Give TechVibe Radio a 360-Degree Spin

TechVibe Radio employed the use of homegrown technology from EyeSee 360 to record show segments in 360 video. Our first experiment includes Charlie Batch and Pittsburgh Tech Council CEO Audrey Russo interviewing BHiveLab. The segment is a little blurry, compliments of the not-so-great iPhone 4 camera, but it’s fun to play around with the video and a 360 view of the studio in action. Give it a spin right here.

Plextronics Awarded SBIR Grant for Reducing OLED Lighting Costs

Plextronics, a U.S.-based  global  company specializing in conductive polymer technology, announced today that it is the recipient of a Phase I Release 2 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Award for the design and development of low-cost processes of printed electrodes for organic light-emitting diode (OLED) lighting. The SBIR program is well recognized for supporting important technological advances.   According to the U.S. Department of Energy, it received 756 applications for the latest round of SBIR grants.  Plextronics was among 79 grant recipients.  The company will receive a $175,000 grant from the SBIR program and will partner with Electroninks, a spin-off of the University of Illinois and provider of printable metal inks.

PBS Coals Mines for High-Bandwidth, Fiber-based Connectivity with Comcast Business Ethernet

Comcast Business, the nation’s largest video, high-speed Internet and phone provider to business and residential customers, announced that PBS Coals, the fourth-largest coal producer in Pennsylvania, is using Comcast Ethernet services to expedite the transfer of critical files to maintain the accuracy of its mining operations and to help ensure the safety of its approximately 650 employees in multiple locations across Somerset County. While the new fiber connection is critical to supporting PBS Coals’ business, there is an added benefit to the broader community, as the investment to extend Comcast’s fiber network to the company’s locations means that other area businesses will now have access to a high-capacity, fiber network as well.

Metis Secure Launches Command Center 2.3

The latest software release from Metis Secure makes it easier than ever to instantly communicate actionable emergency instructions to everyone at the site of a crisis, and rapidly respond to people who need help. In an emergency, safety and security personnel use Metis Secure’s Command Center software, combined with a variety of facility communications devices, to immediately alert everyone at or near the location of  the crisis, and provide urgent emergency instructions. The software also transmits help calls from Metis Secure Emergency Help Stations, which are wall- or pole-mounted communications hardware located at strategic indoor and/or outdoor locations throughout a site.  Authorized users can launch alerts and answer help calls through any internet browser, from any location on- or off-site. Mobile security patrols can also answer help calls on their handheld radios or mobile phones. Universities and schools, industrial facilities, hospitals, office buildings, large parking garages, and third-party security operations centers rely on the Metis Secure system to optimize their response speed and effectiveness if an emergency strikes.

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Develop Zooming Technique for Entering Text Into Smartwatches, Ultra-small Computers

Technology blogs have been abuzz that smartwatches may soon be on their way from companies such as Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft. But as capable as these ultra-small computers may be, how will users enter an address, a name, or a search term into them? One solution is an iterative zooming technique developed and tested by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. Called ZoomBoard, this text entry technique is based on the familiar QWERTY keyboard layout. Though the full keyboard is impossibly small on a watch-size display, simply tapping the screen once or twice will enlarge an individual key until it can be comfortably and accurately pressed.

Capital letters can be typed by momentarily holding a key. A swipe to the left deletes a character. A swipe to the right types a space. An upward swipe calls up a secondary keyboard of numbers and other symbol. “You aren’t going to write a novel, but it gets the job done,” said Stephen Oney, a Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). “This opens up new possibilities for devices such as smartwatches, which generally lack any means of entering text, as many aren’t powerful enough for voice recognition.”