Can lasers save the incandescent light bulb?

A new breakthrough this week may change the attitude that the incandescent light bulb has had it's day.

Compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs) have unquestionably gained popularity for their energy efficiency when compared to the traditional incandescent light bulb. Millions of people around the world have been encouraged bypoliticians, governments, energy utilities, and even light bulb companies themselves to phase out traditional incandescent bulbs in favor of CFLs (or even LEDs) to save electricity in the home.

But now researchers at the University of Rochester in New York have found a way to make an incandescent light bulb more efficient.

Chunlei Guo, associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester.

(Credit: University of Rochester)

A group led by Chunlei Guo, associate professor of optics at the University of Rochester, has been testing the effects of ultra-fast lasers on the properties of metals and decided to try a tungsten filament (the tiny wire you see in the average light bulb).

The group blasted the tungsten filament with an ultra-fast short-pulse laser for a femtosecond. A femtosecond is to a second "what a second is to about 32 million years," according to the researchers.

The blast changed the properties of the surface metal on the filament so that it formed nanostructures and microstructures that enabled it to shine significantly more brightly while still using the same amount of electricity.

"We fired the laser beam right through the glass of the bulb and altered a small area on the filament. When we lit the bulb, we could actually see this one patch was clearly brighter than the rest of the filament, but there was no change in the bulb's energy usage," Guo said in a statement.

The change in the filament has enabled the incandescent light bulb to shine as bright as an average 100-watt bulb, but consume less electricity than the average 60-watt bulb.

Full details of the project, which was sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, will be published in the next issue of "Physical Review Letters."

________________________________________________________________

Audio Slideshow: Livermore Labs unveils super laser

LIVERMORE, Calif.--The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a blast--literally.

I was lucky enough to join the few thousand people who were allowed Saturday to tour the world's largest laser system, which is located in this bucolic valley about an hour's drive from San Francisco.

The $3.5 billion facility was dedicated Friday by a host of dignitaries, including California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. But family members and friends of lab employees were allowed to tour the NIF on Saturday, many of whom started lining up early and waited more than an hour in a serpentine, Disneyland-like line to get into the 10-story facility.

The NIF sports 192 lasers whose beams start out about the size of a 1-gallon gas can and are then filtered and amplified through optics and mirrors and simultaneously fired at a small beryllium sphere filled with hydrogen isotopes. The hydrogen atoms then fuse into helium, releasing thermonuclear energy equivalent to temperatures at the core of stars, or about 180 degrees Fahrenheit.

The lab said that in about three billionths of a second, the lasers create a pulse of ultraviolet light energy of 1.8 million joules. At its peak, it generates 500 trillion watts, roughly 1,000 times the electricity produced by the U.S. power grid.

The tour took us through the entire apparatus, including a peek at the firing target chamber at the system's core.

Unfortunately, the taking of individual photographs was verboten. Cameras and cell phones were prohibited from the grounds, and I wasn't going to even think about messing with the rules. Anyone who has ever been near this place knows its reputation for security--ask Martin Sheen; he is intimately familiar with the lab's security.

However, my colleague James Martin attended the dedication and took the photographs featured in the audio slideshow below.

During my tour, I overheard a gentleman tell his son that this is the kind of place Hollywood comes to get its ideas. Despite comparisons to something you might expect to find at the core of the Death Star and comments about phase congigate target tracking systems, this mega-tool has generated a lot less fear and paranoia than the Large Hadron Collider.

While much of the NIF attention is focused on expanding the nature of the universe and the origin of stars, the stated primary mission is keeping tabs on the country's aging stockpile of nuclear weapons.

The NIF is also expected to create clean energy based on the heavy isotopes of hydrogen, a virtually inexhaustible resource on Earth. If it succeeds, the lab expects to be able to take one gallon of seawater and create the equivalent energy of 300 gallons of gasoline.________________________________________________________________

Smartphone king Symbian ready to strike back

David Wood of the Symbian Foundation at its office in Foster City, Calif.

(Credit: Mats Lewan/CNET)

Just about everyone knows the iPhone--and perhaps also that it runs on Apple's operating system--though the phone only has about 10 percent market share among smartphones. Far fewer know the name of the most widely used mobile operating system, which holds nearly 50 percent of the market: Symbian.

As recently as 2007, Symbian had 70 percent share. Market share has been lost mainly because of the iPhone with its Mac OS X, and to BlackBerry devices running on RIM's Blackberry operating system.

To find out how Symbian plans to strike back, CNET News met last week with David Wood, "catalyst and futurist" at the Symbian Foundation.

