Connectivity & Cloud - Page 12

CES 2015 - Diamond Multimedia is well known for their line of AMD GPUs, but recently they have started to focus more on peripherals of all sorts from 4K streaming devices to Wireless AC peripherals. To start off they are launching a powerful router, the WLR1200AC, which features dual-band (5GHz/2.4GHz) wireless 802.11AC.

Here we have the WR750AC Dual Band Range Extender and WL600AC USB network adapter, which both support the new 802.11AC wireless standard. They also support dual band 5GHz/2.4GHz. The USB adapter comes in two versions, one with the antenna and one without.

On the left we have the BVU5500 USB 3.0 4K display adapter which is a simple device that will allow you to stream to a 4K monitor from your laptop. Then on the right we have the WPCTV3000 4K video streaming device, which utilizes the latest wireless display technologies to wirelessly stream content to a 4K display. It also allows for multiple users to connect to it, which makes it great for wireless presentations where more than one user needs to display content.

CES 2015 - BlackBerry launched its Internet of Things (IoT) platform, with an early focus on the automotive and asset tracking verticals. Using its IoT technology, users will be able to build their services on top of the IoT Platform's efficient and scalable messaging system.

"The BlackBerry IoT platform blends the technologies that have enabled BlackBerry to become a leader in both the mobile data security and embedded systems industries," said Matt Hoffman, VP of strategy and marketing of BlackBerry.

This could be a clever play by BlackBerry, as consumers and companies are showing increased interest in IoT. BlackBerry pairing its QNX Software Systems with its well-respected secure network will allow it to utilize two strengths at a time when its efforts to reclaim glory in the smartphone market has largely fallen flat.

CES 2015 - Danish company Bang & Olufsen announced its BeoSound Moment smart music system, able to adapt to listening patterns and make music and radio recommendations.

The BeoSound Moment utilizes an aluminum interface and a built-in touchscreen to make it easier for owners to browse radio stations and their own music collection. Bang & Olufsen partnered with Deezer, which has a catalog of more than 35 million songs, so there are plenty of music choices that can be provided.

In addition, a custom MoodWheel provides an easy method to find the appropriate type of music based on user moods.

CES 2015 - Delphian Systems is promoting its SecuRemote technology platform during CES 2015, showcasing the Internet of Things (IOT) automation technology. SecuRemote helps ensure OEM products, devices and sensors are interoperable for mobile users on Google Android and Apple iOS devices.

Using the SecuRemote miniaturized electronic module, connected devices are able to interconnect with smartphone, tablets and directly into the cloud. More importantly, SecuRemote provides smart devices interconnection with one another, creating a high-security network with multiple nodes.

Expect the Delphian Systems' SecuRemote to be available during Q2 this year.

CES 2015 - Waxman Industries debuts its leakSMART home water protection system that stops water leaks automatically and has the ability to shut off a home's water in less than five seconds. Using the leakSMART smartphone app, home owners also can receive updates, track water usage, and remotely manage any problems.

"leakSMART makes the smart home something practical for the average homeowner," said Larry Waxman, president and CEO of Waxman Industries, in a press statement. "leakSMART has more than a 'cool gadget factor.' With leakSMART, the everyday homeowner can prevent water leaks in their house, eliminating the possibility of water damage and the thousands of dollars of loss associated with it."

Smart technology will become more prevalent in our homes, and continues to evolve away from just gimmicky, useless features. CES will be a showcase for smart devices, though only 1.5 million households in the United States have smart-enabled devices already in place, according to NextMarket Insights.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has a large amount of momentum to start 2015, with 65 percent of American consumers reportedly moderately or extremely interested in adopting some type of smart home product, according to the Internet of Things Consortium (IoTC). There is great potential for manufacturers to sell these products to consumers, with 54 percent of consumers saying word-of-mouth is the largest consumer factor.

It is now up to manufacturers to make affordable, easy-to-use solutions, along with creating proper security protocols to keep customers safe. Constant connectivity could be a great asset, but not if customer data and privacy are at risk.

"This survey highlights that IoT is moving towards mass adoption, but that industry leaders must make their connected home solutions intuitive, simple and cost-effective to put into play," said Nate Williams, CMO of Greenwave Systems, in a press release. "Consumers don't really care how they manage their smart devices, but they want a frictionless experience - ideally with a solution that someone else installs for free - that saves them money and improves their quality of life over the long-term."

