Tech Innovations You Haven't Heard of Yet

The new SCiB Ion battery will throw off a hefty 4.2 amps, running at 2.4 volts, or enough to help you and the bike get up that hill to the office with just a little pedaling help. It will recharge to 90% capacity in just five minutes, Toshiba says. The SCiB battery is game-changing stuff for all the things without power cords. For example it's perfectly suited for tools, forklifts and other industrial applications where internal combustion engines are not suitable.

Solid-state hard drives

Significant changes also are coming to basic business tools. So-called solid-state hard drives are creeping into mainstream laptops and other business computers. These drives replace traditional spinning magnetic disk drives with solid blocks of memory, similar to random access memory or USB flash drives. Know how when you pick up your laptop, something is humming and vibrating inside? That's the magnetic drive, spinning away as it reads and writes your files. Magnetic drives in computers are fine. But they are fragile, have limits to how fast they can read and write information, and are heavy. Solid-state drives solve all that. SSDs (yes, another acronym we have to master) are essentially indestructible in normal usage, have no moving parts to fail or slow down and are marvelously light.

That is not to say solid-state drives are perfect. SSDs are still brutally expensive when compared with magnetic storage, up to four times the cost. And their quick response time for reading and writing data comes at the expense of battery life. I have found laptops with solid-state drives have something awful like a quarter the battery life, if not less, of a standard magnetic drive unit.

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