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Posts Tagged ‘Challenges’

CloudBlue’s growth calls attention to mounting e-waste problem

CloudBlue Technologies, a company that manages the disposal of e-waste — thrown away electronics ranging from laptops to medical equipment components — says it has just landed a second round of financing, as well as 25 new Fortune 500 clients in the last year, calling attention to a growing yet oft-neglected problem.

The company’s new recruits come from a range of sectors, including insurance, media, manufacturing, finance and healthcare. In today’s knowledge economy, no industry is immune from e-waste. Businesses lacking computers and mobile phones are unheard of, regardless of size. And all of these electronics need to periodically be replaced. In the past, their predecessors would have ended up in landfills despite major opportunities for recycling and reuse — not to mention the toxic or hazardous materials many of them contain.

But companies big and small are running out of excuses for this behavior. New government environmental regulations are requiring strict e-waste disposal measures and non-compliance comes at a hefty price. While this is bad news for enterprises set in their ways, its a huge boon for companies like CloudBlue, which helps them shift course and mitigate their risk.

Based in Georgia, the company tracks every phase of e-waste disposal, from pickup to transportation to recycling. With 16 facilities around the world, it is able to send its own trucks to collect waste in an energy efficient manner that is guaranteed to comply with all regulations and dodge big fines.

E-waste presents several unique challenges. Not only do electronics contain many small, intricate components that need to be dealt with individually, most of them — especially in the enterprise space — contain proprietary information or identification tags that need to be thoroughly and responsibly erased before they are disposed of. CloudBlue takes care of all of these processes, it says.

By and large, the U.S. is behind when it comes to e-waste management. Several states have passed bans on e-waste in general landfills, which is a start, but by no means a solution. Europe covered this a long time ago. That said, the European Union is taking a lot of heat right now because recyclers are doing a poor job of removing toxic materials and properly extracting and processing the pricier metals.

Another big issue: Some e-waste disposal companies are simply shipping what they collect to developing countries where they rot in distant landfills, endangering nearby populations and crippling their own environmental efforts. For example, watchdog organization the Basel Action Network has just called out CRT Recycling for exporting tossed computer monitors to Indonesia. While the Environmental Protection Agency has done its best to regulate against this practice, objectionable shipments still make it through. CloudBlue assures its clients that none of their waste leaves the U.S., but it can’t turn this tide all by itself.

While it wouldn’t disclose the amount of its recent venture round, the company says it came from Riverwood Capital. It previously raised $9.92 million, including $3.57 million in December 2009 that may have been rolled into this current round.

Companies: CloudBlue Technologies, Riverwood Capital

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Week in gaming: 20 games we want, Heavy Rain, MAG review

Did you know that the only game that’s acceptable to be looking forward to is Halo: Reach? We didn’t! Our list of 20 games we wanted to play in 2010 garnered a ton of readers, and a ton of controversy. StarCraft 2 didn’t make the list? We’re skeptical about a 2010 release date. Halo: Reach not our most anticipated game? It’s more Halo. If we left out your favorite game, it’s not too late to register your indignation.

We also took a look at Sony’s massive shooter MAG, which seems to have caught a good amount of our community in its grasp. We look at the challenges Heavy Rain faces… and why they’re all good problems to have in terms of quality. We also take Razer’s newest mouse for a test drive. This is the week in gaming.

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Some Pros and Cons of a Google Tablet with a Chrome OS

The Chrome OS is a bit different than most operating systems. Scheduled to be unveiled late this year, the Chrome OS is entirely cloud-based.

It’s still speculative to say if Google is really working on a tablet computer. But let’s assume for a minute that Google is developing such a device with a Chrome OS.

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I guess that’s not too hard to do considering this concept video Google created.

The Chrome OS opens some interesting opportunities for Google. A cloud-based operating system would make a tablet unique compared to the iPad. No data would be stored on the device at all. A lost tablet would not mean lost data. The information would be retrieved simply by going online.

But the absence of actual data on a device is also an inherent weakness. There are some things you always want to have on your device. For instance, client-based software. You can’t do that with an operating system that’s all in the cloud.

Further, since the Chrome OS is not coming out until late next year, it does face some challenges. First off, Windows Mobile 7 will most likely be unveiled before Google launches the Chrome OS, giving Microsoft a head start in the market. The iPad OS is more mature. Apple has more experience with UX development in this regard.

Speed

In the tech press, we get caught up with issues such as openness. Do customers really care that much? We think they prefer open systems because of the options that come with.

What they really want, though, is speed. A goal for Google with the Chrome OS is to make it very fast. But the iPad is lightning quick. By developing its own processor for the iPad, Apple is realizing a customer desire. Would a Google Tablet with a Chrome OS be as fast as the iPad?

Security

The Chrome OS is a browser-based operating system which inherently raises issues about its security. Browsers are widely acknowledged as prime targets for malware. Remember, Google suffered a cyber attack through an employee’s compromised browser (Internet Explorer).

But are the criticisms founded? The Chrome OS is an open environment. It’s not an air-tight vault. Google knows it has bugs. So, they have gone out to the community, like good developers do, and challenged people to find the flaws. We like what Threat Expert has to say about the matter:

“By openly discussing the security challenges and suggested approaches to circumvent them the Chrome guys talk to us this way:

‘Look, in our bank there is a vault with so much gold in it. The system is secure, but we’re not sure about that air con duct – we think it’s a weak point and the intruders may potentially crawl through it.’

Given the source code is open, the potential intruders will get access to the internal scheme immediately. But the moment they start studying it, the highly qualified white-hat professionals will start doing that as well. The idea is that any bugs, flaws or weaknesses will be revealed and fixed instantly, without leaving the intruders any chance to plan an attack.

