Looking to Top Siri, SoundHound Launches Voice Search

Song-recognition app maker SoundHound Inc. on Tuesday unveiled a wildly ambitious plan to take on Google Inc., Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Amazon.com Inc. with its voice search technology, dubbed Hound.

The Silicon Valley company, which had been working on the technology for Hound since 2005, said Hound can potentially be embedded into anything that's connected to the Internet, allowing people to ask questions of their toaster, coffee maker or car and get answers trawled from databases or the Web. For now, Hound is still in beta and is only available as an app on Android devices. A version for iOS is expected sometime this summer. The company did not say when Hound will be available to the general public.

While Hound is being released initially as a mobile app, the company wants to eventually license the technology for all manner of "smart" devices, including the growing "Internet of Things" universe. Gartner Inc. projected that the number of Internet-connected devices will grow from 4.9 billion devices worldwide this year to 25 billion devices in 2020. To encourage developers to explore its technology, SoundHound on Tuesday also launched Houndify, an application program interface that lets developers integrate Hound voice recognition and search into whatever they're building.

"We believe in a world where we speak to the things around us just as we speak to each other," SoundHound's Chief Executive Keyvan Mohajer said in a statement.

It's a vision that plenty of other companies also believe in. Apple has Siri, Microsoft has Cortana, and Amazon has Alexa. Google's voice recognition is built into many of its applications. All are competing to become for voice search what Google has been for desktop search.

SoundHound, which has 110 employees, believes its technology can compete by offering an approach to search that it says is faster, more accurate and more intelligent than what's currently available. 

"Let's say I want to find hotels in Seattle for three nights, starting tomorrow, that's pet-friendly and are within 0.5 miles of the Space Needle," said Katie McMahon, SoundHound's Vice President and General Manager. "I can drill down even further and tell it to leave out hotels that don't have any air conditioner. Hound gives you results to complex questions right away. You can't easily do that with any other service."

For the music industry, McMahon said Hound could potentially be applied to events, such as concerts and festivals. "We did not launch with events today, but that is one area that we are excited to get into," she said, pointing out that Hound could, for example, search for U2 concert dates in California after July 2. "I can get more granular and more contextual without having to type or text."

The company, which raised nearly $40 million in financing over the past 10 years, continues to draw an undisclosed amount of revenue from its eponymous music recognition application in the form of advertising, technology licensing and affiliate fees generated by traffic referrals that lead to sales.

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FCC to crackdown on robocall spammers' beloved loophole

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has put forward rules to close a loophole used by robocallers and text-message spammers.

The proposed regulations, if approved, will ban robocallers from harassing citizens when they take over a previously used number. Even if the previous owner of the number was OK with the calls, robo-spammers must stop calling once the number is inherited by someone else, the watchdog reckons.

Carriers must make sure these recycled numbers are treated as a clean slate, according to the proposals, meaning telcos should use technology to block miscreants who continue to spam numbers even after they change ownership.

Robocallers are not allowed to dial up people unless some sort of consent has been given, and forms have to be filled in to be removed from the lists. By robocall, the watchdog means calls from computers that play messages touting shady businesses, loans and such like.

"Unwanted calls and texts are the number one consumer complaint to the FCC," the commission said, adding that it had 215,000 gripes on the issue last year.

"There are thousands of complaints to the FCC every month on both telemarketing and robocalls."

The proposed rules will allow people to opt-out of robocalls verbally over the phone, and also set limits on robocalls made by political organizations, which not held to the same standards as commercial companies. The rules, if approved, will restrict campaign calls to those who have consented to receive them rather than blanketing an entire area with political messages.

"Carriers could offer robocall-blocking technologies to consumers," the FCC said. "It would give the go-ahead for carriers to implement market-based solutions that consumers could use to stop unwanted robocalls."

As simple as the FCC makes these rules sound, carriers may not be willing nor be able to simply flick the switch and kill all incoming robocalls by default to recycled numbers. T-Mobile US told The Reg in a statement:

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Oculus Rift and a VR-ready PC will cost $1,500, CEO says

The Oculus Rift is prepared to melt your perceived reality in early 2016 -- if you have the proper PC. If not, a new, Rift-ready PC plus the headset itself should cost around $1,500, Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe said today at the Re/code conference.

