Technology Terkini

According to documents filed in a California court this week, Escom LLC, the former owner of the website sex.com, has reached an agreement to hand over the domain's keys (and handcuffs) to Clover Holdings Ltd. -- a mysterious company based in the Caribbean. The final price? $13 million.


This isn't the first time, of course, that the domain name has changed hands. Match.com founder Gary Kremen originally claimed the name in 1994, but conman Stephen M. Cohen wrested control away from him in 1996. A lengthy legal battle ensued, and Cohen was eventually forced to pay $65 million in damages. (At one point, though, he reportedly was earning $500,000 per day from the site's advertisements alone.)

As the Register points out, though, Escom originally purchased the domain in 2006 for somewhere between $12 million and $14 million -- meaning that it probably saw little profit, if any, from the exchange. Considering that the California-based company recently filed for bankruptcy, though, it'll probably appreciate any extra pocket change it can get.

Many of us here at Switched spend hours a day clicking around inside Google Reader, an essential part of our news-reading operations. Multi-touch gestures are great, but are the rest of our blogging bodies wasting away without more involvement? Matt Richardson's new Google Reader Pedal rips the guts out of a USB keyboard to create a foot-controlled button for moving forward to the next news item (usually activated by tapping your keyboard's 'j' key). Now, you can pursue your RSS-fueled dopamine fix with the tap of your foot! Watch Richardson's DIY how-to in the video after the break.

Eclectic composer Troels Brun Folmann has crafted a laudable, award-winning career through the ingenious musical manipulation of natural and unorthodox sounds. His all-star soundtrack and editing credentials include seminal video games ('Tomb Raider'), popular TV programs ('True Blood') and epic films ('Avatar'). While suffering from food poisoning, he once even reportedly transformed spaghetti-generated intestinal eruptions into "an awesome-sounding synth sound that made it into a couple of blockbuster movies."

Folmann drew inspiration from personal fears and phobias for his latest project, which he titles, 'Music Made from Bees.' Based on the hundreds of stings he has suffered through his life, Folmann believes he emits an alluring scent for the insects. He told Wired, "To test my theory and overcome my apiphobia, I deliberately placed myself in a bee garden and started noticing all the beautiful sounds they make."

The composer recorded those sounds with a Zoom H4N microphone, and then manipulated the buzzing in order to make individual wing flapping audible. Those flaps "create the bases of the rhythms" for a piece which is composed entirely of bee-generated sounds. Watch the corresponding video, because Folmann's finished piece serves an impressively artistic (and catchy) composition. In terms of technologically-driven bee remixes, though, it's still pretty tough to beat this timeless classic.

So it's true, we're living in an age where people would shamelessly line up for certain electronics and luxurious fashion items. Why? Just because they can, and for that reason, some swanky outlets -- namely Christian Dior, Prada, Giorgio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, and Versace -- have attempted to exploit our gadget lust by offering self-branded phones at extortionate prices. In the eyes of every-day consumers, there's really not much appeal in these soulless devices except for the logo and some extra bling, but apparently these two factors alone are enough to make some aficionados drool a river.

On the other hand, Puma -- a less luxurious but naturally more accessible fashion brand -- has decided to do more than just slapping an OS skin onto its aptly-named Puma Phone. Priced at a comparably affordable £300 ($469), this Sagem-made featurephone packs a few unusual features such as a solar panel, a sports tracker, and even a virtual cougar named Dylan. Read on to find out if we could sense the Puma spirit in this device.

Stuart Hughes, the British jeweler known for his expensive remakes of popular gadgets, is at it again, this time with a diamond-clad iPhone 4 with a price tag of 5 million pounds, or roughly $8 million.

The handmade bezel contains approximately 500 individual flawless diamonds that total more than 100 carats.

There's 53 additional diamonds in the back, and the main navigation button is made of platinum, holding a single cut 7.4 carat pink diamond.

If you know diamonds, all of this probably means something to you. To us, it just sounds really, really expensive.

Only two of these will ever be made, so don't worry: if you buy one, the chances of bumping into someone who has the exact same phone at a party are quite slim.

As manufacturers work to drive down the cost of solar power, refining solar cells and panels to make them more efficient is only half the story. Another option is to incorporate newer electronics into the panels that could boost the power output of photovoltaic systems and make them easier to design and install.
Suntech Power, the world's largest maker of crystalline-silicon solar modules, based in Wuxi, China, has announced partnerships with Santa Clara, California-based National Semiconductor and other solar electronics makers to develop "smart" panels that would give the most power possible even if other panels are underperforming due to damage or to sunlight being blocked by shade or debris. This kind of system is useful because in conventional photovoltaic systems, one panel's performance affects the output of the whole system. "We think smart module technology is a clear path for the future," says Andrew Beebe, Suntech's chief commercial officer.

Solar manufacturers are finding it difficult to eke out additional increases in how efficiently crystalline-silicon solar panels convert sunlight into electricity--so solar innovation has shifted to back-of-the-panel electronics. "Every incremental power advantage brings down cost per watt, and electronics are where the improvements are going to be," says Matthew Feinstein, a research associate at Lux Research.

National Semiconductor's power-optimizing device is already on the market. Tests on customer installations have shown that it can squeeze 25 percent more energy from a photovoltaic system, says Kevin Kayser, a marketing manager at the company. Independent tests by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Photon International have demonstrated power gains from arrays as high as 39 percent.

Solar modules operate at various current and voltage levels. Panels are traditionally strung together in a series, and their combined DC power is sent to a large inverter. The inverter does two things: it converts the power into grid-ready AC electricity, and its control circuit constantly searches for and sets the operating voltage and current levels for all the panels based on the total power output of the array. But if one panel's current drops because of shade or debris, the inverter lowers the current of all the other panels, bringing down the array's power output. "Ten percent shade on the array means a 50 percent power loss," Kayser says.

National Semiconductor's power optimizer does away with the central control circuit in the inverter, instead placing a separate control circuit behind each panel. This allows the optimizer to wring the most power from each panel. In addition, Kayser says, while some power-optimization products either increase both current and voltage or decrease current and voltage, theirs can increase and decrease both current and voltage, squeezing out even more power.