Analyst: iWatch Sensor to Protect You from Sunburn

Wearing a watch protects your wrist from sunburn, but if Barclay's analyst Blayne Curtis is right, Apple's iWatch will be able to protect your entire body. It doesn't cover your body or coat you in sunscreen; instead, he thinks the iWatch will include a UV Temperature Sensor that can help monitor your sun exposure to avoid sunburns.

Silicon Labs recently announced a family of products featuring the industry's first digital ultraviolet index gas sensor. These chips measure UV exposure to aid those with elevated risk of sunburn or just a general concern about excessive sun exposure, and we believe they may be of appealing to OEMs looking to differentiate in a crowded market. To that end, while these products have seen little public hype thus far, we believe SLAB has a win in Apple's upcoming iWatch.

The iWatch is Apple's rumored first entry into the wearable technology market. It's expected to offer health and fitness tracking features much like Fitbit and Nike Fuelband, but with a CO Sensor market changing design. Assuming Mr. Curtis is right, it'll help you avoid prolonged sun exposure, too.

He expects the iWatch will ship some time in late 2014 or early 2015. Assuming it hits store shelves this year, Mr. Curtis thinks it will expects consumers will buy somewhere between 5 million and ten million units.

Apple hasn't confirmed it is working on a smartwatch, but company CEO Tim Cook has expressed a strong interest in the market. Apple has also been on a health and fitness expert hiring spree over the past couple years, which adds a lot to the notion that wearable tech from the company is on the way.

Microsoft Offers Windows Phone 'For Free' To Lower Manufacturer's Costs and Increase Market Share

Let’s start with that phrase, because it’s about to get sliced and diced, it’s about to have a bundle of caveats,and  it’s not going to mean the bill of materials lie that says software will actually read $0.00. But that statement, coming out of Microsoft’s Build 2014 conference, is not only a clear in its intention, but it is also being repeated loudly around the tech reporting circles.

Of course the details count. While the licence will be free, that’s not the only software cost involved in a smartphone. There are patent fees to consider, there are the deals put in place with third party apps and services to have them bundled in the firmware, and there are countless ‘testing and certification’ systems that could easily add to the cost of a Windows Phone licence (and note this deal is any Windows Device with a screen under nine inches, so while Windows Phone is the big winner, smaller Windows 8 powered tablets will also benefitting).


Microsoft Build 2014 (image: Microsoft.com)

industrial product director will be looking at the small print in the contract, but the message is clear. Microsoft is moving towards a cloud-first approach, and their chief concern is to get people into the ecosystem and start using the cloud. That could be through MS Office for iPad, it could be through a new smartphone, or it could be through a cheap Windows 8 tablet.

Will this skew the marketplace for smartphones? Up until now, the choices were either a full licensing deal and the associated costs with Microsoft, or use the open choice of Android and deal with Google Play and the Open Handset Alliance. That choice has shifted now, and I suspect Microsoft will reap the benefit of this over the next year, and beyond.

Some will say it is too little, and too late, to compete with the rush of Android. That remains to be seen. While some territories are now at saturation levels with smartphones, and the easy profit and market-share of North America and Europe already divvyed up, there are huge tract of land and legions of users who have still to get their first smartphone.

That’s where Microsoft’s focus with Windows Phone should lie. Territories where a a $700 flagship handset is simply far too expensive , and the battle is all about the budget smartphones on sale in the $100-$200 range. That means a focus on lowering the bill of materials, and removing the cost of the operating system licence is going to have a significant impact on china Industry manufacturers.

As for Microsoft, they should finish up the purchase of Nokia’s Devices and Services division in the near future, and at that point the will be selling the vast majority of Windows Phone devices (over 92% at the end of 2013, reports AdDuplex). The licence would be part of the internal market, but not affect the bottom line coming out of Redmond.

By removing the licence fee, Microsoft level the playing field for manufacturers, they trade a relatively small short-term profit for a more attractive long-term position, and they create some good news and momentum around the Windows Phone platform.

New space sensor to track global air-quality

The European Space Agency (Esa) and Airbus will develop a new CO2 Sensor to improve air-pollution monitoring from space as part of the Copernicus programme.

The Sentinel-5 instrument to be installed aboard the MetOp Second Generation satellite as part of a €144m (£120m) undertaking will measure the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere globally on a daily basis and identify trace gases such as ozone, sulphur dioxide, methane and carbon monoxide.

A formal contract entrusting Airbus Defence and Space with leading the development of the ultraviolet to shortwave-infrared spectrometer has been signed last week.

