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With Apple tablet rumors mounting and anticipation causing its market share to rise, it looks like there is still more innovation to be uncovered. Apple filed a patent application called “Keystroke Tactility Arrangement on a Smooth Touch Surface” which entails a dynamic surface that changes depending on how a user interacts with it. In order to keep a smooth surface while pointing and swiping, like on the iPhone, and getting some ridges or bumps on the surface for typing, the surface of the screen would have to physically change depending on use. So, when you’re just pointing on the screen, there are no bumps — type on the screen and bumps appear.

Another patent application called “Multipoint Touch Surface Controller” will allow greater flexibility with multi-touch systems. The patent says:

While virtually all commercially available touch screen based systems available today provide single point detection only and have limited resolution and speed, other products available today are able to detect multiple touch points. Unfortunately, these products only work on opaque surfaces because of the circuitry that must be placed behind the electrode structure.

Apparently, removing the limitations of an opaque surface would allow for better speed and accuracy, as well as the ability to detect more contact points on the screen. So, with better multi-touch technology and possibly a surface that reacts to how you use it, future Apple products, like a tablet, could see a huge leap forward with regards to how we interact with touch screen devices today.

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Filed under: Convertible, Sedan, Wagon, China, Plants/Manufacturing, Technology, Hatchback, Saab, Earnings/Financials

So, what’s a 2009 Saab 9-5 worth to you? A more appropriate question may be, What’s the 2009 Saab 9-5 worth to you? What about the previous-generation of the Saab 9-3? Apparently, those two vehicle platforms (plus one more unknown platform) along with “two engine technologies and two transmission systems” were worth about $200 million to Chinese automaker BAIC.

It would seem that BAIC got quite a lot for its relatively small sum of money, as both the older 9-3 and 9-5 are still perfectly serviceable automobiles that should allow the Chinese automaker to vastly increase the quality of its own offerings in short order. BAIC Chairman Xu Heyi reportedly said that “the purchase of Saab’s intellectual property can help cut short the development time for Beijing Auto’s own-brand passenger vehicles by 4 to 5 years.”

Xu went on to describe an ambitious plan to sell 100,000 BAIC-branded cars (no doubt relying heavily on Saab technology) in 2011. To turn that goal into reality, BAIC says it will have a production facility ready by 2011 with enough capacity to build 150,000 vehicles per year.

[Source: Reuters]

REPORT: BAIC paid just $200 million for Saab technology originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 15:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Modern whale babies come out tail first to prevent drowning. A new fossil suggests ancestral whales came out the other way.

In the harsh dry air, the hermit crab-like animals needed shields to keep their gills warm.

Well, I hope everyone enjoys their holidays off with their families.

I will be working tonight 12.5 hours in the ICU. And then sleeping on Christmas.

I wonder if Santa will visit me in the unit?

Following North Face’s incredibly short-sighted decision to sue parody clothing maker, South Butt, it seems that the story is going viral in a variety of ways. Not only is the press and various blogs talking about it, but Paul Alan Levy alerts us to the news that South Butt has released a Facebook app that helps you “sharpen your skills” to see if you can “tell a butt from a face.” As Levy notes, this sort of application and attention gaining effort shows why these types of lawsuits are likely to bite you in the butt. Even if there’s a legal basis here (and that’s questionable), the backlash against such a lawsuit is clear (and was widely predicted when North Face first made its threat). Anyone filing lawsuits these days needs to realize how the court of public opinion can weigh in quite loudly on such things.

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As “Fashion 2.0″ sites continue to innovate, the social component of these style-focused sites becomes an important tool for viral growth. Weardrobe, a site focused on capturing and sharing the street style of web users, was recently acquired by Like.com And we’ve written about Polyvore, the startup lets web shoppers pull their favorite items any online store and mix and match to create personalized outfits online. Users can then share their creations on the site and can then buy the items shown. The site is seeing rapid growth, with over 6 million unique visitors per month thanks to new branding efforts and the launch of Facebook Connect.