Devices in the household are getting smarter, and that trend will increase in 2015, as more consumers test connected devices away from TVs and set-top boxes, analysts believe. There are high expectations for security systems to enjoy strong smart growth, with the ability to arm systems from mobile devices, access live video streams remotely, and have systems learn behavior patterns.

However, manufacturers need to be careful not to add connectivity just for the sake of adding internet and other features simply because they can.

"It's one thing if [the technology] seamlessly fits in and there's a benefit, it's another if you're asking people to get out the screwdriver and pliers or change the way they do things," said Robert Brunner, founder of the Ammunition design firm that helped create the Beats headphones, in a statement published by NBC News. "Do you really need a smart can opener that texts you when the can is open?"

LG are looking to show off a full new series of gear at the upcoming world-class technology exhibition, CES 2015. Their new range of Wi-Fi units will be out in force - including products such as speakers, Sound Bars and Blu-ray players.

Their first foray into the battery-powered Wi-Fi speaker market will be displayed, seeing their Model H4 Portable speaker being showcased, alongside their HS7 and HS9 Sound Bars and an interesting wireless Blu-ray player called the BP550. All of the speakers on display have been announced as compatible with both Android and iOS devices.

These new LG units will be able to connect to one another wireless or work independently, meaning you can setup a wide network of speakers across your house, room or establishment without the need for wiring. As their H4 potable is battery powered, this is great for setups in public areas and small gatherings of friends as you can simply pick them up when you leave.

Google has already teamed up with the leading telecommunications company in Australia on its Internet balloon technology, but now its teaming up with France's space agency, Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES).

The search giant has said that it has been working with the semi-secret lab for 12 months now, in order to take Project Loon to the next level. CNES has been helping Google analyze data from its ongoing tests, as well as getting the design of its next-gen Project Loon technology into the air. Google will help CNES work on long-haul balloon flights into the stratosphere.

Google's VP in charge of the project, Mike Cassidy, said: "No single solution can solve such a big, complex problem. That's why we're working with experts from all over the world, such as CNES, to invest in new technologies like Project Loon that can use the winds to provide Internet to rural and remote areas". CNES' Toulouse Space Center director Mark Pircher admitted that when Google first approached the space agency and told them their plans, he didn't think Project Loon was that realistic.

One of Google's more interesting initiatives, is Project Loon; giant, helium-filled balloons that fly through the stratosphere providing Internet access to those below. Since Google has been flying Project Loon in our skies, they've learned quite a bit about running them more efficiently, and how to keep the balloons in the air for extended periods of time.

Over the last 12 or so months, Project Loon balloons have travelled over 3 million kilometers, which is the same as going around the world around 75 times. The problem is, they could only stay in the air for a certain period of time before Google needed to bring them back down to the ground to be re-deployed. Loon balloons are now capable of staying in the air for up to 10 times as long as they could last year, and stay there for around 100 days, or just over three months.

The current record Google has for Project Loon staying in the air, is 130 days, with the extended fly-time due to "hundreds of discoveries" that have helped the company prevent leaks, and assisted with automating the manufacturing process. Google has new auto-fill equipment that drops fill times to just under five minutes, as well as the ability to launch some 20 balloons a day as the company improves its "ability to launch consistently at scale".

Just when you thought your GbE, or Gigabit Ethernet connection was fast with 1Gbps, and its lame, old wires - light-based communications are now coming into play and could blow away current physical line speeds.

Harald Haas, Chair of Mobile Communications at the University of Edinburgh said that the potential for wider bandwidth and quicker response time than Wi-Fi, is with light-based communications. He said: "All the components, all the mechanisms exist already. You just have to put them together and make them work". Haas is working with researchers from many different universities, which are currently half way through an expensive $9 million project funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, in the United Kingdom.

The researchers are looking into ultraparallel visible light communication, which uses "multiple colors of light to provide high-bandwidth linkages over distances of a few meters", as the Spectrum IEEE site reports. This system has the team using commercially-made red, green and blue LEDs as both emitters, and as photodiodes to detect light. Using this simple technology has speeds of 110Mbps, and when transmitting data in one direction only, they reached 155Mb/s.