 "We are looking at an all-in price, if you have to go out and actually need to buy a new computer and you're going to buy the Rift... at most you should be in that $1,500 range," he said (via Re/code). He didn't provide a standalone price for the Rift, but Oculus has already divulged its recommended PC specs and they're fairly hefty.

Oculus Chief Architect Atman Binstock said earlier in May that these specs will apply to the lifespan of the Rift and that the price of such a powerful rig should drop over time. Iribe echoed that idea today, noting that he'd like to see the total price dip below $1,000. Previous Rift development kits -- that's just the headset, no PC -- have been priced around $350.

Now we have two ballpark figures for the Oculus Rift: A vague "Q1 2016" release window and an even more nebulous "$1,500 or cheaper" price point. One day we'll get a straight answer out of you, Oculus. One day.

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Driverless cars will hit vehicle ownership

US car sales may drop about 40 per cent in the next 25 years because of shared driverless cars, forcing mass-market producers such as General Motors and Ford to slash output, a Barclays analyst said this week.

Vehicle ownership rates may fall by almost half as families move to having just one car, according to a report published by the analyst, Brian Johnson.

Driverless cars will travel twice as many miles as current autos because they will transport each family member during the day, he wrote.

Large-volume automakers “would need to shrink dramatically to survive,” Johnson wrote. “GM and Ford would need to reduce North American production by up to 68 per cent and 58 per cent, respectively.”

Self-driving cars have become a frequent topic for auto executives as the technology emerges.

The market for autonomous technology will grow to $42 billion (€36.9 billion) by 2025 and self-driving cars could account for a quarter of global auto sales by 2035, according to Boston Consulting Group.

By 2017, partially autonomous vehicles will become available in “large numbers,” the firm said in a report in April.

Johnson’s report, called Disruptive Mobility, contends that the shift to cars that drive themselves will upend the auto industry.

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Intel Compute Stick review:

The Intel Compute Stick is a $150/AU$229 PC (about £100) that fits in the palm of your hand. It plugs into a display's HDMI port, and -- when connected to Wi-Fi and peripherals -- offers the full Windows 8 experience. (Like all current PCs, it's eligible for a free Windows 10 upgrade later this year, too.)

But having the full Windows experience doesn't necessarily mean you'll have the best experience. The Stick houses a lightweight Atom processor that's usually found in Intel-based tablets, so don't expect to do any heavy image editing or high-end gaming. The Compute Stick needs to be plugged in to power at all times -- there's no battery -- via its Micro-USB port, and Bluetooth performance is finicky at best.

But this is nevertheless a exciting little experiment from Intel, as the Stick offers a great HD streaming experience you can fit in your pocket. You don't want it as a primary PC in your home, but don't too quick to dismiss it. Hobbyists and tinkerers especially may find the Compute Stick well worth the price; those with less patience should opt for something like the HP Stream 11 laptop, which offers a more polished, self-contained bargain Windows experience for just a bit more cash.

Design and features

There isn't all that much to the Compute Stick. It's a little bigger than a Chromecast, and plugs into a TV or monitor via an HDMI port. The Stick can't draw power over HDMI and there's no battery, so you're going to need to keep it plugged in, too: there's a Micro-USB charging port on the side.

The Stick is powered by a quad-core 1.3GHz Intel Atom Z3735F processor paired with 2GB of RAM, and has 32GB of storage space. A microSD card slot on the side can support up to 128GB cards. There's a USB port on the side so you can plug in external devices or a USB key, and Wi-Fi b/g/n connectivity is built-in. Bluetooth 4.0 is also available, but it's woefully unreliable -- we'll get to that in a bit.

The Stick runs Windows 8.1 with Bing. Don't be alarmed: it's a full version of Windows that Microsoft offers to device manufacturers at a deep discount. Bing is the default search engine system-wide when you first run it, but there's nothing stopping you from changing that once you're up and running. As it's a full Windows PC, there's nothing (save performance limitations) stopping you from installing whatever you'd like, including Windows 10. There's also a model that runs Ubuntu Linux, which is slightly cheaper at about $110.

