Author: Eva Glass

Eva Glass first rose to prominence in The INQUIRER. She continues to work behind the scenes to dig out the best stories.

Smart wearables will be invisible

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

glassesThe Gartner Group has studied the tea leaves at the bottom of its tea cup and come up with some predictions on the future of wearable devices.

The market research company predicts that by 2017, a third of so-called “smart wearables” will be practically invisible.

Gartner said smart contact lenses are already being developed, and there’s some interesting projects creating smart jewellery.  Why would you need smart jewellery?  They could deliver comms alerts and emergency alarms, according to Annette Zimmermann, research director at Gartner.

These will be in contrast to smart glasses, which are pretty easy to spot.

And we’ll also see the proliferation of head mounted displays (HMDs) for virtual reality but they’ll have to be not only smart, but smart looking.

Gartner also predicts that by 2016, 40 percent of smartphones will include biometric sensors with such features as fingerprint, facial, iris, voice and palm vein authentication.

And Gartner sees the end of Windows.  It estimates that in 2017. a third of people in emerging markets will never have owned a Windows device.

Organic sensors displace silicon

Posted on December 11, 2014 by - News

fingersPeople who pay good money for electronic fitness sensors based on silicon technology could soon be faced with a far cheaper technology based on organic electronics.

Researchers at UC Berkeley said different pulse oximeters measure pulse rate and blood oxygen saturation levels but they’re based on LEDs that send light through fingertips or earlobes and sensors that measure light that comes through the other side.

The scientists have come up with a far cheaper organic design that deposits green and red organic OLEDs on a flexible piece of plastic and uses the detection of fresh arterial blood to calculate a pulse.

Ana Arias, a professor at the UC Berkeley team, said: “We showed that if you take measurements with different wavelengths ir works, and if you use unconventional semiconductors it works. Because organic electronics are flexible they can easily conform to the body.”

Components of conventional oximeters are relatively expensive, she said, and need disinfection.

But she added that organic electronics are so cheap that they can be thrown away like a sticky plaster once they’ve been used.

Apple gets into enterprise bed with IBM

Posted on December 10, 2014 by - News

ibm_appleApple and IBM have signed a deal over the Pad and the iPhone, reflecting greater use of the devices in the corporate marketplace.

Under the deal, IBM will release what it described as the first wave of IBM MobileFirst for the iOS operating system.

The applications also support web services and big data and analytic abilities to the iPad and iPhone.  IBM said  MobileFirst for iOS is aimed at enterprise sized companies in banking, retail, insurance, financial services, telecomms, governments and airlines.

Customers who have already signed up include Citi, Air Canada and Spring.

Philip Schiller, a senior VP of Apple marketing, said: “The business world has gone mobile and Apple and IBM are bringing together the.. technology with the smartest data and analytics to help businesses define how work gets done.”

The apps are intended for secure environments, linked to core enterprise processes and analytics.

Apps include Plan Flight and Passenger for airlines, Advise and Grow for the banking sector; Retention for insurance companies; Incident Aware for law enforcement; Sales Assist for Retail and Expert Tech for the telecomms market.

5G planning starts

Posted on December 10, 2014 by - News

oldfoneWhile most people haven’t even moved to 4G phone networks yet, manufacturers are already talking about standards for the next faster generation of 5G phones.

Major vendors are engaging with the formal standards process, according to ABI Research.  Those include Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei, Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung, mobile operators and academic bodies.

Research director Philip Solis sad: “These companies are all waving their 5G flags, although 5G definitions and visions remain very vague.  But this is not merely marketing. These companies are most certainly putting a stake in the ground that will leverage their, work, competitive strengths, and, most crucially, patents.”

He said that Qualcomm in particular is keeping its head low, but other vendors such as Apple and Google are getting actively involved.

Solis said that efforts by vendors to use their patents will be fiercer than for 4G.

But despite the competitive edge, Solis said that companies are working together “so the standardisation process can hit the ground running”.

3D printers make the grade

Posted on December 10, 2014 by - News

caxtonDespite high start up costs, more and more businesses are planning to use 3D printers for a whole variety of applications.

IDC surveyed 330 people employed by companies with 100 or more staff that are planning to deploy 3D printing.

The survey revealed that the primary uses are prototyping and product development, there are many other reasons for deploying 3D tech.

Pete Basiliere, an analyst at IDC, said that by 2018 nearly 50 percent of retail, heavy industry and life science manufacturers will employ 3D printers to make parts.

3Dpie

“Respondents felt overwhelmingly that using a 3D printer as part of their supply chain generally reduces the cost of existing processes, especially R&D csts,” he said.  The cost reduction for finished products is around four percent.

When choosing a 3D printer, 37 percent of those surveyed ranked quality as the main factor, while 28 percent considered price the most important.  And 37 percent of the 330 people said they had just one 3D printer and 18 percent owned 10 or more.

