At Intel’s developer conference earlier this month in San Francisco, President and CEO Paul Otellini announced plans to offer chips based on 22 nanometer technology by 2011. The 22nm chip will hold more than 2.9 billion transistors in an area the size of a fingernail. “We are moving ahead with development of our 22nm manufacturing technology and have built working chips that will pave the way for production of still more powerful and more capable processors,” said Otellini. Read more details in this Wired blog post – Intel Plans Even Tinier Circuits in 2011.

TomTom has announced that its GPS car kit for the iPhone will be available sometime in October. The TomTom already has an app for the iPhone that provides maps and routing capabilities, along with a restaurant finder. The TomTom iPhone app lets you access addresses in your iPhone contact list and then create a map to take you there. TomTom’s IQ Routes is also included; this unique technology uses historical travel data from millions of TomTom users to calculate the optimal route based on time and date.

Although the TomTom app is already available in the iTunes app store, the car kit will be sold separately and will provide performance gains and additional functionality.

The picture above shows the curvature of the earth taken from about 93,000 ft (or 18 miles) from the earth’s surface. This stunning picture was not the product of the latest space launch. It was taken with a Canon A470 camera from a weather balloon launched by two MIT students. The total cost of their setup was $148, a bit of a savings over NASA’s projects. The effort was christened Project Icarus, and full instructions for duplicating these spectacular results will soon be posted on the Project Icarus website.

Wired’s Gadget Lab recently ran a post about Panasonic’s EverLED lightbulb.  Panasonic claims that this bulb will last for 19 years before it needs changing.  The efficiency of these bulbs has been increased through better heat dissipation, which makes the bulb run cooler.  The 6.0 watt bulb puts out as much light as a 60 watt incandescent could for 40,000 hours, which the Gadget Lab has calculated come to 19 years if the bulb is run for 5.5 hours a day.  That means that if the bulb was in your baby’s bedroom, you wouldn’t have to change it until after he went away to college.

The EverLED is currently the world’s lightest bulb in terms of weight.  It sells for $40 but is only available in Japan for now.