The competition isn't too stiff in the PC-on-a-stick space, but the Asus Chromebit recently caught our eye. It's a bit cheaper at $100 (about £70, or AU$130), but also runs Chrome OS instead of Windows, with all the requisite drawbacks you'll find from the browser-centric operating system. It does offer a hinged design that'll make it a bit easier to fit into tighter spaces, which I like: I found I needed to use an HDMI extender cable on most of the monitors and televisions I plugged the Compute Stick. The Compute Stick also isn't fanless, but the low hum was pretty much inaudible unless I got very close.

Connections and performance

Intel is pitching the Compute Stick as a cheap way to cram a PC into a tight space, but there's only so much you can expect out of tablet hardware. The PC never felt sluggish while I used it, and things never took an interminable amount of time to load.

Streaming 1080p over sites like YouTube and Netflix works flawlessly, as did playing local HD media. I'd imagine the Compute Stick would be happiest as the streaming end of your media server, getting the content on other devices on your home network to play on any TV or monitor in your house using something like Plex.

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Future elections could be decided through online voting

LONDON: Researchers, including one of Indian-origin, have developed a new technique to allow people to cast their vote online - even if their home computers are suspected of being infected with viruses. 

Taking inspiration from the security devices issued by some banks, a research group at the University of Birmingham, has developed a system that allows people to vote by employing independent hardware devices in conjunction with their personal computers (PCs). 

Taking inspiration from the security devices issued by some banks, a research group at the University of Birmingham, has developed a system that allows people to vote by employing independent hardware devices in conjunction with their personal computers (PCs). 

The technique offers a fresh contribution to the debate surrounding e-voting and could be ready for use in time for the 2020 or 2025 General Election in the UK, researchers said. 

"This system works by employing a credit card-sized device similar to those used in online banking. It is called Du-Vote, and we have been developing it over the past two years. From the voter's perspective, it's straightforward: you receive a code on the device and type it back into the computer," said Professor Mark Ryan, who led the study. 

"The main advantage of this system is that it splits the security between the independent security device and a voter's computer or mobile device. .. 

"A computer is a hugely powerful, all-purpose machine running billions of lines of code that no one really understands, whereas the independent security device has a much, much smaller code base and is not susceptible to viruses," said Ryan. 

Online voting carries a strong security requirement because of the possibility of undetectable interference in an election by foreign governments, criminal gangs, or petty fraudsters. 

Malware affects an estimated 20 per cent to 40 per cent of PCs globally, and specific election-targeting malware could be developed to attempt to alter votes cast or compromise ballot secrecy. 

Malware affects an estimated 20 per cent to 40 per cent of PCs globally, and specific election-targeting malware could be developed to attempt to alter votes cast or compromise ballot secrecy. 

"This is currently the only piece of work that addresses a core problem of e-voting - namely, that someone may have viruses or other malware on their computer," said Gurchetan Grewal, who is part of the project team and recently completed a PhD in online voting at Birmingham. 

"For example, the system in Estonia, where they have already introduced online voting, does not deal with this potentially undetectable source of vote manipulation or breach of voter privacy," said Grewal. 

The system being developed at Birmingham aims to bypass and detect malware by using a separate security device. 

But the system achieves even greater security than those used by banks by allowing for the possibility that the security devices themselves have been manufactured under the influence of a hostile adversary. 

The researchers succeed in proving that even if a hostile adversary controls the entire computing infrastructure, voters and election officials can still detect electoral fraud. 

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You Can Now Comment on Dropbox Files

Dropbox is getting a little more group-friendly with a new feature that lets you add comments to files.

Introduced Tuesday, the new commenting feature lets you have conversations on your own files and the files that people share with you. Comments are now live on the Web at Dropbox.com, and are "coming soon" to mobile, Dropbox said. /p>

"Whether you're collaborating on a business proposal or putting together a vacation itinerary, working with multiple people can be difficult," Dropbox wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "It can involve lots of back and forth conversations, scattered across email threads and chat windows. And in the process, feedback can get lost and it can take ages to get everyone on the same page."

The new feature is aimed at keeping your conversations organized in one place, Dropbox said.

Just like on Facebook or Twitter, you can bring someone into the conversation with mentions. Just type the @ symbol, followed by someone's name or email address, and they'll get an email notification — even if they don't use Dropbox. The notification will include a link to the file you're sharing.

"It's a one-step process to both share a file and gather input about it," Dropbox said.

