January 08, 2008 | Comments: (0)
Polymer integrated circuits promise gigabit Internet bandwidth everywhere. And the first killer app will be videoconferencing
We all realize that technology can change human behavior. If you don't quite know what I mean, just ask television network executives who have seen the erosion of their audience and ad dollars as more and more people log on to the Web for information and entertainment.
In the print world, my old Sunday morning ritual of looking through the newspaper classifieds for interesting stuff for sale is now a Craigslist pursuit I do at night, after work.
So what do you think will happen when technology delivers 1Gbps Ethernet bandwidth over the Internet?
I spoke with Hal Bennett, CEO of Third-Order Nanotechnology, which has patented technology to deliver that kind of performance using plastic, a.k.a. polymer, integrated circuits that convert an electronic signal to light and then switch that light on and off.
"For 30 years, people have been dreaming of building photonic integrated circuits out of polymers. Not only will they achieve integration, but they would achieve low cost. After 30 years of trying, we are on the verge of demonstrating the recipe," Bennett told me.
With a connection that gives a user a thousand times the performance of DSL, Bennett believes the killer application will be videoconferencing.
If you're scratching your head and thinking to yourself, "Not that old chestnut, again," hear Bennett out.
I know I for one have read, written, and heard about the Next Big Technology for videoconferencing time and again. And like many others, I've said, Who cares? Why is videoconferencing so important?
Well, Bennett believes the reason most people feel that way is because the videoconferencing experience has thus far been unsatisfactory, delivering choppy, unfocused talking heads with practically expressionless faces.
Bennett says gigabit Internet throughput will change all that. Not only will you be able to videoconference with 100 people, but you will be able to see and process the "micro-expressions" that run across each face at a thirtieth of a second.
Why is that important?
According to psychologist Paul Ekman, who developed the theory of micro-expressions, nuanced expressions lay the groundwork for the bulk of communication among people. Our brains interpret each of these little expressions, even though our conscious mind may not even see them.
And so, perhaps the real reason videoconferencing leaves us unsatisfied is that we can't really communicate on the subconscious level we need to in order to truly understand one another.
At gigabit speeds, the technology can update the view during a teleconference at 30 to 60 frames per second at a megapixel per frame. With, say, six people in a videoconference, that's a lot of bandwidth.
Finally, Bennett believes, "Humans were built for small groups."
Text, Bennett explains, enabled remote-control, top-down centralization. Thanks to the Internet and ever higher bandwidth, this is breaking down. The phenomenon we are witnessing was first suggested by Marshall McLuhan back in the '60s. McLuhan predicted that we are coming full circle back into small group activities that are distributed over the planet -- a global village, so to speak.
If Bennett is right, in the future, thanks to truly high-speed connectivity, we will be totally satisfied with the videoconference experience. And, because our level of satisfaction is taking place at a subconscious level, we won't even know why.
Viva technology and the human mind.
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Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on January 8, 2008 03:00 AM
December 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Apple, AT&T sued over iPhone use of patented voice mail technology
Do Apple and AT&T routinely infringe on patents in the knowledge that it may take years for the case to drag through courts and in the meantime they get the benefit of a technology which is not theirs and for which they didn't pay?
Is this the way to run a legitimate business?
It all starts with Klausner Technologies, a company that holds numerous telecommunications patents. Klausner is suing both Apple and AT&T for patent infringement on its voice mail management technology.
The suit isn't the first time Klausner has brought giants in the communications industry before the bench for similar patent infringement.
In 2005 the company slapped AOL with a $200 million suit stemming from AOL's use of a visual display to retrieve voice mails, one of 25 patents Klausner's company holds in the area of remote retrieval of voice messages.
Klausner settled with AOL/Time Warner and AOL signed an agreement to pay licensing fees for use of the technology.
In 2006, Klausner was back again this time suing Vonage Holdings, asking $180 million in damages for a similar patent infringement.
Vonage also settled with Klausner for an undisclosed sum for a patent license.
In the latest suit brought by Klausner Technologies, the company is asking $360 million from Apple and AT&T.
The law suit also claims that Skype, Comcast and Cablevision Systems have also infringed on its patents, in particular US Patents 5,572,576 and 5,283,818, according to Vnunet.com, a British technology Web site.
The question that needs to be asked here is, is it possible that Apple and AT&Ts legal departments were unaware of the Klausner patents and blindly used another company's property?
I kind of doubt it. Which leads to the next question. If they did know of the Klausner patents why did they ignore them? What was to be gained?
Anyone out there with a good legal mind that might have an answer?
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on December 4, 2007 01:00 PM
November 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
iPhone, What is good for U.S. is not good for Europe
When the iPhone launches tomorrow in France and across the rest of Europe there will be one distinct difference between that market and the U.S. market. Europeans will be able to buy an unlocked iPhone from Orange, the France telecomm carrier.
That’s the law in most of Europe where the option for an unlocked version must be available.
Of course, consumers will have to pay dearly for the right to have a warranted, unlocked iPhone. Some, like techno savvy users here, may want to just unlock it themselves.
An unlocked iPhone in France is expected to sell for 650 euros, $964, U.S. and for a whopping 1,000 euros, $1,484 U.S., in Germany.
