LG Display has some beauties to show off at SID (Society for Information Display) 2013, but we will concentrate solely on the curved 55” OLED TV that you see above, in addition to the 5” plastic OLED panel that you can check out in the flesh right after the jump. LG Display certainly intends to maintain its lead in the realm of display technologies, where it will showcase the latest TV, mobile, and other products that representing the future of display technology.

The curved 55” OLED TV is based on the same WRGB OLED technology as the standard set, which has been widely adopted at this point in time in the industry as the most effective OLED application for large-sized panels, while being an example to the future of TV design. Not only that, the masses will be treated to an unbreakable and flexible 5” plastic OLED panel for mobile devices, where such a development might prove to be crucial in changing the way we look at how smart devices will be developed sometime down the road.

Read full post →LG Display Shows Off Curved 55” OLED TV And 5” Plastic OLED Panels

YouTube has just turned 8, and I am quite sure that nobody ever figured out that a site like YouTube could have exploded to being what it is today. In fact, just as YouTube celebrates its 8th birthday (many happy returns of the day!), it has achieved yet another interesting statistic for you to mull over – where YouTube users actually upload over 100 hours of video each minute. That’s a whole lot of videos to go through, for sure, and imagine the immense amount of space required to handle all the new videos that are uploaded each day.

The world’s top online video service that is owned by Google came out with that particular statistic, and if you were to extrapolate it into a full minute, we get over 4 days’ worth of video. When you compare this figure to the one garnered in the year 2011, we are looking at just 48 hours of video each minute, with the figure jumping to 72 hours of video uploaded per minute last year. It seems that if you were to take just the past two years alone, we are looking at the average increase of 25 hours of video uploaded per minute each year. When do you think the saturation point would be reached?

Are you a trucker? Assuming you have answered in the affirmative, then you might have come across situations where your truck is a wee bit too large to fit into a tunnel, and there were no road signs before that informed you of the tunnel’s height – either due to the oversight of the road transport department in the municipality, or the sign was vandalized and taken down quite some time ago. Well, here is a novel idea that might get things moving – a huge red stop sign which will appear as though it will obstruct the road right in front of the tunnel entrance, which will obviously ask you to stop.

Needless to say, no truck driver, or any driver in his or her right mind, would want to overlook such an explicit warning, right? Actually, this particular sign was created using an instantaneously produced sheet of water and the help of lasers, thanks to light show company Laservision. This is rather unique as it has been part of an experiment which has taken place in Australia since 2007, where it has successfully done its bit to prevent semi trucks from shearing its top off without any prior intention of doing so. Pretty creative, don’t you think so?

Ever since Samsung decided to come up with the Samsung Galaxy S3 mini to keep company its previous flagship, the Samsung Galaxy S3, and making some success out of the situation, I guess the folks over at Samsung were more than encouraged to roll out more variants of the Samsung Galaxy S4 such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 Active and the Samsung Galaxy S4 mini, where neither have officially hit the market just yet, although where the latter is concerned, we have already seen images of it leaked for some time now. Here we are with leaked benchmark results of the device, and it so happens that the new result points toward a Qualcomm chipset instead of the expected Exynos 5 which made its rounds in earlier whispers.

Obviously, it cannot be released with both chipsets at the end of the day, so one of the rumors are obviously fake. There is, however, a possibility that Samsung could very well have a sudden change of heart and roll out a pair of different versions. The leaked benchmark points to 960 x 540 pixel display, with a 1.7GHz dual-core Krait processor and an Adreno 305 GPU to keep it going, running on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean as the operating system of choice alongside Bluetooth 4.0, GPS support and dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11n connectivity.

How many of you would love to own a self-driving car? Well, some of us might put up our hands, while others could very well figure out that a self-driving car is not something they would look forward to, sitting in one as a passenger, since they would pretty much prefer to have things in their own hands. Thing is, this enterprising 19-year-old high-school student from Romania has managed to work on an artificial intelligence system for self-driving cars which could cut down on the cost of such technology, and he even went away with the top gong of a scholarship amounting to $75,000 scholarship last Friday at an international science and engineering fair.

Ionut Budisteanu did explain the situation surrounding his system, “The most expensive thing from the Google self-driving car is the high resolution 3-D radar, so I was thinking how I could remove it.” His solution? By relying on processing webcam imagery using artificial intelligence technology in order to select curbs, lane markers, and even soccer balls which happen to roll across the road. When this is merged with data from a low-resolution 3-D radar that is capable of recognizing “big” objects such as other cars, houses, and trees, you’ve got a winner here. Compare his $4,000 system to Google’s $75,000 system and you can see where he intends to go with this.

