Toshiba unveiled two 3D TVs today that work without special glasses.

The Regza 20GL1 is a 20-inch flat-panel display with 1,280×720 resolution. The Regza 12GL1 is a 12-inch flat-panel display with 466×350 resolution. Toshiba unveiled the models to coincide with this week’s Ceatec electronics show near Tokyo.

Toshiba said that its 3D technology, which is currently best-suited for small displays, provides “nine different perspectives of each single 2D frame.” The company added that those perspectives are then “superimposed” by the viewer’s brain “to create a three-dimensional impression of the image.”

The 3D effect is available within a 40-degree area in front of the set, Toshiba said. According to the Associated Press, viewers must also sit two feet from the 12-inch LCD and three feet from the 20-inch LCD to view 3D content.

The new LCDs are “first step into the 3D future in the consumer home cinema market,” Toshiba European marketing chief Sascha Lange said in a statement. “But it will take several years to develop larger 3D TVs without glasses with screen sizes of 40 inches and more at a yet reasonable price point.”

The possibility of viewing 3D content sans glasses is something that many consumers will welcome, though.

Last month, a survey about 3D TVs showed that 30 percent of people don’t like the need to wear special glasses to view 3D content.

Although Toshiba is trying to make its name in the glasses-free arena, the company is already a player in the 3D TV market. It currently sells the WX800 line of 3D TVs. Both the 46- and 55-inch models of the WX800 require glasses.

Toshiba’s 20GL1 and 12GL1, which switch from 3D to 2D mode, are scheduled to be released in Japan later this year. They will retail for about $2,900 and $1,400, respectively. The company has not announced plans for availability outside of Japan.

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Congratulations to Ms. Yvonne Kershner –  Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer with Brazos Valley Schools Credit Union!

She is the WINNER of a new Apple iPAD from the Percento Technologies drawing at the Texas Credit Union League 2010 Leadership Council.

Thank you to everyone who joined our drawing.

For Stanford University student Feross Aboukhadijeh, what started off as a bet fueled by youthful ambition and technical bravado, ended up an Internet hit and quite possibly a job.

Last week, Aboukhadijeh, 19, was just an ordinary, albeit talented, college student as he tested out Google Instant, the Web giant’s new predictive search results feature. He was immediately impressed on its debut Wednesday but also inspired. To his roommate, he said, “I bet you I can build YouTube Instant in an hour.” And his roommate took him up on the bet.

Aboukhadijeh didn’t quite make the hour deadline, but three hours later, YouTube Instant was born. The site lets people search the enormous YouTube video database in real time.

He spent a couple more hours Thursday sprucing up the user interface. And before going to sleep that night, he posted his work to his Facebook page.

“When I woke up Friday morning there was craziness,” he said.

By “craziness,” Aboukhadijeh means countless e-mails congratulating him, a bevy of interview requests, a server flooded with Web traffic, the creation of a Wikipedia entry in his name, and–perhaps most notably–a job offer from YouTube CEO Chad Hurley via Twitter.

Unsure just how seriously to take the tweeted job offer, Aboukhadijeh replied along the lines of “Is this a for-real offer?” Hurley then e-mailed him to set up a meeting, which is scheduled for Monday at YouTube’s San Bruno, Calif., headquarters, Aboukhadijeh said.
YouTube officials didn’t respond to an e-mail request sent Friday from CNET seeking confirmation of the job offer or meeting.

Aboukhadijeh is just finishing up a summer internship with Facebook, but he doesn’t see how that would prohibit his taking a job at YouTube, which is owned by Google.

“I’d like to finish college,” he added, which he agreed could pose the bigger problem.

Much like Google Instant, YouTube Instant lets people type in what they’re looking for, and the engine guesses what that video is. By design, it plays the video immediately. However, based on feedback, Aboukhadijeh said he’s working on play and pause features, among other improvements.

“It’s not as useful as Google Instant if you know exactly what you’re looking for, since you’re shown distracting YouTube videos on the way to your destination,” Aboukhadijeh told All Thing Digital’s Peter Kafka. “But I think this is perfect for many Internet users.”

He built the site using the YouTube API but scraped YouTube search suggestions after Google blocked his server for making too many repeated requests to the search suggestion endpoint. Aboukhadijeh ended up re-writing the site to instead query YouTube directly for search suggestions, “eliminating the round-trip to my server,” he said.

Aboukhadijeh, who is from Sacramento, Calif., said he’s been blown away by how quickly his tool went viral and is grateful for all the supportive feedback.

“I’m amazed and humbled by all the attention it’s received. So thank you,” he said.