When someone comments on a file you've shared, you'll get an email notification. If you don't want the play-by-play, just click "Unsubscribe to notifications."

By default, everyone with access to a shared link can make comments. But if you don't want others to add their input, just click "Turn off comments" in the Options menu.

The new feature comes after Dropbox and Microsoft earlier this month teamed up to make it easier to edit your Office documents online. You can now edit Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents in Dropbox using Microsoft Office Online on the Web. This means you don't need the desktop versions of Microsoft Office, and can also use someone else's computer, to edit Office documents in Dropbox.

For more, check out PCMag's full review of Dropbox.

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Tencent Challenges Google, Alibaba With Own Smartphone Software

Tencent Holdings Ltd. released an operating system for smartphones and smartwatches Tuesday as it tries to win more of the 557 million Chinese accessing the Internet through mobile devices.

The software, called TOS+, provides voice recognition and includes payment systems, Chief Operating Officer Mark Ren said during the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing.

Tencent follows domestic rival Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. in creating its own operating system for a country where more than nine out of 10 smartphones use Google Inc.’s Android. TOS+ seeks to tap Tencent’s stronghold in online gaming by including virtual reality and supporting play on televisions.

“What Tencent will be in the future is a connector,” Ren said. “We want to make an open platform to connect all people, devices and services.”

The Shenzhen-based company, which owns stakes in Activision Blizzard Inc. and Riot Games Inc., will work with partners to integrate the software into devices including smart glasses, Ren said.

Tencent is leveraging its ownership of China’s two most-popular instant messaging applications -- WeChat and QQ -- to boost its efforts against Android. Google’s software accounted for 78 percent of the global industry in 2013, followed by Apple Inc.’s 16 percent, according to Gartner Inc.

WeChat and QQ have more than 1 billion users combined, and Chairman Ma Huateng is finding new ways to make money through advertising, payment services and partnerships with Alibaba shopping competitor JD.com Inc.

Asia’s largest Internet company, Alibaba, also developed its own operating system, called YunOS. The company plans to have it installed on tens of millions of smartphones in the long term, Joseph Tsai, Alibaba’s vice chairman, said in an interview in November.

Tsai said he hoped an operating system could help drive consumption in unexplored sectors including digital entertainment, health care and travel. Alibaba announced it would invest $590 million into smartphone maker Meizu Technology Corp in February.

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Silicon Valley Help Sought as Pentagon Fights Cyber-Attacks

The Defense Department is seeking a new collaboration with Silicon Valley to gain access to the latest technology and talent as the U.S. seeks to prevent catastrophic cyber-attacks.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter made his pitch for cooperation on Thursday, in the first official visit in 20 years by a Pentagon chief to the Northern California region that spawned much of the world’s advanced technology. The effort comes amid warnings by defense officials that the U.S. military is losing its technological edge over potential rivals, including China.

Carter, a trained physicist, may have the intellectual candlepower to meet Silicon Valley’s leaders on equal footing. But his call for closer ties is likely to meet resistance from high-tech executives still fuming over government spying disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

“Silicon Valley still thinks it can be Switzerland in any cyberwar,” said Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of homeland security in President George W. Bush’s administration. “That’s an illusion, but he’s going to have trouble getting folks to enthusiastically partner with DoD.”

Denise Zheng, a former government cybersecurity specialist and now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Silicon Valley is home to “the loudest dissenting voices on what our intelligence and national security agencies are doing.”

Facebook Visit

Carter’s cooperation plea came in a speech at Stanford University, beginning a two-day visit that will also include stops at the headquarters of Facebook Inc. and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

The defense secretary plans to establish a full-time office in Silicon Valley, staffed with personnel who will scout emerging technologies that the military could use. The Pentagon also plans to set up its own branch of the U.S. Digital Service, which overhauled the flawed healthcare.gov website last year.

His initiative reflects a turnaround for a government institution that once served as a principal incubator of breakthrough technologies, including a forerunner of the Internet.

Today, innovations in microelectronics, global positioning systems and software applications are more likely to emerge from a West Coast office park than from a government lab.

That’s why the Pentagon must shift from its traditional role of technology exporter to becoming a technology importer, said a department official who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity in advance of Carter’s presentation.

