Finally, a car that runs on ..... WATER!

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Written on Friday, June 20, 2008 by Gemini

Skyrocketting fuel prices, adulterated fuel, long queues at petrol stations, often unscrupulous attendants out to fleece you - your cup of woes spills over everytime you need to fill the tank of of your car.

But all this could be history if Genepax - a Japanese company -- is successful in commercialising its latest innovation: the 'water car.'



Genepax unveiled the car in Osaka, Japan on June 12, saying that a litre of any kind of water would get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80 kmph, or 50 mph.

Genepax president Kiyoshi Hirasawa, in a mission statement published on the company's official web site, said, "Our mission is to develop technology and products for efficient production and use of energy. By 'efficient,' we mean ecologically and economically efficient. Ecological and economical energy is our business. Our goal is to create energy that is not taxing on our natural environment."

The water needed to run the car could be tap, rain or sea water, the company clarified. Once the tank (which is at the rear) of the Genepax car is filled with water, a generator would extract hydrogen from the water using, what the comapny calls, its Water Energy System, or WES, to produce electricity that the car runs on. As opposed to the hybrid cars which emit water, Genepax's invention consumes water.

Whether the car is a commercial success or not remains to be seen, but Genepax said it had applied for a patent and is planning to collaborate with Japanese auto manufacturers. "Energy made from water," as Hirasawa says, "is not a dream story anymore We hope many people will join us in our challenge to promote the use of our WES, for the better future of the earth," he added in a statement.

We've seen plenty of promises about water-powered cars (among other things), but it looks like Japan's Genepax has now made some real progress on that front, with it recently taking the wraps off its Water Energy System fuel cell prototype. The key to that system, it seems, is its membrane electrode assembly (or MEA), which contains a material that's capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction. Not surprisingly, the company isn't getting much more specific than that, with it only saying that it's adopted a "well-known process to produce hydrogen from water to the MEA." Currently, that system costs on the order of ¥2,000,000 (or about $18,700 -- not including the car), but company says that if it can get it into mass production that could be cut to ¥500,000 or less (or just under $5,000). Head on past the break for a video of car in action courtesy of Reuters.

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Technology Transfer Services Immortalized

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Written on Thursday, May 29, 2008 by Gemini

In recent times, the world's leading technology universities are opting in for a different business model, for the sole need of survival. Earlier they were involved only in research & development, and were least focused on the business front. The things started changing when investors in these institutions reduced their investments and hence these R&D centers started looking concentrating on business as well. That's why you'll see many R&D institutes going out in the market selling their research. Many leading technology institutes are in this league. However, in my opinion, Yissum - the technology transfer services company of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem - is in the lead position through its highly appreciated university technology transfer programs. It is responsible for marketing the inventions and know-how generated by the University's renowned researchers and students.

It has expertise in diverse domain from nanotechnology to medicine and pharmaceuticals, agriculture and nutrition, water and environmental technologies to computer science to homeland security. Speaking in terms of numbers, Yissum has granted 400+ technology licenses and is responsible for commercializing products of over $1 billion in worldwide sales every year. Over the past 40 years, Yissum has churned out many popular products like Exelon, Doxil, Superior ceramic ink, UV pearls, Sumo - louse repellent, and Ram onion. There are many successful companies that are born at Yissum including Algen Biopharmaceuticals, Avian Tech, Ester Neurosciences, HumanEyes Technologies, and many more.

Yissum has won many patents (and many more are pending) on various technologies namely Single Image Dehazing, Prevention of Age-Related Retinal Deterioration, New Biosensor for Nerve Gases, Drought-Tolerant Trees, and Process for Producing Organic Ultra Thin Films. I am mesmerized by the wide array of their research in technology field - Improved Cache Performance with Reduced Energy Consumption; Compiler Aided Ticket Scheduling; Markov Model Application for DNA-Arrays and Gene Identification just to name a few. If you want to involve yourself in the world's leading technology institution and contribute to the award winning technologies / products, I recommend Yissum - a true technology transfer company.

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Sexy sells, does RFID?

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Written on Saturday, April 19, 2008 by Gemini

American Apparel makes RFID sexy...


Retailer American Apparel Inc., known for its risqué ads and "Made in Downtown LA" label, is putting radio frequency identification tags (RFID) on every Boy Beater tank, Baby Rib brief, Cross-Back bra and Sleeve Ringer T-Shirt in its 17 New York metropolitan area stores. That's 40,000 items per store, each tagged with a high-tech chip, starting with the Columbia University location in Manhattan. The company is using Vue Technology's TrueVue software to manage the RFID data, Motorola Inc. RFID readers and antennae to capture the data and Avery Dennison Corp. tags to locate and store that data at the item level. Los Angeles-based American Apparel is on an aggressive timetable to roll out the sophisticated inventory tracking system to an additional 120 stores in North America.

The question is why. RFID tagging on crates -- never mind individual pieces -- is currently on the radar for only a handful of retailers, mainly behemoths like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and its legions of suppliers now under orders to adopt transponder tags or else.

