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Roosevelt Island: New York’s New Tech Hub

Jul 30, 2012 1:00 AM EDT

Will New York’s latest dream spawn the next Mark Zuckerberg?

In a sliver of land in New York City’s East River, where a lunatic asylum and smallpox hospital once stood, banners proclaim with unabashed assurance (or chutzpah): “Roosevelt Island: A Fresh Look at the Big Apple.”

The bleak cityscape on the lower half of the island, accessible by cable car and occupied by a hospital for convalescents with battered bricks and rusting air conditioners, will soon be home to a complex of buildings intended to transform the island from an image of urban decay to a bold statement about 21st-century urban design—and transform New York City into an enduring 21st-century economic powerhouse.

In an unprecedented cooperative venture between City Hall, Cornell University, and the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, ground is about to be broken for a top-flight technology campus that Mayor Michael Bloomberg promises will give other hubs of entrepreneurial science around the country, and indeed the world, “a run for their money.”

For the moment, the campus exists as an interinstitutional agreement, some architectural drawings, and the glimmer in the eye of an ambitious city executive who made his own vast personal fortune with information technology. (“This is going to be a very big hit,” says Bloomberg, as of course he would.) But deliberately and relentlessly, the Big Apple has, in the last few years, been going after the same kind of power and preeminence in high technology that it enjoys in so many other fields; and the graduate school is a key to City Hall’s strategic plan for digital conquest.

To realize the project, the city will provide much of the land and about $100 million in funding. Add to that a huge donation by Chuck Feeney, an 81-year-old duty-free magnate and Cornell alumnus, who has put up $350 million to see the first stage of construction through to completion. Early drawings of what it might look like (such as the one shown here) were impressive. But the noted Los Angeles–based architect Thom Mayne, who created the provocative, twisted, and torn Cooper Union building in the East Village, is expected to make it spectacular.

Until the complex is built, however, students at what’s now called CornellNYC Tech will be studying in the big old brick building in Chelsea that Google bought for almost $2 billion two years ago: an outpost of the West Coast’s mellow intensity under the roof of the enormous structure that used to house the Port Authority in Manhattan. (It’s even got some real-life chutes and ladders for techies who want to have a little fun getting from one floor to another. The reviews on Google+ declare it, not surprisingly, “awesome.”)

An early Cornell–Technion team rendering of the project to build a tech hub on Roosevelt Island. (Photo Illustration by Cornell University-SOM-Getty Images)

The graduate curriculum is designed to draw on talent and innovation in the many fields—global finance, medicine, media, design, and fashion—where New York City is already a powerhouse. Greg Pass, a former Chief Technology Officer at Twitter who’s signed on with the Cornell–Technion team to help bring entrepreneurship into the mix, says the project offers “a huge opportunity to disrupt the higher-educational model.”

If New York has yet to make its mark in digital innovation the way Silicon Valley has done—with Stanford as its engine of innovation, or even Boston, with MIT—some vital trends are moving in its direction. “You’ve got to understand how big we are,” says Bloomberg, citing an encounter with a friend from Boston who told him, when the Roosevelt Island project was first being proposed, “Oh, you’ll never succeed because Boston is the education capital of the country.” Bloomberg says he told his friend bluntly: “New York City has more undergraduate and graduate college students than Boston has people.” That, he said with a chuckle, “sort of ended that argument.”

Like Google, with its $2 billion Chelsea building, some of the most important tech companies have been looking east. Twitter opened major offices on Madison Avenue last year, and eBay announced in May that it’s moving some of its units to the Flatiron neighborhood. “They want to be in a big city,” where, culturally, intellectually, financially, there are “more of the best and the brightest,” says Bloomberg. “If intellectual capital is what you need, New York City is where you want to be.”

Pass, who was packing up his house in San Francisco when I reached him on the phone, said New York offers something new. “There already is a Silicon Valley with its outcomes,” he says. “The fact that the culture is different is positive.”

Murata Manufacturing Co., its latest capacitor, measuring just 0.25 millimeter by 0.125 millimeter

Murata Manufacturing Co. - In this undated photo released by Murata Manufacturing Co., its latest capacitor, measuring just 0.25 millimeter by 0.125 millimeter, right, is pointed by a mechanical pencil as it is displayed with its bigger size models. Small is big for Murata: The Japanese electronics maker has developed the world's tiniest component known as the capacitor. And that's big business. Capacitors, which store electric energy, are used in the dozens, even in the hundreds, in just about every type of gadget - smartphones, laptops, hybrid cars, medical equipment and digital cameras.

TOKYO (AP) — Small is big for Murata: The Japanese electronics maker has developed the world's tiniest version of a component known as the capacitor. And that's potentially big business.

Capacitors, which store electric energy, are used in the dozens, even in the hundreds, in just about every type of gadget — smartphones, laptops, parts for hybrid cars, medical equipment and digital cameras. Smaller componentry allows for other innovations and improvements from thinner devices to longer battery life.

The latest capacitor, measuring just 0.25 millimeter by 0.125 millimeter, is as tiny as the period at the end of this sentence.

Murata Manufacturing Co.'s focus on highly specialized technological breakthroughs, such as the one announced Wednesday, also underlines the challenges confronting Japan's electronics industry — once unquestioned leaders but now taking a beating from cheaper Asian rivals.

Japanese makers have struggled to compete against South Korean rivals and manufacturers in Taiwan, China and the rest of Asia with access to cheaper labor. The Japanese are also fighting the strong yen, which erodes the value of its earnings.