Pentagon Hacked

Obama administration officials have increasingly been sounding the alarm about the risk of cyber-assaults on government and commercial networks.

In the prepared text for his Stanford speech, Carter disclosed that Russian hackers intruded into one of the Pentagon’s unclassified computer networks. The penetration was detected and “a crack team of incident responders” began hunting the Russians within 24 hours, Carter said.

The Russians had entered the Defense Department network through “an old vulnerability in one of our legacy networks that hadn’t been patched,” he added.

‘Urgent’ Concern

Pentagon cybersecurity personnel evicted the Russian hackers “in a way that minimized their chances of returning,” Carter said, calling the episode an example of the department’s ability to protect itself.

John Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, last month called cyberthreats “an urgent national security priority” and announced formation of a new digital innovation unit.

Pentagon officials said their new strategy grew in part from concern over increasingly severe and sophisticated cyber-attacks. Carter said in his prepared remarks that the approach includes providing “offensive cyber options that, if directed by the president, can augment our other defense systems.”

Since the department’s previous strategy was released in 2011, institutions from Sony Pictures Entertainment to the White House have been victimized.

Hackers, including from more than 100 foreign intelligence agencies, probe Pentagon computer networks millions of times each day, Eric Rosenbach, Carter’s top adviser on cybersecurity, told the Senate Armed Services Committee this month.

“These cyberthreats continue to increase and evolve, posing greater risks to the networks and systems of the Department of Defense our national critical infrastructure and U.S. companies and interests,” Rosenbach said.

Approach ‘Ineffective’

Baker, now an attorney with Steptoe & Johnson LLP, said efforts to deter attacks are insufficient.

“I’ve yet to see indications that DoD is writing a cyberstrategy to win,” he said. “Instead, we’re talking about ’deterring’ them, which we’ve been remarkably ineffective at.”

The Pentagon also has struggled to retain cybersecurity specialists in an era when the private sector can offer even relatively junior personnel big paychecks.

The military will have a hard time capitalizing on commercial breakthroughs with “a procurement cycle designed to buy aircraft in the World War II era,” said Fred Kagan, a defense specialist at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

Facebook Visit

At Facebook in Menlo Park on Thursday, Carter was to meet with Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s chief operating officer who served as chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in the Clinton administration.

On Friday, he will hold a roundtable with participants including Ben Horowitz, a co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz on Sand Hill Road alongside the Stanford campus. The company holds stakes in businesses specializing in data management virtualization, robotics, drones and “big data.”

Since taking office in January, Carter has made cybersecurity policy a priority. His first public event with troops took place March 13 at the U.S. Cyber Command at Ford Meade, Maryland.

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popSLATE gives your iPhone a second (not so useful) screen

Like most smartphone users, I unlock my screen incessantly so I usually run out of battery when I most need it. But popSLATE promises to be the rehab for my swipe-screen addiction. It's a smartphone case with an in-built E Ink screen that can personalize the back of an iPhone 6. I could use it to flaunt my favorite pictures or if I run out of battery, at say, an airport, I'd be able to flip my phone over to scan my boarding pass. It seemed like the perfect solution for my excessive phone usage. So I turned the back of my phone into a second, always-on screen for about a week.

If any of this sounds familiar, it's because popSLATE is the product of a two-year old Indiegogo campaign that raised a little over $219,000. At the time, it promised to be a unique smartphone case with a 4-inch second screen for an iPhone 5. But the company failed to deliver. Now, they're shipping the pending product to their backers, only this time it's suited for an iPhone 6.

At first sight, it's bulky for a case that's not a juice pack so it adds weight to an otherwise slim device. But its excuse is that it has a mind of its own -- it syncs with your iPhone but also works independently. It doesn't show you notifications or new emails, but it can store up to eight images (or screenshots) that you can swap with an inconspicuous button depending on your schedule or mood. The possibilities for personalization seemed immense, but at $130, it needed to do a lot more than offer black and white images to justify it's high price point.

Setting it up was the easiest part: slide the phone into it, download the popSLATE app and a couple of quick prompts later the phone is paired to the case via Bluetooth. Its biggest selling point is that it doesn't need your iPhone's battery. It comes with its own internal battery that lasts for at least a week on a single charge. The E Ink screen uses power only when you refresh an image, which in my case wasn't as often as I thought it would be so I didn't need to charge it once. But ironically, with my Bluetooth on for days, it drained my phone earlier than usual on most days.

