Brain-Machine Interface @ EPFL: Wheelchair

ASIAN INNOVATION AWARDS 2011

The Wall Street Journal Asia is now accepting entries for the Asian Innovation Awards 2011. Presented in sole partnership with Credit Suisse for the second year running, the Awards are committed to finding the next big ideas in Asia Pacific, from entirely new inventions to the advancement of a classic idea.

The deadline for entries is Friday, March 25, 2011.

In 2010 the Asian Innovation Awards attracted nearly 300 entries from 13 countries and territories throughout the Asia Pacific region. The top prize, the Gold Award, was awarded to Tata Chemicals for its development of the Tata Swach Nanotech Water Purifier – a low-cost, portable “bulb” that purifies untreated water with paddy husks and nano-silver particles.This year’s entries will be judged based on three criteria: level of creativity or degree of innovation, quality of execution, and potential impact on quality of life or productivity. The awards are open to individuals, small businesses, large corporations or academia in Asia Pacific.

All entries will also be eligible for The Credit Suisse Technopreneur of the Year Award, which honors the entry that best applies technology with the greatest potential for commercial success.Twelve finalists will be selected from the entry submissions, each of which will be profiled in The Wall Street Journal Asia as well as online at asia.WSJ.com. Winners will be featured in a special report to be published in The Wall Street Journal Asia later this year. For more information or an application form, please visit www.wsj-asia.com/aia or request an application form by emailing asianinnovation@dowjones.com. 

Phrazer Early adopter program

I always though adoption of an innovation was a beautiful management concept but not heard of a program directly addressing early adopters - a segment of adopters. Phrazer handheld communicator is new product, offered as service deriving value from convenience. The early adopter program is clear and strait forward.
Details:  http://www.myphrazer.com/EarlyAdopterProgram.aspx

Anil Gupta: India's hidden hotbeds of invention

Most Fortune 500 CEO’s have an engineering degree, not business or law

Asia Pacific eCare and Telecare congress

1st Asia pacific eCare and Telecare conference is planned on 16-19, June 2011in Hong Kong.
Details: http://www.asiatelecare.org/home.php
Contact: Email: roy.lee@schsa.org.hk   , Tel: (852) 2952-7202 ,Fax: (852) 2797-8990

Whole Brain® Thinking - Knowledge of thinking styles

Ned Herrmann, as Manager of Management Education within General Electric Corporation, pioneered the study of the brain in the field of business - specifically, how individuals' thinking preferences, or "brain dominance", affect the way they work, learn, and communicate. While at GE, Ned developed and validated an instrument now known as the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument^® (HBDI^®, and the organizing principle behind it, Whole Brain^® Thinking (WBT^®). 

This training program is available in India from Empowered Learning Systems. 

Flavours of Incredible India – Opportunities in the Food Industry

According to a Ernst & Young report  on the Indian food industry titled ‘ Flavours of Incredible India – Opportunities in the Food Industry', investment opportunities in the Indian food industry are set to shoot up by a huge 42.5 per cent to $181 billion in 2015 and to $318 billion by 2020.

While there are several in-house industry research departments carrying out extensive studies in new product development, there is major presence of research institutes under the government of India  initiative. These include Mysore-based Central Food Research and Technological   Institute (CFTRI), Defence Food Research Laboratory (DFRL), National Dairy Research Institute,  Karnal and Bangalore, National Research and Development Centre(NRDC) which is based out of both New Delhi and Bangalore,  Hyderabad’s   National Institute of Nutrition, working under the aegis of the Indian Council of Medical (ICMR) Research and the Ministry of health and family welfare,  Central Institute of Fisheries Technology, part of Indian Council of Agricultural Research and Central Poultry Development Organizations located at its four regional centres of Chandigarh, Bhubaneswar, Mumbai and Bangalore. 

Read article: fnb news

Download report: CFTRI

The Biology of Stress (Mental Health Guru)

Technology breakthrough fuels laptops and phones, recharges scientist's ...