Jeremy Gutsche signed up for a 30MB in-flight Internet plan when he boarded his Singapore Airlines flight, priced at $28.99. Once a user goes over the 30MB, they're charged for the data used beyond it, where Gutsche's bill ended up landing on $1171 in additional charges.

Gutsche took to his website, where he wrote: "I had an otherwise enjoyable flight but the sticker shock of being gouged $1,200 made me feel like I was deplaning from Total Bastard Airlines, that old skit from SNL where they kick you off the plane with a 'Buy BYE! If you were a family traveler or someone like my mother, that bill would certainly ruin your vacation".

Gutsche said that he visited around 155 webpages, checked his e-mail, and uploaded some PowerPoint presentations. He then estimated that his PowerPoint presentation cost around $100 to upload, adding that "I hope my team liked it". OnAir, the firm responsible for the in-flight Wi-Fi told The Wall Street Journal that the purchase process is "entirely transparent", and that "To consume several hundred megabytes during one flight takes much more than basic email viewing, for example downloading heavy attachments, cloud access and using Skype".

LinkNYC, a new "communications network" has announced its plans to turn all of New York City's existing payphones into public Wi-Fi stations, with Superman being the most disappointed with this news.

The new Wi-Fi kiosks will be taller, and narrower than the average phone booth, but will still have ads plastered all over them. These Wi-Fi stations will boast "up to gigabit speeds", doubling as charging stations for devices, which is a nice touch. The new Wi-Fi network is part of a "public-private" collaboration between LinkNYC, the Mayor's Office of Technology and Innovation, DoITT, and CityBridge. A collective of New York-based companies, such as Qualcomm, Antenna, Comark, and Transit Wireless are also involved.

Not only will the phone booths be turned into Wi-Fi hotspots, but the LinkNYC kiosks will have touch screens that will provide information about the city itself, as well as allowing for free domestic phone calls. LinkNYC has said that the network will be "the fastest and largest free municipal Wi-Fi deployment in the world" and that it will be "more than 20 times fast than the average home Internet service in NYC" including a "seamless roaming experience from Link to Link". The best bit? LinkNYC said that the free gigabit Wi-Fi across NYC will be done "at no cost to taxpayers" with all of its revenue being secured through advertising, with around $500 million being made over the next 12 or so years. The roll out begins early 2015, with up to 10,000 Links to be installed across five boroughs of the city at first.

The phrase Internet of Things (IoT) has been around for more than 15 years, and while it remains a buzzword, the industry is rapidly growing. There will be 30 billion connected "things" in 2020, with the industry valued at $3.04 trillion in 2020, according to the IDC research group - and that figure is only going to keep climbing, especially as adoption reaches outside of developed markets.

"The opportunities presented by IoT are driving widespread attention among both traditional and non-traditional ICT vendors looking to take advantage of emerging revenue opportunities," said Vernon Turner, IDC SVP of Enterprise Infrastructure, Consumer, Network, Telecom and IoT Research. "We're still in the early stages of maturation and IoT represents unparalleled opportunity in government, consumer, and enterprise environments."

Network security will remain a significant concern - and despite increased security protocols - social engineering and attacks designed to deceive users will pose problems.

Well, any network you're on has now been put to shame thanks to researchers from the University of Central Florida and Eindhoven University of Technology, who have worked together to completely blow away the world speed record for data transmission over a fiber network.

The researchers used a completely new type of fiber, which was able to jump right up to an insane 255 terabits per second. This is a number that is hard to get your mind around, as it can transfer 1GB in 31.25 microseconds, which is just 0.03 milliseconds, or 1TB in just 31 milliseconds. As it stands, single-fiber links used in commercial use today hit a ceiling of 100Gbps, which is a massive 2550 times slower than what this new fiber network is capable of.

This new fiber network uses seven separate cores that were built into a hexagon shape, and by using spatial multiplexing, the researchers were able to hit 5.1 terabits per carrier, with wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) to 50 carriers down the cores. This eventuated into the researchers slamming through 255 terabits per second. Now all we need is every single Internet connection in the world to be upgraded, NICs to be up to 10TB/sec and cheaper, faster SSDs to handle all of this insane bandwidth.

The FCC is laying the ground work for 5G mobile Internet in the United States, with the council voting unoanmously to start looking at accessing the higher-than 2.4GHz frequency spectrum than was previously thought to be unusable by mobile networks.

