains that this process is normally called selective laser melting.

The injector has 40 different elements and NASA scientists suggest that the 3D-printing technology was able to build the component as one unit rather than being manufactured separately. The space agency indicates that the injector built with the help of 3D-printing technology is identical to the size used in small rockets and also possesses similar design aspects as found in big engines.

Tech for the Hospitals

A child checks in to have a cyst removed at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and the admissions clerk gives her a disposable ID bracelet loaded with her identification, her date of admission and her physician’s name and contact number. Her worried parents get bracelets with smart tracking technology embedded in them, too.

The hospital uses this smartcard ID technology to ensure that only authorized family members remain in the surgical and post-operative areas, and that intruders don’t interfere with the work of doctors and nurses. Medical personnel verify each visitor’s ID bracelet by using a portable LCD monitor display with height-adjustable Ergotron brackets; an optical mouse and a keyboard tray; a Wyse thin client terminal with a wireless PCMCIA card; and scanning technologies.

Rush University Medical Center’s system was built by Vernon Hills, Illinois-based technology services specialist CDW.

The consensus now in the industry is that these kinds of technologies are “critical” to improving healthcare “from both the patient and the medical side of the operation,” said Gina Wilde, national manager, healthcare for Eugene, Oregon-based data collection specialist Datalogic ADC.

Across the country, whether it is in the form of a bracelet ID or smart ID tags affixed to bags of blood, IV bags or surgical tools, hospitals and health care organizations are adding smartcard technology to their IT mix. Hospitals, physicians and clinics are currently implementing smartcards in combination with identity software solutions.

The technologies, part of electronic medical records systems, help manage the overall safety and security of patients, and their deployment “is becoming more mainstream,” said Dr. Dick Wuest, an emeritus professor of pharmacy at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and an expert in healthcare technology. “For healthcare, it is vital that the information is “accurate, easily understood and easy to access.”

The U.S. has been slow to embrace the smartcard for healthcare, even though it has rapidly become a technological feature in hospitals and clinics overseas, according to the SMART Association, an industry trade group based in Citrus Heights, Calif.

Countries with national healthcare systems – France and Germany – have to date issued over 150 million smartcards that carry health data, according to the association.

But the U.S. has stronger privacy regulations than other countries, and this has slowed implementation of the technologies here. There is also a generation gap in the usage of wireless technologies, favoring the young, not the old, who more often visit hospitals.

Dr. Pedro Reyes, an associate professor of operations and supply chain management at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business and director of the university’s Center for Excellence in Supply Chain Management, said the use of tracking technologies in U.S. medicine is only now becoming a normal solution “because users are now understanding how it can be used.”

Wearable Tech

We use our handheld smartphones for just about everything, but soon they may be a thing of the past.
As CBS 2’s Kristine Johnson reported, everyday technology can now be built right into our clothes and accessories, letting you actually wear it rather than carry it around.
A tennis pro working on his game while wearing what looks like your average run-of-the-mill workout shirt could actually be monitoring his heart rate, respiration and other body functions simply by wearing a new “bio sensing garment” developed by Ralph Lauren.
“The technology is really in the materials that are weaved through the shirt,” said David Lauren, Executive Vice President of Ralph Lauren. “There’s a small box which is like a battery that can transmit to your phone.”
Ralph Lauren’s cutting-edge tops made their debut on the ball boys at this year’s U.S. Open.
“When major fashion designers are getting on board and really making wearables beautiful, and that’s the key. People may get turned on by them and start to adopt them,” Mashable Chief Correspondent Lance Ulanoff said.

Ebook Tech

For years, people have been forecasting the death of the e-reader. Ever since more flashy, multi-function tablets became mainstream – prompted by the launch of Apple’s iPad in 2010 – black-and-white e-readers with their matt e-ink screens have come to be seen as poor relations.
Indeed, earlier this year, Sony was forced to admit defeat in the e-reader market, withdrawing its Librie series of devices from stores in the US, then from Europe and Australia, and finally its home turf, Japan. The company said at the time that the product line was “no longer economically viable”.

However, the e-books industry is a lucrative one. The publishing industry as a whole is valued at about $100 billion, and e-books acount for about $14.5 billion of that, with the number expected to reach over $22 billion by 2017.
While many of these e-books are read via apps on smartphones and tablets, there remains a core group of passionate book lovers which contines to champion e-readers, claiming that e-ink screens are easier to read in sunlight and are less likely to cause eye-strain than the LCD displays commonly used in tablets.
When Japanese e-reader maker Kobo launched its Aura HD in July 2013, for example, the company’s expectations for the device were fairly modest – it predicted that the Aura HD would account for around 5 per cent of its sales. To everyone’s surprise, it ended up accounting for closer to 25 per cent.