“The Sentinel-5 instrument will be very important to continue the monitoring of our atmosphere by an operational system,” said Volker Liebig, Director of Earth Observation Programmes at the European Space Agency (Esa).

The instrument will also measure concentrations of aerosols that affect air quality and climate. The Humidity Sensor readings will not only help to monitor the atmospheric processes but also to differentiate between natural and men-made emissions, providing new insight into how human activity affects air quality, the ozone layer and climate.

The data will also facilitate Temperature Sensor predictions, ranging from near real-time, next-day air pollution forecasts to climate forecasts for the coming decades.

The new instrument will be part of the pan-European Copernicus programme designed to enhance environment monitoring from space.
The programme is about to achieve a major milestone this week with the launch of the first dedicated Sentinel-1A satellite scheduled for Thursday, 3 April.

Lens-Free Camera Sees Things Differently

Patrick Gill is excited to show me a small, fuzzy-looking picture of the Mona Lisa, printed in black and white on a piece of paper. It’s not much to look at, literally, but it’s unmistakably her, with long dark hair and that mysterious smile.

More intriguing than the low-resolution image of da Vinci’s masterpiece, though, is how the picture was created: with a lens-free camera that, at 200 micrometers across, is smaller than a pencil point.

While digital cameras with lenses can take great photos, it is difficult to get cameras into smaller devices. Miniaturizing lenses only works to a certain point: the smaller they get, the more difficult it is to make their precise curved surfaces. Gill, a senior research scientist at the technology licensing company Rambus, thinks one way to solve this problem is by replacing the curved camera lens with an itty-bitty Carbon Dioxide Sensor that uses a spiral shape to map light and relies on a computer to figure out what the resulting image should look like.

Eventually, he envisions the tiny camera being built into all kinds of things, from wearable gadgets to security systems to toys, without having to add to the cost or bulk of a camera with a lens. “Our aim is to add eyes to any digital device, no matter how small,” he says.

The point is not to build high-resolution cameras like you’d want on a smartphone but rather to build the smallest, cheapest, easiest-to-make optical sensor that can still capture enough information to show what’s going on.

Gordon Wetzstein, a research scientist at MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture Group, is optimistic about the technology, though he says it’s still not clear how well it will work. “Other than pixels getting smaller, we haven’t really seen much progress in CO2 Sensor for a while,” he says.


The top image shows what the sensor captures. The middle image is the computer’s reconstruction; it’s fuzzier than the original (bottom image) but still recognizable.

Gill shows me a prototype sensor at Rambus’s Sunnyvale office that has been etched with 28 different types of diffractive structures—spirals and other shapes like a cross and a pentagon. A tiny segment of the chip contains a spiral that has been used to capture a number of images, including the Mona Lisa picture Gill shows me as well as fuzzy depictions of John Lennon and Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières.

When you take a picture of a painting on a wall with a regular digital camera, a lens focuses each point of light it captures on a sensor, generating a digital file that a computer can show you as an image. Rambus’s approach instead uses a grating etched with a spiral pattern through which light can enter from every orientation. The Humidity Sensor below the grating captures a jumble of spirals that a human wouldn’t see as a recognizable image, but software can translate into one.

Gill uses the Mona Lisa image to demonstrate. He shows me a regular black-and-white image of the painting, a blurred black-and-white form indicating the jumble of spirals the sensor would capture for the computer to interpret, and a blurry but still recognizable black-and-white image of the painting as reconstructed from this data by software.


Gill says Rambus’s algorithms let users ask the computer to produce images at various resolutions; the highest he’s done thus far with prototypes is 128 by 128 pixels, which he says represents the capabilities of the highest-resolution sensors Rambus would make if it commercializes the technology.

Volvo sensor technology reads drivers’ eyes and attention

Volvo is conducting a new research project into in-car driver monitoring aimed at improving safety and allowing cars to better know their drivers.

Conducted with involvement from Gothenburg’s Chalmers University of Technology, the Swedish car maker says the driver monitoring Humidity Sensor already installed into test vehicles can recognise and distinguish whether a driver is tired or inattentive.

Intended to help make cars of the future even safer, the dashboard-mounted Temperature Sensor can monitor where drivers are looking, how open their eyes are and their head position and angle.

Undertaken with an eye towards autonomous car incorporation, Volvo says the project could lead to the development of safety systems that detect the driver’s state and adjust the car accordingly, including being able to wake a driver falling asleep.

Volvo engineer and driver support functions project leader Per Landfors said the technology would enable drivers to be able to rely more on their car, and know that it will help them when needed.