With a two-year contract, locked, iPhone buyers will see a saner, but not inexpensive price tag of about 399 euros, about $592. U.S.,plus the monthly voice and data charges that start at 49 euros per month, about $73 U.S.
Orange says it expects to sell about 100,000 devices in the first month, a not unrealistic number according to Vincent Poulbere, senior analyst at Ovum.
However, Poulbere says there’s a great deal of competition in the European market, especially for similar devices that are more highly subsidized.
“There won’t be any queues at the stores to buy an iPhone,” said Poulbere.
The European market will share one similarity with the U.S. market, said Poul-bere, users can expect a price reduction at some point in 2008, especially if a new model is introduced.
With the exchange rate extremely favorable to European shoppers some may get creative and fly to the U.S. buy an iPhone here, take it back and hack it so it can be used in Europe with a local SIM chip.
Technology is fun, isn't it?
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 27, 2007 08:42 AM
November 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Lightweight, viral systems that grow with use will define how we keep in touch in the years to come
Late last week I spoke with Andy Lippman about the future of communications.
Co-director of MIT's Communications Futures Program and associate director of the MIT Media Lab from 1983 to 2001, Lippman is a deep thinker. And for the past 30 years, Lippman has been thinking deeply about personal communications and computing. As you might expect, Lippman took the conversation to some heady places:
"A lot of people are thinking about telepresence: feeling what is happening remotely...almost like being there."
"When things are connected, all things become opportunities for services."
"We will see real-world mashups between people, between people and machines, and machines talking to machines."
But you would be wrong to think that Lippman has his head in the clouds. Holding 11 patents, mainly related to TV and radio signals, Lippman is currently on a year-long sabbatical, working with Nortel's R&D group as a visiting fellow. Moreover, he was deeply involved in creating Nortel's Wireless Mesh Network Solution through MIT.
So what I enjoyed most about our conversation is Lippman's ability to switch between the highly practical, applied science, to the way-out stuff such as telepresence and hyperconnectivity.
"Hyperconnectivity is where the person is fully in the loop," Lippman says. "It will allow you to control stuff on Mars or do surgery from 3,000 miles away."
Funded by commercial companies, the MIT Media Lab came up with the novel idea of creating a consortium. That way, it does not have to apply for funding from each company individually.
"We owe our soul to none of them or all of them collectively," Lippman says, adding that this has allowed the lab to choose research topics that its members feel passionate about.
Of late, Lippman and his students have been working on "viral" communications -- systems that are agile, light on infrastructure, and optimized for invention. He calls such systems viral because, similar to other viral systems, they are built to "catch on person-to-person."
Traditional communications systems are anti-scalable, Lippman says, in that the more people you have tapping them, the more interference you get, and the smaller the bandwidth allocation becomes. Instead, Lippman asks, what if communications systems could grow as the number of users of the system grows?
A fine example of what the good doctor means can be seen by examining the current cellular network. Instead of having a cell phone blast its signal to a distant tower, what if it could jump from computer to computer, or cell phone to cell phone? It would require far less bandwidth and power and could scale organically, because as the number of people using the system grows, the system gains additional connection points.
A simple and elegant idea, isn't it?
And it has a very practical use. The entire one-laptop-per-child idea, also known as the $100 computer movement, will depend on deploying communications in societies where the big, wasteful infrastructure is just not available. But communications will work nicely in "mesh" mode, with each computer passing on data to a nearby computer, using little power and small amounts of bandwidth.
Light and agile, like the doctor says.
I think Lippman's real genius is not in his skills as an engineer but rather in his ability to look at problems from a different perspective: for example, Fluid Voice, the hyperconnectivity technology that he and his students in the Media Lab built.
Fluid Voice is a phone system that acts like a big party line -- push to listen, instead of push to talk.
The default is you can hear everyone in your group who is talking. Instead of a dial, each person is a dot. If you move the dot in or out, the voice becomes louder or lower. Or you can move the dot, and the person, off the screen entirely. You can hear anybody and can decide how much attention you want to pay to each person.
On the practical side, in case of an emergency, firefighters could use Fluid Voice to tune into a police emergency or tune out the ambulance driver, for example.
Lippman's greater point is that the current limitations on radio-enabled communications systems are not due to the physics of the technology but rather to its engineering history. In the old days, radios were expensive, while spectrum was underused and inexpensive. And because receivers were dumb, it became OK to waste spectrum.
Now, the radios are cheap, and spectrum is relatively expensive.
"Mesh is an attempt to break the barrier and history of communications as a limited, fixed, and unscalable system," Lippman says.
"When I went to school, a lot of what you studied was how can you do something given certain constraints," Lippman says. Students were asked to write a program that didn't use more than this much memory, disk space, or processing cycles, for example. Engineering was taught in the context of its limitations.
At some point, engineering courses changed, Lippman says.
"Now students are asked to write a computer program where memory is free, disk space and processing cycles are unlimited," Lippman says, adding that, because of this shift, "we can challenge students to stretch their minds."
Sounds like Lippman is stretching his students' minds in worthwhile directions.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on November 27, 2007 03:00 AM
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