Connectivity & Cloud - Page 14

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has inked a deal with Germany which will see the two countries work on 5G Internet for Britain. This new ultra-fast Internet will be fast enough to download an 800MB file in less than one second.

Cameron said that with the "world on fast forward," the UK could be left behind without super-fast Internet access. The deal between the two countries was struck at CeBIT 2014 which is currently underway in Hanover, Germany. Cameron also announced a £73 million or $122 million deal to develop the Internet of Things, which will allow billions of everyday objects to communication with one another online.

The Internet of Things will allow appliances, smart devices and other tech gadgets of the future to communicate with each other - such as power meters that can automatically get consumers the best deals, and monitors which allow doctors to track patients' heart rates in real-time. Cameron said: "This is a world on fast forward. A world of permanent technological revolution. And in this world, countries like the UK and Germany will only succeed if we have a relentless drive for new ideas and innovations. The UK tech scene today is dynamic. Relentlessly ambitious. Leading the way."

Computer scientists in the University of Washington have made a prototype of a low-cost gesture control system that requires no battery to power it up. The control system even allows the users to control their devices that are out of sight using TV signals.

This research project is funded by a Google faculty research award and Washington Research Foundation. The prototype called 'AllSee' uses TV signals as a source of power and its way to detect any gesture command from the user. The assistant professor computer science and engineering at the University of Washington said,"This is the first gesture recognition system that can be implemented for less than a dollar and doesn't require a battery. You can leverage TV signals both as a source of power and as a source of gesture recognition."

The users will need to use a small sensor which can be placed on any electronic devices. The sensor has a receiver which can recognize gestures via wireless transmissions. These sensors consume 3-to-4 less power than existing wireless transmission which therefore allows you to keep this on and enabled on your mobile devices. AllSee consumes 10 microwatt of power. The sensors can also be used in household electronics as well, enabling the use to control any household appliances using gestures and maybe even connect them to the internet.

The hybrid memory cube consortium (HMCC) is an organization comprising of memory providers such as Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, and SK Hynix, is dedicated to developing and establishing an industry-standard interface specification for the hybrid memory cube (HMC) technology.

This week, the consortium unveiled HMC 2.0, which is capable of some truly crazy speeds. HMC 2.0 is capable of supporting bandwidth of 480GB/sec per one memory device. HMC can do this by using advanced through-silicon vias (TSVs) - which are vertical conduits that electrically connect a stack of individual chips - in order to combine high-performance logic with dynamic random access memory (DRAM) die.

HMC 1.0 was capable of 160GB/sec of bandwidth, in 2GB density while running 10Gb/s per late data-rate, using up to 70% less energy per bit than existing technologies. The new HMC 2.0 specification supports increased data rate speeds advancing short-reach (SR) performance from 10Gb/s, 12.5Gb/s, 15Gb/s and up to 30Gb/s, allowing the peak bandwidth of a single memory cube to bounce all the way up to 480GB/sec.

Santa Clara-based PureWave is working with Artemis Networks, which is company behind the impressive pCell Technology that we reported on a few days back now. The two companies are working together on the design and development of base stations for Artemis' pCell technology.

Artemis Networks chose PureWave to supply pWave radios for its upcoming trial deployments, with the test involving the companies using various bands and power levels to wireless carriers who will be using pCell. Dan Picker, PureWave Networks' CEO, said: "PureWave is excited to have partnered with Artemis Networks in helping to realize this promising new pCell technology. It has long been clear to industry veterans that a completely new approach is required to keep up with the exponentially increasing mobile broadband capacity demands of today's users".

He continued: "PureWave has focused on Smart-Antenna and Small Cell Base Station technologies to improve the efficiency in which valuable spectral resources are consumed. For this reason, we quickly understood the potential of pCell technology, since it effectively exploits a combination of these techniques. We also knew that our latest generation base station platform would be the perfect complement to realizing the technology in a real-world setting".

