Skiff Ereader

Remember the movie “Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home”? Scotty needed to create a tank onboard to house two hump backed whales. He gave the technical specs to a manufacturer to create a sheet of transparent aluminum. A lab at Oxford University has now created such a transparent aluminum sheet. Now a company called Skiff will be releasing an ebook reader later this year which uses a thin transparent metallic layer instead of glass to protect the screen underneath. The silicon thin film transistors (TFT) are also on a flexible stainless steel substrate which makes the whole screen shatterproof and crack proof.

This new ereader will be one of many that will be competing for the top prize of best ebook reader for 2010. It is hard to say who will come out on top but I feel my money is currently on the enTourage eDGe.

Another movie in the 80′s that popularized science was the movie “Back to the Future”. Remember the Stainless Steel car called the DeLorean? This car was retrofitted with hardware that allowed the car to travel in time. DOC had returned from the future with an engine that took any material like a can of cola including the can and turned this immediately into fuel. Now a designer has been working with Nokia to produce such a fuel source for mobile devices.

Daizi Zheng has created a bio battery that uses enzymes to breakdown the sugars to produce power that produces 3 to 4 times longer lasting power over the current Lithium-ion technology on one charge. The current prototype accepts cola as the fuel and the final by-product is water and oxygen. SWEET!!! Clean and environmentally friendly.

Cola powered phone - Images Daizi Zheng

This technology probably will not be available for a few years still due to consumer acceptance and various other issues like:

• What do you do if the container leaks?
• How do you clean the liquid container?
• Pressure from battery manufacturers to not have this in the marketplace.
• Just the yuck factor of pouring a syrupy liquid into a small container to recharge your electronic device.

In any regards, the potential of these types of scientific advancements will truly revolutionize the mobile and electronic industry within the next 5 – 10 years. We are currently at the fringe of a new era of truly exotic technologies becoming mainstream. I am really looking forward to the next 5 years and beyond.