In the "green" world of 2008, "energy-efficient" is getting the buzz for the chip industry.

Earlier this month, MIT and Texas Instruments showed a preliminary chip for portable devices that uses 10 times less energy than those chips used today.

According to a release from the two parties, the chip could go commercial in five years. MIT graduate student Joyce Kwong exhibited the chip in San Francisco on Feb. 5 at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference.

According to the report, applications for the chip include implantable medical devices, wireless terminals, battery-operated instrumentation, sensor networks and medical electronics.

What was most interesting about this announcement was that the chips might require only "ambient energy" in the future, relying on heat from the body.

Although this referred to medical devices, imagine BlackBerries and Trios running on heat from the human body in the future and not needing a charge. Far-fetched? Maybe.

"The methodology developed in this chip is generic and can be applied to any portable battery-operated device," said Anantha P. Chandrakasan, a professor at MIT and a collaborator in the project.

She mentioned specifically the circuitry to do video decoding on a cell phone or the circuitry for radio signal processing.

Welcome. With the launch of the new InternetNews.com site, I'm happy to present my debut post. As copy editor here, I attack the grammatical violations I find in the pieces you read on the site (hopefully before you read them!), but for this blog, I'll be focusing on innovations in the world of technology.

Recently I spoke with Sheldon Gilbert, founder and CEO of Proclivity Systems, about the company's Proclivity Mail software, which predicts what customers will buy on a site and sends out targeting e-mails based on the consumer's interests.

Now is this innovative? Well, Gilbert mentioned that a large amount of data is wasted when browsers lurk on a site and not buy. "Click-through data is not being used and can provide immense info on what customers really want," he said. Gilbert calls this data a "digital behavior bank."

With Proclivity Mail, the company aims to know what the company will buy with "unprecedented accuracy." Now, I know I don't want more spam, but at least the company will make it more focused on what we want. "It's always been the holy grail to know what your customers want and at what price point," Gilbert said.

The company previously went under the name Gilbert Systems but is relaunching its site next month under the name Proclivity Systems. Barney's New York online division is one of the retailers using Proclivity's engine.

As for privacy, Proclivity calls this service "permission-based marketing," since clients put up a disclaimer about the service. On Barney's privacy page the company discloses that it sends this information to third parties and allows you to opt out. This seems fair, but how many people click on the privacy policy at the bottom of the page?

Let's keep an eye on predictive e-mail marketing and see where this goes.