Its been a while since I've posted, but here are a couple of interesting things that caught my eye recently.
First, RIM: There are reports of a takeover for Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of BlackBerry. RIM has gotten hammered by the iPhone in the upmarket scene and by the Android tsunami in the mid and low cost sections of the market. In fact, the key (no pun intended) advantage of BlackBerry phones remain security (each device gets its own 32 bit pin) and an email server network that takes it own initiative, pushing email onto your device from, say, your employer's servers. These security characteristics are loved by those in finance and government, all over the world, and so RIM seems to have a niche market for now. Especially since these customer groups are quite loyal: look at how the finance world swears by the Bloomberg terminals. But further growth in RIM might be limited to just these markets and I think that's what shareholders might be unhappy about. Further drama in any possible takeover is due to the Canadian govt; according to this Nytimes article, which claims that Canada may not be open to a foreign takeover of what they consider an "important" company. Well I think, with state support, RIM could survive this lean period to fight another day. From my biased perspective as a supporter of camera-centric thinking, I think RIM should take advantage of its rep as a maker of tough, "phones for the Pro" and perhaps think about camera sensors that would be advantageous to law enforcement, firefighters and first responders: perhaps mobile IR and thermographic sensors on Blackberry phones?
Second, optics for Solar cells: We know that solar cells covert electromagnetic waves from the sun to electricity. But an important part of solar cells are the optics that make sure the maximum possible sunlight is captured by the cell. There are some cool companies out there that use ray tracing (geometric optics) to increase the length of the ray through the photo-sensitive part of the solar cell. The key here is to make the optics flexible and thin, so it can be "rolled out" (basically printed or fabricated) along with the solar cell. So the ideas that dominate solar optics are ones that exploit total internal reflection or rough surfaces. Designs from SolOptics and Morgan Solar follow this trend, and these links have cool explanatory diagrams.
You can also go beyond the optics that collect light, and think about modulating the incoming solar radiation into something that can be easily converted to electricity. The Economist has an article about a "lens" for a solar cell that is made of tiny pits in a sheet of tungsten. The pit size is such that heat from the sun is easily absorbed. But when this heat is re-radiated out from the tungsten sheet, it gets "lost" in the pits and reabsorbed into the sheet. Its a heat trap, that allows easy entry but difficult escape. So the tungsten sheet "trap" gets very hot, and a custom solar cell behind it is tuned so that the heat that does escape the "trap", is mostly converted to electricity.
Happy New Year!