The app tries hard to be a social network. It lets you link your Instagram account for quick access to your favorite square-format pictures or take new images so you can "pop" them to the back of your phone. It automatically shares those images on its network, but you can choose to opt out. There's a follow feature so you can set up a community but it's missing a crucial feature -- you can't like or comment on anything so there's no validation or interaction. You can only "re-pop" the black and white images but it's not half as satisfying as a red-heart on your Instagram.

popSLATE is essentially a protective case that wants to make use of the real estate that's wasted on the back of your phone. But it's not like a Yotaphone 2 that has a fully functional second E Ink screen on the back. This one doesn't replicate the experience of your main screen. It needs you to remember what you might need to access when your phone runs out of juice and then "pop" it. The information I sent to the back was handy, but it wasn't always clear. Some street names in a Google Maps 

screenshot were illegible and my calendar was blotchy too. I did play around with the images, though. Most of them looked great with a vintage vibe when converted to E ink. So at the very least, I figured those artsy shots would be a great conversation starter. But popSLATE didn't grab any attention from people around me. It was probably the dull grey tones that didn't pique anyone's curiosity. But then, maybe, people are already too jaded from looking at smartphone cases that aspire to do more than just protect your phone.

A week into it, I hardly remembered to flip my phone over. And even when I did, I found no real use for the display. Every time I saw the low-res monochromatic images on the back, I found myself missing my vibrant (eyesight weakening) screen that was waiting to be unlocked.

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How Moore's Law Changed History (and Your Smartphone)

After 50 years, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's prediction about semiconductor miniaturization still holds up.

                   

When I was a kid, I got an idea from a puzzle book which I believed in my childlike way would make me fabulously wealthy in just a few weeks. The trick was to convince my mother to pay me a progressively doubling wage for doing household chores for a month—a penny on the first day, two cents on the second, four on the third, and so on.

Unfortunately for me, my mom was too bright to take me up on the offer. So I missed out on collecting $10.7 million and change after 30 days of doing the dishes, taking out the trash, and the like. Fortunately for all of us, the semiconductor industry did accept Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore's challenge to do something similar 50 years ago—and we continue to reap the benefits today.

Back in 1965, Moore, then the director of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductor, was asked by Electronics magazine to submit an article making a prediction for developments in the semiconductor component industry over the following decade. So for the 35th anniversary issue of Electronics published on April 19, 1965, Moore noted that the number of transistor and resistor elements on computer chips had been doubling roughly every year—and that he expected this to keep happening for the next 10 years.

It was a prediction that ended up extending far past its first decade. And what later became known as "Moore's Law" would prove to be perhaps the most reliable and enduring guide to the pace of technological advance in not just the semiconductor business, but in the computing industry as a whole.

But back in April 1965, Moore's observation, accompanied with a simple graph he'd sketched, wasn't even regarded as cover story material in Electronics. Instead, you had to thumb forward to page 99 to find the Intel co-founder's prophetic pronouncement amidst the writings of other industry experts. For just 75 cents, you'd have had the very first iteration of Moore's Law in your grubby hands, but finding it wasn't easy.

In an interview earlier this year, Moore, who co-founded Intel in 1968 with the late Robert Noyce, explained how the whole thing came about after Electronics asked him for the article.

"I took the opportunity to look at what had happened up to that time. This would have been in 1964, I guess. And I looked at the few chips we had made and noticed we went from a single transistor on a chip to a chip with about eight elements—transistors and resistors—on it," said the 86-year-old chairman emeritus of Intel.

"The new chips coming out had about twice the number of elements, about 16. And in the laboratory, we were creating chips with about 30 elements and we were looking at the possibility of making chips with twice that many, around 60 elements on a chip. Well, I plotted these on a piece of semi-log paper starting with the planar transistor in 1959 and noticed that, essentially, we were doubling every year.

"So I took a wild extrapolation and said we're going to continue doubling every year and go from about 60 elements at the time to 60,000 in 10 years."

