[H]ardNews - Blair's Tech Ed.

Intel Invests In Micron:

Intel Corp. invested US$450 million in Micron Technology Inc. and said it would team with the memory chip maker to develop next-generation chips that work with future Intel products. The investment by Intel's strategic investment program Intel Capital gives the Santa Clara, California, chip giant a 5.3 percent share in Micron, of Boise, Idaho, the companies said in a joint statement.

Microsoft 360° Webcam:

Microsoft is showing around a prototype product, called the Ring Cam, designed to make Web conferences more like face-to-face meetings. Combined with Web-conferencing software that Microsoft acquired this year, remote-meeting participants would be able to view and hear a live, 360-degree image of participants in another location. Few details are known about when products might result from the prototype. A Ring Cam--actually multiple FireWire cameras--would stitch together images from its surroundings.

Father Of The PC?

Canada is the birthplace of the telephone and cellphone. Now it has been recognized as the home of another invention — the first personal computer. It never made a rich man of its inventor, Mers Kutt, who still works with computers and ekes out a living from his Toronto house. But the MCM-70 Microcomputer, unveiled by Micro Computer Machines 30 years ago today and built at least four years before the Apple, has been recognized as the first of its kind in a recent issue of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, a respected journal based in the United States.

Nanopage Digital Screen:

Jean Chretien Favreau refers to himself as an “architect/inventor”. He seemed to have been wearing both hats when he first got the idea for Nanopage, a flexible digital screen. “I would do a lot of computer-assisted design and I was always frustrated by the small-sized screen,” he said. “So I imagined a screen you could roll up like a blueprint.” That little idea has come a long way since Favreau registered his first patent in 1998.