Tech News February 24, 2014

Augmented Reality Gets to Work

Augmented reality hasn’t yet lived up to its promise, but it could catch on in situations where it makes employees more efficient.

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Tech News February 19, 2014

Why Illumina is No. 1

After outflanking and outlasting competitors, it is on top of the genome-sequencing business—just as that market is about to soar in importance.

Almost 25 years after the Human Genome Project launched, and a little over a decade after it reached its goal of reading all three billion base pairs in human DNA, genome sequencing for the masses is finally arriving. It will no longer be just a research tool; reading all of your DNA (rather than looking at just certain genes) will soon be cheap enough to be used regularly for pinpointing medical problems and identifying treatments. This will be an enormous business, and one company dominates it: Illumina. The San Diego–based company sells everything from sequencing machines that identify each nucleotide in DNA to software and services that analyze the data. In the coming age of genomic medicine, Illumina is poised to be what Intel was to the PC era—the dominant supplier of the fundamental technology.

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50 Smartest Companies 2014

These businesses are setting the pace of innovation. They’re shaking up markets or creating new ones.

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Glass, Darkly

For its wearable computer to be accepted, Google must convince people that the device isn’t creepy.

Google Glass shares much of its electronics and software with the smartphone, but it’s a very different machine.

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Show Me the Bitcoins

Though still volatile, Bitcoin is surging in value and being spent more freely; it’s also inspired a legion of competitors.
The World’s Most Powerful 3-D Laser Imager

A new military LIDAR chip shows promise for faster and more precise aerial mapping—doing in minutes what used to take days.

Airborne laser scanning has produced stunning maps and insights in the last few years. Among others, it revealed the faint outlines of a vanished medieval city street grid obscured by the jungle surrounding Cambodia’s Angkor Wat (see “Laser Scanning Reveals New Parts of an Ancient Cambodian City”), a feat that required 20 hours of helicopter flight time to map 370 square kilometers to a resolution of one meter.

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Samsung’s Tizen Will Hit the Ground Running with Android Apps

As the world’s leading smartphone maker prepares to launch its own OS, new software will allow it to run as many as “hundreds of thousands” of Android apps.

If app availability is the make-or-break factor in the success of any smartphone operating system, then Tizen—the secrecy-cloaked OS that Samsung is expected to unveil on a new device this month at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona—could leap from the gate fairly strongly.

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Genome Surgery

Precise and easy ways to rewrite human genes could finally provide the tools that researchers need to understand and cure some of our most deadly genetic diseases.

Over the last decade, as DNA-sequencing technology has grown ever faster and cheaper, our understanding of the human genome has increased accordingly. Yet scientists have until recently remained largely ham-fisted when they’ve tried to directly modify genes in a living cell. Take sickle-cell anemia, for example. A debilitating and often deadly disease, it is caused by a mutation in just one of a patient’s three billion DNA base pairs. Even though this genetic error is simple and well studied, researchers are helpless to correct it and halt its devastating effects.

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Yahoo Expands Research Labs in Search of Personalized, Mobile Experiences

The rejuvenated research labs at Yahoo are investigating ways to predict what users want and new forms of mobile hardware.

There are many conflicting opinions about what troubled Web giant Yahoo must do to turn itself around, but critics and company leaders at least agree on one thing: fresh ideas must be part of the solution. As a result, Ron Brachman, head of the research division Yahoo Labs, finds himself working closely with new CEO Marissa Mayer, who took charge of the company in 2012. “There is a lot of two-way dialogue with Marissa and her senior staff,” Brachman says. “They expect us to be the thoughtful leaders in innovation that can tell you where the world and technology are going.”

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Phones, Browsers, and Search Engines Get a Privacy Overhaul

Small companies are showing that the technology we rely on can be redesigned to protect our data—and that consumers are interested.

As the reach of the Internet has grown, so has the medium’s favored business model: targeted advertising. Signals recording our activity are harvested as we browse the Web and, increasingly, as we use our smartphones. That information is used to build profiles that help advertisers target ads, and opting out is rarely easy.

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Zynga Hopes to Breathe New Life into Flat Games Characters

Zynga is switching strategy with animation technology that makes characters move more naturally.

The future of troubled gaming company Zynga may owe more to a charming, if clumsy, ninja than to the pixelated cows of the company’s breakout hit FarmVille.
A Robotic Hand, This Time with Feeling

A man with a robotic hand can now feel varying degrees of pressure thanks to an implant that connects with the nerves in his arm.

A Dutch man who lost his left hand in a fireworks accident nine years ago is now able to feel different kinds of pressure on three fingers of a prosthetic, robotic hand. The work involved a new kind of implanted device that delivers feedback directly to the remaining nerves in the man’s arm. The implant was left in place for 31 days, allowing the man to feel gradations of touch pressure, depending on the amount of electrical stimulus delivered.