“Since the car is able to detect if a driver is not paying attention, safety systems can be adapted more effectively,” Landfors said.

“For example, the car’s support systems can be activated later on if the driver is focused, and earlier if the driver’s attention is directed elsewhere.”

Able to team with existing safety systems such as lane keep assist, forward collision warning with automatic braking and adaptive cruise control with queue assist, Volvo says analysis of the driver’s state – known as driver state estimation – is a field that may be key to gas sensor cars of the future determining for themselves whether drivers are capable of taking control in certain conditions.

The research project and driver monitoring technology are part of the manufacturer’s broader 2008-launched ‘Vision 2020’ safety goal of having no one killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo by 2020.

In December last year, Volvo announced it will initiate an autonomous driving pilot project from this year, with 100 self-driving cars planned to reach public Gothenburg roads by 2017.

Japanese candy manufacturer finalizes Orange County purchase

Morinaga America Foods Inc., the American affiliate of the Japanese candy maker of Hi-Chew candies, has finalized its purchase of 21 acres of land in western Orange County where it plans to begin construction of a manufacturing plant that will employ 90 people.

The plant is expected to open by June 2015.

Morinaga had announced in September plans to build the 100,000-square-foot production plant in Mebane after reaching incentive grant agreements with both state and local officials.

The company could qualify for nearly $1 million in cash incentives from the state’s One North Carolina Fund and from Mebane if it meets all hiring and investment goals for the $48 million project.

Orange County will provide most of the water and sewer improvements to the site, which will be mostly reimbursed by a Community Development Block Grant from the state, says Steve Brantley, director of Orange County Economic Development.

N.C. Department of Transportation will help pay for much of the roadwork to the site, and the Hillsborough campus of Durham Technical Community College is expected to provide much of the training for Morinaga’s employees.

Morinaga paid $997,500 for the 21 acres of land in the Buckhorn Economic Development District, according to industrial product director records. It purchased the land, which is very near the Orange County and Alamance County line near I-40 and I-85, from W.H. Wilson Family Investment Group LLC.

InSpec Group has been hired as the construction manager for the facility, and work is expected to begin in the next two to three weeks.

The parent company, Morinaga & Co., Ltd. of Tokyo, Japan, has been in business for 115 years, and ranks as Japan’s largest candy and china Industry manufacturers.

Toshiaki Fukunaga has been appointed as the new local president of Morinaga America Foods Inc.

Parrot’s Flower Power Plant Sensor Gives You A Mobile Green Thumb

So I bought a plant. I named it Stan. I’ve never really been a plant guy. But maybe Parrot’s new wireless plant monitor can help. Stan’s life depends on it.

The Flower Power is a small Temperature Sensor. It runs on a AAA battery and simply sticks in the plant’s dirt. It’s cute and hardly noticeable. The device measures and tracks light intensity, air temperature, fertilizer level and soil moisture. These are things people with a green thumb understand, but the rest of us completely forget about. That’s why there’s an app for that.

Setup takes a few minutes. Select the type of plant in the smartphone app and stick the Flower Power in the dirt. After a couple of minutes, the Flower Power is connected to the app and sending live data. It needs to be partly exposed to track sunlight. The device is weatherproof.

The Flower Power app contains a database of 6,000 plants. Stan is a money tree and the app contained that listing. And yes, cannabis is in there, too.

This device takes a lot of the guesswork out of plants. Likewise it takes some of the magic out too. The Flower Power takes all the pseudoscience out of maintaining plants. That’s great! But it’s also a bit sad since it turns gardening into a chore dictated by push notifications.
Is it accurate? As far as I can tell, it works fine. The air temperature reading is dead-on and it knew when I forgot to water Stan, which was often.

A single Flower Power can be set to monitor a specific plant or easily reset to monitor different plants at different times. For instance, if selected to monitor green beans, it will not provide appropriate readings for the tomatoes planted in the neighboring bed. An owner can either buy another Flower Power for the tomatoes or use a single device to monitor both since they probably have different growing gas sensor anyway. At $59.99 each, it can be a bit pricey to outfit an entire garden. But Parrot does brag that it brings professional-level monitoring to the home consumer.

Parrot is on the forefront of an open market. There are several competitors including the Koubachi Wi-Fi CO Sensor and SoilIQ, a SF 2013 Startup Battlefield contestant that has yet to launch its product. Still, even with several other players, the Flower Power should flourish in the emerging Internet of Things market.

The Flower Power works. Stan is proof of that. So far, because of the push notifications, he’s lived longer than any of my previous plants and I don’t see him drying out anytime soon.