Scientists create world's first light-powered circuit

Bangalore: For the first time, scientists have created a circuit that can power itself, as long as it's left in a beam of sunshine. The world's first photovoltaic circuit could eventually power a new line of consumer devices or even model the human brain, reports Discovery News.

"This as the potential to create a new generation of optical and electronic devices," said Dawn Bonnell, a Scientist from the University of Pennsylvania who co-authored a recent ACS Nano paper describing the research. "The touchscreen of your computer could act as both the electrical charger and the computer chip."

Right now Bonnell and her colleagues can only coax minuscule amounts of electricity from their photovoltaic circuits, which is too little to power consumer electrical devices. Those amounts could quickly skyrocket. "We would have one amp with one volt in a sample the diameter of a human hair and an inch long," said Bonnell. "If the efficiency scaled up without any additional limits."

Yet another way to get more power is by turning their 2D structures into 3D structures. Stacking multiple layers of light-collecting and electricity-using circuits would also boost power.

The photovoltaic circuit developed by Bonnell and her colleagues is a scientific breakthrough, not a technological one. These new circuits will most likely never replace their silicon counterparts.

Photovoltaic circuits could be ideal for other applications, however, such as powering tiny robotic devices or running computer calculations at the speed of light. Far into the future, these circuits could even be used to set up as artificial neural networks that could model the brain.

"This could open the door for many kinds of new devices," agrees Lukas Novotny, a Scientist at the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester. Novotny notes that right now the circuit turns light into energy. He wonders if the circuit could turn energy into light, creating an entirely new class of lighting materials.

Boeing to deliver 9 planes to Indian carriers

MUMBAI - U.S. aircraft maker Boeing plans to deliver nine planes to Indian carriers in calendar 2010, a senior company official said on Tuesday, and expects fresh orders from airlines in India by next year end.

Boeing will deliver the planes, a part of its order backlog of 85 aircraft for delivery over a four-to-five year period, to Air India, Jet Lite and SpiceJet, said Dinesh Keskar, president of Boeing India.

Apple earnings jump 50 percent

Apple first-quarter 2010 earnings soared past Wall Street expectations Monday, with the company reporting a profit of $3.37 billion, or $3.74 per share.

That's up 50 percent from the same quarter a year ago, when profits reached $2.26 billion, or $2.54 per share.

Revenue for the quarter was $15.6 billion, up 32 percent from the same quarter a year ago. Wall Street was expecting between $11.21 billion and $12.6 billion in revenue on earnings of $2.07 per share. And Apple always gives an overly conservative estimate; last quarter, Apple said it was anticipating earnings between $1.70 per share and $1.78 per share, and revenue of between $11.3 billion and $11.6 billion.

In short, it was Apple's best quarter in company history. One of the reasons the numbers were so far ahead of what many had been anticipating is the company's decision to adopt the new accounting principles laid out by the Financial Accounting Standards Board last fall for the first quarter of 2010, which ended on December 26, 2009. That means that revenue from the iPhone and Apple TV can be recognized the same quarter that the sales are made, rather than over a two-year period, as had previously been Apple's practice.

As with the previous two quarters, there was good news on the Mac and iPhone fronts, with iPod sales lagging once again. Apple sold 3.36 million Macs, up 33 percent from a year ago, 8.7 million iPhones, a 100 percent gain over the last year, and 21 million iPods, 8 percent fewer.

In a statement, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called it "surprising" that Apple is now a $50 billion company, and he hinted at Wednesday's event, saying there will be a "major new product that we're really excited about." It's widely assumed that the new product will be a tablet computer.

Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer said Apple's retail stores did their best business ever during October, November, and December of last year. Sales totaled $1.97 billion, up 13 percent from the same holiday shopping period a year ago, but Mac sales did particularly well. Together the 283 Apple Stores worldwide sold 689,000 Macs, a record for them. And half of them were to first-time Mac customers, Oppenheimer said. Foot traffic to the stores was also the highest ever: Apple says 50.9 million people went through their doors for the most recent quarter.

AT&T and Verizon

Oppenheimer handled the bulk of the earnings call. Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook stayed silent until it was time to respond to questions from investors. And when he did speak, he revealed some interesting tidbits. Notably, Cook came to the defense of AT&T, the exclusive iPhone carrier that has gotten battered on the public relations and customer service front for the past few months.

"AT&T is a great partner. We've been working with them since well before we announced the first iPhone. They had more mobile broadband usage than any other carrier in the world...In the vast majority of locations we think iPhone customers are having a great experience. As you know, AT&T has acknowledged they're having issues in a few cities," and are working on a plan to correct them, Cook said. "We have personally viewed these plans and we have high confidence that they'll make significant progress in addressing them."