But imitation is the highest form of flattery, and it appears he’s got that, too. TechCrunch on Saturday pointed to Alabama-based developer Michael Hart, who, inspired by Aboukhadijeh, used jQuery and the Google Maps API to build Google Maps Instant. And the same blogger later pointed to an all-encompassing Instantise page that gives a home to the evidently quickly growing number of sites with instant, predictive search results. Instantise was reportedly designed by Scottish engineer Tam Denholm, TechCrunch said.

Aboukhadijeh is a majoring in computer science, but his technical expertise has been developing over many years. Around age 5, when his parents bought a new microwave oven, he took the manual and learned how to turn on the child lock, something his parents never learned to do. That knowledge came in handy when he was old enough to get grounded–he would lock it up and use it as a bargaining chip.

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BERLIN–Panasonic made its 3D sales pitch Wednesday, showing new 3D products and saying it’s plugged a final gap: letting people record their own 3D video.

At the IFA electronics show here, the company touted its HDC-SDT750 camcorder and offered attendees a chance to try the camera on their own. The model combines a regular 1080p video camera with an optional 3D lens attachment that gathers the necessary dual views for the left and right eye.

“We have already produced 3D eyewear, TVs, theaters, Blu-ray drive players. However, there is still one thing missing,” said Makoto Nagura, director of Panasonic’s video camera business unit. “That is to keep your precious moments in 3D.”

The TX-P46VT20E will cost about $2,800, and the TX-P42VT20E about $2,550.

Also at IFA, Panasonic showed off a mammoth 3D-capable TV, a plasma screen with a 152-inch diagonal. Its resolution is 409×2160 pixels. The screen should be available in 2011, Panasonic said.

Of course, not everybody is happy with 3D. It’s seen, sometimes rightly, as gimmicky. But as the swath of 3D movies demonstrates, it’s a real transformation of entertainment, just as the arrival of audio and color were in decades past.

A sales effort will be important to convince people to purchase the premium products. The video camera will go on sale in October for about $1,399. Handling the video also raises complications. The 3D video can be copied and shown using HDMI, SD cards, or USB, Panasonic said, but don’t expect consumer video editing to be a simple matter.

The 3D revolution is important for several reasons. First, it offers novelty for an electronics industry that continually seeks to generate demand for the latest, premium-price thing.

Second, it offers a potentially more immersive experience for those watching video or playing games.

Last, it requires content producers to retool for a technology that’s significantly more computationally intense and bandwidth-sapping. Streaming video is tough, but streaming 3D video is tougher.

Also at the IFA show, Panasonic showed off updates to the rest of its 3D line, including new TVs, Blu-ray players, home theater systems, and glasses.

The two new 3D-capable home theater systems, the SC-BTT750 and SC-BTT350, that will go on sale in September.

The higher-end SC-BTT750, with a cost of about $1,020, combines a Blu-ray player, six tall-and-thin speakers, and a wireless network to stream video to a compatible TV. The SC-BTT350, at about $700, has six conventional speakers and lacks the wireless ability, though it can be added later.

For TVs, Panasonic announced two new members of its NeoPDP plasma-based VT20 line with 42-inch and 46-inch screens, both available in September.

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Imagine walking into your favorite cafe and instead of waiting in line to place your order for a large iced nonfat latte and handing over your debit card, you submitted your order and authorized payment from your bank account via an application on your phone.

You can’t do that now. But it’s very possible that some day you will. It will be a big leap forward getting banks, credit card companies, retailers, and cell phone makers–not to mention consumers–on board with this idea. But a few companies are beginning to provide digital stepping stones to what someday could be a wallet-less future.

On Thursday, Intuit and Mophie (maker of the JuicePack battery for iPhone) will introduce the Complete Credit Card Solution, which fits over the iPhone 3G and 3GS like the JuicePack and has a credit-card reader that uses Intuit’s 18-month-old GoPayment mobile payment software. It will be available as an iPhone accessory in Apple Stores.

The idea is to allow small businesses or anyone who needs to process payments that doesn’t have a permanent place to plug in a cash register to be able to accept something other than cash on a device many people already have. The hope is consumers would find this more convenient than keeping cash on hand when they want to make a purchase, even from a nontraditional retailer.

While plastic and cash are still the way the vast majority of retailers do business, that could change over the next few years as smartphone usage continues to skyrocket, and more personal finance details are being taken care of online and on the phone. Hardware makers, banks, and payment processors are at least dipping a toe into the water by participating in trials or offering new ways to pay people without using plastic or cash.

The rest of the field
Intuit is not the first to do a smartphone-attached card reader. Verifone developed a card swiper for the iPhone to enable small businesses to accept and process payments on the spot without need for a cash register. Then a smaller company called Square came up with a similar solution to allow everyone from food trucks to Craigslist sellers and other small businesses to offer a legitimate way of accepting payment without the need for large sums of cash to change hands.

