The Next Web

Who loves the sun? Try dancing for energy

Written on June 27, 2008 – 12:12 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Today is Glastonbury day. World’s largest music festival kicks off this morning and will feature artists like the Editors, Gossip, Jay-Z, Amy Winehouse, Manu Chao, The Raconteurs, The Verve, and MGMT. The area where Glastonbury takes place is pretty spacious, so the lucky ones who got a ticket might loose their friends in the music chaos. No problem, as long as your phone works. But what if.., your battery is flat?

Lately, rumors about solar iPhones have been zooming around. But to quote the Velvet Underground, “Who Loves The Sun?” - if there’s a alternative around that’s way more fun? Mobile phone operator Orange and GotWind - a company specializing in renewable energy - have teamed up to test a product during Glastonbury that charges a phone by using your dance moves.

Instead of just enjoying the music, you’re also generating some power with a geeky cool-looking light weight device. The portable kinetic energy chargers are attached to your arm, employing a system of weights and magnet which provide electric current which is stored in a special battery.

So next time you’re at a festival, looking for your friends, try to dance like a maniac for a while and then charge that battery.

This is one of those rare posts that actually doesn’t concern the web in any way, but just tech. I just had to share it with you though. Hope you don’t mind.

I hope you like that post!

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energy, glastonbury, gotwind, green, mobile, music

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Your computer still too slow? Try this one…

Written on June 10, 2008 – 11:51 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Nuclear weapons didn’t bring the world any joy so far, I think we can agree on that. But now there actually has emerged a positive side effect: world’s fasted computer. This beast is designed to run virtual tests of U.S. nukes and makes 1,000 trillion calculations per second while doing so.

Reuters reports that the U.S. Department of Energy announced that the IBM Roadrunner supercomputer is the first one to achieve a petaflop of sustained performance. What a petaflop is? Good question! “Flop” is an acronym meaning floating-point operations per second. One petaflop is - hold on to yourself - 1,000 trillion computer calculations per second.

The department thinks of the supercomputer as a break-through - which is not so hard to imagine - and foresees a bright future, as they expect the Roadrunner to fight global warming and to open “new windows in the basic scientific research fields”.

This sounds all impressive, but I’d like to conclude with a terrific quote from the press release that really shows how incredible this new computer is. Here it comes:

To put this into perspective, if each of the 6 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours per day, 365 days a year, it would take 46 years to do what Roadrunner would do in one day.

energy, ibm, nukes, supercomputer

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