Google has launched a new program devoted to fostering discussions and ideas among leaders in the science and technology industries. The project, dubbed “Solve for X,” aims to be a seeding ground for solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems. The site is meant to inspire “moonshot” thinking, out-of-the-box technologies and projects that might seem closer to science fiction than real-life solutions to global problems. The program hopes to sponsor thinkers and doers that can highlight a widespread problem and present concrete and radical solutions.

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Back when Apple promised editing features built into the iPhone 3GS (the first iPhone to have a video camera), I wondered how a video-editing program could possibly fit into a phone. It wasn’t just a question of available processing power, though that was part of it. It was also a question of screen size. Video editing needs a lot of space. If you’re going to be throwing around a few dozen clips and managing multiple tracks for sound, you’re going to need some elbow room.

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A change to the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act recently sailed through the House of Representatives without a hitch. The bill would allow a provider of rental DVDs or videos to get consent to share their customers’ title selections, as long as users were provided with an opportunity to withdraw that consent. That smooth ride ended in the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, when opponents of the measure took the opportunity to grill Netflix, which has been pushing hard for the change.

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When it comes to playing audio and video files in Linux, media players pretty much all work the same way and have a very similar user interface. It usually all comes down to features. With SMPlayer it depends on what you want to play. Unfortunately, this bug of sorts is something its developer Ricardo Villalba has yet to resolve in the latest release, version 0.7.0. It is more of an inconvenience than an all-out reason to reject using SMPlayer completely. The problem is this app’s inability to read directories from CD/DVD music collections inserted in the optical drive.

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After Apple announced that it had “reinvented” textbooks at its education media event in New York earlier in the month, I knew I had to take one for a spin myself. I downloaded the new iBooks 2 iPad app and launched it to get to the refreshed iBooks Store. I tapped the big “Introducing Textbooks” graphic and started looking. There were eight titles available, covering topics like Algebra, Geometry and Physics. Seven of them cost $14.99, which seems like a steal, but I’m not personally interested in learning Algebra 1 all over again, for example.

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LiVES is an advanced video editor that can double as a video jockey tool. It is surprisingly powerful. But its interface makes it rather simple to learn. In fact, it has so many feature levels that this app would be right at home as the video editor of choice in any professional film editing studio. I had almost no trouble putting LiVES to work on a current project before I even finished my initial shakedown of this application. This trial-by-fire test run proved highly successful.

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Asking a seasoned Linux user what music player you should use is akin to bringing up questions about religion or politics with your drinking buddies. A much safer strategy is, don’t ask and don’t tell. But if you insist, let me throw a suggestion into the fray. Uncage Songbird. You might be pleasantly surprised at the melodious results. I’m not saying that Songbird is a near-perfect song collection organizer and player. It has a lot to offer, though. Songbird is unlike so many other music players on the various Linux desktop environments.

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At the Consumer Electronics Show on Sunday, Lenovo unveiled a smart TV it says is the world’s first to run Android 4.0, or Ice Cream Sandwich. Powered by a QualComm 8060 Snapdragon dual core CPU, the smart device — called the “K91″ — features a 55-inch screen, a gamepad, and a user interface that combines Video On Demand, Internet applications and traditional TV programs. Thirty console-quality games will come bundled with the TV, with many more apps available in the Android Market and the Lenovo App Shop.

The K91 is now available in China, but information on pricing and availability elsewhere was not provided.

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Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide book series solved the problem of interplanetary language barriers with a Babel fish — a little telepathic alien leech-like animal you stick in your ear that instantly translates any spoken language via pure brain waves. In the real world, about the closest we can get to that are online tools like Google Translate, which have made all corners of the Internet accessible to nearly everyone, regardless of language. They’re no substitute for actually learning a language, but they come in handy.

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YouTube is a great source for watching an eclectic collection of videos on music, human stupidity and worldly comedy. But I find it much too easy to go far afield as I click on “also watched” videos when viewing a particular topic line. Minitube solves that problem for me. Not only does Minitube better filter the flow of videos I take in, but it also creates a more pleasant viewing experience that resembles a high-def TV environment. And it does this without Adobe Flash Player or a Web browser just to get them to play.

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Intel announced its third-generation Atom mobile processor-based platform, code-named “Cedar Trail,” on Wednesday. It consists of two dual-core mobile processors, the N2600 and N2800, and two that target entry-level desktop and other solutions, the D2500 and D2700. The platform introduces new features such as Intel Wireless Music and Intel Wireless Display, which let users stream media to TVs and home speakers, respectively.
These features “are new to the netbook platform,” said Intel spokesperson Mark Miller. They “enhance online services such as Netflix for media or Pandora for music.”

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Apple is holding talks with media executives to discuss the future of television, according to a recent report. It’s also allegedly working on providing wireless streaming capabilities, voice and motion controls, and features that enable the sharing of content across multiple devices. “We believe it’s very likely that Apple’s working on a set-top box or iTV or whatever you’d like to call it, because the TV is the next growth area for Apple, and it’s the only one screen they haven’t conquered yet,” said Jia Wu, a senior analyst at Strategy Analytics.

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