This is a record that is 9 years in the making – after a whopping 9 years of roving around, Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity has finally breached the previous limit that was set 40 years ago where extraterrestrial travels on the ground is concerned. Last Thursday marked the moment when the tenacious six-wheeled robot drove 80 meters (263 feet), which so happened to increase the total distance traveled on its odometer since landing on Mars way back in 2004 to 35.760 kilometers (22.220 miles). The previous record holder were NASA’s Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt when, in December 1972, they managed to drive their Lunar Roving Vehicle 35.744 kilometers (22.210 miles) over the lunar surface (and realizing that there were no Transformers spacecraft that crash landed there along the way)..

Of course, this might be NASA’s record-breaking ride at the moment, but it is still relatively far away from the international extraterrestrial land-distance record, falling short by a number of kilometers. In fact, it was in 1973 that the Soviet Union’s Lunokhod 2 remote-controlled moon rover roved around for 37 kilometers (23 miles) across the lunar surface, making it the long time, undisputed champion of distance driving on an extraterrestrial surface.

Earlier this morning, we talked about how the MacBook Air supply has fallen short before WWDC 2013 kicks off, and this has led to some analysts predicting that there could very well be a new model of the MacBook Air that is ready to be unveiled at WWDC 2013. After all, history does repeat itself when it comes to technology, and a shortage of supplies of the current MacBook Air stock at major US retailers could very well point to an upcoming revamped model.

In fact, selected models of the 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Air have begun to show up as “Not available”, not to mention the same also applies to majority of the other retailers such as Amazon and Best Buy. Could it be that the folks at Best Buy are plain hopeless at managing inventory? I think that MacBook Air fans would want to think otherwise. To put things into perspective, it has been nearly a year since the MacBook Air last received an update, which is relatively long, so a new MacBook Air model in the pipeline is not too far off the mark.

In February earlier this year, Verizon launched a new set of prepaid plans primarily focused towards customers on a budget. The carrier offered two plans, unlimited talk and texts with 500MB of data for $60 per month. The same talk and text but with 2GB of data for $70 per month. These new 3G prepaid plans are available for 3G smartphones as such compatible BlackBerry, Android and iPhones.

Verizon has now quietly increased the data cap of these prepaid plans without raising the prices, which no doubt is a good thing. The $60 plan now comes with 2GB and the $70 plan now comes with 4GB of mobile data respectively, unlimited talk and texts are present as before. The change in these data caps is effective immediately for all existing customers, whereas new customers will have to wait until June 6th to be able to get these allowances. It goes without saying that these plans are limited to Verizon’s 3G service, there’s no telling when or if at all the carrier will be bringing LTE support for these prepaid plans some time in the near future.

According to a new report, the Galaxy S4 “Nexus” edition smartphone announced at I/O 2013, might be the T-Mobile variant of this smartphone that simply has modified software. Said to best meet the hardware criteria, T-Mobile’s S4 variant was chosen to be made Nexus edition Galaxy S4 that touts the stock version of Android OS. Starting June 26th, Google will begin selling this smartphone through Play Store unlocked for $649.

Apart from running a stock version of Android OS, the device will have its bootloader unlocked, which would make it easier for those who wish to flash custom Android ROMs. This smartphone will be able to support both AT&T and T-Mobile LTE networks. Google has also said that the Galaxy S4 Nexus edition will receive software updates promptly like other Nexus smartphones do. The best thing about stock Android OS is that it doesn’t have all the bloatware that carriers ship smartphones with or the skins that manufacturers bake on top on the core Android OS, such as Samsung’s TouchWiz UI. Though this is obviously not confirmed yet, the device actually needs to be released first before it can be said for sure exactly which variant it is similar to.

Verizon has certainly been late to the Galaxy S4 party. Other major carriers in the U.S. have rolled out Samsung’s latest Android flagship smartphone to their customers, whereas Verizon subscribers wait patiently for the new device. Just a fortnight ago the carrier announced that it will begin rolling out the device from 23rd May. It is now being reported that Verizon is actually pushing out the devices well ahead of time, with some customers allegedly receiving their units as early as last week.

A number of Verizon subscribers who pre-ordered their units are now claiming that their devices have been shipped ahead of the May 23rd release date. If this is indeed the case, then obviously no one would be complaining about actually receiving the device they’ve been waiting patiently for all this time a bit earlier. There’s also an upside to the roll out beginning soon, the Galaxy S4 bootloader unlock wasn’t being released because it is deemed to be compatible with Verizon’s S4 and wasn’t released before Verizon rolled out the device. As the device begins being shipped, we can only hope that the unlock also arrives soon. [Image via CNET]