This would pave the way for Gigabit Internet connections, similar to what South Korea is doing with its incredible 10Gbps Internet access. The FCC believes that using "millimeter waves" would have higher bandwidth made possible, for more people and devices with speeds that blow most other in-home broadband connections provide now.

The problem is, it only works over short distances - for now at least - and requires line-of-sight for their point-to-point microwave connections. This is what the FCC hopes to fix, with this unanimous vote meaning research can nnow begin to see this technology arrive in the hands of US broadband users. Current estimates have it pegged at being available by 2020, so let's hope they're right.

South Korea is set to get the world jealous with an impressive new 10Gbps fiber Internet service, with SK Broadband to introduce the new super-fast Internet connection at the Plenipotentiary Conference of the International Telecommunications Union to be held at Busan's BEXCO Center, in partnership with the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning and the National Information Society Agency on October 20.

Considering all of the advancements that broadband technology is experiencing in Asian countries like Japan and South Korea, citizens of both of these countries are product that they are far out and ahead of the United States. Natsuki Kumagai said: "In the 1960s the world watched NASA send men to the moon and many of us grew up amazed at the constant advancements of the Americans. Now the Americans watch us". Pyon Seo-Ju added: "In my travels to the United States, it is very plain they have lost their way in advancing broadband technology".

Seo-Ju continued: "Internet access is terribly slow and expensive because American politicians have sacrificed Americas's technology leadership to protect conglomerates and allow them to flourish. Although unfortunate for America, this has given Korea a chance to promote our own industry and enhance the success of companies like Samsung that are well-known in the United States today".

Online cloud storage has always been plagued with one issue or another, which eventually affects its users whose data is either compromised, stolen or even deleted. Earlier, iOS cloud storage had a massive leak of celebrity nude photographs which alone raised questions about such cloud storage. Before that, it was Megaupload where its customer's data could have been wiped out.

Dropbox is now the latest name in a string of cloud storage problems, where a bug was found which deletes files of some of its users. The company said that the bug is present in its older version of the desktop app which deletes its user's data from the cloud, which happens when Selective Sync is enabled. This function allows users to use their local storage to download data from selected folders in the cloud automatically. But if the system shuts down while the Selective Sync is running, it will delete the files.

Dropbox also confirmed that its working to restore these deleted files and released a new desktop app fix that should prevent this issue from happening again. For the troubles, Dropbox is offering its affected users a year's service of Dropbox Pro. This may not be a compensation for some people whose irreplaceable data is probably worth a lot more than Dropbox Pro account. But if the cloud storage company is able to successfully retrieve all the lost data, then there should be no harm done. However, irrespective of the end result, this will raise serious doubts about the long-term reliability of cloud storage.

Qualcomm has just teased the next generation of wireless technology with its new LTE Direct technology, something the company has been working on for close to a decade. LTE Direct is built upon the foundations of the LTE protocol, which allows LTE Direct-powered devices to communicate with one another without requiring a cell tower.

LTE Direct will also work at distances greater than 500 yards, which means we have signal ranges that far exceed that of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Better yet, LTE Direct uses very little energy, meaning a device can be on the look out for another LTE Direct signal without draining the battery. Then there's the other side of the LTE Direct coin: it's not just limited to handsets, as beacons can be set up to communicate directly with anything nearby.

Mahesh Makhijani from Qualcomm has said that this is somewhat of a sixth sense, which is constantly aware of the environment around you. With the world filled with information, LTE Direct can help people use their phones to better their lives. But, with retailers jumping on board, and you being blasted directly in places where you'd normally not get cell signal, it could get annoying, fast.

Apple introduced a new feature for its iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus and previous models with iOS 8 called Wi-Fi calling, of which only T-Mobile and EE will be providing at the time of launch. AT&T on the other hand plans to roll out Wi-Fi calling support, but as late as next year.

Despite AT&T's attempts to ensure that Wi-Fi calling will work without interruptions hinted as a reasons for a slow rollout, Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO of AT&T's new Mobile and Business Solutions group said that there's no urgent need to roll out Wi-Fi calling for now.

"We're very focused on making sure it's a great experience for customers, but we see it as a complement, not a replacement," Ralph de la Vega said. "We feel good about a great nationwide network with unlimited talk and text." He added that Wi-Fi calling will serve only as a complement to voice-over LTE AND 3G voice.