Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Liquid Metal as Thermal Interface Material. Coollaboratory Liquid Metal Examined

10:50 pm | Yaroslav Lyssenko

The research of more and more efficient technologies for cooling never stops: in the past few years computer coolers faced a lot of changes and more companies began to produce cooling system targeting enthusiasts – water-coolers, phase-change systems and other. But not only actual products, but even the thermal interface materials are improving.

Coollaboratory, a startup based in Germany, has introduced an interesting product for those in search of high performance thermal interface material. The Coollaboratory Liquid Metal is positioned as a high-performance replacement for wide-spread thermal grease that is supposed to ensure better heat conduction. 

Coollaboratory liquid metal consists of a liquid metal alloy at a 100%. It does not contain any non-metallic additives like silicone, oxides, nor it does not include any solid components either. “Due to this composition, which is a completely new for heat conducting pastes, it surpasses the best previously existing heat conducting pastes in the heat conductivity value by the factor 9-10, more simple heat conducting pastes by the factor 100. “Coollaboratory liquid metal” is optimised in its composition for the application with high-quality copper coolers,” says a statement at Coollaboratory’s web-site.

Although the product is advertised as a better than conventional thermal paste solution, the real-life testing carried out by PimpRig.com showed slightly different picture. The Coollaboratory Liquid Metal was tested and compared with such thermal compounds as Arctic Silver 5, Blue Nanotherm and Ceramique.

“All of the thermal interface material performed very similar, with the Liquid Metal having the second best temperatures of the group. I believe this shows that the Liquid Metal actually works, but what the long term performance is like is unknown,” writes PimpRig.com.

• Coollaboratory.
• PimpRig.com: Coollaboratory Liquid Metal - Thermal Interface Material.

Web Publishers to Face New Traffic Counting Rules. Interactive Advertising Bureau Pushes Rules for Publishers

10:47 pm | Yaroslav Lyssenko

The success of a web-site is usually measured by the number of visitors and page views, which makes it more or less appealing for advertisers. Unfortunately, the amount of visitors and viewed pages can be easily boosted by publishers by simply using different ways of counting. However, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is seeking to adopt a stricter set of rules to measure traffic on web-sites.

CNET News.com brings an example of sport news web-site ESPN.com that attracts an estimated 15 million unique visitors a month, according to the audience-metric firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Included in its traffic are an estimated 1.2 million unique visitors from content partner Active.com, an activity event site that displays a small logo from ESPN.com at the top right-hand corner of its pages. Some other web-sites are also reportedly counting traffic from their co-branding web-sites and even traffic on the web-sites they submit content to.

“The measurement companies have had different hierarchies, and each partner site was able to roll up traffic in different ways, causing great consternation around the industry,” said Leo Scullin, an IAB vice president who is driving the initiative.

The new rules from IAB are designed to end all of the aforementioned practices and force publishers to “play fair”.

The project organizers hope the changes, which are not yet finalized and should go into effect in the middle of next year, will help Web publishers and their advertisers get a better understanding of how many people are visiting which sites, and how often, according to the news-story.

• CNET News.com:
  A Better Way
  to Count Clicks?

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