The new wave of Silicon Valley start-ups

Silicon Valley is the southern part of San Francisco's Bay Area, stretching from the city to San Jose. This is one of the top research and development centres in the world; wherever you look someone is having a good idea.According to the Wall Street Journal, half of the 20 most inventive towns in the US are in Silicon Valley.Nowadays the place is not just about silicon chip makers; all technology is here.It is a string of satellite towns full of clever people, incredibly successful tech companies, and hopefuls looking to make the big time.This place was the centre of the dotcom bubble of the mid 90s, when investors were pouring money into anything with a dot in the title. Of course it was also the hardest hit when the bubble burst. For every surviving big player, hundreds went under.Now the optimism is back, along with the money.
Cash call Each week there are meetings, networking events and presentations in which hopeful start-ups attempt to garner interest from investors. Vincent Lauria, Tech meetup organiser said: "Hi-tech meetups have actually grown phenomenally. We started out pretty small, six people first met up. We met every month and kept growing gradually, bigger and bigger until it hit critical mass and started growing on its own."We are now over 1,500 people," he said."I try to pick companies that either I feel are on a very good course to do well, or have a really unique idea that nobody else is really touching."It is often the simple things that take off. Take Data Robotics which makes high capacity home storage systems called Drobo.Geoff Barrall, Data Robotics boss, said: "Today's storage solutions are all very intensive; you have to move data around, you have to copy files, you have to worry about backing up data. "The Drobo does all of that for you. So once the data is on Drobo it's going to worry about keeping it safe, it's going to worry about letting you add more storage and grow into the future without you having to do anything at all."Simplifying storage and back-up has tapped into a big market. Data Robotics claims it is selling its $500 (£250) boxes faster than it can make them.
Green machines It is not just computer technology that folks in the valley are working on. Green technology is winning investors too, said Drew Clark from IBM Capital Ventures."I think [one of] the major drivers in today's buzz in Silicon valley is clean tech or energy tech or energy 2.0, whatever we are calling it these days," said Mr Clark."If you look at venture capital statistics it is now the third highest place that money is going into.One of the green innovations dreamed up is a highly efficient solar panel. The panels produced by SolFocus reflect sunlight to a central point to harness the energy.Unlike flat panels it means the expensive materials used to convert the energy to electricity are concentrated in one place. SolFocus claims to use 1/1000th of the area needed by flat panels, which keeps the manufacturing costs low.Gary Conley, SolFocus explained: "These cells have efficiency over double that of the best silicon today. We concentrate the sun 500 times on that small amount of cell, hence the 1000th of the amount of material used, or the expensive part."When there is no sun, or you can't see the solar disc, our panels produce zero power. They only produce power in bright sunny locations or when the sun is out."Contracts have already been signed with the Spanish government for a large scale solar farm in Southern Spain.

Nissan studies drink-proof cars

Japanese carmaker Nissan has unveiled new technology designed to detect whether a driver has been drinking.

It includes odour sensors that monitor breath, detectors which analyse perspiration of the palms, and a camera that checks alertness by eye scan.

If the system thinks a driver has drunk too much, the car will not start.

Nissan, Japan's third-largest carmaker, says the technology is still being developed, but it will eventually be introduced to reduce road deaths.

The firm says it has no specific timetable, but it aims to cut the number of fatalities involving its vehicles to half the 1995 levels by 2015.

Nissan general manager Kazuhiro Doi said the sensitivity of the technology still needed to be worked out.

"If you drink one beer, it's going to register, so we need to study what's the appropriate level for the system to activate," he told Reuters news agency.