Polyvore’s virtual styling tool allows people to mix and match products from any online store to create fashion collages, called “sets,” and collections that can then be embedded in other sites. Armed with $7 million in funding, Polyvore has recently forged partnerships with brands like Calvin Klein, Barney’s, Lancome, Zappos Marc Jacobs, and the Gap to create branded collages that the Polyvore community of users can then share and buy from. Many of these brands use Polyvore’s technology to create contests for users.The startup collects revenue in these partnerships and also sees returns from affiliate fees when users buy

And users can now share their branded “sets” via Facebook and Twitter, serving as social advertisements for designers and fashion companies. Polyvore says 30,000 sets are created daily on the site. Launched in 2007, the startup just raised $5.6 million in funding.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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SCVNGR, the platform that lets you build location-based games compatible with any mobile phone, is on a roll. The company has just raised $4 million from Google Ventures, with participation from existing investor Highland Capital. Google Ventures’ Rich Miner will be taking a board seat. The news comes just over a week after we learned that SCVNGR is cash flow positive, with over $1 million in revenue in its first full year in business.

While mobile location based games like Foursquare and Gowalla are getting a lot of attention right now, SCVNGR has quietly managed to establish a very nice niche market for itself. SCVNGR makes a platform that allows companies, schools, and other organizations to build their own location-based scavenger hunts. Dozens of major universities have used the service at campus orientations, while major companies have used it for team building exercises. The platform has been used by over 400 clients including Princeton, Yale, MetLife, and HSBC, and has a whopping 91% client repeat rate.

SCVNGR is also expanding very quickly. In the eleven days since we last wrote about them, they hired six new people. They are currently doubling the company’s size from 20 to 40 employees, filling roles in everything from mobile application development to sales.

Oh, and there’s one other impressive thing about the startup: SCVNGR closed its funding round on CEO Seth Priebatsch’s twenty-first birthday.

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With the vast number of devices coming out running multiple OSes, OEMs have started making their own app store like creations (Samsung has a WM marketplace, Motorola has an Android one, and there are more). This will inevitably make the centralised app stores less effective as developers can submit to one or other marketplace, leading to generally smaller marketplaces.

With the iPhone, it’s a completely different matter. There is only one device, only one OS and only one marketplace. This locks everything down, and developers have to use the central marketplace, so it thrives. WM and Android lead to more options, but is this choice ultimately going to lead to the downfall of the marketplaces?

Windows Marketplace for Mobile started at a disadvantage, WM has supported software installation well before the marketplace concept, and so channels for releasing software have built up before, and it takes a considerable amount of time and effort to move applications from the alternatives to the central marketplace.

Which would you prefer? A central marketplace developers have to use, or a lot of choice for developers and users?

Phonearena have published their full review of the LG eXpo. Saying its not your typical Windows Mobile handset, they were content with the design, but noted the resistive screen had poor outdoor visibility.

They liked the S-class interface, finding it fast and responsive.  They were less happy with the picture quality, saying pictures tended to be over-exposed, but that photo capture was near instantaneous. 

Video playback was smooth, even for higher resolutions, but the phone unfortunately  lacked DIVX support.

The pico-projector is of course the smartphone’s standout feature.  PhoneArena complained of a bluish tint to the projection, but they felt it did not take away from the allure of the feature.

Phone call quality was good, but the battery did not last a full working day, meaning a charger would need to be kept nearby.

Scoring the device a solid 8.5/10 they concluded:

Conclusion:
LG did a wonderful job in disassociating itself from the sour after taste that left us with the LG INCITE. They’ve clearly reworked their designs and managed to produce a worthy Windows Mobile smartphone that will aim to please a wide range of users with its impressive lists of features. Not only does the S-Class interface make its US debut on the eXpo, but it adds a lot of visual flare that we haven’t seen stateside to make it a refreshing option for users consistently seeing either TouchFLO 3D or TouchWiz dominating the scene. Finally, the implementation of the pico projector opens up a plethora of implications that can cater to a whole new list of needs. The X in eXpo marks the spot where LG clearly differentiates itself in being a prominent figure in the Windows Mobile landscape.

Read their full review here.

