Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Gorilla Glass is probably best known as the (somewhat) impervious cover of approximately 1.5 billion smartphone screens.
According to Corning, the company could soon be shipping the mighty glass to automakers, which would be looking to take advantage of its lighter weight and soundproofing capabilities. A Gorilla Glass equipped car would theoretically offer a quieter ride with better gas mileage.
In comments made after MIT Technology Review’s Mobile Summit in San Francisco on Tuesday, Corning senior vice president Jeffrey Evenson said he expects at least one high-end auto maker to begin building cars that use some Gorilla Glass within the next year.
The installation of Gorilla Glass in cars would bring the Corning project full circle. The company experimentedwith car windshield technology in the 1960s. That research eventually laid the foundation for the development of modern-day Gorilla Glass.
The revelation comes just after Corning announced the release of the next generation of Gorilla Glass technology in May, Corning Gorilla Glass 3 with Native Damage Resistance. James R. Steiner, senior vice president and general manager of Corning’s Specialty Materials department noted that the company is continuing to develop Gorilla Glass technology.
“We aren’t standing still,” he said. “We’ve already introduced three versions of Gorilla Glass since its launch in 2007.”
“We work closely with consumer electronics manufacturers to understand their new designs and additional features for future devices,” he added. “For example, we’ve begun to produce Gorilla Glass at a thinness level that allows it to be curved and formed into shapes without sacrificing any of its toughness. This will allow manufacturers to offer more distinctive devices in the future.”
Steiner also said that future iterations of Gorilla Glass will reduce reflections, addressing the common consumer complaint associated with viewing mobile device screens in bright sunlight: glare.
Some observers have speculated that manufactured sapphire crystal might become a viable alternative to Corning’s Gorilla Glass, citing its use in the production of high-end watches. Corning officials have said that strength tests have shown that sapphire is not as strong as Gorilla Glass.
In his comments this week, Evenson also revealed several other endeavors the company is pursuing. One technology currently in the development stage is “antimicrobial” glass that is scheduled to be certified by the Environmental Protection Agency within the next few months, Evenson said. The groundbreaking material is designed for use in the health-care industry, as a sanitation aid, but could be used in other applications.
“The bacteria are obliterated,” Evenson said. “The number of germs on a smartphone exceeds the number of germs on a public toilet. We think there might be a bigger market.”
“Once we are ready to commercialize this version of Gorilla Glass, the application possibilities are enormous, including hospitals, public spaces, schools, and mobile devices and so forth,” Steiner remarked on the technology in an earlier statement.
Another highly-anticipated Corning product, Willow Glass, is described as being flexible like plastic, as thin as a dollar bill, yet retaining the durability and stability of glass. Evenson said Willow Glass could lead to “hundreds of new products,” from flexible displays to new insulating layers in semiconductors.
Source: Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online
Google Glass has the potential to revolutionize how we get information on the move, but a team of Russian motorcyclists-slash-engineers are going one step further with an augmented reality GPS system built directly into a bike helmet.
Based in Moscow, the LiveMap crew got fed up with paper maps and unintuitive touch-screen navigation systems, so they looked to the world of fighter jets for a solution.
The result is a full-color, translucent image projected onto a helmet’s visor running a version of Android and controlled through voice commands.
Instead of a Google Glass-like setup where the rider would have to look up and to the right to see the next waypoint or turn, the LiveMap system displays everything directly in the middle of the rider’s point-of-view. That might sound dangerous at first, but it’s execution is similar to what you’d find in the latest BMW sports sedans, and with an ambient light sensor, the system can adjust the brightness and contrast to suit the environment.
Even more impressive is the integration of a gyroscope and digital compass, so when the rider turns his head — say, to check a blind spot — the image changes orientation to acclimate to the movement.
Voice controls and point of interest searches will supposedly be provided by Nuance, the top-shelf company that helps Siri understand commands, while mapping software will come from the folks at Navteq.