Now in a sign that the trend is entering the mainstream, even the big companies are jumping on board. Intuit is the company behind Quicken, QuickBooks, and now Mint.com, and thinks mobile payments are going to be a booming business in the next few years. The numbers they’re looking at are $11 billion in mobile point-of-sale transactions by 2013.

Card readers are just one way of processing mobile payments though. Contactless payments is something that has been tried for years using cards or a clip for keychains and is now starting to be integrated into the smartphone.

DeviceFidelity recently released a case and microSD card for the iPhone that will make Visa charges by waving the phone near a contactless payment terminal.

PayPal, the company that brought online payments into the mainstream, is envisioning a fully digital “mobile wallet” someday, but it will begin with something more like the trial they began recently with BlingNation.

The BlingTag is a sticker that goes on your phone and uses NFC, or near field communication, a technology like USB that can transfer data over very small distances, up to 4 inches. An RFID chip in the sticker authenticates transactions made between the phone and a BlingNation payment console, which a retailer would have to agree to carry.

“NFC is considered the holy grail of getting the mobile phone to [be used in] point-of-sale” transactions, said Todd Ablowitz, president of Double Diamond Group, a payments consultation company in Denver. But it requires an infrastructure to be in place to gain any real traction.

“It takes handset makers, financial institutions, retailers to be on board, with a reader that can read it. The chicken and the egg is…how do you issue payment if no one can accept it?”

There have been baby steps on the part of wireless carriers in this department. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile have reportedly teamed up with Discover and Barclays for a pilot program in some U.S. cities where people can use their phones in place of a credit card. If it were to happen, such a partnership could pose a major challenge to Visa and MasterCard.

Forrester mobile analyst Julie Ask says trials like PayPal-Bling Tag and the Discover-carrier partnership are just that and have a long way to go before they become anything more permanent.

“Banks, carriers, handset manufacturers, and retailers with point-of-sale terminals need updated hardware and software,” she said. “A lot of pieces have to come together for that to happen…I don’t see it yet where we get to a point where I leave my wallet at home instead of my phone.”

But, she says, anything could happen if someone came out of left field.

Say, for instance, the maker of one of the most popular mobile devices in the world. Apple recently hired Benjamin Vigier from mFoundry as mobile payments product manager, and there was also word that Apple had outfitted an iPhone with near-field communications chips for testing last week.

If true, Apple’s entry into mobile payments–perhaps opening up iTunes as a way of paying for things besides music, videos, books, and mobile apps–would quickly push the idea of using a mobile device for payments into the mainstream since what Apple does in the mobile world (see iPhone, iOS, iPad), competitors tend to bend over backward to follow.

But the bigger question to all of this is why. Why would retailers or banks, for whom credit or debit card purchases are working well, want to introduce this?

“You’ve got people doing more things with their mobile phones and you’ve got payment schemes which are looking to capture nonelectric types of commerce,” said Ablowitz of Double Diamond Group. “If you can convert cash to electronic (payments) you’re gaining a lot of share.”

Hurdles
Besides infrastructure and convenience, security is a major concern–especially when companies you’ve never heard of–Bling Tag, for instance–are suddenly dealing with your money. And when seemingly random people–Craigslist sellers, food-truck cashiers, etc.–are suddenly equipped to swipe your credit card.

The Consumers Union, the nonprofit group that publishes Consumer Reports, says it’s concerned about this new wave of payment options and that consumers may not be fully protected. Earlier this week, the group issued a statement that urged mobile payment providers and facilitators to “make sure that they are at least as safe for consumers to use as traditional credit card and debit card payments.”

Hardware manufacturers, like Mophie, say that they’ve tried to be extra “paranoid” about security. The Intuit and Mophie system ensures that credit cards swiped on the device are safe by using hardware encryption that does not store credit card numbers on the device or the phone. Once the card is swiped, the iPhone sees only the last four numbers of the card, and the encrypted packed of data is sent to the bank for authorization, according to Ross Howe, vice president of marketing at Mophie.

But even being extra careful isn’t the only concern. Managing for fraud and having the resources to compensate people when it happens (an invariably it’s going to) is tough, as Square discovered and explained to customers earlier this year.

But besides an unknown company trying to get into payment processing, turning phones into credit card readers is likely not the future of mobile payments anyway.

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Because it is based on the established iOS mobile operating system — and because it is relatively cheap and increases productivity — the iPad has found uncharacteristically quick approval from many information-technology managers at U.S. corporations.

