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Friday, April 30, 2004

E-Paper 


I read an article on Slashdot the other day that lead me to a couple of articles on e-paper. Its very interesting stuff and if they could get the cost down it will be very useful. I then started thinking about e-paper in conjunction with daily lubricants, and came with, what I think, is an interesting idea.

The days of balancing your checkbook have started to go by the wayside as people begin to manage their finances in real time. Looking at your checking account for 5 minutes a day can free up a few hours of one weekend a month. What if it took less than 5 minutes? What if your credit card/debit card had a display on the back that showed your last 10 purchases and your current balance? How do you do it? Wi-fi/Bluetooth + epaper + smart card. You’ve got some privacy issues to deal with(maybe the ink fades after 30 minutes), but I think it would help some people out. You have to spend less time looking at your balances online and the $10,000 balance on the MasterCard staring you in the face might persuade you from buying that Grande Latte that don’t REALLY need.

You heard it here first, self updating credit and debit card, © 2004 Austin Fatheree, Patent Pending, etc.

That is all well and good, but what are some other ways that we can use this concept of self updating epaper to make our lives easier? People keep talking about how this will change the way that we read books, but I think that it is going to make a much bigger impact in other areas first.

Comments:
Idea:

E-paper on your shopping cart. You walk by a certain RFID tag and the paper changes to a new advertisment/special.
 
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Thursday, April 29, 2004

Nanotech 


Last Night I went to a presentation on Nanotechnology by Dr. James Tour of Rice University at First Presbyterian Church here in Houston. His presentation was aimed at the above average lay person(at least from an educational stand point). He covered Passive Nanotech(no moving parts, coatings, paints, etc), Active nanotech(Nano Trucks, Nano Machines), and Electronic Nanotech(computers, memory, etc.). It was a broad overview and he was mainly trying to give the group a general understanding of Nanotechnology, but he did present a couple of conclusions that I thought were interesting from a trends standpoint.

The first was that passive nanotech is the area for personal investment at the moment. Dr. Tour and his colleagues have been doing a lot of research into carbon nanotubes and they have found a number of practical applications, including making rubber tires 4x stronger with out losing any elasticity.

The second conclusion is that active nanotech is not an area for personal investment at this time but it is a great area for our government to invest in. The technology is in its infancy and the practical applications will not be hitting the market for a large number of years.

The third conclusion was that there are a ton of practical applications for electronic nanotechnology, but that for the next 10 to 15 years development in silicon will continue to outpace what we can do with nano tech. Five years ago he started trying to develop a non memory that would allow for a gig of memory the size of a pen. It was unthinkable for silicon at the time, but now that they are able to make the nano memory at that size, silicon can fit 4GB in the same space. This is also a great area for our government to invest in and in 10 to 15 years it should be profitable for personal investors as well.

Anyone know of any passive nano tech companies? He mentioned that a colleague had started one in Katy.

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Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Gmail and the end of spam 


I was able to get a beta account for Google's new Gmail service. I've been using it and it has a ton of great features. One that I'm trying to test out right now is the way that it handles spam. I'm very optimistic about its abilities although I haven't seen it in action. The theory is that someone gets a spam message and they click 'report as spam'. Google scans the message, records the key words, and then sets up a filter that other email has to go through. So when I get the message a little later, google runs the key words through their search engine and if a marked as spam email gets a high score, the email goes directly to my spam folder.

Keep your eyes out for any reports on the success of this model and post them in the comments. If Gmail is successful, email may be moving off of your desktop and pc out onto a web server very quickly.
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