A pair of 3,000 mAh lithium-ion batteries claim to provide enough juice for a day-long ride and charge up using a standard USB plug. And while LiveMap admits that the helmet will be slightly larger than a standard brain pan, they’re using a carbon fiber shell with injection-molded foam to keep weight in check. All in, the helmet should come in around 2.5 pounds, and will meet all the major crash certifications around the world (DOT, ECE 22.05 and Japan’s JIS T 8133) when it goes on sale in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia in 2014, while Europe and Japan have to wait an additional year to take delivery.
Currently, LiveMap has developed the helmet, software, optics and board with funding from a range of Russian government sources, but it doesn’t have a fully-functional prototype yet. So the team is turning to Indiegogo to raise $150,000, with backers coughing up $1,500 a pop to get their hands on the first round of helmets. After that, LiveMaps says the price will go up to $2,000 each — a seriously steep sticker for something most bike experts suggest you replace every five years.
Considering how much we love our current helmet, we’d be much more inclined to plunk down the coin for a retrofitted system, but considering the lack of intuitive navigation options on the market, we could be swayed.
Cree CEO Chuck Swoboda, May 2013. (Credit: Michael J. Bowles for Forbes)
This North Carolina maker of light emitting diodes aims to kill off the incandescent lightbulb. It’s already doubled its market cap to $7 billion in just one year.
In the ad for Cree lightbulbs you see snow whipping across a desolate field as a bagpipe creaks out “Amazing Grace.” An announcer holds up a lightbulb and speaks into the camera. “Mr. Edison , today we lay to rest your creation, the incandescent lightbulb. I know you’re not shocked, sir. You knew that it needed an unreasonable amount of energy to do its job and that it had the life span of a lucky bug.”
He fits the bulb into a tiny wooden casket and places it into a hole in the ground. Then we see Cree’s new LED bulb. “The biggest thing since the lightbulb,” we’re told.
It’s a fun commercial, and Chuck Swoboda, CEO of Cree, means no disrespect. “We made sure the Edison estate was okay with it,” he says. “There’s an Edison quote that has always been inspirational to us: ‘There’s a better way to do it. Find it.’ ”
Swoboda believes his company has done just that. More than 130 years after Thomas Edison created the first salable lightbulb, his design remains little changed. Electricity flows across a resistant wire in an oxygen-free environment and glows. Cree’s lightbulb, on the other hand, uses an array of light-emitting diodes to create a similar kind of rich, warm light without the headache-inducing flicker of compact fluorescent bulbs.
It does so with unassailable economy. A regular incandescent bulb costs $1 and uses $7 of electricity a year if used three hours a day. A Cree bulb may cost $10, but it uses 10% of the electricity, costing $1 a year. And while an old-school bulb will burn out in less than two years at that rate, LED bulbs will keep working for more than 20 years. At a cost of $9.97 for the equivalent of a 40-watt incandescent, or $12.97 for a 60-watt replacement, the Cree bulbs are cheaper than comparable LED offerings from rivals.
That performance is a big reason Cree now boasts $1.3 billion in sales and $70 million in earnings. Its market cap of $7 billion has doubled in less than a year; investors foresee broad adoption of LEDs once federal lighting standards force the phaseout of 40- and 60-watt incandescents in 2014. Nationwide, of roughly 6 billion lightbulbs in American homes, 3.6 billion are incandescents. Lighting sucks up roughly 14% of America’s electricity; replacing all those Edison bulbs with LEDs could cut that demand in half.
The Durham, N.C. company was founded in 1987 and went public in 1993. In those early years it had a good business selling semiconductor chips made of gallium nitride that glow when an electric current is passed through them. But the early light-emitting diodes came in only two colors: red and green.
The industry’s elusive Holy Grail was a “ white” LED. If they could somehow create a bright blue LED they could combine it with the red and green to make what the human eye would perceive as white light. For years physicists thought bright blue was an impossibility, until in 1994 a researcher at Japanese company Nichia proved it could be done.
Cree’s engineers followed soon after with their own bright blue LED chip, made from wafers of silicon carbide. “Everything came from this,” says Swoboda, who joined the company in 1993, when it had only 30 workers. It now boasts over 6,000.
