Cars are the third place (besides Home and Work) that many of us spend most of our times while commuting. Cars are continuously improved to meet today’s techie needs. The technology is helping tech savvy people to remotely work from their cars. Most of today’s cars are iPod ready making iPhone users listen different (tech or business) podcasts from an app like Stitcher which aggregates all podcasts into one neat interface. An app that – can read out loud the incoming emails, Respond to emails via Speech to text from car stereos is all foreseeable future.
But coming to the present year 2009, Forbes did a demographic research on Cars and their user types. Four Car manufacturers are rated according to tech-savvyness of the the users. The winner is Honda and the looser – Chevy.
Honda users also tend to be tech-savvy–only 3% of owners don’t use the Internet
Chevy must find a way to deal with the fact that its owners have a reputation for being behind the times
13% of Chevy owners have never used the Web. By contrast, only 3% of Honda owners remain in the technological Stone Age.
Honda users also tend to have most college degrees followed by Toyota’s 60%, Ford 45%.
Ford is repairing its tech damage –
“pleasing younger, more tech-savvy group, Ford has introduced features in its cars such as Ford Sync, which allows drivers to play music from an iPod on the auto’s sound system using Bluetooth technology. Drivers can request songs by voice command; Sync will even read text messages aloud.”
Information Technology (IT) revolution took new dimension in this digital era powered by fibre optics communications. The communications – email, texting and chat via internet is all possible because of inventions by researchers who made this possible.
This year’s Nobel technology committee awarded the honors to fibre-optic and digital sensor technology. Today’s fibre-optic cable enables the data to transmit at the speed of the light. Today’s digital cameras are possible as the photos are captured electronically using CCD and CMOS technologies rather than on a film as in old days.
Charles Kao (Fibre Optics), Willard Boyle and George Smith (Digital Sensors) are the 2009 Nobel Prize winners for ground breaking technology inventions.
Nobel Jury quotes –
If we were to unravel all of the glass fibers that wind around the globe, we would get a single thread over one billion kilometers long – which is enough to encircle the globe more than 25 000 times – and is increasing by thousands of kilometers every hour.
Digital photography has become an irreplaceable tool in many fields of research. The CCD has provided new possibilities to visualize the previously unseen. It has given us crystal clear images of distant places in our universe as well as the depths of the oceans.
Source: nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009 , nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/press
2009 Technology Nobel Prize Winners – Fibre Optics & Digital Sensor
Information Technology (IT) revolution took new dimension in this digital era powered by fibre optics communications. The communications – email, texting and chat via internet is all possible because of inventions by researchers who made this possible.
This year’s Nobel technology committee awarded the honors to fibre-optic and digital sensor technology. Today’s fibre-optic cable enables the data to transmit at the speed of the light. Today’s digital cameras are possible as the photos are captured electronically using CCD and CMOS technologies rather than on a film as in old days.
Charles Kao (Fibre Optics), Willard Boyle and George Smith (Digital Sensors) are the 2009 Nobel Prize winners for ground breaking technology inventions.
Nobel Jury quotes –
If we were to unravel all of the glass fibers that wind around the globe, we would get a single thread over one billion kilometers long – which is enough to encircle the globe more than 25 000 times – and is increasing by thousands of kilometers every hour.
Digital photography has become an irreplaceable tool in many fields of research. The CCD has provided new possibilities to visualize the previously unseen. It has given us crystal clear images of distant places in our universe as well as the depths of the oceans.
Source: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/index.html , http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2009/press.html
Three physicists won the 2009 Nobel Prize on Tuesday for work on fibre optics and light sensing that helped unleash the Information Technology revolution.
Charles Kao, Willard Boyle and George Smith were hailed by the Nobel jury as “the masters of light” for transforming communications from copper-wire telephony and postal mail to the era of the internet, email and instant messaging.
“This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics is awarded for two scientific achievements that have helped to shape the foundations of today’s networked societies.
“They have created many practical innovations for everyday life and provided new tools for scientific exploration,” it said.