"The power of Japanese high-tech makers is waning — in development, marketing and management. And it can't all be blamed on a strong yen," said Rick Oyama, analyst with market researcher HIS iSuppli in Tokyo. "What counts is whether a company can deliver creative products and innovation."

Murata, based in the ancient capital of Kyoto, central Japan, is best known for its bicycle-riding robot, which showcases its delicate sensor technology. But since its founding in 1944, the company's core business has been ceramic capacitors.

The latest super-small capacitor is a quarter of the size of the previous smallest ceramic capacitor, also developed by Murata, in 2004.

Murata Executive Vice President Yukio Hamaji, who heads the component business, said that building something so small that is composed of even tinier layers of material to store electricity, is a challenge, requiring precision in preparing raw materials and baking the ceramic.

"This is so small you can barely see it," he told The Associated Press. "You can imagine how difficult making something that small can be, and do it in mass production and in stable supply."

Murata is the world No. 1 in market share and production capacity in ceramic capacitors.

It controls about 35 percent of that market, trailed by Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co., which is the component unit of South Korea's Samsung, with about 20 percent of the market.

Hamaji acknowledged that Samsung, close on Murata's heels in super-small capacitors, was a threat, and stressed that Murata was learning from Samsung the importance of being nimble.

Japanese electronics makers have been struggling lately.

Sony Corp. posted its biggest loss in its 66-year history for the fiscal year ended in March. It was Sony's fourth straight year of red ink and highlighted its fall from the days when it wowed consumers with its Walkman portable music player and reigned supreme in color TVs.

Sony's archrival Panasonic Corp. hasn't fared any better, racking up an even bigger loss than Sony for the fiscal year ended in March, also the worst in its 94-year history, and among the biggest annual losses ever for Japanese manufacturers.

In even worst shape is Sharp Corp., which is trying to woo investment from Taiwan's Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., but it has yet to announce a final deal as Sharp shares nose-dived, making its prospects shakier than ever.

Other Japanese electronics makers, such as Toshiba Corp. and Hitachi Ltd. are focusing on high-speed trains and nuclear power plants, rather than consumer electronics and computer chips as the Japanese did in decades past.

One of the key failings of the Japanese in consumer products, such as cellphones, was the inability to foresee and adapt to changes in the global market.

Although the "i-mode" cell-phone service NTT DoCoMo pioneered in 1999 for text messaging and network information was way ahead of its time, it proved too insular, and grew obsolete, as the iPhone as well as handsets using Android technology from Google arrived.

Murata still has an edge. Murata, which employs 37,000 people, rakes in nearly 90 percent of its nearly 585 billion yen ($7.5 billion) annual sales from abroad.

But even the latest capacitor is not going to be making millions for Murata just yet. It is still so new products have yet to be designed that use it. But Hamaji stressed it was crucial for Murata to keep innovating, and show the world it was going to stay No. 1 and was getting only better.

"Murata has to be that place where everyone goes for a capacitor," he said.

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Soft robot - transformer

This robot is made of silicone. It can walk, change color and light up in the dark. It can even change temperature. And it can do all of this for less than $100. In the future, robots like this might be made for just a few dollars.

New DARPA soft robot concept moves, camouflages itself like an octopus Technology News Blog - Friday, August 17, 2012

We've seen robots that mimic animals in order to perform life-saving acts , but an emerging trend in autonomous creations are robots that actually look organic. Case in point: This new robot being developed for the Defense Advanced Project Research Agency (DARPA). Made of soft silicon, it crawls along like a squishy undersea creature and can fill with colored pigment to blend in with its environment.

Created by researchers at Harvard University, the robot uses air —supplied by an external mechanism at the moment — to inflate and deflate its appendages, causing it to walk. A sensor on its underside it capable of detecting the color of its surroundings, and this data can be used to determine a mix of pigments that are pumped into its skin through tubes in order to change its coloring to match.

The goal of designs such as this is ultimately to produce robots that can be used for missions such as infiltration behind enemies lines . The ability to change their shape, color, and even temperature — for evading thermal scans — will make them much harder to detect. If the research pans out, the military may soon be putting its enemies between a robo-rock and a hard place with the help of real-world Transformers .

Disney unveils facial modeling technology that makes robots look real

This is half fascinating, half scary, and 100 per cent freaky: Disney has invented a process to clone real humans into silicone-skinned robots. Their method analyses the face of a target using 3D motion capture cameras. Then it calculates the precise shape, density and composition of a synthetic skin that accurately mimics that specific human's expressions:

This is the paper description, presented at this year Disney Research Zurich has introduced a technology that its team calls a "new physical face-cloning method." In other words, it can make animatronic faces that no longer resemble Chucky. It allows them to capture a whole new level of detail and accuracy in expressions. The video explains the process, from 3D capturing of a person's expression to the fabrication and modeling of the face.

"Creating such figures is a difficult and labor-intensive process requiring manual work of skilled animators, material designers, and mechanical engineers," the researchers said. But it's clear that the hard work yields amazing results. The face cloning method could be applied to the animatronic figures at Disney attractions, such as those in the Hall of Presidents.

It's one of many recent developments in technology by the "imagineers" at Disney. One of the most recent areas of interest for the company is the power of touch control, with investigations into the capability to turn anything into a touch-enabled surface and the ability to turn plants into touch sensors.