Measuring sea level rise from space

Meteorologists and climate modellers are eagerly awaiting the launch of a satellite that will be able to measure sea level rise to an unprecedented degree of precision.
Jason-2, scientists hope, will help shed light on the oceans' dynamics by measuring the topography - the "hills" and "valleys" - of the world's seas every 10 days.
The satellite's radar altimeter, Poseidon-3, is designed to measure the sea level height to within a few centimetres. It will do this from its orbit more than 1,300km above the Earth.
Data collected by Jason-2's instruments will help researchers develop more precise forecasts, improve hurricane path projections and reveal how climate change is affecting ocean currents.
"There is more to the dynamics of sea level rise than just a single, global rise," explained Mikael Rattenborg, director of operations for the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (Eumetsat).
"Although we have seen, overall, global sea level rise, there are areas that have decreased for long periods, followed by an increase.
"We can only analyse the significance of regional variability of sea level rise if we have altimetry data available to us," he added. "Jason-2 will help us model and explain this evolution."
The satellite will be able to map 95% of the world's ice-free oceans every 10 days, something that would be impossible using survey vessels on the surface of the planet.
As well as observing variations in sea levels, Mr Rattenborg said the mission would also help researchers map seasonal and inter-annual ocean patterns, such as the Pacific's El Nino effect.
"This has a profound impact on the weather, not only in that region but globally. We can study this phenomenon in much greater detail with the altimetry data.
"All of these processes are coupled to climate analysis, which is the key reason why Eumetsat is interested in altimetry."
Storm tracking
Eumetsat operates and collects data from satellites on behalf of Europe's national meteorological agencies, such as the UK's Met Office, to compile forecasts and climate models.
Mr Rattenborg said the sea surface topography recorded by Poseidon-3 would also reveal tell-tale signs that would help predict the path and intensity of hurricanes.
He used Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the US Gulf coast in 2005, as an illustration.
"It passed over the Florida peninsula into the Gulf of Mexico as a strong hurricane (category three), but not an intense one.
"But suddenly, about 24 hours before it hit New Orleans, it developed into a category five hurricane.
"If you look at the sea surface temperature in the Gulf at the time Katrina passed over, it is fairly homogenous, so it does not explain why the system developed so rapidly."
Mr Rattenborg said the answer could be found in something called the Tropical Cyclone Heat Potential.
"It is a measurement of the heat energy available in the deep layer of the ocean," he explained.
"Altimetry provides us with a measurement of this potential, because the (sea) surface topography reacts to the changes to the heat content beneath the ocean.
"In the area of the Gulf, south of New Orleans where Katrina passed, there was a sea-surface height anomaly, which corresponds to a very deep layer of very warm water.
"This clearly shows that by looking into the ocean, we can monitor the availability of heat energy."
But it is not only the thermal energy stored deep within the oceans that causes the variation in sea level, gravity also has an influence.
The subterranean geology is not uniform, some regions are more dense than others. This causes a subtle but significant shift in the Earth's gravitational force.
To measure the influence of gravity and its impact on ocean topography and currents, the European Space Agency (Esa) plans to launch an arrow-like satellite called the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (Goce). If we want to improve our climate models then we need to improve our knowledge of how the oceans move, and Goce will help us do that," mission scientist Dr Mark Drinkwater, from Esa, told BBC News, combining the data gathered by Goce and Jason-2, meteorologists and climate scientists will advance their understanding of the physical factors influencing the oceans and atmosphere.Jason-2 is the latest addition to a series of satellites fitted with altimeters to map the sea surface.The first, Topex/Poseidon, was launched in 1992 as an experiment to assess the effectiveness of high-accuracy altimeters to measure ocean dynamics from space.Its success paved the way for the Jason-1/Poseidon-2 mission, launched in 2001.Lessons learned from the previous missions have allowed the team building the Poseidon altimeter instrument for Jason-2 to improve its accuracy and reduce the margin of uncertainty to within 2.5cm.