One of them is the fibre-optic cable, which enables transmission of data at the speed of light, and the other is the digital sensor that is the digital camera’s “electronic eye,” the Nobel jury said.
Kao, who has British and US nationality but has been based in Hong Kong, was awarded half of the prize for groundbreaking achievements in the use of glass fibres for optical communication.
“If we were to unravel all of the glass fibres that wind around the globe, we would get a single thread over one billion kilometres long – which is enough to encircle the globe more than 25,000 times – and is increasing by thousands of kilometres every hour,” the jury said.
The 1966 discovery by Kao, now 75, means that “text, music, images and video can be transferred around the globe in a split second,” it added.
Kao, whose curiosity for science began as a young boy when he mixed mud balls with red phosphorus powder and potassium chlorate and threw them to watch them explode, was vice-chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong but has been retired since 1996.
Boyle, a Canadian-US citizen, and Smith, a 79-year-old American, shared the other half of the prize for inventing an imaging semiconductor circuit – the charge-coupled device (CCD) sensor, which is the “electronic eye” of the digital camera.
The CCD, which converts light into electrical signals was invented in 1969, inspired by the photo-electric theory that earned Albert Einstein the 1921 Nobel.
“It revolutionised photography, as light could be now captured electronically instead of on film,” the committee said.
CCD technology is also used in many medical applications, such as imaging the inside of the human body, both for diagnostics and for microsurgery.
Most digital cameras today use the more efficient CMOS (complimentary metal oxide-semiconductor) sensor, though the CCD sensor is still used for advanced photography.
The pair spent their entire careers at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey in the US.
Boyle, 85, told reporters in Stockholm by phone that he was in disbelief over winning the prize.
“Wow, this is really quite exciting, but is this real?”
“I haven’t had my morning cup of coffee yet, so I’m feeling a little bit not quite with it all,” he said.
He said he was proud to see the everyday applications of his work in the huge commercial success of digital cameras and pioneering pictures taken by scoutcraft to Mars.
“I see myself all the time these days when I go around and I see everybody using their little digital cameras everywhere … So we are the ones, I guess, that started this profusion of little small cameras working all over the world,” he said.
“I guess the most important part of our invention, which affected me personally, was when the Mars probe was on the surface of Mars and it used a camera like ours … and we saw for the first time the surface of Mars … And it would not have been possible without our invention.”
On Monday, Australian-American scientist Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider and Jack Szostak of the United States won the Nobel Medicine Prize for identifying a key molecular switch in cellular ageing.
The Chemistry Prize laureates will be named on Wednesday, followed by the Literature Prize on Thursday and the Peace Prize on Friday. The Economics Prize will wrap up the awards on Monday, October 12.
The Nobel prizes, founded by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, were first awarded in 1901.
Laureates receive a gold medal, a diploma and 10 million Swedish kronor ($A1.62 million) which can be split between up to three winners per prize.
The formal awarding of the prizes will take place at gala ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on December 10.
Jeff Cornwall of “The Entrepreneurial Mind” discusses how important it is to “look beyond” a technical skill when adding new people to the team. When building bootstrapping culture – meaning no external support whatever for the business, the common mistake is to recruit employees solely based on technical skills. Culture fit is important than technical skills when forming a new team for a business.
The Chinese and Indians are playing a big role in the knowledge economy and are at their best of innovation. They are filling skills gaps not only technical but different cultural aspects by mix and match knowledge from different parts of the world.
Skill gaps are increasing as surveyed by WSJ – 62% of employers feel that the gap is widening between employee’s skills and the business needs. Training of those special skills narrows the gap but the way economy is transforming, the employees are less confident if the employer training would help their future career path.
Technical sectors is still ranked top in the most available jobs sector in future. Other sectors following technical are Education & Health (38%), Professional and business services, Construction (12%) and Manufacturing (7%)
To Sum Up, Technical skills with right culture fit are the key for future jobs in the new competitive knowledge economy.
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