"I admire Apple for their advertising. They're actually teaching people about applications. Apple has done a tremendous job."

--David Wood, Symbian Foundation

He revealed that the company has no plans for its own app store, but explained how Symbian plans to make it easier for developers to negotiate with several stores, like the Nokia Ovi Store, which got off to a bumpy start last week. On Tuesday, a developer's Web site for the new open-source Symbian went public.

He also explained the influence Nokia is likely to have on the Symbian OS.

But first he made it clear that the U.K.-based company now is growing aggressively, with the expansion happening largely at its Foster City, Calif., office.

"We have 72 employees today and intend to grow to a bit less than 200," he said. "Many will be in the Silicon Valley, in part to tap into the skills here."

The Symbian Foundation was founded in October as a base for a new open-source strategy aimed at making the Symbian OS stronger amid completely new market realities, including the success of Apple and RIM, and Google's launch of Android, a license-free, open-source operating system for mobile phones. And the Palm Pre, with its new Web OS, will only add to the competition when it goes on sale this weekend.

Symbian was founded in the U.K. in 1998 by Psion, Nokia, Ericsson, Matsushita, and Motorola, basically as the mobile industry's defense against Microsoft.

David Wood has been at the company from the start. Before that, he spent 10 years at Psion, whose operating system Epoc was the base for Symbian OS.

Until now, global mobile phone leader Nokia has been Symbian's main proponent. But Nokia hasn't quite figured out how to make the masses download applications, as Apple did.

"I admire Apple for their advertising," Wood said. "They're actually teaching people about applications. Apple has done a tremendous job."

The figures prove this. In September 2008, Apple reached 100 million downloads from its App Store within two months and recently hit the 1 billion mark. But Nokia only reached 90 million downloads from its much less well-known Web site, Nokia Download, in two years.

Back in November 2007, when Google first unveiled Android, adding to the competition from Apple, RIM, and Windows Mobile, it was already obvious the smartphone market was getting much tougher. Symbian and Nokia clearly had to do something.

So last year Nokia acquired the whole company. It buried interfaces used by Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and NTT Docomo in favor of its own S60; restructured the code; and handed it over to the new, not-for-profit Symbian Foundation in April of this year, declaring that Symbian OS should go open-source and be license free.

Interestingly, Nokia simultaneously became the last major phone manufacturer to launch a modern touch-screen phone, adding touch-screen features to its Symbian-based S60 user interface.

Have all these moves come too late?

"I think it couldn't have happened much earlier, because the industry was still uncomfortable with open-source ideas," Wood said.

Comparable to Windows XP
The Symbian source code is huge: 40 million lines of code in 450,000 files, comparable to Windows XP. The open-source transition has just started, and Wood expects it to be finished by mid-2010. The developer site for the open-source project just went public at Developer.symbian.org, where users now can register and find many other resources, such as forums, bug tracking, and reference documentation.

Meanwhile, foundation members already have access to the whole source code. The membership fee is now $1,500, whereas it used to cost $30,000 to gain access to the Symbian source code.

"We will have no software engineers doing programming here, just integration, validation, and verification," Wood said.

So the OS will be developed by contributions from outside. And as Nokia acquired all Symbian employees and has in-house expertise in the S60 user interface, the bulk of contributions currently comes from Nokia.

"Probably the largest contribution will still come from Nokia for the foreseeable future," Wood said. "But we hope that by maybe three years' time, maybe 50 percent of contributions will come from outside Nokia. That's why we're going the open-source route--no matter how many smart software engineers there are in Nokia, there are many more smart software engineers outside."

He also underscores that Nokia only has one voice on the Symbian Foundation board, where decisions on road maps, architecture, and user interface matters are made.

And yes, the current user interface--Nokia's S60 that was recently adapted for touch-screen use in a way thatdidn't really impress everyone--will be replaced.

"It's called Direct UI and has already been designed. It's available in labs and will be shipped in phones with Symbian release 4 at the end of next year," Wood said. He mentions new features, such as the capability to control the phone by hovering above the screen but not touching it.

So what about an application store? Will Symbian rely on the Nokia Ovi Store that was finally launched last week, garnering a number of negative comments?

No single app store
"We won't create a store," Wood said. "There won't be a single store for all kinds of devices that run Symbian software, because some operators and some manufacturers want to have their own store."

"The worst drawback is for developers who must negotiate with many different stores. So we're going to provide a single publishing route so that an application that meets certain criteria will automatically be available from any of these app stores."

