Tag Archives: telephone

Alberta welcomes a new nanotechnology product and research centre plus some news on a kissing phone

The new facility will be called the Hitachi Electron Microscopy Products Development Centre (HEMiC) at Canada’s National Institute of Nanotechnology (NINT) at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. From the media release (on Azonano),

“Alberta’s strength in nanotechnologies, and the province’s coordinated strategy for nanotechnology made our decision to seek a partnership here easy,” said John Cole, President of Hitachi High-Technologies Canada, Inc. “This initiative engages Hitachi with Alberta’s nanotechnology community at the leading edge of research while contributing to commercial opportunities.”

The Centre will house three new electron microscopes valued at $7 million, including the first-ever Hitachi environmental transmission electron microscope Model H-9500 in operation outside of Japan.

There are many quotes in the media release, surprisingly, none from Dr. Nils Petersen, NINT’s  Director General.

Fast Company is featuring an article by Kit Eaton about phones that won’t require buttons for control (more touch screen-type technology but introducing a new level of innovation). As it turns out, these phones will be coming from Nokia. Kissing the phone as a gesture that you want to contact a loved is just one of the ideas being explored. More here including a Nokia video about the project. The product designers are looking at how people gesture and, depending on your culture, the meaning behind gestures can vary greatly as the Nokia designer notes in the video. Anyway, this type of project relates to my interest in multimodal discourse and my suspicion that we won’t be writing (or for the matter reading) as much as we do now.

Rob Annan over at Don’t leave Canada behind has picked up on my series of last week’s about innovation in Canada, in his posting Canada not simply hewers and drawers.