Compare it with an alternative approach: ‘Look, in our bank there is a vault with so much gold in it. The system is secure.’ After the robbery: ‘The system is secure.’ After another one: ‘Ok, we fixed it, the system is secure’, and so on.”

It is smart. But that is what we expect from Google. A smart approach. Here’s Google’s take on how it approaches the security issue with Chrome OS:

Conclusion

A Chrome OS makes sense on a device like a tablet computer. Google’s focus is on cloud computing. Perhaps the most valid criticism is Google’s broad approach and lack of experience in the hardware market.

Google is learning and they have some clear advantages. The iPad does not support multi-tasking. The Chrome OS makes it easy to manage multiple applications. Lacking features means Apple won’t dominate with the iPad. But the Chrome OS is a first-time operating system that is unprecedented in its approach.

That’s not always a recipe for market domination.

Discuss

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Engineering a stripped-down bacterial drug factory

Many of the drugs we use are natural compounds or their derivatives, obtained from plants, fungi, or bacteria. Unfortunately, these organisms produce them for their own needs, and don’t always make enough for us to obtain them in sufficient bulk or purity. One of the things that motivates the field of synthetic biology is the hope that we can design an organism from scratch so that it will make useful compounds like these drugs. But a paper that will be released by PNAS later this week suggests that there may be an easier way to go about things: take an existing bacteria and delete anything it doesn’t need to make the drugs.

One of the challenges of engineering bacteria to produce natural compounds is that the chemicals involved in the production process—the biosynthetic pathway, as it’s called—may come from many different parts of a cell’s metabolism. So, for example, the biosynthetic pathway may stitch together a piece of a sugar, part of a broken-down protein, and some lipid in order to make a useful drug compound. So, it’s not simply enough to identify the enzymes that catalyze the steps in a biosynthetic pathway; you have to identify the raw materials, too, and ensure that your engineered bacteria makes all of those.

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EverTune challenges Robot Guitar for in-tune supremacy
Gibson’s Robot Guitar may have gotten off to a head start, but EverTune is here at CES with an automatic guitar tuner of its own that promises to keep your guitar in tune forever. To do that, EverTune makes use of a simple mechanism that relies on springs to maintain the same amount of tension on each string as the tuner post loosens, which should ensure that your guitar won’t go out of tune even while playing (something that other self-tuning guitars can’t account for). Unfortunately, EverTune isn’t ready to announcing anything about availability (or pricing, for that matter), but it saying it will “soon be available on a wide range of electric guitars,” and that it’ll also be available as an installation kit through select retailers.

EverTune challenges Robot Guitar for in-tune supremacy originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 11:32:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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OneRiot Launches New Real-Time Ads to Monetize Trending Topics

OneRiot, one of the leading real-time search engines, just announced the launch of a new advertising product for real-time apps. RiotWise Trending Ads will give OneRiot’s partners a feed of ads related to currently trending topics on the Web. These ads can, for example, be integrated in a user’s stream of updates in Twitter apps or displayed as regular mobile ad units. Digsby, for example, plans to place these ads directly in its users’ streams, but because the units are delivered as a feed through OneRiot’s API, developers are free to use them in whatever way the see fit.

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OneRiot’s ad network, RiotWise, launched about 2 months ago as a closed beta with roughly 20 partners. The new RiotWise Trending Ads program was built on top of this network. The network will feature a mix of CPM and CPC ads.

2010: It’s all About Monetizing the Real-Time Web

As OneRiot’s general manager Tobias Peggs told us earlier this month, “2010 will be all about monetizing the real-time Web.” Real-time advertising, however, comes with its own set of challenges. While Google AdSense, for example, can take its time to learn about what works best for a certain keyword, advertising systems for the real-time web have to work with a different set of signals and react to an environment that is always in flux. In this context, it makes sense for OneRiot to launch a product that focuses on trending topics and not on trying to match an individual user’s stream to the right advertiser.

Initially, OneRiot will work closely with developers to ensure that the initial implementations of the RiotWise Trending Ads work well for users. For now, developers will have to get approval to use the new ads by applying through the OneRiot Developer Network. The company plans to roll out the program more aggressively in the next year.

Discuss

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Art Lebedev’s Transparentius eliminates opacity, improves road safety

Kudos where it’s due: not many design houses use tanks in their illustrations of a new road safety concept. Transparentius, as with most good ideas, is remarkably simple — you jack a camera onto the front of a truck, or lorry as they’re known in some places, and then project that image onto the back of your hulking transporter. The effect of this is to render the truck figuratively transparent for the driver behind, who is enriched with a lot more information about what lies on the road ahead. No word on how the rear projection is achieved or how sunlight glare is overcome, but knowing Art Lebedev, you can bet both challenges are solved in the most unaffordable fashion possible. Anyhow, now that you’ve got the idea, we’re throwing this one over to you dear mod-loving friends — can you build this without remortgaging the house?

[Thanks, Dennis]

Art Lebedev’s Transparentius eliminates opacity, improves road safety originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Comcast inches closer to buying NBC

It’s been over a month since we last heard anything about the rumored Comcast takeover of NBC, but things are slowly starting to move forward: Bloomberg says that NBC parent company GE has bought out Vivendi’s 20 percent stake in the broadcaster for $5.8b, with up to a $2b refund due back if the Comcast deal isn’t done by the end of 2010. That’s no small gamble — Comcast will have to clear a “gauntlet” of federal regulators from the FCC and FTC, who will scrutinize everything from the transfer of TV broadcast licenses in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles to the effects on competitors like Dish Network and Verizon, who will still want access to NBC’s huge stable of content and programming. Big challenges, to be sure, but we get the feeling this deal is going down one way or another — get ready for a rocky 2010.

Comcast inches closer to buying NBC originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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