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Microsoft's Surface computing is the kind of Buck Rogers' technology that can dazzle consumers and boost a company's "cool" factor. But in an interview last week, Robbie Bach, Microsoft's president of Entertainment & Devices Division, said he came close on multiple occasions to deep-sixing the project.

Customers will be able to order drinks by touching a digital image on Surface.

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

"I probably thought about killing it every year it was in development," said Bach, the man who forged a reputation as a hit maker by spearheading Microsoft's Xbox game console.

During the interview, at a Microsoft-sponsored dinner attended by a handful of reporters, Bach said that the excitement generated over the technology has taught him more about an interesting metric: "customer delight." I'll get to that later.

Originally code-named Milan, the Surface computer looks like the 1980s sit-down Ms. Pac Man machine. It uses infrared cameras and a projector to create a touch-screen that can respond to multiple users' hand gestures, as well as interact with other objects. Bach said that Surface was in development for about five years in a "pure incubator" environment with 20 Microsoft employees developing the computer.

Surface has wowed audiences everywhere it's been showcased. Nonetheless, serious challenges still lay ahead, such as reducing the price so consumers can afford it as well as shrinking the clunky 22-inch-high table and 30-inch horizontal display.

"We don't want to be in the furniture business," Bach quipped. Microsoft has said it plans to have the consumer version on shelves by 2011.

Right now, the devices are starting to appear in the retail stores of cellular carrier AT&T. Sheraton hotels, Harrah's casinos, and T-Mobile retail locations are also expected to get the machines. At about $10,000, the price is too high to be considered a consumer product. Finding a way to reduce costs, as well as the computer's size, were why Bach was skeptical about Surface as a profit maker.

"I didn't have a clear line of sight on what the business model was," Bach said. "I was always asking myself whether we could afford to keep it."

Surface did have one important cheerleader: Bill Gates.

Gates is a huge proponent of Surface computing. At a gathering last month of CEOs in Redmond, Wash., Gates said he wants to turn everything we touch into a computer: "It will be absolutely pervasive," he said. "When I say everywhere, I mean the individual's office, the home, the living room."

Bach called Gates a "big supporter" of Surface.

Besides generating applause from reviewers, Surface provided another benefit. Bach said he learned about how to gauge "customer delight" better. He cautioned, however, that Microsoft isn't just out to create gee-whiz products--not unless a sound business plan can be found for them.

"The Buck Rogers stuff won't carry the day on its own," Bach said, adding that just because something is cool doesn't mean it's going to make money (See Segway).

In case you missed its one-night gig at Caesars in Vegas last month and are still dying to see it, Microsoft's "Surface" is reportedly scheduled to make a debut in four cities today.

Already delayed for months and still a pipe dream for consumers (until at least 2011), the company plans to display the much-anticipated touch-screen tabletop computer at a handful of AT&T stores in New York, Atlanta, San Antonio, and San Bruno, Calif., just south of San Francisco, according to Boy Genius Report. The exact addresses are listed here.

Unfortunately if you wanted to use it to order wine, you may have missed your chance.

SAN DIEGO, Calif.--The citizens of Serrana, Brazil, are not waiting around for Intel or Nicholas Negroponte to deliver low-cost PCs to their school children. Instead, they're taking the matter into their own hands.

A Brazilian student tries the Serrana digital desk

(Credit: Victor Mammana)

Starting at the end of this month, the Serrana Digital Desk project will get underway when 200 surface PCs that transform into desktop PCs will be placed in classrooms in the city of 45,000. It's a trial run of a new, very local program that is intended to give kids computers in the classroom while involving as many community members as possible in the implementation of the project. See a video of one of the desks here (Note: it's a Brazilian news feature in Portuguese).

CNET News.com sat down with Victor Mammana, who heads up the display branch of the Brazilian government's Ministry of Science and Technology, here at the U.S. Flat Panel Display conference.

Mammana's interest in the project is two-fold: he's a physicist by training and co-invented the low-cost tablet display that will be used in the Serrana digital desks, but he's also involved evaluating the impact and utility of low-cost PC programs for education for Brazil.

He's worked closely with Nicholas Negroponte, who heads up the One Laptop Per Child initiative, as well as Intel, which has its own version, the Classmate PC. Both Intel and OLPC are currently bidding for the contract to provide their low-cost laptops to Brazil's federal government.

The Serrana project is intentionally local to the core. It wasn't Mammana's idea; instead he was approached by the mayor of Serrana, Valerio Galante, a man who Mammana describes as "passionate" about education. The mid-size urban city that's 3 hours outside Sao Paolo wanted to institute a local solution to bringing technology to their 7,000 school kids by taking the school desks already in classroom and refurbishing them with tablet PCs built into them. The key is that the desks will be refurbished in Serrana, and the technology is Brazilian made.

Victor Mammana, head of the Information Display Division for Brazil's Ministry of Science and Technology

(Credit: Erica Ogg/CNET News.com)

"The idea is not to make a business out of that, but more like a social franchise," said Mammana. "It's interesting, this idea of providing a local solution for a local problem."

When Galante approached Mammana, the mayor already had a site picked out to refurbish the desks. By employing local workers to do that, as well as maintain the new computers, the city of Serrana wants to demonstrate that education is not just taking place in the classroom, but also when young students see their older family members and community pitching in to find a local solution, said Mammana.

The tablet PCs, which feature 15-inch LCD with multi-point technology (not a touch screen, but the surface can pick up more than one stylus at a time), will cost less than $30 each to build, and incorporating them into the desks will cost roughly $550. Though that's significantly more than the idea of a $100 to $200 laptop, that's fine with them.