Giant truck set for sky-high task

A colossal 28-wheel truck that will help build a major telescope array in the Chilean Andes has successfully passed a series of tests.The giant vehicle will heave antennas - each weighing 115 tonnes - up a mountainside to the site of the array, a plateau 5,000m above sea level.The Alma telescope will study the night sky at sub-millimetre wavelengths.Astronomers say Alma will illuminate one half of the Universe that has hitherto been shrouded in darkness. Alma stands for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array.When it is completed in 2012, the £470m ($900m) array will be able to observe some of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang, and catch planets in the act of forming around young stars.The telescope project will initially comprise 66 high-precision antennas, installed at the high-altitude Llano de Chajnantor site in Chile's Atacama desert.Each antenna has a dish measuring about 12m across and a surface engineered to be accurate to within 20 microns (millionths of a metre).
Power and precision The dishes will be electronically combined to provide astronomical observations which are equivalent to a single large telescope of tremendous size and resolution.Alma will be able to probe the Universe at millimetre and sub-millimetre wavelengths with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution, with an accuracy up to ten times better than the Hubble Space Telescope.The antenna transporter is 10m wide, 20m long and 6m high. It weighs 130 tonnes and has as much power as two Formula 1 engines.
The first of two vehicles has been put through its paces at the firm Scheuerle Fahrzeugfabrik near Nuremberg in Germany.The custom-built colossus will be able to transport a 115-tonne antenna and set it down on a concrete pad within millimetres of a prescribed position.Engineers have tested whether the transporter can safely pick up the 115-tonne antenna and very carefully settle it back down again."As it picks up the antenna, the transporter puts its arms under the armpits of the antenna, lifts it up and pulls it slowly up a ramp. It gradually lifts the antenna higher and higher and eventually pulls it right into the vehicle," said Adrian Russell, Alma project manager for North America."When it gets to where the antenna is being relocated, the antenna very slowly and carefully slides back dow. On top of the world He told the BBC News website: "It can then be manipulated left and right, and slowly lowered on to the antenna foundation. That entire mechanism has to be tested very carefully with dummy weights, as well as the independent steering of the wheels."The vehicles will have to haul their heavy cargo safely from the 2,900m-high Alma base camp, where the antennas are assembled, to the array site, which lies at 5,000m - about half the cruising altitude of a 747.The vehicles must therefore be extremely powerful, as the journey will make extraordinary demands on the two 500kW diesel engines.Because of the low oxygen content of the air at 5,000m, vehicle operators will need to wear portable oxygen canisters. The backrests of the driver seats are shaped to allow the driver to wear his oxygen tank while driving.Llano de Chajnantor was chosen as the site for Alma because it is so dry. Water vapour absorbs sub-millimetre waves, interfering with observations using the telescope.If all the water vapour above Chajnantor were collected, it would form a pool just 1mm deep.n the ramp so it is overhanging the edge of the vehicle.

The Astronaut’s Drinking Rules

After a NASA report suggested that some astronauts may have flown while intoxicated, a furor erupted, and NASA ’s alcohol rules — or lack of them — came to light.
The rules regarding alcohol and astronauts are somewhat vague, NASA officials said Friday at a news conference. Its alcohol rules for space flight have historically been the rules it applies to the use of its aircraft, informally carried over into the realm of space flight.
With the new report, NASA announced an interim alcohol policy based on rules for the T-38 training jets that astronauts enjoy the free use of. Those rules call for no alcohol consumption within 12 hours of a flight, and “astronauts will neither be under the influence nor the effects of alcohol at the time of launch.” NASA officials said at the news conference that during the quarantine period of about a week before a flight, alcoholic beverages were available at crew quarters.
They also said that the schedule the day before a launch was very busy, and that the astronauts were in close contact with medical personnel, so that it was hard to understand how such incidents could occur unnoticed. There’s no indication in the new report as to when the alleged incidents occurred: In the last couple of years, in the changed safety climate after the Columbia accident? Before Columbia? Before Challenger? So it’s impossible to know the severity of the problem.
There’s a long tradition of two-fisted hard living among military pilots. Tom Wolfe wrote in “The Right Stuff” about Chuck Yeager having a few drinks at the Muroc hangout, Pancho’s, two nights before breaking the sound barrier and going riding horses with his wife and having an accident that broke two ribs.