10 Amazing, Emerging Advances in Medical Technology

Roxanne McAnn managing content for Nursingschools.net shared this information on 10 emerging advances in medical technology.
Read and enjoy: 

National Health Research Policy- your comments invited on the draft

Draft of National Health Research Policy is placed in the public domain: http://www.dhr.gov.in/draft_nhr_policy.pdf 
E mail yr comments to lalitkant@icmr.org.in  or 
attend open house discussion on  25th Feb , 14.00 hrs in Room 301 (Conference Hall) at the Indian Council of Medical Research headquarters, V.Ramalingaswamy Bhawan, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi - 110029.

Devas- an application developer or service provider

The controversy on agreement between Devas and Antrix corporation rages on. From the press meet, it appears Dr Kasturi Rangan was trying to convince that some of the best brains in satellite communication are at work in Devas and they are developing a new technology. Not much was covered about the technology, so I dig into some.

EchoStar VII and EchoStar VIII in USA are both spot beam satellites. With these two highly powerful spot beam satellites, we can direct about 50 different spot beam “projections” to the continental U.S. and deliver a lot more local programming to those specific areas. Each spot beam has an approximate diameter of 300 miles, making them powerful satellites. Read more.

On applications, there is this paper `Emerging Trends in Multimedia Broad casting' by AK Bhatnagar, CE, AIR& Doordarshan. This application is called Satellite DMB system and there are 4 players in that: Worldspace, MBCo, MAESTRO, ISRO/DEVAS.
Mobile Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) backed by Toshiba provided the system

Two CDM Transponders are equally shared between Japan and Korea

MBSAT satellite launched in May 2004

25 MHz Spectrum from 2630-2655 MHz is used

In Korea, Service being provided by S.K Telecom - Top Mobile Phone Operator

Total system capacity is 20 video, 50 audio and some data channels

Thousands of Terrestrial Gap Filler deployed In Korea and Japan

Reception with hand held devices

WoridSpace Multimedia Service Capabilities

Files can range from HTML files, Video Clips, MP3 files, Text Files etc. Streaming data is also supported.

Content is directly cached In the users hard drive and can be viewed at user’s convenience

Consumers can download data from 32 to 128 KBPS speeds i.e. from 14 Mbytes to 56 Mbytes an hour.

Time sharing of Channel between user groups

Each Adapter Is addressed with a unique license file thus ensuring that relevant content is sent only to authorized subscriber

European MAESTRO S-DMB

Still in planning stage

MAESTRO stands for Mobile Applications

Services based on Satellite & Terrestrial inter working project

Alms to have close integration with 3G Mobile Networks

7 spot beams from high power Geo Stationary Satellite

IMT -2000 Mobile Satellite Band

Reception with hand held terminals

ISRO’s Multimedia Satellite Service (G SAT 6)

G SAT 6 to be launched around Dec. 2008 .Subscribers to be served by M/s DEVAS India

5 Regional spot beams

’S’ Band (2550 -2630 MHz) to be used

Is it possible to develop an application with only the Transponder without Spectrum? If not how much Spectrum is needed for application development? And how will the application developer benefit if competitors are allowed free play without development costs?

Welcome comments/ more information

Build a hotel for 6 days !!!

Redpine Signals is a Silicon Valley based wireless systems company with a development center at Hyderabad. Focusing on high end wireless technology from day one, the company began with development of wireless LAN systems, and started licensing its IP to a select few semiconductor companies (who were selling several 100 million mobile chips per year) who would use it in their product or SoC as a wireless interface. This enabled Redpine to continue making R&D investment in advanced wireless technology developments in other wireless technologies like Mobile WiMAX and also enabled it to create its flagship 802.11n low power chip in late 2007. The product — a chipset based on the new wireless standard 802.11n targeted at high throughput applications. One of the means of doing achieving this efficiency was MIMO (multiple input/multiple output), a way of doubling or tripling the capacity of a given piece of spectrum. 802.11n MIMO modes use 2 or more antennas, while portable devices like mobile, MP3, notepad and other devices can not have more than one antenna - but would still like to take the benefit of 802.11n. Redpine was the first to see the potential in single antenna 11n and in 2008 it got its product certified for Wi-Fi 11n, one of the first in the industry to get certified for single stream 11n.
Read : Smarttechie