“3D printing vendors that take the time to articulate the value of their product in terms that align with their clients’ needs will be well positioned to capitalise on any future growth,” said Basiliere.

Germanium displaces silicon

Posted on December 10, 2014 by - News

This graphic depicts a new electronic device created at Purdue that uses germanium as the semiconductor instead of silicon. Germanium is one material being considered to replace silicon in future chips because it could enable the industry to make smaller transistors and more compact integrated circuits. (Purdue University image) Chips today use complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) based on purified silicon substrates to do their magic work.

But scientists at Purdue University claim to have created the first modern germanium circuit that cuts silicon out of the equation.

The first transistor, created by Bell Labs, used purified germanium cooked up in the Purdue labs in 1947.  That was superseded by silicon but as devices get tinier and tinier, silicon is reaching the end of its long innings, according to Peide Ye, a professor at Purdue.

He said: “The industry will soon reach the limit as to how small silicon transistors can be made, threatening future advances.  Germanium is one material being considered to replace silicon because it could let the industry make smaller transistors and more compact integrated circuits.”

Ye said germanium has other advances over silicon, including the ability to make superfast circuits.

Ye didn’t talk about the price of germanium. Chips made by giants like Intel use purified silicon but ultimately based on sand. And sand is cheap.

Scientists use Twitter to track mental illness

Posted on December 10, 2014 by - News

kingfisherPsychologists appear to believe that tweets from Twitter can help them garner data about common mental illnesses.

Glen Coppersmith, one of a number of computer scientists at John Hopkins University (JHU) said that looking at tweets from people who publicly mentioned their diagnosis lets them speedily and cheaply collect data on seasonal affective disorder, depression, bipolar disorders and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The scientists trawl through tweets and use computer technology to counter the high costs of collecting mental health data using surveys.

“With many physical illnesses… there are lots of quantifiable facts and figures that can be used to study things like jow often and where the disease is occurring. But it’s much tougher and more time consuming to collect this kind of data about mental illnesses because the underlying causes are so complex and because there is a long standing stigma that makes even talking about the subject all but taboo,” said Coppersmith.

Coppersmith also said the team didn’t want to replace surveys to track trends in mental illness.  Its techniques are meant to complement them.

PTSD is more prevelant at military installations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Depression happens in places that have high unemployment rates.

So what of the algorithms?  The scientists look for words and language patterns including phrases like “I just don’t want to get out of bed”.  The scientists looked at eight billion tweets.

Infosys founders sell $1 billion of shares

Posted on December 9, 2014 by - News

Infosys office in Mangalore - Wikimedia CommonsShares in Indian software services company Infosys fell on the Mumbai bourse today after four co-founders of the company sold the equivalent of $1 billion in shares.

They took advantage of an increased share price this year but the move meant the price of the stock fell by nearly five percent.

Co0founders NR Narayana Murthy, K. Denish, Nandan M.Nilekani and the wife of SD Shibulal claimed the sale was to fund “various philanthropic activities”, a statement from the co-founders said.

In a statement, the founders said they had spent mover three decades “nurturing the company”.

Infosys has over 160,000 employees and has fingers in almost every pie, including financial services, aerospace and defence, automative, enery and retail.

The seven co-founders of the company no longer have executive roles on the board, but control nearly 16 percent of the shares.

PC shipments up in Western Europe

Posted on December 9, 2014 by - News

A not so mobile X86 PCPeople are being tempted to upgrade their PCs after years of delayed renewals.

IDC said that PC shipments in Western Europe were up by 23.6 percent in the third quarter, compared with the same quarter last year.

Although sales slowed in the enterprise arena, people are being tempted by low end notebooks using Windows 8.1 Bing.  The commercial sector has already largely completed its shift from Windows XP, IDC said.

The tablet market declined in the third quarter but 2-in-1 machines did well, growing 46.4 percent in the quarter.  Smartphones showed 6.1 percent growth – largely caused by affordable smartphones and the arrival of 4G networks.

IDC calls notebooks, desktop PCs, smartphones and tablets “smart connected devices” and the leader of the pack is Samsung – even though its growth fell by 16.5 percent compared to the third quarter of 2013.  Samsung was followed by Apple, Sony, HP, and Lenovo.

Lenovo showed a 64.1 percent unit growth quarter on quarter, year on year.

IBM assesses top cyber threats

Posted on December 9, 2014 by - News

ibm-officeBig Blue has assessed that 80 percent of executives in charge of security think that challenges by external threats to their enterprises are on the rise.

And IBM said 60 percent of enterprises believe they are being outgunned in the cyber war.

Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) think that sophisticated external threats is their biggest challenge – with 40 percent believing that they top other challenges they face.

Data leakage prevention, cloud security and mobile security are the top three areas that CISOs believe are the areas that need addressing urgently.