Ericsson and Philips have announced that they are teaming up on a new project that brings green LED lighting to streetlights and helps mobile providers to expand mobile broadband within a city. Ericsson calls the system Zero Site and the idea is to help cities reduce clutter while offering expanded access to broadband around the city.

Philips is providing the green LED streetlights for the plan and the poles used have space inside to support Ericsson cellular networking hardware. Philips says that the city can help offset the costs of installing green LED streetlights by selling or renting the space for networking gear to a wireless provider.

The streetlights will help the city reduce electricity usage significantly with a large rollout. Philips says that the lights can provide a power savings of 50 to 70%. Power savings of up to 80% is possible with smart controls according to Philips.

According to OpenSignal's State of LTE report for Q1 2014, Australia leads the pack in terms of the fastest LTE/4G speeds in the world. Australia's leading ISP, Telstra, is helping to drive that back home for the country.

The OpenSignal report looks at countries all across the globe, analyzing their 4G networks to see who has the best coverage, speeds and carriers. 17 countries in total were compared, with Italy coming in second place, and in second-to-last, the United States. The average download speed experienced in Australia was 24.5Mbps, while the US trailed behind with just 6.5Mbps.

If we compare the speeds with the last report taken, the US was sitting at 9.6Mbps, and is now reaching an average download speed of 6.5Mbps. Australia on the other hand, has increased from 17.3Mbps to 24.5Mbps.

Garmin is famous in the GPS world for making products ranging from navigation apps for smartphones to PND devices for cars and watches for athletes and outdoors types. Garmin has announced a new GPS watch that is aimed at athletes that like multiple sports. The new watch is called the fenix 2.

Garmin bills the watch as the ultimate multisport adventure watch and it has features for running, climbing, riding, hiking, skiing, and swimming. The watch is water resistant and can survive the outdoors. It features an altimeter, barometer, and a 3-axis compass.

It also provides GPS navigation for people when they are off the beaten path. It will store breadcrumbs to make sure you can find your way back when needed. The GPS functionality supports up to 10,000 track points and 1000 waypoints. Those GPS details can be shared with other Garmin devices via Bluetooth.

Steve Perlman, has something that could truly solve some of the problems we have with mobile data congestion, dead zones and more, with his new 'pCell' device.

Current cellular networks use a tower to transmit a radio signal, forming a large cell that provides wireless signal to all mobile devices within that area. This umbrella of signal will feed out whatever you need in terms of data or calls. Cell tower capacity is then shared through mobile devices, taking turns to avoid interfering with each other, and once more people enter the area, speeds can drop.

Companies simply can't just add more antennas in order to prepare for the increased demand, as their signals would be disrupted if they're placed too close together. This is where Artemis Networks' pCell technology comes into play, as it enhances the signal itself, with multiple waves combining to form stronger waves.

Its been a few months since I first reported on Microsoft being forced to rename SkyDrive, and just a few weeks ago we learned that the service would be transitioning to the moniker "OneDrive." The initial announcement said that it would take several weeks for the new branding to be fully implemented, and today Microsoft's cloud storage service is now officially named OneDrive.

Visiting Skydrive.com redirects you to the OneDrive site as does OneDrive.com, but the official URL is OneDrive.live.com, something that may be confusing to some non-technical customers. Microsoft has only changed the service's name and all functionality appears to have remained the same. New users who sign up receive 7GB of free storage space and an additional 500MB for each additional user they invite to the service. Additionally, users who opt into auto backing up images from their smartphone receive an additional 3GB of free storage space.

"Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to get all of your favorite stuff in one place - one place that is accessible via all of the devices you use every day, at home and at work. Because let's face it, until now, cloud storage services have been pretty hard to use, and the vast majority of us still have our stuff spread out everywhere," said Microsoft's Chris Jones. "In fact, according to a recent poll, at least 77 percent of people who are familiar with the cloud still have content stored on a device that is not backed up elsewhere. We want to change that."

