New Batteries, Please, and Hold the Explosion
By Ryan Blitstein, Dean Takahashi and Nicole Wong, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.
Jan. 9–Next-generation battery technologies are everywhere at the Consumer Electronics Show, and for good reason. Everything is mobile, and if you want to go mobile, you need power.
The lithium-ion batteries that are in 95 percent of laptops are nearing the end of their improvement cycle (not to mention that they might explode on you), so the race is on for something to replace them. Zinc Matrix Power, a well-funded private battery company based in Camarillo in Southern California, whose backers include Intel Capital, has one model.
Zinc Matrix’s batteries, to be released late in 2007, are based on silver-zinc technology that the military has been using for years, but the company improved it for consumer use. The main advantages: Zinc Matrix batteries last about 15 percent longer (and that may increase), they can recycle 99 percent of the silver and they won’t explode, because they’re water-based.
DEAN’S DELAY: LATE-NIGHT TRAFFIC: The show floor opened at the Las Vegas Convention Center Monday. So it’s time to bring up one of those Las Vegas curses.
As people were exiting the Bill Gates reception at the Venetian Hotel at 10 p.m. Sunday, I ran into a traffic jam in the 10-story parking garage. It was like somebody let out a sporting event, but this was two hours after the speech was over. Then, I was driving to the keynote speech Monday morning for Motorola CEO Ed Zander and hit another traffic jam. I couldn’t get near the Venetian to get in the keynote line. So I bagged it and went to the convention center, where there was parking.
I think the rental car has seen its last days at CES. It works well late or early, but otherwise is quite useless. I could really use Dash Express right now, the GPS traffic service that senses when your drive slows to a crawl and suggests alternate routes.
HAVE HDTV, WILL TRAVEL: Samsung Electronics said it has invented a way to make digital TV sets in the United States into portable machines so that you could, for instance, put a digital TV in the back seat of your car and allow your kids to watch live HDTV over-the-air broadcasts.
John Godfrey of Samsung said the A-VSB technology uses a sideband feature of the signals broadcast by TV stations for digital TV. With a minor upgrade for equipment in TV stations, Samsung says, the A-VSB signal can be used so that a moving portable TV can always maintain reception for a digital TV signal. The TV station inserts a tracking signal in the broadcasts that makes this happen, but the digital TV sets don’t need to be changed.
The company is going to try to get the technology accepted as a standard. It only works in areas such as the United States, Canada, Mexico and South Korea where the ATSC digital TV standard is being used. Samsung is demonstrating the technology on moving buses at CES. The technology could debut in 2007.
“It’s going to liberate the couch potato,” Godfrey said.
DANCERS? WHAT DANCERS? The biggest surprise at Hewlett-Packard’s party Sunday night, which was held from 9 p.m. to midnight at the exclusive Pure Nightclub, was that pretty women wearing pretty tight clothes were seductively shaking their booties on stage — and a bunch of guys couldn’t have cared less.
These techies turned their backs on the hired entertainers and focused their gazes on the Voodoo PC video games, as an amused male colleague observed. In fact, gaming seemed to swallow up the room — the famed Pussycat Lounge, where the Pussycat Dolls perform Tuesday through Saturday nights.
A gigantic metallic goblet revolving in the center of the room held high a shocking orange-colored Voodoo computer, as the Pussycat Dolls ceiling swing that’s wrapped in pink boas receded into the shadows. What a way to usher in CES, where cutting-edge technology unfailingly steals the spotlight.
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Copyright (c) 2007, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.
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