Highlighting the success of the iPad in the business world, The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday noted that while many companies would not approve the iPhone for corporate use when it debuted in 2007, the iPad has quickly found acceptance with IT departments at companies. Part of that is because the iOS mobile operating system, previously only available for the iPhone and iPod touch, has been updated with business-friendly features such as Exchange e-mail and remote erase capabilities.

“Apple has addressed these and other issues, including the ability for companies to encrypt information on iPhones and set up secure ways for employees to connect to corporate networks,” author Ben Worthen wrote. “The latest version of the operating system used by the iPhone and iPad adds features that make the devices easier for a tech department to manage, including the ability for businesses to distribute internally developed apps without going through Apple’s App Store.”

The report noted that more than 500 of the more than 11,000 applications currently available for the iPad are business-oriented. One free application from Citrix, which allows employees to access corporate programs on the iPad, has seen more than 145,000 downloads.

Other advantages to the iPad: its $499 starting price makes it less expensive than a traditional business laptop, and more functional for activities like working standing up or giving a presentation.

The paper recalled that Mercedes-Benz dealers have been equipping employees with iPads to help them sell cars. The car maker began using the iPad at 40 dealerships in May, and earlier this summer said it was considering using the iPad at all 350 of its U.S. locations.

Other specific corporate uses of the iPad mentioned in the Journal’s report include:

• Baush & Lomb Inc., maker of eye-care products, had about 50 employees using an iPad soon after its launch. The company built its own application for salespeople. The company likes the fact that the device starts quickly and has a long battery life.
• Kaiser Permanente, an Oakland, Calif., health-care organization, has been testing the iPad in a 37,000-square-foot technology lab for viewing medical images such as X-rays and CT scans.
• Though Chicago law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP banned the iPhone when it first came out, it preordered 10 iPads before it was released. The company now has more than 50 attorneys equipped with iPads, and plans to issue them as an alternative to laptops next year.

Earlier this summer, Apple revealed that the iPad is at use in more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies. Companies such as SAP and Wells Fargo.

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After recently debuting in Japan, Toshiba is now selling its dual-screen laptop/tablet in the U.S., the company said Monday.

As previously reported, the Libretto W105 (marketed as the W100 in Japan) is a small, 1.8-pound, 7-inch Windows 7 clamshell device that sports two capacitive LCD screens:one for viewing, and one for typing. The typing screen is much like the virtual keyboard on the Apple iPad, though the Libretto offers a few extra keyboard configuration options. The W105 can also function as a dual-screen tablet.

As of Monday, the W105 is available in the U.S. via preorders at ToshibaDirect.com. It will also be available at select retail stores on Sunday, August 29, for $1,099.99, the company said.

U.S. specs are slightly different from the model in Japan, a Toshiba spokesman said. The U.S. model will only come with one battery–the larger 8-cell battery–bumping the device’s weight up to 1.8 pounds compared with the 1.5-pound weight of the model with the smaller battery in Japan. (The Japan model comes with two batteries, a standard smaller-capacity battery and a larger 8-cell battery.) The U.S. model will not include WiMAX wireless broadband, either.

The Libretto W105-L251 model is listed on Toshiba’s U.S. Web site with the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system; an Intel Pentium U5400 dual-core processor; 2GB of memory (DDR3 800MHz); a 62GB solid-state drive (SATA); two 7-inch WSVGA multitouch LED backlit displays (1,024×600); Webcam/microphone built into the LCD bezel; Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n); and Bluetooth V2.1, among other features.

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Google said it has added a real-time weather layer for Google Earth to help travelers plan their trips or see what the weather is likearound the world.

Downloaded by more than 700 million people around the world, Google Earth is a freedesktop application that lets users search for satellite images of maps, terrain and buildings, from the depths of the oceans to the reaches of outer space.

The application, one of the few non-Web apps Google makes, has been getting several refinements of late.

Google Earth 5.2 now offers images of rain and snow over areas as the conditions are occurring, according to Google software programmer Quarup Barreirinhas.

Amateur meteorologists and ordinary users alike will enable the clouds layer in the control panel of Google Earth to zoom in to a particular location where it might be raining or snowing.

Google’s data for precipitation covers some areas in North America and Europe. Users who want to try this feature can enable the radar layer in Google Earth 5.2 to see if the relevant weather information is available.

In preparation for a trip to the American Southwest earlier this year, Barreirinhas checked the status of Hurricane Alex via Google Earth 5.2 in advance. The swirling mass in this screenshot highlights the precipitation.

Noting that the hurricane was entering Mexico and Texas, he zoomed in and saw rain along the coastline of Texas.

Google released Google Earth 5.2 in June, adding a Web browser and support for Apple’s iPad tablet and other utilities, including the ability to view elevation, speed and other information as a graph layer.

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Information Technology Management