At first Cree just made the chips and sold them to the LED makers; early uses included backlit car dashboards and cellphones. The potential seemed so great that in 2004 analysts were calling Cree the next IntelINTC-0.25%. But white LED lights weren’t ready for the residential market. Early fixtures cost too much and suffered from another then-unsolved problem: LEDs are a directional light source; like a weaker version of lasers, they cast light in only one direction. That’s fine if you want to spotlight something but a nonstarter if your aim is to replace the all-around glow of incandescents.
Playing to their strengths, LED makers started marketing so-called downlights. Cree in 2007 bought Chinese light-fixture maker Cotco and in 2008 acquired LED Lighting Fixtures. It began a relationship with Home DepotHD+1.92% selling downlights under its EcoSmart brand.
It hadn’t even tried developing an incandescent replacement, instead focusing on municipalities and industrial customers. Anchorage, Alaska replaced 16,000 high-pressure sodium streetlights with LEDs; Los Angeles is gradually swapping out 140,000. Wal-Mart installed LEDs at hundreds of its stores . To profit from this industrial market, Cree in 2011 bought fixture manufacturer Ruud for $525 million.
So how to make LEDs mimic incandescents? The key was in redesigning the structure in the middle of the bulb called the filament tower, where 10 or 20 LEDs of varying colors are arranged. Cree’s configuration let the individual light sources overlap, creating an omnidirectional glow.
For now Home Depot is the only place you can buy the Cree, part of an exclusive deal to roll out the bulb in more than 2,000 stores. “The exclusivity is to be negotiated. We will look at other partnerships at some point,” says Swoboda.
Malaysia is an easy place to get cheap, good, English-speaking talent, with overheads that are often far lower than in more advanced markets in Southeast Asia. But it continues to suffer the effects of brain drain. Simply put, Malaysia isn’t cool to be in for some of the nation’s brightest, and this has hurt its startup scene, according to Khailee Ng.
Ng, who is from Malaysia, was recently hired by 500 Startups as venture partner for Southeast Asia. The Silicon Valley VC also set Ng up with a shiny new $10 million microfund for the region. (The SEC-filing was called 500 Durians.)
When I spoke to him on the sidelines of the conference, he said Malaysia has all the makings of a ripe scene to be picked, but he has been watching in dismay as startups flocked to larger, far less Internet-penetrated countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines. And Malaysia often gets outshone by its smaller neighbor to the South, Singapore, where plenty of large corporations have set up shop, and seed funding is readily available, backed by government funding.
Malaysia’s situation is the result of an under-marketed set of funding from the government, plus a syndrome where none of its successful entrepreneurs are keen to let others know about them, said Ng. Some government funds that have been around for a decade already. “Nobody knows they exist, or there are misconceptions that it’s hard to get, or there are bureaucratic hoops to jump through,” he said.
For example, the Cradle fund offers up to $160,000 (RM500,000) in seed funding to projects that are younger than three-years-old. Other non-government-linked funds that have just been set up within this year include $10 million from 1337 Accelerator, $150 million from Catcha Group, and $5 million from the Asia Venture Group.
Ng also said that people are often surprised to find that some of the largest tech companies to IPO in the region are from Malaysia. According to a ranking of publicly-listed companies taken about a year ago, Jobstreet had a market cap of $268.2 million, iProperty Group had $178.2, My EG Services had $151.7 and iCar Asia had $56 million. The fifth in the list was the only one not from Malaysia, and was Singapore-based Asiatravel.com, at $40.4 million, he said.
He said the local scene also needs more experienced professionals coming in. “There’s nothing wrong with fresh grads, but sometimes you get one or two guys who have either had a failed startup, or one of those McKinsey, Accenture guys, and you can really feel things getting serious (in the startup),” he said.
Copycats are also the reason why startups in the region need to think outside their home bases from day one, said Ng. While many often think they should conquer one market and slowly expand outwards, it’s often too late by the time the expansion happens. “Be in as many markets as you can afford to be from the beginning,” he said.