Another headache for Symbian developers has been the issue of tool development. Whereas the tools for iPhone and Android have achieved great success among developers, many developers consider the Symbian development environment to be complicated. Wood admits this and says tools will be an important focus for the Symbian Foundation.

"The largest group of Symbian Foundation employees is the support team, which includes responsibility for improving the development tools," he said.

Two new levels of programming will be released--an easy one for widgets based on Web standards and another, more advanced, called Qt ("cute") and based on open-source code from Trolltech, a company that Nokia acquired in 2008.

Making developers happy is key, as they are often considered the lifeblood of an operating system. But competitors are accomplishing that task well. What will make Symbian stronger? According to Wood, it's about four things.

• Openness, not only the open-source code but also in what he calls open governance--for example, publishing details of the road map early, which Symbian has already done.

• Expertise in coping with multiple form factors while keeping the platform unified.

• Understanding compatibility well, meaning bringing out new phones without making existing software obsolete.

• Skills in maintaining high quality amid rapid change.

Brand awareness a possible issue
Will that be enough? If so, one issue could still be brand awareness, particularly in the U.S. where Symbian is little known because of Nokia's weak position.

AT&T's presence on the board of the Symbian Foundation could help, and so could new phone manufacturers that are choosing Symbian, in addition to companies such as Samsung , Motorola, and Sony Ericsson. According to Wood, Chinese phone makers Huawei and ZTE now want to make Symbian smartphones for the U.S. market.

But even if the Symbian Foundation manages to get a highly modern and effective OS into lots of smartphones from various phone makers, with a slick and nice-looking user interface that appeals to the masses, will end users know it's Symbian?

"I want end consumers to realize that Symbian delivers particularly slick performance," Wood said. "We would like phones that pass Symbian's compatibility test suite to have a little mark somewhere, like this heart mark (Symbian Foundation's new logo). It might appear at least on the box."

________________________________________________________________

Yahoo Mail gets inbox filtering by contact

Yahoo has added a small but useful feature to its Web mail service that lets users filter the contents of their inbox to see only the messages from their contacts. This means that if someone's not on your contacts whitelist, you don't see their message.

Short of Yahoo Mail's built-in filters and its connections sorting, this is one of the simpler ways to cut out any inbox clutter from people you don't know. However, there's some work involved on your part to build that list of contacts. To enable the feature, users must first create a Yahoo profile over at profiles.yahoo.com. Then whoever you've added as a contact has to give you their blessing that they know you too--the same way it works in Yahoo's photo property Flickr.

Besides sorting by connections, users will soon be able to sort by contacts. Here's what the inbox looks like before the sort.

(Credit: Yahoo )

And here's what it looks like after the sort.

(Credit: Yahoo)

One area where this terminology might confuse users is the difference between "contacts" and "connections."Yahoo Mail's help section refers to connections as "contacts with special status." In the case of mail, what makes them special is that you've interacted with them frequently, so the product assumes you know them. Contacts, on the other hand must be manually added, either through mail, or over on Yahoo's profiles site.

Yahoo Mail's senior product manager Rick Pal says this feature will only be available for Yahoo Mail users in the U.S. and Australia, and won't be rolling out to all accounts until a "few weeks" from now.

________________________________________________________________

Can Comscore stop ticking publishers off?

When is 2 million people too small a group to get a good feel for the latest trends?

When you're trying to perform the deceptively difficult calculation of just how many people visited a Web site.

ComScore, by some accounts the leading analysis firm that supplies publishers and advertisers with figures about how many people visit various Web sites, announced Tuesday a switch to a new method geared to provide more accurate Web traffic numbers. Previously the company had judged traffic on the behavior of a panel of 2 million person scattered across the globe, but the new service, Media Metrix 360, combines that data with statistics taken directly from the Web servers that can tally visitor totals.

The hybrid approach is a big departure for ComScore, which for years as staunchly defended the panel approach. ComScore Chief Executive Magid Abraham expects will put to rest most complaints by publishers that ComScore's statistics dramatically underestimated real popularity.

"There is a big gap that we will rectify," Abraham said. "My personal belief and hope is it will address 90 percent-plus of the issues...Unless there is a widely different method for measurement that a publisher is using on their own, we should not really see differences anymore."

The hybrid approach still is fundamentally panel-based, but uses server data from participating publishers to inform the totals. ComScore expects it will estimate traffic better from computers that panels miss today: mobile phones, larger companies, cybercafes in Asia and Latin America, and public terminals at schools and libraries, Abraham said.

