review

Critics of the U.S. patent system have long griped that it's entirely too easy to get patents these days on obvious or otherwise unmeritorious inventions--in part because overworked patent examiners don't have ready access to information about what's already out there.

A yearlong pilot project, endorsed by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in partnership with the New York Law School, is supposed to help.

The goal behind the Peer to Patent Project, officially launched last Friday, is to allow anyone who's interested to weigh in on 250 pending patent applications belonging to … Read more

CORONADO, Calif.--Say what you want about all the projects to bring low-cost PCs to the world, but at least someone's thinking of the children.

The Future in Review version of PCs-for-schools, Project Inkwell, tries not to get sucked into the increasingly competitive world of low-cost PC projects. Nick Negroponte of the One Laptop Per Child project recently traded blows with Intel Chairman Craig Barrett over who's more concerned about helping the poor, and who is simply looking for a new market.

"We think it should be a good business, we don't think there's anything … Read more

CORONADO, Calif.--It's not a vacation home in Santa Barbara, but the best thing that people can leave to their children might just be a DNA map.

At least, that's what Ryan Phelan, founder and CEO of DNA Direct, thinks about her company's services. Phelan told attendees at the Future in Review conference that people who are taking several different prescription drugs or have a family history of cancer should consider looking into their genetic profile.

DNA Direct offers people a chance to send in a DNA sample (a cotton swab to the inside of the cheek) … Read more

CORONADO, Calif.--The real threat to the future security of the world might just be the AIDS virus, according to a U.N. official.

More than 25 years after the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS, 65 million people have been infected and 25 million have died, said Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, at the Future in Review conference. The way the world looks at AIDS is changing from short-term fear to long-term worries about the stability of countries that fail to control the epidemic, he said.

"It's moved into one of the defining issues of … Read more

CORONADO, Calif.--Future versions of Windows will have to be "fundamentally different" in order to take advantage of multicore processors, according to Ty Carlson of Microsoft.

"You're going to see in excess of 8, 16, 64 and beyond processors on your client computer," said Carlson, director of technical strategy at Microsoft, during a panel discussion at the Future in Review conference. Windows Vista, on the other hand, is "designed to run on 1, 2, maybe 4 processors," he said, referring to the fact that quad-core processors are now available from Intel and are … Read more

CORONADO, Calif.--Fed up with a cell phone contract that seemingly renews for another two years every time you call to check the balance? Try WiMax.

Kamran Elahian, chairman of Global Catalyst Partners and an investor in WiMax chipmaker Beceem Communications, compared the current state of cellular data communications on smart phones to the old America Online days. Right now, carriers want to have control similar to AOL's control of your dial-up connection, as it tried to keep you within its own network, discouraging exploration of that wild, wooly Internet thing.

But that changed as other ISPs simply connected … Read more

CORONADO, Calif.--The car of the future will apparently have more in common with a kitchen appliance than a lawn mower.

"The future is going to be an automobile that looks like a two-ton Cuisinart," said Josh Wolfe, managing partner of Lux Capital, at the Future in Review conference Wednesday. Wolfe was part of a panel discussion entitled "The Future of Energy on the Nanoscale," in which panelists focused mostly on battery technologies and how those will evolve for cars and other devices.

The night before, researcher J. Craig Venter suggested that fuels derived from algae … Read more

Review Basics is a collaborative workspace for small teams and businesses. It runs right in your browser, and offers a fairly simple and straightforward way for others to share and leave feedback on photos, video files, and office documents. The interface runs entirely in Flash, so there are no special extensions to download, or programs that need to be installed on your computer. Just start up a workspace and go.

Review Basics works with a variety of common office document standards like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and PDF. It also can handle uploading an entire zipped folder, so if you get a zipped attachment in an e-mail, you can upload it straight to the service without having to unpack it and send files one at a time. Review Basics also handles videos, although they have to be in the .FLV Flash format, which despite its popularity on the Internet, isn't a consumer-friendly standard compared to .MOV and .AVI. Files are capped off at 25MB apiece, so if you're working with any video clip over a minute or two, it's likely to be too large.

Annotating media is fairly simple. Users get five different tools to mark what's on the screen: boxes, arrows, a highlighter, call-outs, and emoticons. There is no drawing tool, which is one thing I enjoy and make use of on other collaborative workspace services like ConceptShare [hands-on] and Octopz [hands-on]. I think at a basic level it makes things feel familiar, like using a pen. There are still boxes which can be resized and color coded, but for irregularly shaped elements, you're out of luck.

To separate which feedback is being displayed, you can toggle each person's edits on and off. It's a lot like PhotoShop when you show or hide layers, and useful when you have more than two or three people working on a piece of media at a time, as things tend to get crowded.

Review Basics is very versatile for a free app, but it's missing a few things I think would make it far more competitive in this space. I'd like a way to leave audio or video notes. Some people (like me) find it easier to hit a record button, say something and move on, instead of writing it out. I'd also like to see live chat or live video conferencing, something that can take telephones out of the equation for both businesses and customers. The service is planning on moving to a paid model in the future, adding these things would certainly put it in the realm of some of the other services charging monthly fees.

The team has put together a series of hands-on demos you can play with to get a feel for the service. [More screens after the break.]

… Read more

Creationists are adapting another element of the traditional scientific realm to their cause: the peer-reviewed journal.

The Institute for Creation Research, a prominent believer that the scientific method can validate a literal reading of the Bible's account of the creation of the universe, Earth and humanity, has begun soliciting papers for the International Journal for Creation Research.

Peer review, in which a scientist's paper is scrutinized by a group of colleagues, is designed to find errors and weed out half-baked ideas. And although some have criticized peer review for rejecting new ideas just because they're too radical … Read more