Time of the Tech

First off, let me give credit to whom it is due. I have gloriously modeled (or blatantly copied) the design of this blog entry, "three thoughts on ...", from Sports Illustrated writer Grant Wahl. Now back to my three thoughts. Google unveiled their first official tablet earlier this week, which is the Nexus 7 tablet. The device will debut for $200 and the hardware is manufactured by Asus. Thought 1: At 7 inches and $200 this is meant to compete with the Amazon Kindle Fire which is also 7 inches and $200. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft are all staking claims into different segments of the tablet market. Amazon and Google are competing for the smaller screen, E-reader, more affordable sector. Apple is dominating the higher end tablet sector. And the upcoming Microsoft Surface is vying for the tablet/netbook sector. Thought 2: The Nexus 7 will be a perfect device for anyone looking for an E-reader that can also function as a web browser. The Nexus 7 is clearly ...

Amazon released Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player a week ago.  What are they? They are the future of how we will store and access our music. Amazon Cloud Drive will store 5 gigabytes of music for free in the "cloud". An average song is 5 megabytes, which means you will be able to store 1,000 songs with the 5 gigabytes allotment. For a fee you can upgrade to 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000 gigabytes for $20, $50, $100, $200, $500, $1000/year respectively. For those of you not familiar with the "cloud", it is the new way to store data ( see Sherrie's article on cloud software ). Instead of using your physical hard-drive or flash drive, you store the data in the internet, in this case, Amazon will host your music data in the "cloud". The advantage of the Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player is that you can access your music with any computer or Android device. You are no longer limited by the songs on your computer's hard-drive or phone's SD-card...

For the March/April 2011 issue, Technology Review  did a piece on the top 50 most innovative companies of 2011. Innovation can be tricky to define. But let us not battle like nerds over the minutia. To prevent trolls* from blasting a Time of the Tech produced list, we give you the top fifty innovative companies of 2011 list from Technology Review , MIT's world famous magazine: A123 Systems Akamai Amazon.com Amyris Apple Applied Materials ARM Holdings Complete Genomics First Solar Geron Goldwind Science and Technology Google HTC IBM iRobot Life Technologies Netflix Nissan Novartis Pacific Biosciences Roche Siemens Suntech Toyota Private Companies American Superconductor BIND Biosciences BrightSource Energy Calxeda Cellular Dynamics International Claros Diagnostics Cotendo Crowdcast eSolar Facebook Groupon Joule Unlimited Lattice Power Layar Lyric Semiconductor Novomer PrimeSense Serious Materials Silver Spring Networks SpaceX Square S...