Devon Innovations- product development partner for Medical products

Devon Innovations based in Bangalore is a product development company with proven expertise in developing a wide range of medical surgical  products in field of Urology, Gastroenterology and Gynaecology. For OEMs they offer a full service in product development in related fields.Devon Innovations operates out of an ISO 9001:2008 and ISO 13485:2003 certified manufacturing facility and the products are CE marked.

Nathan Myhrvold at TEDMED 2010

Ram Charan's 8 sutras for Business Leaders.

1. finding a central idea for business that meets customer demands and that makes money.
2.detecting patterns in a complex world to put the business on the offensive.
3.getting the right people together with the right behaviour and right information to make better, faster decisions and achieve business results..
4.calibrating people based on their actions, decisions and behaviours  and matching them to the non-negotiables of the job.
5.getting highly competent  ,high-ego leaders to coordinate seamlessly .
6. determining the set of goals that balances what the business can become with what it can realistically achieve.
7. defining the path and aligning resources , actions and energy to accomplish the goals.
8. anticipating and responding to social pressures you do not control but that can affect your business.
Read more: http://www.ram-charan.com/knowhow.htm

Technopark incubates 100 start-ups

An important milestone is reached when Technopark Technology Business Incubator signed agreement with 100th incubating firm   TRANDMS Media & Technology Pvt. Ltd.  The national goal of incubating 1000 technology start-ups appear feasible. Technopark is located in Kerala, not associated with entrepreneurial motivation also it is not located in any IIT or engineering college.

Is it  due to initial success (Mob Me) and social network of young enterprises? 

Innovation- Indian Vs Europe

Innovation Union Scoreboard 2010 released by EU compares the innovation performance of EU 27 member states with US, Japan, China, Brazil, Russia. Abstract on Indian innovations:

For both the US and Japan innovation performance is well above that of the EU27. The results also show that the EU27 has a strong lead compared to each of the BRIC countries. The performance lead towards India has remained stable over the last 5 years and that towards Russia has slightly increased. China and Brazil are both catching-up towards the EU27 where the rate of relative improvement for Brazil is more modest than that for China.

The EU27 is performing better than India in most indicators . In Knowledge intensive services exports India is performing better. Overall there is a clear performance lead in favour of the EU27. But this lead is declining, as India’s innovation performance has grown at a faster rate than of the EU27. India has been decreasing the
performance gap in 4 indicators (Most cited publications, Business R&D expenditure, Public-private co-publications and License and patent revenues) and has experienced a decrease in its performance lead in Exports of medium-high and high-tech products and Knowledge-intensive services exports. The EU27 has increased its lead in Tertiary education, Public R&D expenditure, PCT patents and PCT patents in societal challenges.

Innovation Tournament 2011

Wipro Technologies and Knowledge@Wharton, have teamed up for the second year to conduct a global “Innovation Tournament“. Inspired by the book Innovation Tournaments by Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich, this tournament will require participants to create solutions by which society can implement green technologies as well as customer-centric work processes. The tournament is open to all individuals and/or groups from around the world who wish to submit a solution for consideration.

The deadline for submissions to the Innovation Tournament is March 7, 2011.

Carbon Capture and Newtralisation (CCN) technologies from Cuycha

Cuyha Innovation Oy was founded in 2004 by renowned nuclear physicist Matti Nurmia to manage and develop his inventions. Most of Dr. Nurmia’s inventions relate to energy production and environmental issues.Dr. Nurmia’s most notable invention is the neutralization of CO2 backed by several patents.The firm is looking for partners for joint development and commercialisations. Technologically these projects can be divided into eight categories.

