tech spotlight

Developers with innovative ideas about how the cities of the future should look have been honoured at the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh. This year’s TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) prize, normally given to an individual, was awarded to an idea dubbed “City 2.0”. Ten projects that are improving city life were selected to benefit from the $100,000 (£64,300) prize fund. Winners include a designer of an open-sourced “wiki-house”.

The device is made by the Taiwanese company Asus rather than the firm’s own Motorola hardware unit. It runs the new Jelly Bean version of Android.

An 8GB version will be sold for $199 (£127) from mid-July pitching it directly against Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

The firm also showed off its internet-connected augmented reality glasses revealing the first models will ship in 2013.

In the field of social psychology, there’s a concept known as the “fundamental attribution error.” Believe it or not, it has a lot to do with Silicon Valley and tech companies.

infoneer-pulse:

The Flame computer virus is not only capable of espionage but it can also sabotage computer systems and likely was used to attack Iran in April, according to a leading security company, Symantec Corp.

Iran had previously blamed Flame for causing data loss on computers in the country’s main oil export terminal and Oil Ministry. But prior to Symantec’s discovery, cyber experts had only unearthed evidence that proved the mysterious virus was capable of espionage.

Symantec researcher Vikram Thakur said on Thursday that the company has now identified a component of Flame that allows operators to delete files from computers.

» via MSNBC

Once the Unikey locking system is installed in a door, any paired Android, iOS, or BlackBerry device can unlock it. The system is not dependent on an app, but rather the system unlocks the door by simply detecting when the phone is in the immediate vicinity. “As long as I’m in range of the lock, I can control it,” said Unikey founder and CEO Phil Dumas

Alan Turing, the British mathematical genius and codebreaker born 100 years ago on 23 June, may not have committed suicide, as is widely believed. At a conference in Oxford on Saturday, Turing expert Prof Jack Copeland will question the evidence that was presented at the 1954 inquest. He believes the evidence would not today be accepted as sufficient to establish a suicide verdict. Indeed, he argues, Turing’s death may equally probably have been an accident. What is well known and accepted is that Alan Turing died of cyanide poisoning. His housekeeper famously found the 41-year-old mathematician dead in his bed, with a half-eaten apple on his bedside table. It is widely said that Turing had been haunted by the story of the poisoned apple in the fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and had resorted to the same desperate measure to end the persecution he was suffering as a result of his homosexuality.

As we look toward the next decade, it’s clear that we are in for even more dramatic changes in the roles that technology will play in daily life. But what technologies are poised to move from niche toward the mainstream in the next 10 years? And how will these technologies change everyday activities? To bring this into sharper focus, Innovaro Inc.’s futures consulting group identified 10 key themes that it feels will help define the tech experience in the coming decade. These 10 ‘technology trajectories’ will give people a powerful new ‘toolkit’—new devices, services, and capabilities—that will forever alter the way that we go about everyday activities, from dating and shopping to learning and working.