The Blue Frog Lounge (Mumbai) - Cool Restaurant Design in India by the Serie Architects

Indian architecture for the most part has been traditional with carvings and intricate patters, and for a long time, people used to favor these traditional settings until the West came to influence the thinking and gave birth to a new design style of "cool and retro"! And now, its very common to see designers come up with chic yet comfortable and meaningful ideas in terms of house decor, furniture and designing buildings, offices, and now restaurants. Check out this latest Restaurant and Lounge in Mumbai, currently termed as the most hip-city in India. The Blue Frog Lounge is designed in cool blue shades with psychedelic lights to suit your moods.

Anglo-Indian architect Serie has completed the design of the Blue Frog acoustic lounge and studios in Mumbai, India. Why the name "Blue Frog"?? Well, the moment you step into the lounge, you'll be struck by a vision similar to frogs sitting on lily pads. For unobstructed people and performer watching, you'll see staggered heights and angled booths atop a glowing blue lake of light, giving the impression of floating in a warm lake under the spring moonlight!! The designers Chris Lee and Kapil Gupta, have successfully created an entertainment space that is both attractive and stand-offish at the same time, mirroring its patrons casual chic attitudes. Just take a look at their restrooom design below and you'll know what I'm talking about!


The lounge will be used as a music venue within a complex of sound recording studios in a converted warehouse and incorporates a restaurant, bar and live music stage. The different sized cylindrical booths seat between 4 and 10 people and are arranged at various heights to stagger the eye levels of seated diners and standing customers, intended to afford uninterrupted views of the stage. The empty central area can be used as additional space for standing visitors or as an extension to the stage. The undulating booth structure is made from block board finished with mahogany and topped with back-lit 8mm acrylic sheets. As it'll mostly be used as a recording studio, the walls are designed t be bumpy and textured to help absorb sound.

This sure shows that architecture and design is getting highly competitive in India, and its not far when the designers in the rest of the world will look towards indians for ideas and innovations!

Read more!

Nestle's Research Shows that Machines Can now Smell and Analyze Your Espresso!

Anyone who's addicted to coffee and its flavor can vouch for the fact that your daily cuppa-joe needs to be brewed perfectly, if possible. Simple events like change of baristas, change of venue or change in ingredients can kill the taste of your coffee. That's why most of us stick to the same cafe for our drinks! But here's some sizzling news - Robots or Machines that can smell coffee are in the making, research by the food giant Nestlé suggests. A team led by Christian Lindinger at the company's research centre at Lausanne, Switzerland, has developed a machine that can correctly predict the judgements of trained human coffee tasters - and may eventually replace them.

Designing a machine that can identify the aroma of complex coffee flavors and describe it has proved challenging for flavour scientists. Seems like they have finally achieved it. To establish a connection between the verbal description given by humans and the chemical analysis performed by machines, Lindinger and co-workers compiled "sensory profiles" for 11 different espresso coffees by asking tasters to score each one in 10 different taste categories, such as bitter, woody, or acid. They then fed the results of proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry of the gas phase above each coffee into a computer program that was able to 'learn' from experience and matched up the mass spectrometry results to the human sensory profiles.

Finally, to test the program, the researchers used it to predict the sensory profiles for eight new types of espresso. The predicted profiles closely matched the evaluations of human tasters, even though the machines were not able to taste the coffee, only analyze its smell! As the machine only needs two minutes to take each sniff, the Nestlé researchers say their method would be suitable for high-throughput analysis of coffee quality. From there, a machine that can brew a cup of coffee to suit every customer's unique taste profile is surely just a small step away.

Nestle researchers have stated that the machine has "nearly" the taste accuracy of a panel of trained espresso tasters, who, if this machine is any indication, may soon have to switch professions! Will Nestle market this machine as a product? While there's apparently still quite a bit of work to be done on the coffee tasting machine, Nestle eventually sees it being used as a quality control device for the entire coffee industry. Right now, it has no plans to sell the concept as a "product".

Read more!

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 is Finally Here!!

It's been spoken and contemplated about for quite some time now, and has shifted in and out of focus. But after more than 5 years in the making, Windows Server 2008 is finally here!! It made its first public appearance on Wednesday with a glitzy Los Angeles launch event that also included sneak peaks of Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008. Microsoft executives call it "the most significant enhancement to the server platform since its inception." Windows Server 2008 is available now to Microsoft Software Assurance and MSDN customers, with media being available for purchase in various retail channels by early March.

Microsoft Corporation has finally lifted the curtain on its new Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008 products. Though Windows Server '08 represents a cash cow for Microsoft, it is also vital to the company's efforts to encourage corporate customers to adopt the Vista operating system. But the real focus lies on Windows Server's new features, designed to appeal to IT managers and developers. The features fall into one of these five areas: security, virtualization, Web productivity and business intelligence and new energy-efficient features for the green set. You can download the entire Windows Server 2008 Reviewer's Guide right here.