Of the respondents surveyed by IBM, 90 percent have either adopted or will adopt cloud initiatives and they expect their cloud security budgets to increase over the next five years.

Only 45 percent of the CISOs think that mobile and device security is being adequately addressed.

Scientists make solar panel breakthrough

Posted on December 9, 2014 by - News

plasmonsResearchers at Caltech claim to have made a breakthrough in a new type of solar cell.

Current solar panel technology only absorbs and uses a small fraction of sunlight but the researchers have a found a way to make use of infrared waves with a structure that isn’t made from silicon, but of metal.

Metalsshow a phenomenon called plasmon resonance which are essentially waves or ripples of electrons that exist on metals where they meet air.

The resonances, say the Caltech scientists, can be tuned to other wavelengths by using nanostructures manufactured in a laboratory.

The researchers showed that metal surfaces can produce a potential to build up an electrostatic potential.  The scientists preduct the possibility of solar cells using plasmoelectrics to be used with regular photovoltaic cells to capture both visible and infrared light.

Thin clients get skinnier

Posted on December 9, 2014 by - News

Dell logoThe move towards thin clients has slackened after some growth prompted by Microsoft’s decision to deck Windows XP support.

IDC said shipments of terminal clients and thin clients amounted to 1.35 million units in the third quarter of this year, falling by 1.8 percent and bucking predictions.

While Windows XP made some move from PCs to thin clients, public projects were delayed and that accounts for the slippage.

Thin clients represent a massive 97 percent of enterprise client devices.  Within the thin client umbrella, those without operating systems – so called zero clients – still hold 24.6 percent share.

The winners in the thin client race for the third quarter are HP, Dell, Ncomputing, Centerm and Igel.  Of these, Dell saw growth of 16.6 percent compared to the same quarter last year, while Ncomputing’s share slumped by 44.7 percent.  HP more or less held its own although its share fell 4.3 percent compared to the same quarter last year.

Sony gets hacked again

Posted on December 8, 2014 by - News

wargames-hackerReports said that Sony has come under a fresh cyber attack following the break in which crippled Sony Pictures two weeks ago.

The Financial Times reported that the PlayStation store was downed earlier today for a couple of hours.

A gang that dubs itself the Lizard Squad has claimed that it is responsible for the hack – and the attack may be nothing to do with the Sony Pictures incident – blamed by some on North Korean hackers.

The Lizard Squad made a similar attack on Microsoft’s Xbox Live service last week, according to the FT.

North Korea said yesterday that it wasn’t responsible for the attack on Sony Pictures, as we reported elsewhere today.

Sony is so far unable to say whether the latest hack attack has resulted in personal or corporate information being stolen.

Ofcom says broadband coverage patchy

Posted on December 8, 2014 by - News

parliamentDespite the government maintaining that the UK is on track to deliver broadband just about everywhere in the country, regulator Ofcom said economics mean that’s just not going to happen.

Ofcom said in a report that communication services are used by an average UK adult for over half of their waking hours.

That means, coverage, capacity, and reliability of the digital infrastructure are of fundamental importance to both people and to businesses.

But, said Ofcom: “The economics of networks means there are parts of the UK that will not be fully served by the market.  There are also some services which may not be provided to all by the market.”

Either Ofcom or the government could intervene to make life better for people/

Ofcom said that fixed broadband technology is “almost universally available” – the average download speed is 23Mbit/s. But broadband speeds vary quite a lot, the organisatiion said.

The government aims to provide universal availability of at least 2Mbit/s – only three percent of UK sites fall below this.  But this causes difficulties for those affected.

Fifteen percent of UK households can’t get 10Mbit/s speed/

Ofcom said that the government target to deliver superfast broadband to 95 percent of premises by 2017 “is an aggressive target”.  About 18 percent of households still don’t access the internet, whether fixed or mobile.

3D nanostructures mean low cost

Posted on December 8, 2014 by - News

nanoScientists at North Carolina State University (NCSU) said they created a new lithography technique that uses nanoscale spjeres to create 3D structures.

The structures will be of use in electronics, biomedics, and photonics, the researchers said.

Dr Chih-Hao Chang, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NCSU claimed the approach will reduce the cost of nanolithography “to the point where it could be done in your garage”.

While conventional lithography focues light on a photosensitive film to create 2D patterns, those methods need expensive specialised electron beams, lasers or special lenses. The researchers at NCSU said they put nanoscalte polystyrene spheres on the surface of the photosensitive film

The nanospheres are transpart but bend and scatter light in predictable ways.

Chang said: “We are using the nanosphere to shape the pattern of light, which gives us the ability to shape the resulting nanostructure in three dimensions without using the expensive equipment required by conventional techniques.  It allows us to create 3D structures all at once, without having to make layer after layer of 2D patterns.

Applications could include nanoscale “inkjet printers” to create electronics, biological cells, antennae or photonic components.