As in previous years, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs’ salary this year was $1, but that doesn’t seem to be hindering his ability to amass serious wealth. Jobs is now worth at least a billion dollars in Apple stock alone, thanks to that company’s healthy gains in the stock market this year.

Jobs is commonly called eccentric, and his compensation package is no different. In 2009, Apple said in a filing with the SEC that it reimbursed Jobs $4,000 for company travel on his $90 million Gulfstream jet. He did not receive reimbursement for any other common items, such as personal security, AP reports. The Gulfstream was a bonus he received in 1999.

The $4,000 is a lot less than what he normally expenses. Last year, Apple reimbursed Jobs $871,000. But he also took off about six months to get a liver transplant.

It’s not the salary, or the reimbursements that pays the bills for Jobs. He holds 5.5 million shares of Apple’s stock, however, has not sold a single share since he rejoined the company in 1997. In fiscal 2009, Apple’s stock gained about 42 percent, and as of Wednesday when the stock closed at $202.10, Jobs’ holdings were worth about $1.1 billion. That’s easily overshadowed by his stake in The Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) As the largest single shareholder, his 7.4 percent is currently worth about $4.5 billion.

La operación de venta por Saab se ha convertido en todo un show de dichos y entredichos, mientras la marca sueca pende de un hilo. Por desgracia, las señales dadas por GM desde el fin de semana, cuando se conoció la contraoferta de Spyker, no han sido nada claras y parece que todo está estancado.

Un vocero de GM, ha dicho hoy que el cierre de la marca continúa y no hay ninguna novedad. Por otro lado, en Suecia, comenzó a difundirse el rumor de que GM ya había rechazado la oferta por considerarla sin sentido. Victor Muller, CEO de Spyker, dice que las discusiones continúan. ¿A quién le creemos?

Puesto que el comunicado de GM es oficial, me inclinaría a darle más crédito, a pesar de que eso significaría una demora en la suerte adversa de Saab. Los días pasan y no se ve una solución favorable a la marca sueca que pasará unas amargas navidades.

Vía | Automotive News

Boston-based SCVNGR has raised $4 million from Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Ventures and its existing investor Highland Capital to continue building out its location-based platform for mobile phones. As part of the investment, Google’s Rich Miner will sit on the board.

TechCrunch reports that the financing occurs just weeks after the company said it is cash flow positive and has more than $1 million in revenues during its first year in business. SCVNGR helps other companies build their own location-based services. For instance, dozens of major universities have used technology to give campus tours, and major companies use the scavenger hunt aspect for team-building exercises. SCVNGR will apparently need the cash for expansion. In the past 11 days, it has hired six new employees, which doubles the company’s staff to 40.

When INQ Mobile showed me a phone with a fast built-in Facebook app earlier this year, my immediate reaction was: “It’ll do Twitter, too, right?” Sure enough, the latest version does Twitter.

But it turns out that my enthusiasm puts me in a minority demographic. Americans asked by research and consulting firm Strategy Analytics what brands they would want on their mobile phone gave tweet-crazed San Franciscans a reality check: They placed Twitter just below MSN’s suite of Windows Live apps and far, far below Facebook.

I asked Strategy Analytics to take some time and come back with their explanation of why the two most popular social networks were so far apart in most consumers’ minds. Analyst Paul Brown says that despite Twitter’s hotness among Internet addicts and the media, we forget that it’s got only a fraction of Facebook’s user base.

“Twitter has approximately 55 millionusers, compared to around 325 million Facebook users,” he wrote me. “So while there is a high media buzz around Twitter, the number of users is considerably lower than either Facebook or MSN, thus the reason why desirability for Twitter is much lower.”

Why did MSN place just above Twitter? “For MSN, this was the whole suite of Windows Live services, including Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail,” Brown explained.

Hotmail, which has been around since before the first Internet boom, claims nearly 300 million users in 36 languages around the globe.

This shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that Twitter is not a mobile brand. It’s impressive that Twitter — and Pandora, too — placed above Amazon and CNN in the poll. But the real story is Facebook. The relative newcomer outranked Yahoo and nearly tied Google as the most desirable mobile service. Twitter, often spoken of in the same breath as Facebook, in reality has a long way to go to match it.

