With word that MySpace has swapped traditional hard drives for solid state drives, this “prototype” portable data center from a pioneering Dell employee may be a sign of things to come. This is a pretty marked departure from the shipping container data centers being constructed by Google, Sun, and seemingly everyone else. This datacenter-in-a-briefcase is not an actual product (yet!), but just something this guy threw together in his garage.

Graphene, as everyone knows, “is a one-atom-thick planar sheet of sp2-bonded carbon atoms that are densely packed in a honeycomb crystal lattice.” (Seriously, I didn’t just check Wikipedia for that.) Scientists have been using the material for lots of different applications for some time now. Recent work at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center has focused on using graphene as a photodetector, and it turns out that it does a pretty good job in that role.

Full-body scanners are being tested in a variety of airports. I didn’t get the pleasure of using one on my recent trip to Japan, unfortunately, so I can’t provide a first-hand account of what it’s like. I suspect it’s quite unremarkable to walk through one of these. That won’t stop people from being outraged over the fact that some TSA goon sitting in a sterile room somewhere where he can’t see the individual walking through the scanner gets to drool over grainy black-and-white images of everyone’s naughty bits!

I mentioned a newly released hardware encrypted USB flash drive last week, and promised a full review. Here it is! The Lexar JumpDrive SAFE S3000 FIPS is a hardware-encrypted USB drive that satisfies U.S. government computer security standard FIPS 140-2 Level 3. “Physical security mechanisms required at Security Level 3 are intended to have a high probability of detecting and responding to attempts at physical access, use or modification of the cryptographic module.”

The SAFE S3000 FIPS accomplishes this by means of a Gemalto .NET V2.2 FIPS smart card, which provides “tamper-resistant storage, isolation of all security-critical computations, and strong authentication through a stringent PKI-based challenge-response process.”

The metal casing is water proof, and the entire thing is filled with “military-grade epoxy compound” to thwart physical access. This drive has some serious heft to it, compared to other USB sticks. In a pinch, you could probably cause modest pain to someone by throwing it at them. Seriously, this thing is solid. Read on for the whole story.

Great news, Linux users! The Linux Foundation is rolling out new individual membership benefits, including employee purchase pricing on Dell, Lenovo and HP devices. This translates to up to 40% off of store prices. Plus, you can get an @linux.com email address, and the peace of mind knowing that some portion of your membership dues will be going to directly support the continued work of Linus Torvalds! There are a few other perks, too. Full press release inside!

The Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute — the same Fraunhofer that holds many of the patents on MP3 — have a booth at CEATEC exhibiting some of their research efforts, shopping them around for potential licensees. Their Virtual Mirror display is, I think, a great example of augmented reality done right. It uses a camera, a display, and their special software to dynamically alter the image projected back to the viewer. Video inside!

USB media represents a double-edged sword: on the one hand, data portability is an extremely useful thing; but on the other hand, data portability can be a gigantic liability for your business operations. You can try to train your users not to put sensitive data on USB drives, but chances are that convenience will win out over security, and your data will slip out on USB media anyway. And then it’s all too easy for USB media to simply disappear: I can’t count how many thumb drives I’ve lost. New products are coming soon to help solve this problem.

While Sony is prototyping a single-piece flexible OLED netbook, Toshiba is going the modular route with their L01 series netbook thingie. A 7-inch display is paired with a separate QWERTYkeyboard, giving you something akin to a traditional laptop experience. Or you can leave off the keyboard and use the L01 as a digital photo display, if that’s your thing.

One of the more interesting booths at CEATEC is that of the Tagged World Project. It aims to deploy many RFID tags around an elderly person’s domicile, and then equip their slippers (or other house clothes) with RFID readers that will read the tags in its proximity. Then a variety of analyses can be performed on the data collected to determine, ostensibly, how healthy and active an older person is. Read on for more.

John mentioned TransferJet briefly during the Toshiba press conference at IFA in September. It’s a wireless data transfer system. It’s different from Bluetooth in that there’s no pairing required. It’s also extremely limited in range — like, two inches or less — so there’s less need to worry about someone sending pr0n to your mom’s TransferJet-enabled television. Sony’s got a live demo of TransferJet at their CEATEC booth, and I’ve got to admit that it’s pretty cool — and fast!