A software glitch has forced Toyota to recall 1.9 million vehicles sold worldwide from 2010 to 2014, trying to fix an error that causes the car to stall. The recall hits 1 million cars in Japan, 700,000 in the United States and the remaining 200,000 from Europe and other select markets.

Specifically, Toyota will have car dealerships install updated software to fix a bug that leads to heat buildup in the car's circuit transistors, which obviously caused damage. Engine warning lights would trigger an alert, but the vehicle would also occasionally stall while driven.

No reports have been submitted to Toyota regarding accidents or injuries from the unexpected error.

Cloud computing is predicted to reach $121.1 billion by 2015, according to a report from MarketsandMarkets, though other analysts guess the market will have a difficult time in 2014. Embracing the cloud gives users the chance to utilize a scalable and cost-effective way to access and share information from any Web-connected device.

For companies trying to sell cloud services to the consumer or B2B markets, it's quickly coming down to service quality. Any company trying to drive innovation in the cloud market must pay attention to good product support, customer support, and clear lines of communication with users.

Companies such as Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon tend to get a lot of headlines for their respective cloud efforts, though software providers like Red Hat and CA are expected to have a difficult time growing this year.

Manufacturers have finally figured out how to attract consumers to connected high-definition TVs (HDTVs), using third-party Web-based apps to draw in users. Smart TVs will capture the "majority of television shipments" this year, and more U.S. consumers will have smart TVs than connected TVs by 2015, according to Business Insider.

Original Web TVs initially seemed appealing, but were wrongly predicted TV viewers would want to use the TV to browse the Internet in a traditional manner. Some companies embrace open platforms, such as LG, Roku and Google Chromecast supporting open source, while Apple, Samsung and other companies rely on closed infrastructures.

Apple TV and Roku set-top boxes lead the market for streaming devices, though Google Chromecast also sold a large number of units. Apple TV racked up 8 million units shipped during all of 2013, while Roku shipped 4.5 million units.

Less than one year after the public launch of its Chromecast HDTV dongle, Google has finally opened up the software development kit for developers trying to get in on the fun. The Cast SDK was previously available, but was in a restricted form as Google worked with exclusive partners to give them earlier access to create Chromecast apps.

"With the Chromecast, we're resetting consumer applications," noted Rishi Chandra, Google Chromecast director of product management.

App developers now have the ability to integrate Chromecast apps with Google Android, Apple iOS, or Web-based apps - and Google developers believe the potential for Cast-enabled apps is huge - joining Netflix, YouTube, Chrome, and a small number of apps Google immediately included support for from launch.

AT&T has recently filed for a patent that would institute a credits-based system. The new system is designed to allow AT&T to lower the bandwidth allotment for file-sharers, but the implications of the patent go much further than that. The new patent could have a chilling effect on content distribution networks, including Steam, Origin, and Netflix.

The patent, titled "Prevention Of Bandwidth Abuse Of A Communications System", would theoretically allow AT&T to create Internet plans that would only allow access to certain sites or protocols. The patent has a brief description:

During the first half of last year, Microsoft found itself in a bit of hot water when the British Sky Broadcasting Group took Redmond to court over the SkyDrive name. Following the courts ruling, Microsoft agreed to change its cloud service's name to something else. Today, more than six months later, the new name has arrived.

Microsoft SkyDrive will now be known as Microsoft One Drive, and the company says that the re-branding will take place soon, and that no changes will be made to the service that affects your data. In a statement, Microsoft said: The Service "will continue to operate as you expect and all of your content will be available on OneDrive and OneDrive for Business respectively as the new name is rolled out across the portfolio."

"Changing the name of a product as loved as SkyDrive wasn't easy," admits Microsoft's Ryan Gavin. "We are excited about what is to come, and can't wait to share more." Gavin's statement leads us to believe that Microsoft is planning the launch of new features for OneDrive, but with the service already fully featured, I am not sure what else they could add.

