You know when you are in 2003 when… .. at the Japanese MTV Music Video awards, fans stick up their camera-phones to capture a shot of their idols.

RFID chips will soon be in everything you own. It is the new standard to replace the large and unwieldy UPC bar codes on products. For example, a box of cereal will have this tiny chip embedded in its packaging. When you pass through the checkout, the reader at the checkout will power the chip, [...]

IBM has unveiled the new T41 line of notebooks, safe for use by crash-test-dummies. It integrates circuitry that can measure acceleration. If you drop your notebook, the new ‘Active Protection System’ (APS) will detect the impact and immediately move the hard drive heads into the ‘park’ position to avoid damage to the data. Of course, [...]

Researchers at IBM have found a way to use a hybrid transistor to control the flow of current through circuits. By using a technique normally used to make CMOS circuits more efficient, they have increased speeds three times, while using 80 percent less power. These circuits used in wireless devices, such as Wi-Fi cards or [...]

You’ve got your wireless router to share your broadband internet connection with your wireless laptop and your iPaq. That in itself is pretty cool. But when you add a cheap 802.11b chip to home electronics, it opens the door to new applications you probably hadn’t considered. That’s exactly what chipmakers Phillips and Broadcom are trying [...]

At just 138g, the new Gigabeat G20 is the thinnest, lightest and smallest hard drive based portable music player on the market. It measures a mere 8.95 x 7.65 x 1.27cm, compared to Apple’s iPod (10.25 x 6 x 1.55cm, 159g). The unit contains a 20Gb hard drive. In addition to the standard mp3 and [...]

Toronto-based ATI Technologies has beaten out rival Nvidia to build the graphics chip for the next-generation Xbox. The Xbox contract accounted for 15-20 percent of Nvidia’s sales over the past two years yet they have been trying to distance themselves from the Xbox2 project.

Scientists in Manchester have assembled technology that enables cameras to see through fog. It filters out light that is reflected by water droplets in the air that obscures vision in fog. They are envisioning this technology for use in everything from Airports to Security Cameras to Television Broadcasts. Pretty cool.

Microsoft will be releasing PocketPC 2003 on June 23. The new version will have better support for wireless networking and improved performance. It will also ship with Windows Media Player 9! According to PDA Avenue, a page appeared on the HP site which has since been removed describing their new models, with the iPaq 1930 [...]

Speaking of game consoles, Sony has revealed a hybrid game/tv system based on it’s PlayStation2 technology. The PSX combines the guts of the PS2 with an analogue TV reciever, a DVD recorder, and a 120Gb Hard Drive. The PSX is due for release in Japan in late 2003, and everywhere else in early 2004.

That game machine console packs some serious punch. The current generation of game machines are not only cheap, but powerful. Researchers at the University of Illinois have assembled 70 PlayStation 2 devices into a cluster at a cost of about $50,000. For that relatively small cost, they have built a supercomputer capable of a half [...]

A private company based out of Cambridge Massachusetts has a working prototype of a paperlike display that is only 0.3mm thick, which can be rolled into a half-inch wide scroll. They are working with Royal Phillips Electronics to create a prototype consumer product within the next year. It works with thousands of tiny particles, white [...]