Invisibility, Sweet Software, and Lupine Algorithms

So what do these three seemingly disparate things have in common? Absolutely nothing. Except that they are incredibly cool and this week’s Inno-Focus.

First we head off to sunny and somewhat socialist (alliteration aside) Berkeley, California where Dr. Xiang Zhang of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and director of UC Berkeley’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center has made a significant advancement in cloaking technology. Read about it here at Science Daily (an amazing site I recommend highly). The article, published in Nature Materials, outlines the invisibility cloak in all of its ridiculous optical complexity. The long and short is that the cloak makes objects disappear by causing the light reflected from the cloak look like there is just the flat surface behind or under it. Right now it only works in the near-IR spectra. The tech is not quite there yet, but Zhang is confident his design will yield a visible light version soon.

Leaving the Harry Potter references aside for a moment, this is an incredible technology with myriad applications. Of course the mind immediately goes to military applications, but once the technology moves into the consumer space and costs come down this could be coming to a home near you. Windows where walls once stood. Glass-bottomed cockpits. Uncluttered surgeries (as long as they can avoid forgetting the invisible scalpel inside the patient. Read more from 'How Stuff Works' here. And I think this is only the beginning of the applications for this tech.

Wicked Cool Software - Bumptop

Young software genius Anand Agarawala has a vision. And it rules. Anand was voted one of Business Week's Best Young Entrepreneurs 2009. Well deserved. Bumptop turns your boring 2D desktop into a really sweet interactive 3D experience. What looks like a bird's eye view of a software developer's padded cell, bumptop's unique interface lets you pick up the icon for that spreadsheet you've been killing yourself over all week against the wall, and watch as bumptop's physics engine bounces around the realistic desktop, knocking into other icons that get "bumped" into, and rattle into place on the desk surface. Rifle through documents or photos like they were tangible items not just kilobytes in a folder, fan them out, stick them to the walls, all sorts of fun stuff.

But this is more than just a novelty download. I found myself fully immersed in Anand's (and bumptop gang's) world. I wanted to use the desktop more. I normally avoid adding shortcuts to the desktop. Within minutes I was grouping, organizing, and customizing my desktop in ways I'd never dreamed. And as touch interfaces become more pervasive in the coming years this will become the superior way to utilize your desktop screen realestate. Face it, the mouse is soon to be caught in the technology mousetrap (along with the fingerpad on laptops, and good riddance).

Despite only $1.65M in grants and angel investments (according to Businessweek's article), bumptop is out of beta and is shipping product. Download the only slightly limited-functionality of the free version or buy the Pro version for 3 workstations for only $29. A steal, frankly.

A friend showed me Anand's TED conference talk (use the Bumptop link above) about a year ago. I made a mess of myself when I first saw it. Try it, I dare you. You won't go back. Bumptop is in talks to ship bumptop with operating systems. Give them the Windows 7 deal, Ballmer! Please?

Lupine Algorithm

Ever get frustrated when you type an urgent question into Google and get back frustratingly irrelevant results? Enter mad genius Stephen Wolfram. (Ph.D. from Caltech at 20? Check.) Wolfram Alpha will scour the web, assimilate the data for your answer, and present your factual data in a coherent and straightforward fashion. No more trudging through worthless PDFs and gov't documents searchig for data. And if the algorithm can't answer it he'll email you himself. Ok, I'm kidding. But Google killer? TechCrunch thinks maybe.

Last week Google fired back, launching its own version of the data aggregator as Wolfram was debuting the concept during a talk at Harvard University. Wolfram followed with its own screenshot.

I have one question. Why the cat fight? Either Wolfram wants to fly solo and build the Google killer (good luck buddy). Or he has a checkered past with some of the Google execs (total speculation and unfounded). Or both. But if Wolfram is simply stretching his intellectual muscles, substantial they may be, the whole exercise smacks of muscle beach swollen ego. Wolfram may be mildly successful as a niche structured search engine, only to be surpassed in a year as Google bulks up its own offering. Or it does take off, and Google simply won't let that happen. Google has shown itself the internet's Pac-Man, gobbling up budding web technologies. And it has worked for them.

Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt built the one of the coolest --and largest-- companies in the world buy smelling these opportunities from a mile away. They may not be Wolfram smart, but Wolfram hasn't shown anyone any business acumen. The two are not mutually exclusive, but I've seen countless braniacs think "running a company is easy, lesser men do it" and blow it. I think its a perfect match, and will amount to a substantial retirement package for Wolfram.