Home cells signal mobile change

Standing in the corner of the room; being exiled to the bottom of the garden; or teetering precariously on a chair.People will go to extraordinary lengths to find that elusive one bar of signal that will allow them to make a mobile phone call.But soon the days of despair that occur when you arrive home only to find your new handset does not get any coverage in your house may be over.There is a new home technology on the block, known as femtocells, and if the hype is to be believed, it will end signal problems forever."People I talk to say 'I want one now'," said Stephen Mallinson, CEO of UK femtocell producer ip.access.
Technology trial The paperback sized-boxes are essentially compact, personal, mobile phone base stations that plugs straight in to your internet connection.Make a phone call on your mobile and, instead of routing the call through the network of base stations and masts that cover most of the country, it sends the call over the internet using your broadband connection.Until now, they have been the preserve of big business, but sometime in the next two years they could come bundled with your mobile phone contract. "We always had the vision that the technology would be cheap enough to be in the home," said Mr Mallinson.The company has just launched a 3G femtocell, targeted directly at home users, which could also bring high-speed mobile broadband into the home.It is one of several offerings from companies such as Airwalk or Ubiquisys, which recently rose to prominence when search giant Google invested in the firm.At the same time, large networks operators such as Vodafone and Softel have announced they will trial the technology.And according to research firm ABI, by 2012 there could be 70 million femtocells installed in homes around the world serving more than 150 million users.But for the network operators at least, the technology goes beyond just mopping up those people who cannot make phone calls on their network."In a sense it's mobile taking on wi-fi," said Mike Roberts, principal analyst at research firm Informa Media and Telecoms.
Call hassle Femtocells pack high speed 3G technology or High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) inside, which can have download speeds of up to 7Mbps, similar to many home broadband offerings."In developed markets, their [the network operators] business has matured and they're looking for any growth opportunities they can. Taking on fixed broadband is one of those and femtocells are a great weapon to do that," said Mr Roberts.According to the Oxford Internet Survey, 67% of the UK's population are current internet users and 29% have wi-fi access.Grabbing an increasing share of this market is attractive to mobile operators, said Mr Roberts, and one way of doing that would be to build HSDPA straight into laptops"That way you can connect to your femtocell and you can use it everywhere else as well - that's compelling," he said.But the rise of the femtocell also has other advantages to the mobile networks.Over the last few years various technologies have converged that threaten to make a dent in mobile operator's profits.For example, wireless connectivity on handsets along with VoIP allows people to cut the cost of calls by bypassing the mobile phone network.Companies such as Skype, Jajah and Truphone have all got in on the action."VoiP over wi-fi is starting but it's still early days," said Mr Roberts. "It's a real hassle to use and it's nowhere near the quality, reliability or usability of cellular voice."If mobile operators can get femtocells into the home quickly, then they can prevent the rise of VoIP over home wi-fi."It's kind of like the mobile operator empire striking back," said Mr Roberts.

Mac and iPhone sales boost Apple

Apple has made strong three-month profits, helped by Mac and iPhone sales, even though the phones were only available for two days of the quarter.Apple sold 270,000 iPhones on the first two days of their US launch.Net income was $818m (£398m) between April and June, up 73% from the same period of 2006.Apple shares have risen 62% since the start of the year when chief executive Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone and predicted 10 million sales in 2008. But the shares fell on Tuesday after AT&T, the exclusive US carrier, said it had activated 146,000 iPhones in the first two days after the 29 June launch.Analysts had been expecting the number sold in the first weekend would be closer to 500,000.
Direct sales Mr Jobs says he is confident of selling his millionth phone within the first three months.Apple said it shipped 1.76 million Macintosh computers in the quarter, a rise of 33% from a year earlier, while shipments of iPods were 9.82 million, up 21% from the same period of 2006.The results were also boosted by lower commodity prices and more sales being made in Apple stores, according to its chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer."We did benefit in the quarter from a favourable commodity environment and better mix of direct sales as well," he said.