RFID is tricky, said John Fontanella, an analyst at AMR Research Inc. in Boston. "The use cases for RFID are not as obvious as some proponents would have you believe," he said. Automating a process like taking inventory changes the way people work, and that "requires a significant amount of re-engineering," Fontanella said, and up-front labor. There's little doubt of that, said Zander Livingston, RFID technology director at American Apparel. The manual tagging for a single store alone required multiple employees working three full days. But for American Apparel, with its numerous, nearly identical styles in a rainbow of colors, the technology makes a lot of sense.

"The No. 1 reason is inventory accuracy," Livingston said.

American Apparel differs from a lot of other apparel companies, Livingston said, in that it displays one -- and one only -- of each size, style and color of a particular item on its sales floor. Each item in each of its color and size variations has a place on the salesroom floor, but the company does not load up the racks with multiples of the same kind. "So basically, as soon as an item has been taken off the rack to be tried on, or purchased or just carried around the store as the customer is browsing, the item is no longer available. We also have a lot of items that look similar to each other, and because of that a lot of items get misplaced," Livingston said. The high sales volume often means that more than 1,000 items a day are moving back and forth between stockrooms and salesrooms.

"We'd have 10% of the items lost in the stock room that needed to be on the sales floor. Part of my goal was to make sure that we had a perfectly fitted sales floor, at 100% capacity," said Livingston, an old classmate of American Apparel CEO Dov Charney from their prep school days at the elite Choate Rosemary Hall, who was recruited by Charney to put RFID to work. Accuracy was a big problem. Taking manual count of 10,000 items on the sales floor and the 30,000 stocked in the basement means having to ask employees to come early or stay late. Fatigued employees might glance at the tag in the collar, but because of the similarity in styles, misidentify the item. RFID accuracy is 100%.

Tom Racette, director of RFID market development for Mortorola's Enterprise Mobility Division, said RFID is becoming easier to implement. "A couple of years ago, this was all about the big challenging implementation, putting RFID across the supply chain. We are seeing more and more retailers, and businesses of all kinds, who are finding creative ways of implementing RFID in ways that are providing value," Racette said. Dr. Bill Hardgrave, professor of information systems and executive director of the Information Technology Research Institute at the University of Arkansas, said in a statement, "We've noticed an increasing trend among retailers that are implementing RFID at the item level, and American Apparel is a prime example of a retailer on the forefront of this trend."

By deploying the technology in additional stores, American Apparel expects to increase sales and customer service by having real-time visibility into products at nearby stores, enhancing the intrastore transfer process to balance stock, Racette said. Furthermore, the retailer will be able to respond more efficiently to market behavior by using RFID to record and report on purchases, not only within one location, but also across a region of stores.

For CIOs, they are looking at RFID and seeing that inventory accuracy is going from 80% to 99%, as it did in the American Apparel pilot, and that RFID is reducing the cost of managing inventory substantially, said Chris Schaeffer, director of RFID product marketing at Motorola. "CIOs are tasked with figuring out how to utilize the IT infrastucture to bring business value, and this can improve processes and efficiencies. It's good for a CIO to be able to say, 'See how this technology investment helped me do that,'" Schaeffer said.

Livingston did not give out a dollar figure for the investment, except to say the cost was about equivalent to the salaries of two full-time sales employees per store. The project is not without challenges, he cautioned. The deployment takes a "little more human interaction" than perhaps initially anticipated to verify everything being transported from the stockroom to the sales floor. He had to re-evaluate certain work movements so RFID readers were not blocked. It can be difficult to read tags around metal, for example. Down the road, he wants to design portals to capture theft -- people walking out the door with stuff -- but the "gates" have to be "aesthetically pleasing" so they are not in odds with American Apparel's meticulous stores. Livingston said the next step is to cut down on the manual labor by tagging items at the manufacturing plant. "I'm not going to tag another item in New York until there is source-level tagging."

Source: SearchCIO article

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Now wear your battery on your sleeve!

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Written on Tuesday, November 06, 2007 by Gemini

Imagine being able to use electronic devices by simply plugging them in to your clothing. If some scientists in Australia have their way, that’s just what you’ll be doing in the future.


--- Picture: An illustration of the Flexible Integrated Energy Device (FIED) showing the flexible batteries ---

Researchers from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) are developing a new technology called the ‘Flexible Integrated Energy Device’ (FIED) that could have a range of applications, from military to medical.

Principal research scientist with CSIRO’s Energy Technology Division, Dr Adam Best, said the technology would be incorporated into a piece of clothing and would comprise three components: Advanced, conductive fabrics as part of the battery; a vibration energy harvesting device; and a rectifier/power management system to power electronic equipment.“It will look like an ordinary garment, but will have extraordinary capabilities,” Best said. “As the person wearing the garment moves, the vibrations they create can be harvested and channelled into recharging the battery or powering plug-in electronic device or devices.”

“We have combined the areas of energy harvesting, energy storage and advanced fibre development to create the integrated battery technology,” he added. The device will be used to store and provide energy over a continuous period of time. It can be charged by plugging into an electrical power point or through vibration energy harvesting.

“This kind of technology has important applications for soldiers in the field and could mean they no longer need to carry heavy batteries,” Dr Best said. “Essentially, they’d be wearing the battery,” he said. There are a range of other civilian applications for the FIED, including communication devices such as radios and mobile phones, small electronic devices including MP3 players, and sports wear.

The researchers say it could also be used in medical devices such as vital sign monitoring systems.

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