Alcatel-Lucent and BT have teamed up to work on a new research project: 1.4Tbps broadband. The new technology using commercial-grade hardware, spun with a new protocol which pushes for these insane, next-gen speeds.

The new protocol has been dubbed Flexigrid, which allows multiple signals to be laid over the top of one another within the same cable. During testing, the researchers were able to layer seven 200Gbps channels, which created something they called an "Alien Super Channel", which was capable of driving 1.4Tbps across 255 miles of fiber.

The two connections were the bases of a BT research facility in Suffolk, to another BT Tower, in London. 1.4Tbps is... well, fast, very fast. How fast in real-world terms? Well, someone with this connection could stream some 64 hours of HD through Netflix, 38 hours of 4K through Netflix, or an insane 36,409 songs... all within a single second.

Network hardware company Cisco Systems focused on the Internet of Everything (IoE), setting the landscape for people connected to mobile devices, smart buildings, transportation networks, data and other processes on a wide scale. The number of estimated connected devices is 15 to 25 billion by 2015, which will propel up to 50 billion by 2020.

"Cisco has led customers through every Internet transition over the last 30 years," said Blair Christie, Cisco Senior VP and chief marketing officer, in a statement. "The Internet of Everything is perhaps the most promising of these, creating unprecedented opportunities for organizations, individuals, communities and countries to realize dramatically greater value from networked connections between people, processes, data and things."

Cisco has been forced to adapt to a changing environment in which employees are largely embracing the 'bring your own device' craze. However, the IoE blows that out of the water, with service users able to benefit from long-form content, location-based and profile data, home/control/automation features, and sensor-collected data in the home and workplace.

Germany nearly turned into Australia there for a minute, with Deutsche Telekom attempting to introduce Internet throttling, where users' Internet speeds would be capped once they downloaded a certain amount of data.

But the Cologne Regional Court ruled that this would not happen, strengthening the rights of consumers. Deutsche Telekom has enforced users downloading over 75GB be throttled, something which will take place in 2016. The industry thinks Deutsche Telekom could split its customers into two groups: those who don't mind the capping, and those who consume digital data in many forms, especially the growing web form - YouTube, streaming services (music, TV, movies), and next-generation gaming.

The problem here is that the term Deutsche Telekom is using, is 'flat rate' where consumers connect to an Internet service through the fixed network, with a fixed price, for a pre-defined surfing speed, and 'do not expect restrictions' which is where the Civil Chamber of the Court will base its decision. At the moment, the judgment is not yet final.

HDMI 2.0 has finally been officially announced, arriving at a perfect time to be baked inside of the 4K TVs flowing out of manufacturers' factories. HDMI Licensing took some time of out of its day to announce the new standard, which is quite powerful.

We'er looking at a bandwidth capacity of 18Gbps, which has enough room to squeeze 3840x1260 at 60fps, which is quite nice. HDMI 2.0 also has support for up to 32 audio channels, "dynamic auto lipsync" and additional CEC extensions. The connector itself remains unchanged, which means we should be all systems go for backwards compatibility.

The cables themselves also won't change, which is refreshing, with the HDMI Licensing group claiming that current high-speed Category 2 cables can handle the increased bandwidth.

Google's super-secretive but super-cool Google X labs have designed some amazing things so far, such as Google Glass and the self-driving cars from Google. Google X have just outdone themselves today by announcing Project Loon, which would see balloon-powered Internet access to parts of the world where Internet access is hard, or impossible to come by.

Google even started testing this new initiative during the week, which would provide users with 3G-like speeds using balloons blasting Internet down to the people below in New Zealand. Google have said that they've found a way to let these balloons "sail freely in the winds" and would steer them by moving them up or down to catch the right winds. Of course, this means that Google still have some work to do, which I can see them creating the technology to at least automate this process.

The Mountain View-based search giant have said that they're solving this problem "with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power." Google would be using wind data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to give the balloons their flight paths. The search giant are currently using 30 balloons to test the project with around 50 tests in New Zealand who are using the service on the ground.