[Images: INQ Mobile and Strategy Analytics]

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Panasonic is charging into the green space headlong — first with deals to supply batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles — and now announcing that it will launch a massive lithium-ion storage battery capable of powering an average home for up to a week, the company says.

This is significant for two reasons. First, if home batteries like this one become commonplace, renewable sources of energy like rooftop solar and residential turbines could finally take off. The biggest roadblock to their adoption is that they are intermittent; reliable storage is needed to make them effective. Second, if affordable storage is achieved on the home-level, there might be less need for grid-scale storage, which is pricier and harder to accomplish.

The announcement is hastened by Panasonic’s acquisition of a more than 50 percent stake in Sanyo, making the company a battery manufacturing powerhouse that could trounce almost everyone else in the market, including A123Systems, Johnson Controls-Saft, Valence Technologies, and others. Becoming the earliest entrant into the home storage space would solidify its dominance.

Panasonic, which says it has already thoroughly tested this technology, plans to bundle its storage device with a home energy monitoring system that would allow users to view how much power they are using and how much it is costing them right on their television displays. This could make the company a major player in the smart grid arena as well.

Depending on how successful Panasonic is at marketing its household battery (and bringing down the cost), it could become a formidable competitor for fuel-cell makers like Clear Edge Power. Fuel cells also allow for low-emission operations, converting natural gas into electricity and recycled heat. But they don’t store electricity for use later, which is a major need for alternative energies to gain traction.

Panasonic, which scored a deal to supply batteries to Tesla Motors in October, has already successfully pushed automotive battery makers out of the market, like Imara, which shuttered earlier this month. Valence, being kept afloat by a new contract with Smith Electric Vehicles, could be next if it doesn’t move fast. In any case, it will have a head start, with Panasonic’s storage system not hitting stores until 2011.

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With a slew of new netbooks powered by the Intel Atom N450 about to launch, I’d be hard pressed to recommend buying an older netbook right now. But if you’re feeling put off by lack of visual horsepower in an all Intel netbook, you might want to look into those with the Nvidia Ion platform. These devices pair a GeForce 9400M with the Atom CPU and simply blow away the Intel integrated graphics solution.

So although new devices are around the corner, Laptop Magazine placed four of today’s Ion-based netbook models into the ring to see which would be the last netbook standing. I won’t spoil the surprise, but if you’re still sold on today’s netbooks and want support for gaming and 1080p video playback, you’ll want to see which netbook won this prize fight. It’s noteworthy that when similarly spec’d out, these little laptops can run north of $550, although a bare-bones system with Ion can be had for $400. And don’t forget that next year’s netbooks will work with both the Nvidia Ion2 as well as Broadcom’s Crystal HD accelerator.

Rebecca Zacks wrote:

The boys and I will be taking some much needed time off for the next week and a half, so posting will be light in the main blog and News Xpress sections. But keep your eyes peeled, because over in the Xconomist Forum things are going to be hopping right on through the New Year. A number the the world’s leading innovators, entrepreneurs and investors have graciously agreed to use that space to share their thoughts about the most important developments in their fields in the last decade, and their predictions for the decade to come.

Thanks to the Xconomists, to all of our readers, and to all of our underwriters and partners for helping to make this last year such an exciting one for Xconomy. To watch our reach and our business grow, particularly in what’s been such a tough year, has been deeply gratifying and humbling.

We’ll be back on January 4 with all the tech and life sciences news you need to know about and, shortly after that, with some new faces (hint: the editorial team will no longer be “the boys and I”) and features. Until then, I hope your days are joyous, relaxing, and—with some help to the Xconomists—illuminating.

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Always wanted your own Enterprise? Now you can own your personal Star Trek space ship but then as a webcam that you can have on your PC or Mac.

The webcam can be clipped on to your screen with the Star Trek Badge and connects to a USB port.

Great for video chatting in MSN, Skype, iChat an much more.

Check out the Star Trek Webcam