Cloud tops the hype cycle

According to a report coming out of Gartner, cloud computing has reached the apex of the analyst firm's 'Hype cycle of emerging technologies for 2009', says InfoWorld.

The technology is said to be two to five years away from mainstream adoption, and it must still go through the eerie 'trough of disillusionment' before it can reach the 'slope of enlightenment' or the 'plateau of productivity'.

In order to get to enlightenment, IT managers are going to need to cut through much of the hype that currently surrounds the cloud. The report states, "The levels of hype around cloud computing in the IT industry are deafening, with every vendor expounding its cloud strategy and variations, such as private cloud computing and hybrid approaches, compounding the hype".

Ford Motor's future electric vehicles will have the ability to communicate with the nation's future power grids, company executives revealed, according to The Detroit News.

The automaker's smart-grid communication system, which Ford will test on 21 plug-in hybrids, allows a car and grid to speak to one another to provide more efficient charging, Ford and power company officials said.

The announcement is the most recent development in the quickening pace of vehicle electrification.

Nintendo created a stir when it introduced motion-sensing controls to the video game industry, but subsequent developments that are no more than a year or two from fruition are already threatening to confine this relatively new technology to the proverbial scrap-heap, writes GizMag.

The latest of these is PrimeSense, the winner of CableLabs' Innovation Showcase and 'best new product' at the event. On paper at least, PrimeSense appears to be versatile and innovative enough to have widespread impact on the way people interact with modern technology.

The product is essentially a 3D camera that allows devices like televisions to 'see a view of the surrounding area' by scanning a room to determine who is present through a combination of shape recognition and thermal imaging. Among other things, this would players to interact with games by making hand gestures and movements without the need for a dedicated controller.