The reason why many copycat models fail is not because transplanting models doesn’t work, but because execution is the main difference, he added. Operational excellence and being “super tight” can make or break a startup. “That’s why you get group-buying being crazy profitable in some markets, but bleeding in just the next country. Same model, right? It’s operational issues,” he said.
Newly discovered minuscule nanocrystals that glow different colors may be the missing ingredient for white LED lighting that illuminates homes and offices as effectively as natural sunlight, and thus provide a boost to this already surging sector.
Light-emitting diodes, better known as LEDs, offer substantial energy savings over incandescent and fluorescent lights and are easily produced in single colors such as red or green commonly used in traffic lights or children's toys.
Developing an LED that emits a broad spectrum of warm white light on par with sunlight has proven tricky, however. LEDs, which produce light by passing electrons through a semiconductor material, often are coupled with materials called phosphors that glow when excited by radiation from the LED.
"But it's hard to get one phosphor that makes the broad range of colors needed to replicate the sun," said John Budai, a scientist in ORNL's Materials Science and Technology division. "One approach to generating warm-white light is to hit a mixture of phosphors with ultraviolet radiation from an LED to stimulate many colors needed for white light."
Budai is working with a team of scientists from University of Georgia and Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories to understand a new group of crystals that might yield the right blend of colors for white LEDs as well as other uses. Zhengwei Pan's group at UGA grew the nanocrystals using europium oxide and aluminum oxide powders as the source materials because the rare-earth element europium is known to be a dopant, or additive, with good phosphorescent properties.
"What's amazing about these compounds is that they glow in lots of different colors—some are orange, purple, green or yellow," Budai said. "The next question became: why are they different colors? It turns out that the atomic structures are very different."
Budai has been studying the atomic structure of the materials using x-rays from Argonne's Advanced Photon Source. Two of the three types of crystal structures in the group of phosphors had never been seen before, which can probably be attributed to the crystals' small size, Budai said.
"Only the green ones were a known crystal structure," Budai said. "The other two, the yellow and blue, don't grow in big crystals; they only grow with these atomic arrangements in these tiny nanocrystals. That's why they have different photoluminescent properties."
X-ray diffraction analysis is helping Budai and his collaborators work out how the atoms are arranged in each of the different crystal types. The different-colored phosphors exhibit distinct diffraction patterns when they are hit with x-rays, enabling researchers to analyze the crystal structure.
"What that means in terms of how the electrons around the atoms interact to make light is much harder," Budai said. "We haven't completely solved that yet. That's the continuing research. We have a lot of clues, but we don't know everything."
The knowledge gained through their atomic-scale analysis is helping the research team improve the phosphorescent crystals. Different factors in the growth process—temperature, powder composition, and types of gas used—can change the final product. A fundamental understanding of all the parameters could help the team to perfect the recipe and improve the crystals' ability to convert energy into light.
Advancing the material's luminescence efficiency is key to making it useful for commercial LED products and other applications; the new nanocrystals may turn out to have other practical photonic uses beyond phosphors for LEDs. Their ability to act as miniature "light pipes" when the crystal quality is high enough could lend them to applications in fiber-optic technologies, Budai said.
"You can keep growing the crystals and measuring them, or you can understand why it's doing what it's doing, and figure out how to make it better. That's what we're doing—basic research. We have to figure out nature first."
The team's most recent study is published as the inside front cover article in the April 25 issue of Advanced Functional Materials as "New Ternary Europium Aluminate Luminescent Nanoribbons for Advanced Photonics."
(Photo : Los Alamos National Laboratory) Embedding nanocrystals in glass provides a way to create UV-producing LEDs for biomedical applications.
Budai and use of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne were supported by DOE's Office of Science. Zhengwai Pan was funded by the National Science Foundation.
The Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory is one of five national synchrotron radiation light sources supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science to carry out applied and basic research to understand, predict, and ultimately control matter and energy at the electronic, atomic, and molecular levels, provide the foundations for new energy technologies, and support DOE missions in energy, environment, and national security. To learn more about the Office of Science X-ray user facilities, visithttp://science.energy.gov/user-facilities/basic-energy-sciences/.
DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. -- Courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy.
Micro-display LED tech could light up the next generation of face-wearable gadgets. By Rachel Metz
Blue chip: Lumiode tests out a blue LED.
A tiny head-mounted display, like the one in Google Glass, will only be useful if you can see on-screen alerts and information clearly. And that’s tricky to achieve, especially without draining battery life—as Google notes, it can be hard to use Glass’s projected display in bright sunlight.
A Brooklyn-based startup called Lumiode is working on one possible solution. Unlike most displays, which have a light-emitting backplane and use filters to make the individual color pixels that collectively form images, Lumiode’s technology uses the light-emitting diodes as the pixels. They are more efficient because no light is lost through filtering. The result, says founder and CEO Vincent Lee, will be tinier, brighter, more energy-efficient head-mounted displays and projectors. And while it will be some time before the company’s technology is ready for a Google Glass-like product, growing interest in ever-smaller electronic displays that fit in with our daily lives could spur demand.
Most displays—such as LCD monitors or smartphone screens—use LEDs for the light source at the back of the screen. In such screens, images are created as light passes through filters. The drawback is that this reduces overall brightness and means that the LEDs are always on, which wastes energy.
Lumiode, which spun out of Lee’s graduate work at Columbia University’s Columbia Laboratory for Unconventional Electronics, takes a different tack. The company patterns LED into arrays, adding a layer of silicon on top of each individual LED that controls the amount of light it emits. In this way the LED itself serves as the component that forms an image. “What we’re doing is, we’re patterning LED wafers directly, and making the image component directly in the LED material, rather than using it as a backlight,” Lee says.
Lee says the Lumiode display isn’t very expensive to make, since it uses standard components and processing techniques. The company believes its technology is 30 times brighter and 10 times more efficient than other display technologies.
Officially formed in September, Lumiode is still in the early stages—the company’s latest prototype is about one millimeter square and contains 50 by 50 LEDs of a single color; additional colors will likely be created by adding a special layer on top of the chip. But Lee expects to make a 320-by-240-pixel prototype in about a year, and hopes to then partner with electronics makers to incorporate the technology into future devices. In addition to head-mounted displays, he can envision Lumiode’s technology being used to project information onto the windshield of a car.
Lumiode is exploring other potential uses for its technology. Combining Lumiode with infrared or ultraviolet LEDs, for example, could lead to improved 3-D scanning and printing.
Howard Levin, near right, and Mark Gelfand are revolutionizing the treatment of chronic diseases with devices inspired by long-abandoned surgical techniques.
On a February afternoon at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in northern Manhattan, the operating room has been filling for half an hour with a steady trickle of surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, medical researchers, and a few curious observers.
Some are here to help, others to witness something they have never seen before. The patient is heavily sedated but still awake; an LED screen suspended above the operating table displays the vital signs. Normal blood pressure is anything below 120 over 80. This patient's reading is 270 over 110. The astronomical numbers are why everyone has come today--to see whether chronic hypertension that drugs aren't helping will respond to a radical new procedure.
Ajay Kirtane, an interventional cardiologist and head of the surgical team, begins with a small incision near the patient's groin. He inserts a short, hollow sheath, his gloved hands speckling with blood. He then methodically threads a catheter--a long plastic tube--into the artery and, guided by a scan on an overhead display, to the blood vessels leading to the kidneys, which on the screen resemble giant gray beans. So far the procedure is a lot like any catheterization--complex yet utterly routine. The team pauses, however, while an assistant opens a 4-foot-long orange and white cardboard box marked with the word "symplicity" and removes what looks like a motorcycle throttle with an electrical cord at one end and a 3-foot-long wire on the other. He plugs the electrical cord into a generator and Kirtane threads the wire through the catheter till it reaches the kidneys. The assistant activates the generator. The patient doesn't flinch as an energy burst destroys a swath of the renal nerves. For the next 20 minutes, Kirtane manipulates the wire, wiping out various sets of nerves. Toward the end, he turns around and says, modestly, "That's all there is to it."