Though he appeared to be standing by AT&T, it wasn't what potential and current iPhone users who hope to see the iPhone on Verizon soon probably wanted to hear. However, Cook didn't rule out new or additional carrier partners in the future. As with most things in Apple's future, he was vague. In response to a question from an analyst about iPhone growth in countries where additional carriers had been recently added, Cook said this:

"We've seen in the countries where we had (added carriers) the sales are largely incremental as we add carriers."

He said it was true for the U.K., France, and Scandinavian countries, and he expected it to be the same for Canada.

He added: "However, we've also selected in most cases countries that we thought that would happen in. I don't want to imply that would happen in every market or that we are headed that way in every market."

Waiting for Wednesday

But despite the record-breaking quarter, most investors and analysts are more curious about the future than the past. Several analysts tried to ask questions about the impending Apple tablet and were rebuffed. Oppenheimer flat-out refused to answer a question about whether the guidance for the next quarter included any unannounced products, and Cook told another analyst, "I wouldn't want to take away your joy of surprise when we reveal our latest creation on Wednesday."

Looking ahead to the next quarter, Apple again stayed conservative, saying it expects revenue between $11 billion and $11.4 billion, and earnings per share from $2.06 to $2.18.

Yahoo 4Q earnings top analyst views as slump eases

SAN FRANCISCO – Yahoo Inc. moved further down the road to recovery in the fourth quarter as online advertising began to snap out of a yearlong stupor to ease the Internet company's long-running slump.

The results released Tuesday represented Yahoo's best performance since the company hired Silicon Valley veteran Carol Bartz as chief executive a year ago. Bartz has been vowing since her arrival to engineer a turnaround that eluded her two predecessors, Terry Semel and Jerry Yang.

Yahoo promised to deliver even more meaningful progress to start this year. Management projected its revenue would rise about 3 percent to $1.63 billion during the January-March period, ending five consecutive quarters of decline.

The lessening erosion in Yahoo's Internet ad sales during the fourth quarter provided the latest evidence that the market is picking up again as marketers feel better about the economy. Google Inc., the Internet's dominant advertising vehicle, closed out 2009 with its most robust growth of the year.

"Things seem to be returning to a more normal state in the online advertising business," Bartz told analysts in a Tuesday conference call.

Yahoo earned $153 million, or 11 cents per share, during the final three months of 2009, rebounding from a loss of $303 million, or 22 cents per share, in the prior year.

If not for charges for internal reshuffling and a proposed search partnership with Microsoft Corp., Yahoo said it would have made 15 cents per share in the quarter. That topped the average estimate of 11 cents per share among analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters.

Yahoo shares climbed 45 cents, or 2.8 percent, in extended trading. Before the results came out, the stock ended Tuesday's regular session at $15.99, up 13 cents.

Revenue remained in a rut during the latest quarter, slipping 4 percent to $1.73 billion. By contrast, Google's fourth-quarter revenue surged 17 percent. Yahoo still did better than the first nine months of 2009, when the company's revenue dropped 12 percent.

In a sign of Yahoo's growing confidence, the company added 700 workers to its payroll in the fourth quarter to end December with 13,900 employees. That's still down from Yahoo's recent peak employment of 15,200 workers in September 2008.

Yahoo also intends to buy other companies this year, Bartz said, setting her sights mostly on small deals that improve the company's technology and bring in more compelling content to its Web site.

"We are done looking inward," Bartz told analysts. "We are looking outward at the incredible opportunities ahead."

For all of 2009, Yahoo earned $598 million, or 42 cents per share, on revenue of $6.46 billion. That compared with income of $419 million, or 29 cents per share, on revenue of $7.21 billion in 2008.

The worst U.S. recession since World War II hindered Bartz through most of last year as skittish advertisers reined in spending on all media, including the Internet, where Yahoo has long been a marketing magnet.

Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., had been struggling even before the recession's onset in December 2007, as Google widened its lead in the Internet's lucrative search market and online hangouts such as Facebook emerged as new hot spots for socializing and advertising.

Since her arrival, Bartz has been trying to spur more advertising by re-establishing Yahoo as the center of people's online lives. The makeover has included a redesigned front page that makes it easier to connect to Facebook and other Web sites. The front page sold all its available advertising in the fourth quarter, Bartz said.

Yahoo was especially pleased with renewed spending on its bread-and-butter — the online billboards known as display advertising. Sales in that category were flat from the same time last year, but climbed 26 percent from the third quarter. That was Yahoo's largest sequential gain in display advertising in three years.