1. CCN-Project: carbon capture & neutralization.
2. Oxygen-Project: oxygen-enriched-air production.
3. CHP-Project: better power-& CHP-plant efficiency.
4. WindTurbine-Project: a more efficient and higher wattage design.
5. Generator-Project:  a variable generator eradicating the need for a transmission.
6. Desalination-Project: the production of drinking water from sea water.
7. Snow/Water-Cannon-Project: a high-volume howitzer for water or snow.
8. Other Projects:
   • Paper-machine innovations.
   • Electricity from tidal-power
   • Electric cars and lithium production.
   • "ThinkTank"-projects.

2011 R&D 100 Awards

Nominations for the 2011 awards are now being accepted. Technologies introduced in the calendar year 2010 are eligible for the 2011 awards.Last date: 28th Feb 2011.

Read about the R&D 100 Awards and application process.

 10 Most Common R&D 100 Questions

How To Win An R&D 100

Instructions and Entry Form

contact RDeditors@advantagemedia.com.

CTNS- validation of Functional Foods

Functional foods are defined  as foods and food components that provide a health benefit beyond basic nutrition (for the intended population). Examples may include conventional foods; fortified, enriched or enhanced foods; and dietary supplements. These substances provide essential nutrients often beyond quantities necessary for normal maintenance, growth, and development, and/or other biologically active components that impart health benefits or desirable physiological effects. 

Recognizing the tremendous health benefits offered by functional foods, the Institute of Food Technologists commissioned an expert panel to review the available scientific literature related to functional food development. The panel’s report is divided into nine sections: Definitions, Introduction, Food and Genes, Current Legal Standards, Scientific Standards, Policy Limitations, Bringing Functional Foods to Market, Role of Research, and Conclusions. Copies of the report are available at www.ift.org. 

Technological Centre for Nutrition and Health (CTNS), Spain offers services such as, validation of functional foods, from selecting the most appropriate ingredient to evaluating the biological efficacy of the functional food, complying with European Regulation 1924/2006.

The market for Nutraceutical exports  to US and Europe is estimated at $75 billion by 2013.

SciTech Patent Art (SPA)

SciTech Patent Art (SPA) is an  IP services organization supporting R&D scientists as well as patent attorneys, in business for over 8 years now and serving many Fortune 500 companies, law firms, VC firms and research institutions. SPA has advanced science/engineering graduates who conduct in-depth patent/publication analyses on various topics of interest to clients. They help  identify technology white spaces, conduct freedom-to-operate analyses, assess novelty, map technology/claim trends, draft patent specifications, analyze foreign language patents, and much more.  Current strengths cover chemistry, chemical engineering, electronics, electrical engineering, polymer science, material science, life sciences, biotech, food science, biomedical engineering and so on. 

SciTech’s exemplary Patent Trackers demonstrate how patent analytics can be used to source information related to technology and market. See the illustrations.

Creative Minds- Innovators cooperative in A.P

After waiting for a very long period for investors and business partners, the grass root innovators of A.P realised that self help is the best help. They grouped together with mentor J.Gurgaprasad and formed a cooperative 'Creative Minds' to market their innovations. The innovators work as innovators, producers and marketing wizards. Typical is case of innovator Linga Bhamam, innovator of Iron running on LPG. 

Linga Brahmam (28) is a non matriculate in a small village in Warangal dist. His family lived on making brass vessels. Due to the advent of Plastic, their need in the villages had drastically reduced and they had no other skills to earn living. Brahma is creative and always wanted to do something in life. He once saw a tailor using an electric iron being heated on a gas stove in the village and using it for ironing of clothes as most of the time in the villages power supply was not available. Brahmam thought of combining the gas and the iron and after a year developed an alloy which burns and becomes red hot in a very short time once the gas flames surround it. He made a 8.5 kg iron for washermen operated by LPG. This was a very user friendly, cheaper and least cumbersome solution to the washermen over the present electric or coal based iron. 10gms of gas is sufficient for one hour of continuous ironing.

Contact: Creative Minds, 1-1-336/64, vivek nagar colony, Chikkadapally, Hyderabad 500 002

creativemindsap@gmail.com