Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Finishing up it’s two-day convention in San Fransisco yesterday, YPulse National Mashup is a yearly event that brings together youth media and marketing professionals from brands, agencies, and the non-profit sector to share practices for reaching today’s totally wired youth. And this year’s findings were a rather obvious one for anyone walking around any school, mall, or other teen gathering place. Teens are becoming more and more mobile and cell companies, advertisers, and other media companies plan to be sure to capitalize on this.

And capitalize on it they will indeed be able to.  It’s estimated that teens wield a whopping $200 billion annually in discretionary spending. Yep, you read that correctly, and it wasn’t a typo. Two-hundred BILLION. Today’s kids must be charging much more for lawn-mowing services than back in the day, or else get one heck of an allowance.

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Those that have seen the Harry Potter movies may remember his magic cloak that enabled him to be invisible from those around him. Sounds a bit fantastical and far-fetched doesn’t it? Well, the future may be closer than you think.

The ability to hide something from sight, is usually accomplished by using what is known as a superlens. This type of lens contains a negative refraction index, the “refraction” part obviously meaning bending. In this case it allows it to bend electromagnetic waves back upon themselves. So, as a result, the object appears “invisible.” Voila! No bulky cloak even needed.

Although superlensing isn’t exactly yet feasible for making something huge like a military warship invisible, there is still promise for more standard large objects. This is being done using copper-based meta-materials to create a type of cloaking cylinder.  Work is also being done on the lenses by Graeme Millton, of the University of Utah, who is currently working in mathematical models for the superlenses. 

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Korean mobile phone manufacturer Pantech recently organized a contest in which students from Korean Universities were asked to create design concepts for cellphones that can be made available by 2010. And in its conclusion, five dazzling mobile phone concept designs were released. Pictured here is the Cell Dot cellphone design, featuring a very minimalist overall look and feel, plus it’s seriously slim. Other designs include the Tower Lily, Wavy Stream, Waterfall Fish, and Simplice Section.

With the way things are working right now, it’s a little hard to believe that phones just like this one will be available in just two short years. Well, although I’m certainly up for something like this, at this point in time I just don’t see where a device like this would be coming from. But then again, I could be wrong. Any student who took part in Pantech’s design contest could stand up and bring his/her concepts to life. You never know.

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Nokia’s new N-Gage service has been marred by several delays and, in December 2007, the company formally pushed the launch of the service to the first half of 2008. Now with a pre-launch version, N-Gage First Access, being made available to N81 users through the official N-Gage website, the full version can’t be far off. And just before the launch of the service, the ongoing Game Developers Conference proved to be a great platform for the cellphone maker to shed more light on N-Gage’s new avatar as a standard gaming service for Nokia cellphone which will allow users to download and play quality games on their cellphones.

Read [Gamertell]