Loewe Invisio: A Stunning Transparent Flat Screen TV

In the last few years we’ve watched the television get super thin, a design that has elevated them to appear more like art, and with the ability to hang them on the wall like a picture frame, TV’s have truly become beautiful and unobtrusive pieces of furniture. So what’s next for TV design?

A new design my Michael Friebe, displays a completely transparent TV called the Loewe Invisio and it appears like a solid piece of glass attached to a modern-looking metal base. Friebe’s design has been entered for a 2011 IF Concept Design award , an international competition for professionals in the areas of design, architecture, marketing and engineering.

Let us know what you think, is this the coolest TV you’ve ever seen?

Meet Samsung’s sexy new mini-camcorders

Samsung’s new HMX P100 and P300 debuted at CES earlier this month. The sexy, slim new mini-camcorder was designed by the Feiz studio, a Dutch design firm.

The “shoot and share camcorder” includes a built-in usb arm to easily upload to the web and microSD recording. It features ‘smart pause’ technology, which permits momentary pauses in filming before continuing to record in the same file, making it easier in post-production to edit footage.

The P100 has a backside-illuminated 5-megapixel CMOS sensor for better low-light recording, a fixed focal length f2.2 lens, and a 2.3-inch LCD with an 80-degree viewing angle.

The HMX-P100 is the cheaper version of the more elegant HMX-P300. The P300’s backside-illuminated CMOS sensor is 8-megapixel with a 3x f2.8 zoom lens and a 3-inch touch screen. Both cameras can capture at 1080/30p, 720/60p, and 720/30p and feature autofocus, digital image stabilization.

The P100 will be available n February for $149 and comes in black, blue, silver and pink. The P300 will be available one month later in the same colors for $199.

Will robots replace journalists? No. Well, maybe a few.

First let me just say that no, robots will not replace journalists. Robots will likely only replace jobs with particularly low cognitive loads. So, maybe press release re-writing bloggers, but not thinking, analyzing, interviewing, friendly journalists.

In an on-going experiment called “ My Boss is a Robot ,” an alliance of journalists and computer scientists aim to combine the distributed human brainpower of Amazon’s small-task outsourcing engine, Mechanical Turk , with a robot boss pre-programmed to absorb a myriad of discrete human-accomplished tasks into something resembling the work of a single person. Niki Kittur, a Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of Human Computer Interaction and freelance science and technology writers Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell are heading up the experiment.

We’ve seen automated “robotic journalism” before. The NYTimes uses the semantic web to automate wedding announcements. Business Week used software to replace sports journalists. Infonic’s Sentiment software analyzes thousands of news stories to determine how a particular company is faring. And TV journalism could be replaced by a prototype of software that uses voice-over narration of a rapid-fire series of pre-taped stories, vidclips and images to present television news.

The Mechanical Turk has even written a simple encyclopedia entry about New York City . Based on this success, the scientists behind My Boss is a Robot believe Turkers (as the distributed workers on Mechanical Turk are called) could transform a research paper into a 500 word piece of original science journalism.

The deeper question Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell hope to answer is whether or not the process of journalism or any other kind of knowledge-based work can be deconstructed and then restructured algorithmically.

If it works, the result will likely be something similar to AOL ‘s Demand Media -style content generation efforts, also known as “ The AOL Way .” But this “Bionic Journalism” will not be the future of media so long as human beings avoid falling into a meatspace existence and still enjoy reading thoughtful, creative and educated news stories on their iPads.

Non-mechanical fingers crossed.