"The tabletop seems more expensive than a single (laptop) device, but by investing in the whole economy, it's OK if it's slightly more costly," Mammana said.

The tabletop PCs will have WiFi connectivity, Intel Celeron processors, small solid-state drives (no local hard drive) and will run a version of Linux. Each classroom will have its own server where all the data will be kept, and each teacher will have access to a content management system where they can input their lesson plans. Digital chalkboards at the front of the classrooms and will connect up with the desks.

The Serrana project is significantly different from the cutesy laptops being pitched to the federal government in other ways too. The biggest difference is that the digital desk isn't a mobile product, but Mammana, who's spent two and a half years exploring this segment of computing, says he's unconvinced portability is necessary in this case.

"I'm not sure how important mobility is for 8- to 12-year-old kids," he said. It's not as if they're checking e-mail on their way to the airport, he noted. Plus, keeping the PCs in the classroom allows for more structure in how they're used and cuts down on misuse of the government-funded devices, like illegal activity, pornography, or the devices being sold off piecemeal, or in whole, on the black or gray market.

They also like the surface idea because the bigger displays encourage more comfortable posture, and better legibility of the screens. But the digital desk shouldn't be considered a competitor to OLPC. Mammana is under no illusion that this scenario could work in just any city.

"There has to be the right conditions," Mammana said. "This wouldn't work in Sao Paolo." In other words, it's a more manageable issue to tackle in a city of 45,000 versus a metropolis of 17 million.

"I don't believe it's going to be viable for all cities. Brazil has 10,000 cities," he added. "If 50 can reproduce this social franchise, that's already a great achievement."

(Credit: U.S. Navy)

The U.S. Navy is installing an electro-magnetic laboratory rail gun at its Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, Va., bringing it one step closer to developing a ship-mounted version of this futuristic cannon.

The 32-megajoule weapon appears to be the largest rail gun ever built, according to defense contractor BAE Systems. A joule is what's needed to produce one watt of energy for one second.

It uses a magnetic "rail" instead of a chemical propellant like gunpowder to heave projectiles at Mach 7 for what could be up to 220 miles down range--that's 10 times farther than what contemporary naval guns. The projectile hits at Mach 5, destroying the target with kinetic energy instead of conventional explosives.

Ship building and design are expected to benefit should the new gun prove feasible, mainly because new vessels won't be forced to haul tons of explosives. But while the rail gun uses no gunpowder, it can hardly be called energy efficient. A planned 64-megajoule system would suck around 6 million amps.

In addition to developing new onboard capacitors or pulsed alternators to power the weapon, the Navy must come up with new materials to secure the gun, firing it can dislodge the conducting rails--or even rip the gun barrel apart, according to some reports. The Navy, which has already tested smaller versions, as seen in the video, wants a rail gun onboard a ship as early as 2020.

(Credit: Metal Storm)

After years of development, a new class of weapon that uses computer-controlled electronic ignition instead of primers to fire projectiles may be finally taking its much coveted place in the U.S. military inventory.

Brisbane, Australia-based Metal Storm has delivered a four-barrel weapon to the Naval Surface Warfare Center for testing that uses a small electrical current instead a conventional firing pin to deliver stacked rounds at an astounding rate.

How astounding? Try 1 million rounds per minute. That's the rate, by the way, not the volume; still, there's no way you want to be anywhere near the wrong end of one of these puppies.

One version, the Redback, features a remotely operated 40mm that can automatically track targets by slewing around at almost 2 complete revolutions per second, according to the company. "The employment of Metal Storm's stacked round technology for a U.S. military weapon system is a huge step for us," Metal Storm CEO Lee Finniear said in the company's press release.

Electronically fired weapons and the general concept have been around for awhile--Austrian company Voere offers an electric, bolt-action hunting rifle--but nothing has approached Metal Storm (PDF). Metal Storm weapons use multiple, "lightweight, economical barrels" mounted in pods on a variety of platforms that can fire a wide selection of munitions.

The projectiles are stacked in-line in the barrel--nose to tail--so there are no magazines, no shell casings, and no mechanical components. This makes them ideal for unattended area denial or picket duty. They are also easily adapted to light vehicles and robot platforms. In fact, the company just signed an MOU with iRobot Government & Industrial Robots to combine its robot platforms with Metal Storm's scalable systems.

"Together with Metal Storm, we aim to develop a superior next-generation weapons platform that ensures absolute safety and always places a human in the decision loop," iRobot's Joe Dyer promised in announcing the agreement. "When you are talking about weaponizing robots, there is no margin for error."

Especially at a million rounds per minute.

Microsoft shows off its Surface computer in May

(Credit: Ina Fried/CNET News.com)

DENVER--On Thursday, Microsoft plans to show its partners the Surface computer that it introduced in May. But it will be a little while longer before most partners get a chance to do more than look at the tabletop computer.

Allison Watson, the head of Microsoft's partner efforts, plans to show off the touch-based device as part of a talk she is giving on Microsoft's innovation pipeline. Watson also plans to announce the company is forming a partner advisory council to help the company decide how it should open up the product to outside developers.

"Starting in April, I think the hope is we can launch an actual (software development kit) for partners," Watson said in an interview at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference here. "Before we do that, we thought we'd bring in real partners to help us."

For now, Microsoft is focusing the device, which costs around $10,000, on the hospitality and gaming and retail markets. Software development is limited to a few handpicked partners.