How much energy do you think is wasted every day powering devices that aren’t actually being used? I’m not talking about stand-by power consumption, but actually on-and-in-use without a user there. I know a lot of people who turn their TVs on just as “background noise”, without ever actually looking at the screen. Hitachi’s cooking up a system to place TVs in power consumption mode if it detects that the viewer isn’t actually viewing the screen. Click on through to see it in action.

Boy howdy could I use this thing at CEATEC today. Running on a Windows Mobile handheld, Toshiba has a real-time voice translation demonstration. It worked quite well. How much longer until we get the Star Trek universal translators? Video inside!

Sony, and just about everyone else, has been fooling around with OLEDs for quite some time, and they’re starting to come up with some pretty clever applications of the technology. Flexible OLEDs have been in the news this year, and Sony’s getting into that game, too. In this short video we see a 0.2mm thin OLED display being gently bent back and forth, while actively showing content on its surface.

Sharp has on display a number of fun new gadgets at CEATEC. As is all too often the case, these things are for Japanese release only (at least for now). Maybe we’ll see them in a couple years. Read on for details on a dial-by-photo phone, newspapers on TV, solar-charging cell phones, and the Sharp Netwalker!

ALPS, the folks that mainstreamed the touchpad way back in the day, are continuing to innovate. Now they’re playing with electric field transmissions, which allows the human body to act as a communication medium. Video inside!

All the big players are here at CEATEC showing off their latest iteration of 3D televisions. They’re bright, and colorful, and pretty, and impressive. And it looks like they all require the use of special viewing glasses. Come on, guys, I saw this stuff last year at IFA: have you really made no substantial progress on easy-to-watch 3D displays? I almost walked past the Holoart booth, and I’m glad I didn’t. They’re taking a unique approach to 3D viewing.

Augmented reality is all the new buzz, I guess. I don’t know, because I only have an iPhone 3G — mine’s missing that important “S” indicating it’s the new model on which augmented reality can actually execute. But at CEATEC today I saw some Sekai Camera examples in the real world. My experience wasn’t entirely positive: find out why.

Way back in March I wrote about the HRP-4C robot that walks and talks. At CEATEC today I saw this thing in person. And now it sings! Watch the video!

Matt wrote about Wink Glasses a couple of months ago. He was skeptical of their value. I found them on display at CEATEC 2009, and just had to try them out! In the photo above, you can see them in the “active” state, helpfully reminding me that it’s time to blink. Click on through for a thrilling video of Wink Glasses in action! HOT!

Greetings, from the Land of the Rising Sun! You missed a wonderful meetup in Tokyo last night at the Ebusu Beer Station. We had about two dozen folks sharing food, drinks, and conversation. Although most were living in the Tokyo area, at least one fellow traveled several hours from Kyoto to join us! Many thank to the TechCrunch Japan crew for coordinating this, and thanks to everyone who made it out. Click on through for photos and more!

The GorillaMobile — Joby’s bendy stand thingie for handhelds — uses a suction cup to hold the phone to the legs. Or it did, until today! Now there’s an updated version of the GorillaMobile that uses four little hooks to keep your phone — i or otherwise — safely secured to the bendy legs.

I don’t use my garage very often, but I am a pretty forgetful person. So it’s not uncommon for me to leave my garage door open all night, revealing its precious contents to passers-by. Thankfully I haven’t been burgled yet. And now, thanks to a new instructable, I can make my own “Hey dummy, you left your garage door open” reminder system!

Great news, everybody! I’ll be in Tokyo, Japan next week for CEATEC. Let’s have a meetup! A successful meetup requires good people, good conversation, and good beer. I think we can manage all three, don’t you?

Behold, the Pioneer BDR-205! Thrill to the 12x write speeds on double layer Blu-ray media! Marvel at the 50Gbytes of storage capacity! Be amazed by the low, low price of $250 United States dollars! Click on through to read the entire exciting press release!