Motorola patents skin tattoo throat mic for smartphones

Motorola patents skin tattoo throat mic for its devices

 

Seems like that the times when mobile phones were identical, homogenous devices are going to be past soon. With technologies like finger scanner, iris scanner etc one can now make the device highly personalized and secure. Taking this trend to the next level, companies like Motorola are fiddling with the idea of haptic tattoos to be embedded into smartphones.
In the coming days, you may use your own skin tattoo to let your Motorola smartphone identify you and collect various biological data from your body. To take the concept to the next level, Motorola is aiming to use these skin tattoos as throat mics which can record your voice, store it onto the phone and let various applications use this as input.
Currently, the Google owned company intends to improve the quality of voice in crowded and noisy environments, cut out an acoustic noise and pass on clean signals to the device for transmission to the other end.
Along with tattoo sticker, the device will have its own transceiver and antenna, microphone, signal processor, a power supply unit and even a small screen to ensure that your voice is not lost. The power supply unit will use a personal area network to get energizing signals to run all the time.
Getting too close for comfort for many. Motorola wants tattoo mic to have galvanic skin response detector to detect skin resistance of a user. Hence, activities and  reflexes like nervousness, anxiety or panic may be captured and abstracts like falsehood may be detected, just like a lie-detector.
Motorola is so convinced about the technology that it has attained patent for the same. However, it still needs to convince the buyers regarding the same but we highly doubt that Google and Motorola will have an issue doing that.

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Stephen Elop reportedly mulling Xbox and Bing split if elected as Microsoft CEO

According to a report in Bloomberg, Nokia’s former chief Stephen Elop has grand plans in consideration if elected as the next CEO of Microsoft. Already on the shortlist for the position Elop is said to consider selling off the Xbox business and axing Bing.

In addition to the abovementioned changes, Stephen Elop is reportedly mulling over expanding the reach of the popular Microsoft Office to a broad variety of devices, including iOS and Android products.Currently, Microsoft is offering a stripped down version of the suite for iPhone and Android smartphones, which is available only to existing Microsoft Office 365 users.

Getting rid of Xbox and Bing has been called for by investors in the past, as the duo is considered to be a costly distraction for Microsoft. A Nomura analyst report suggests that Microsoft’s earning can be boosted by 40% in fiscal 2015 if the company sells the two businesses.

Stephen Elop will certainly be up to the above tasks if given the top job at Microsoft – as a Nokia chief, hekilled off Symbian and spun out the Finnish company’s mapping services into a separate business. For the time being however, such events are not considered very likely, as Microsoft is moving towards integrating Bing deeply into its product lineup.

Microsoft is yet to choose its next CEO. Reports suggest that a decision might be made before the end of the year.

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Li-Fi, cheaper, safer alternative to Wi-Fi

Scientist in China have discovered a new way of transmitting data through the use of light instead of radio waves as is being used in WiFi. Named as Li-Fi, the system claims to offer data transfer speed of up to 150 megabits which is almost similar to a generic WiFi system commonly used in homes and offices.

It is said to be cheaper than a WiFi system in terms of hardware apart from reducing level of radio waves that humans are exposed to with the use of high power WiFi systems. Li-Fi system is a combination of infrared based data transfer system and optical fiber based system in one.

A disadvantage of Li-Fi is that in this system the receiver always have to face the transmitter to receive data and since a normal wavelength based light would be used, it might be a source of distraction for users.

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