To make things even more interesting, Moore himself did not at the time regard this remarkable prediction of exponential growth in integrated circuit (IC) complexity to be the most important point of his article. Instead, he was trying to stress that making ICs was going to get cheaper to do over time—potentially, a whole lot cheaper.

"I was just trying to communicate the point that this was the direction semiconductors were going," he said. "And this was going to give a tremendous cost advantage, which wasn't true at the time. The early integrated circuits cost quite a bit more than the pieces to assemble the similar circuits out of individual components.

"But one could see the trend was going in the direction that this was going to be the cheaper way eventually. That was my real objective—to communicate that we have a technology that's going to make electronics cheap. But I didn't expect this binary order of magnitude increase, the thousand-fold increase in complexity to be very accurate."

The accelerated pace of early IC manufacturing slowed a bit in ensuing years. Moore later revised his timetable for the doubling of transistor density in microchips from one year to two. More recently, we've seen the cadence at which Intel and other leading semiconductor manufacturers ramp new process technologies range from about 18 to 32 months.

Making Moore's Law Happen

Of course, the continued relevance of Moore's Law hasn't just happened by magic. Moore's prediction, while remaining accurate for 50 years, isn't actually a natural "law" like the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

 Shrinking the size of elements on computer chips so consistently and for so many decades has required incredible innovations like CMOS, silicon straining, VLSI, immersion lithography, high-k dielectrics, and most recently, FinFET or tri-gate "3D" transistor process technology. Those advances didn't just appear out of thin air because Moore's Law demanded they happen—brilliant, doggedly persistent people working in labs at universities and companies like Bell, Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild, Intel, Toshiba, IBM, Advanced Micro Devices, TSMC, Samsung, and elsewhere invented them and thus helped extend Moore's Law, not the other way around.

Moore made his original prediction about the pace of miniaturization in computer chip components as a way to highlight the attractive economics in semiconductor manufacturing. By his own admission, he wasn't terribly confident that it would hold up over time. But in the ensuing decades, Moore's Law has become as much a challenge to the industry to keep it alive as an axiom for how chipmaking works.

I never managed to trick my mom into paying me a fortune to make my bed for a month. But 50 years ago, Moore set the wheels in motion for an entire industry to dedicate itself to producing increasingly complex integrated circuits to make progressively more powerful computers and devices. As a child, I thought it would be really cool if I could use math to turn a penny into millions. Way cooler—and far more beneficial to all of us—is that we've turned transistors that were once the size of a human hand into nanoscale electronic switches powering smartphone supercomputers we can fit in our pockets.

Moore's Law has presided over that astonishing process of human ingenuity for the past 50 years. It's still holding up even as we approach atomic-scale limitations in making circuitry even smaller than it is today—a possible end of the road for Moore's enduring insight, or perhaps just the next great challenge.

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The law that predicts computing power turns 50

Today represents a historic milestone in technology: it's the 50th anniversary of Moore's Law, the observation that the complexity of computer chips tends to double at a regular rate. On April 19th, 1965, Fairchild's Gordon Moore (later to co-found Intel) published an article noting that the number of components in integrated circuits had not only doubled every year up to that point, but would continue at that pace for at least a decade.

 He would later revise that guideline to every two years, but the concept of an unofficial law of progress stuck. It not only foresaw the rapid expansion of computing power, but frequently served as a target -- effectively, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The revised law has largely held up over the past five decades, but it might not last much longer. With chips at 14 nanometers (such as Intel's Broadwell processors), the industry is starting to hit physical limits. Circuits are now so small that escaping heat is a big problem. 

While Moore's Law may survive for another couple of processor generations, there's a chance that chip designers will need new materials or exotic data transmission techniques (like quantum tunneling) for the rule to hold true. Semiconductor companies have run into seemingly impassable barriers before, though, so Moore may be vindicated for a while yet.

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This Disney 3-D Printer Uses Fabric to Create Soft Objects

A new type of 3-D printer created by Disney Research allows layers of soft fabric to be used instead of plastic or metal. The result is objects that are as soft and pliable as normal 3-D printed things are rough and solid. It works by laying down a sheet of fabric, be it felt, cotton or synthetic, and using a laser to cut the shape of the bottom-most layer. The sheet is then treated with a heat-sensitive adhesive and another layer of fabric placed on top, which is then laser-cut again in the shape the next layer — and so on. At the end, the fabric surrounding the object being built layer by layer can be removed, leaving behind the object itself.