The product will use Go Daddy's Internet Information Services 7.0 software to improve Web site performance and enhanced security. The companies have worked together to build the performance specifications of the new product for more than a year. The new server will allow further customization than the previous releases and is built from the same code language as Microsoft Vista, the company's latest operating system. Like Vista, Windows Server 2008 has enhanced security and administrative features.

One of the more talked-about features is its remote control configuration and maintenance abilities. Using Microsoft Management Console, users can interface with the scaled-back Server Core installation to handle maintenance. Users can also use command line interface windows as well.

The Microsoft Server 2008 will bring to life functions and features of Vista that have been hidden somewhat in Server 2003 environments. The company officials claim that for organizations that deploy Server 2008 and Vista together, the primary benefits will come in the form of more reliable code and consistent hot fixes within both platforms, and it'll be easier to identify issues for customers.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer also mentioined that virtualization isn't solely relegated to Hyper-V, the server-virtualization engine that is scheduled to be released as a Windows Server 2008 add-on in about six months. Microsoft's Terminal Services is also considered virtualization, and the latest version is shipping now with the core Server 2008 operating system. It also boasts a better bandwidth management for much-improved performance, and a slick Web interface that allows administrators to publish application icons onto Internet Information (IIS) and SharePoint servers while users run the full desktop application experience within their browsers. The Enterprise and Data Center versions will have built-in clustering, including a slick and intuitive management screen that not only makes clustering easy to configure but also incorporates a best practice checker that makes sure user configuration is set up correctly.

Bob Visse, Microsoft's senior director of marketing for Windows Server 2008, said that the company has gone to extreme lengths to make the platform highly reliable out of the gate. Microsoft's energy efficient efforts cover more than just virtualization, according to Ballmer. Server 2008's 64-bit capability allows it to take advantage of larger hardware resources(especially RAM) and advanced features that Intel and AMD are building only into their 64-bit CPUs. The combination enables much deeper utilization and control of underlying hardware, which allows customers to make more energy efficient use of their data centers, according to Microsoft.

The standard version will retail for $999 with five client access licenses. Enterprise will run $3,999 with 25 client access licenses, while the data center edition will cost $2,999 per CPU. The Itanium-compatible version will be priced the same as data center, and there will also be a single-task version, designed solely to run as a Web server, which will cost $496. All versions will be available in both 32- and 64-bit versions.The launch is generating quite a bit of hype already, but whether it can save the Software Giant and help in restoring it's lost pride is what needs to be seen!

Read more!

The Wave-Powered Suntory Mermaid Ship - All Set For its First Voyage

Most of us are aware of how many times oil spills in large ships cause irreversible damage to the ocean life and pollute and destroy the marine resources. Since quite some time now, people have been exploring alternative sources of energy to make eco-friendly ships. And looks like one of them has actually succeeded. After the air-powered car, here comes a wave-powered boat! The three-ton catamaran Suntory Mermaid-II is all set for its first voyage from Hawaii to Japan in May 2008.

The primary objective in designing this ship is to make alternative energy work economically and practically. And here's a brief explanation of how that is achieved. As the above picture shows, a pair of side-by-side fins in the ship's bow absorb wave energy and express it in a dolphin-like "kick". Since the fins react to the waves, the ship as a whole remains remarkably steady. Sort of like driving over a bumpy road - your car's tires jounce and bounce yet the passenger cabin does not.

The Suntory Mermaid II is the latest of a number of Japanese eco-powered, recycled aluminum construction watercraft sponsored by Asahi News, supported by Suntory Co. and built by the Tsuneishi Shipbuilding Company. Kenichi Horie, veteran of a number of eco-voyages over the past decade and a half will captain and crew the vessel on its May 2008 inaugural 4350 miles long voyage from Honolulu, Hawaii to Kii Suido, Japan on wave power alone.

Unlike pedal-power, the Mermaid II's innovative wave propulsion system shows the way for large cargo shops to go green, but that comes with the associated disadvantge of low-speed. The Mermaid II has a maximum speed of just five knots and will take two to three months to make the trip from Hawaii to Japan, compared to a diesel-powered craft's single month journey. But that shouldn't be a problem for large cargo ships.

The recycled-aluminum hulled catamaran is equipped with 8 solar panels producing 560 watts power to run electrical lighting and Horie's computer & phone. The ship does have an outboard motor engine and a sail, but they're only there for use in case of emergency. The massive ship sounds like the perfect design for its intended use. At least we'll not be responsible for large-scale depletion of non-renewable marine resources!

Read more!