future technology - News, Features, and Slideshows

As you're reading this article, developers, engineers, and product designers are working on the next great mobile technology. The mobile world is rapidly changing: Smartphones have gone from portable messaging and email devices to streaming-video machines that surf the Web at blazing speed and have cameras that rival point-and-shoots (and they also happen to make calls). What will smartphones look like in five years? Or ten? What sort of amazing things will they be able to do?

Google+ seemed like a boys club at first, but recent estimates point to a growing number of women using the Internet search giant's social networking service.

Sick of long wait times or restaurants? Loathe idle banter? Suffer no more! One startup company called E la Carte (get it? 'E' for electronic. Hah!), is offering tablets which will be able to take your order, entertain you, and accept your payments.They're calling it a "Restaurant Revolution." Touché!

Your move Apple: Google announced that they are changing Chrome's support of HTML5 'video' to be, in Google's view, more friendly towards open development. The H.264 codec is being removed in favor of the Theora and VP8 video codecs as well as any higher quality, open codecs. The resources that were used on H.264 will instead be used in supporting these open technologies.

As reported at physorg.com, University of California, Riverside physicists have made breakthroughs in developing graphene-based “spin computers”. A spin computer would allow for huge storage capacity using a fraction of the power consumption of current electronics. This is accomplished through polarization of electrons -- the spin process actually gives each a directional orientation, up or down. A spin computer would maximize usage of this state of materials to store more data, perform faster, and generate less heat than standard electronics.