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It turns out you might also use them to power a mobile phone network. This microplant, shown at 3GSM, but already in action in Nigeria and Tanzania, processes biodiesel from oils squeezed from crops. This unit (pictured) produces 2,000 litres per day, enough to fuel up to 40 cellular base stations.

Ericsson has developed it because in remote areas in emerging economies there is no electricity grid, and trucking fossil diesel fuel to the base station power generator can be a long, hazardous and costly affair -- in some cases it even requires a helicopter trip and guards to protect the fuel.

Motorola is also on the road to renewable energy with prototype base stations running on a combination of wind and solar-power. Motorola says it's cheaper than fossil fuels, and all the associated costs. Sounds like a good idea, no? Such a good idea, in fact, that local farmers have started stealing the solar panels which are worth several thousand dollars each (you need four to run a base station). The plan is to put the solar panels on high poles and fence the whole unit off with high voltage fences -- powered by the solar panel, indeed...

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Here's Motorola's new idea in mobile phone charging: a bicycle dynamo. OK, it's not so new. Bike power is about as old as Motorola itself (1928).

Yet Motorola thinks this could do well in emerging economies where a mobile phone is the only electronic device in some households. There must be a pretty big market in the Netherlands and Denmark, too, but Motorola should figure out a way to easily detach the holder or inadvertently create a market in stolen chargers. Watch video

About 100 protesters carried placards and chanted: "Don't just talk business, talk about health as well."

Where are the tin-foil hats when you need them?

Anti-GSM at 3GSM makes the point reasonably well.

Which is why some visitors to the 3GSM mobile industry trade show in Barcelona this week could be forgiven for thinking that Samsung has entered a major new market.

Hotels. Yep, hotels.

Samsung, which is famous for its in-your-face advertising at global trade shows, has out done itself this week and completely plastered the inside and outside of the posh Hotel Rey Juan Carlos in Barcelona with its branding.

The picture at right shows a Samsung banner, a mere 12-stories high or so, inside the hotel's atrium.

Photo: Reuters/van Grinsven
(Updates to fix typo in headline)

The teddy bear of the consumer electronics industry who is staring ahead at several more quarters of expected losses from his PlayStation video games consoles group, jumped at the opportunity to bask in the sunshine of his company's mobile phone success story.

Sony Ericsson is the world's fourth biggest handset producer in units and the second most profitable one after Nokia, helped along by the Sony halo from its Walkman music and Cybershot camera brands.

"I want to associate myself with a winner," he quipped when he joined the stage with Sony Ericsson president Miles Flint (middle) and Ericsson CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg (left).

If thin is in, Sony surely deserves an award for its OLED displays in its booth at CES. The displays are thinner than a comic book, yet they are brighter and crisper than any LCD or plasma display out there.    

OLED, short for organic light emitting diodes, light up by themselves and are many time more energy efficient than LCD displays because they do not require a backlight that's always on. That technology also improves contrast ratios and black levels, because an OLED pixel which is turned off is quite literally blacked out, and not just a drawn curtain in front of a powerful lamp which is how LCD technology creates blacks.

Sony has managed to produce a full color, full high definition, 27 inch OLED display which is only 11 millimeters thick. Smaller displays, which can be used as picture frames, are just 8 millimetres thin. We've seen full colour OLED displays before at trade shows, but never before packaged in such ready-for-the-market frames which suggests the technology is finally getting ready for commercial introduction. Sadly Sony does not want to say when these prototypes will come out of its laboratories and make it to the shops.

 

]]> http://blogs.reuters.com/2007/01/11/sony-goes-organic/feed/ http://blogs.reuters.com/2007/01/11/if-geeks-exercised/ http://blogs.reuters.com/2007/01/11/if-geeks-exercised/#comments Thu, 11 Jan 2007 01:13:53 +0000 Lucas van Grinsven http://blogs.reuters.com/2007/01/11/if-geeks-exercised/ And the winner in the category "where geeks meet health freaks" is the Spark from Expresso Fitness, a stationary fitness bicycle with an integrated LCD screen with a video of the track and other cyclists to overtake.

Now here's an invention that turns a boring workout into something beginning to resemble the real thing. The computer which powers the electronics is hidden in front, and can be hooked up to the Internet to race against friends. It's not exactly a brand new product, as it can already be found in many fitness centres in California and elsewhere, but it's a popular feature in the "personal health" section of Intel's booth at the Consumer Electronics show.

If you can't spare the $5,000 for the bike, the display and the computer hidden underneath, you can of course also turn to Performance Bike for their Travel Trac
RealAxiom v2 cycle trainers. At $550 you have to bring your own bicycle, computer and monitor, but the device which varies resistance does give you the option to cycle some real world climbs, such as the European road courses the Limoges climb from the 2004 Tour de France and the 2004 Verona World Championship course. Resistance changes based on the course and rider input.

Or if you would rather climb to the top of the time trial killer Mont Ventoux, or cycle the one-day Alps marathon Marmotte while watching the real footage, go to Tacx.

Anyone who has ever attended a speech by John Chambers, the preacher-in-chief of network equipment maker Cisco Systems, knows the routine.

The smooth-talking West Virginian native can stay on stage only so long before he is seized with the need to wade into the audience, a revivalist in search of lost souls to save.

Dressed in semi-formal black and grey, the one-time IBM salesman used his appearance at the Consumer Electronics Show to spell out his company's ambitions to be a major force in consumer living rooms.

Not only is it already the world's biggest communications gear maker, having won over both corporate customers and telecoms operators, but now Cisco sees fresh opportunities in the residential market.

"This is a three-to-five-year vision," Chambers said afterward. "We'll take this to where we think the consumer market will go, just like the enterprise, just like services providers," he said, using the industry jargon for markets serving corporate customers and networks operators.

Read the Reuters story on Chambers' vision of building "human networks" -- where devices are intelligently networked together to revolve around users rather than making users adapt to the way the devices work.

(Photos: REUTERS/Lucas van Grinsven, Rick Whiting)

He actually had a serious message in Las Vegas -- where cyclists are barely tolerated on public roads -- because the Motofone is designed for emerging markets where power lines and cars can be rare and a bicycle dynamo is a practical way to charge a cellphone.

Just a few days after his company shocked the financial market with a whopper of a profit warning, Zander made light of his stock price: "You're joining with a good share price," he joked on stage to a new Motorola recruit, who had joined the company a few days earlier.

On Monday, bigger rival Nokia unveiled a new flip phone that was finally thinner than the RAZR, Motorola's flagship phone, which had set off an industry craze for thinner handsets when it was introduced several years ago.

Zander said it was time to declare the next big trend. "Now everybody decides to do thin. So weve decided to do this," and he pulled out a first generation, 20-year-old Motorola cellphone the size of a brick.

"Fat is back," Zander said.

(Photos: REUTERS/Rick Whiting, Motorola handout)