Measuring traffic is a long-running point of contention between publishers and ComScore; MySpace and Major League Baseball's MLB.com are among those who've objected in the past to panel-based numbers.

Torstar Digital, a division of the parent company that owns the Toronto Star, is one company that's had trouble reconciling its newspaper sites' numbers with ComScore when it came to tallying how many times visitors viewed pages, said President Tomer Strolight.

"We regularly saw discrepancies between ComScore page views and unique visitors of three to one or greater when compared with our server-based tools on those sites," Strolight said. ComScore's panel-based approach posed problems when it came to extrapolating statistics from people at work and older audiences, he said, but the new service helps.

"The discrepancy, and that ratio in particular, are not present in all sites by any means, but it does happen to affect my largest site and it is therefore very important to me that we resolve that issue," Strolight said. "ComScore's new methodology can do this."

So why does the number matter beyond bragging rights in a press release?

Money, of course. Advertisers want to know if they're showing an ad to the same person multiple times or to different people. And of course Web publishers want to know how many people really do use their site.

"A media market develop on basis of trusted information for all the participants. The sellers and buyers have to agree the numbers are something they can live with," Abraham said.

Not as easy as 1-2-3
One might think it a simple matter to measure how much traffic a Web site gets. Just keep a log of the Internet addresses of visitors, or perhaps deliver the "cookie" text file to their browser for easier identification of repeat visitors, right?

Wrong. There's often a discrepancy between independent panel-based statistics from companies such as ComScore or competitor Nielsen Online on the one hand and a server-based statistics from a Web publisher's internal logs or third-party services such Google Analytics or Omniture on the other. Here are some factors that can inflate Web site visitor statistics based on server logs:

• The same person might visit the same site from work, home, and increasingly, from a mobile phone. That's not a problem when counting total traffic to a site, but it is when trying to tally unique users.

• Sometimes people delete cookies either manually or automatically through antispyware software, meaning that a cookie might be delivered to a person who seems to be a new user but who in fact has visited a site before.

• Someone might visit the same site with multiple Web browsers or open a tab in a browser without actually making it active.

• Computer servers such as search engine indexers can visit Web sites.

These issues are diminished when users must log into a site, making it easier to track individual use, but the panel approach attempts to address the issue more broadly, consistently, and independently. Panel-based information also answers a question that an individual site cannot: how often is a particular person exposed to the same ad while browsing multiple sites on the Web?

"Ultimately, we need to report unique people, not unique machines, unique cookies, or unique browsers," Abraham said. "There is a lot of energy that goes on trying to reconcile the numbers and trying to explain to people the ins and outs and the subtleties of why this number is not that number."

Panel shortcomings
However, panel-based measurements have their own shortcomings, in part because they rely on software installed on users' machines. Thus the difficulties with mobile phones, businesses, cybercafes, libraries, and schools, Abraham said.

Cybercafes are widely used in Asia and Latin America, he said. Mobile usage for typical sites accounts for less than 1 percent of traffic today, but it's much larger--potentially more than 20 percent--for sites that appeal to mobile users such as those handling weather, stock quotes, breaking news, sports scores, local information, and social networking. And today, ComScore largely just estimates traffic from big-business users.

"It's really difficult to recruit users to participate in panels in large corporations," Abraham said. "Large businesses are in essence voted for by the medium-sized businesses, by proxy. Sometime that works, sometimes that doesn't. That's one area of improvement this (Media Metrix 360) will create."

The company has begun offering panel software to some mobile users but doesn't yet publish resulting data. "We do have that developed for a number of smartphone platforms such as Windows, Palm, and (BlackBerry maker) Research in Motion. We are working on solutions for iPhone and Android," but it's difficult to deal with the plethora of models in the market, he said.

ComScore recruits panel members by offering them free software such as games and screensavers and through incentives including sweepstakes and, more recently, an offer to plant trees in third-world countries. The panel size of 2 million people spans 170 countries, enough for global estimates and for specific measurements in 40 countries. The company also uses technology that can distinguish different users on the same machine by identifying signature patterns in mouse and keyboard use, an important factor for shared computers.

The switch to the hybrid methodology will be gradual. Publishers must add a transparent pixel to their Web sites that ComScore uses to track visitors, Abraham said, and participating sites undergo a 60-day "incubation period" to make sure data collection is working and nobody is gaming the system, he added.

"We think we'll get widespread support. There is widespread hunger for this," Abraham said. "From many people we've heard, 'What took you so long?' It's a fair question. The answer to that is it's not as easy as it first appears."

________________________________________________________________