But in truth there is much more to it than that.
In the spring of 2003, Howard Levin and Mark Gelfand were just a couple of frustrated entrepreneurs banging around Silicon Valley, looking to sell a stake in an idea for the device that would become Symplicity. Over and over again, they made the rounds of the venture capital firms on Sand Hill Road, where they gave earnest but futile presentations to potential funders. With each passing month, they became more demoralized. Some VCs dismissed their idea as stupid, or crazy. Some thought it intriguing but too risky. All had a reason to say no. Gelfand recalls, "Everyone and their grandmother pissed on us."
They had expected a better reception. By the time they arrived in the Valley, the two men had already collaborated on several devices and had created several startups that either succeeded modestly or appeared to have real promise. One was a vest that could administer CPR to a patient in cardiac distress by automatically contracting and expanding; another was a blood-filtration device that alleviated symptoms of congestive heart failure. What's more, the potential pool of patients for their newest idea could be in the tens of millions. But you could see why the VCs had their doubts. For starters, the men didn't fit the Silicon Valley mold. Both were in their forties, well past the bloom of technological youth, and both were voluble New Yorkers. More to the point, their approach to medical innovation could kindly be described as audacious. They were pitching not just a new kind of machine but an entirely new kind of therapeutic treatment. In fact, their claims were tantamount to suggesting that rather than looking for the next miracle pill, the health care industry should be looking for the next miracle device. This stance cast them against the currents of medicine for the past half century. In an era when Big Pharma was spending billions on breakthrough products and patients would much rather take a pill than suffer a doctor's scalpel, why fund a device that sounded like a science experiment?
In the end, only one group of West Coast techies--a Menlo Park medical-device incubator known as the Foundry--was willing to bet on Levin and Gelfand's invention. Foundry CEO Hanson Gifford was intrigued by their research showing a relationship between the removal of renal nerves and improvements in cardiovascular health. In 2004, in exchange for a significant share of future profits, Gifford and his partners agreed to take over development of the project and set out to build, improve, and test a renal device. By 2007, the first human trials were starting to show that in some cases the new treatment might lower blood pressure far more than any single drug therapy could--and with few significant side effects. And these findings were the main reason Medtronic, the medical-device maker, bought the idea, now known as renal denervation, in 2011 for $800 million. It was the highest price ever paid for an early-stage medical-device technology.
At the moment, the treatment is being used in Europe on patients with drug-resistant hypertension and is in the midst of a large (and likely definitive) U.S. trial that includes New York-Presbyterian. Medtronic expects it to be on the market here within two years. Dr. Oz has already begun to blog about it. Until the trials are complete, the device elicits a wait-and-see caveat from most doctors. But in the half-dozen conversations I had with some of the country's leading cardiologists, a strain of barely contained excitement comes through, mainly because the preliminary results of the treatment are so astonishing, and the side effects so minimal, compared to new drug therapies. "You now have a technology that can potentially be done safely and reduce the blood pressure by 30, 40, 50 millimeters of mercury?" Mehdi Shishehbor, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, tells me. "That is just enormous."
Levin admits, only half-seriously: "We are now the most famous people you've never heard of." But then he adds, "People come to us and say, 'Was that just a fluke that you guys did that, or was it real?' And so the answer is--"
"Well, our answer is, we have a system," Gelfand says.
"Right," adds Levin. "We don't think it's a fluke. We think it's a function of how we do things, rather than, you know, did we just get lucky."
The device industry has the distinction of being both immensely important and exceedingly obscure. It is not a business that consumers can easily follow: Like the rest of us, the patient on Kirtane's operating table had little awareness of the innovations that now allow for catheterized tubes to be pushed through the bloodstream, let alone the origins of the experimental device. Still, I came to spend time with Levin and Gelfand because their medical work over the past decade promises to have more of an impact--a life-and-death impact, that is--than so much of the gadgetry that clogs the web with speculation, chatter, and tweets. At the same time, their innovative process helps explain how new ideas, rather than just new technology, can alter the future.