Multiple fabric types can be used, or more rigid materials, or even electronics. The paper describing the new printer shows a star-shaped item with a touch sensor, and a smartphone cozy with a layer dedicated to wireless charging. It's not quite at the "print me a teddy bear" phase, but the technique could eventually help make smart clothes and smart toys, or otherwise augment the 3-D printing process.

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Hands Full? Navigate Using the NailO Thumbnail Trackpad

Capitalizing on the recent nail-art craze, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a thumbnail trackpad intended to be fashionable and functional.

The wearable sensor, dubbed NailO, sticks to your fingernail and essentially brings your smartphone's touch screen to your finger. Scroll through a digital recipe while cooking, or answer the phone when your hands are full.

"It's very unobtrusive," said Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, an MIT graduate student working on the NailO. "When I put this on, it becomes part of my body. I have the power to take it off, so it still gives you control over it. But it allows this very close connection to your body."

Still a prototype, the device was inspired by the colorful stickers women often apply to their nails.

"It's a cosmetic product, popular in Asian cultures," Kao said in a statement. "When I came here [from Taiwan], I was looking for them, but I couldn't find them, so I'd have my family mail them to me."

Using capacitive sensing—like the technology embedded in an iPhone's touch screen—the device works even with a thin coating between the sensor and your finger. That's good news for the MIT researchers, who hope to develop a commercial version featuring detachable "nails" that can be swapped out for different colors and styles.

You won't find NailO next to the polish remover or emery boards on shelves any time soon, though. This early prototype is still under development. As you can see in the video, it's still a bit larger than the average nail, so researchers are working to slim down the device and battery without losing functionality.

Still, the team has already managed to pack capacitive sensors, a battery, and three separate chips into a thumbnail-sized gadget. Not an easy task, according to grad student and researcher Artem Dementyev.

"The hardest part was probably the antenna design," he said. "You have to put the antenna far enough away from the chips so that it doesn't interfere with them."

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Reviews Reveal The New MacBook The Future Of Laptops, But With A Catch

The new 12-inch MacBook from Apple Inc may be the most beautiful laptop ever (to date), but several tech sites suggest that users looking for power should skip the first generation — and wait for the next one, probably next year?

Reviews from several trusted sites pointed out that the new 13.1 mm thick MacBook is a promising new “category” within the laptop market, but it lacks the necessary power to run many applications. They also suggest that Apple would introduce a new model next year that may include more USB-C ports and better processors for improved performance.

In case you’re wondering, the new 2-pound MacBook with 12-inch Retina display is not replacing the MacBook Air, although they have similarities. The new MacBook (without the “air” branding) is being positioned as an alternative to iPads.

This new product is also more expensive than the MacBook Air (and the iPad, of course) with base price of $1,299 with 1.1GHz dual-core processor and 256GB on-board flash storage, compared to Air’s base model with asking price of $899. Apple is also selling a higher-end 12-inch model for $1,599 which ships with 512GB flash storage and dual-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz.

According to CNET, users who can live “with its limitations” would enjoy the laptop’s groundbreaking design. Meanwhile, the Verge, known for its mostly positive reviews for Apple devices (including the Apple Watch), claims that the new MacBook is the “future” of laptops — although the review is indirectly suggesting that users should wait for the next model that would address all the limitations of the first model.

Another review worth mentioning is from Macworld, also known for its mostly-positive reviews for Apple products. The site revealed that one of the laptop’s bells and whistles is actually a “con” — the MacBook’s keyboard. The review said the butterfly mechanism on each key, which delivers reduced travel from the surface to the bottom of the key, is making “fast typing harder, and less satisfying.”

And similar to other reviews, the Macworld piece also criticized the laptop’s single USB-C port which demands carrying more adapter.

New MacBook Is The Future Of Notebook Personal Computing

Phil Schiller, the firm’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, is confident that the new MacBook is the “future of netbooks”. In a press release earlier last month, Mr. Schiller underlined the product’s build quality, thinness, and portability, instead of highlighting its capability to run applications.

Apple is also not shy to admit that the new MacBook was built using the same techniques used to make iPhones and iPads — with the main focus on making everything thin, light, and appealing.

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