The Flight of Dragonfly Robots

One day, the U.S. military hopes to use tiny flying robots, equipped with cameras and sensors, for surveillance. But such robots would need to be able to navigate around obstacles, carry weight, and be efficient enough to fly for long periods of time. A group of researchers believe that the key to making such a robot might lie in the dragonfly.

Dragonflies are one of few creatures that utilize four independently controlled wings to fly, allowing them to hover, dart, glide, move backward, and change directions rapidly. Looking to understand such abilities, scientists at the Royal Veterinary College, in England, and the University of Ulm, in Germany, have developed a robotic dragonfly to measure the current flows over and under the wings at different flap cycles. While most of the dragonfly hovering scenarios were not efficient, the team found that if the lower wings are beating slightly ahead of the top wings, the double set of wings proves more efficient at generating lift, employing 22 percent less power to lift the same weight as a single pair.

"The one specific advantage you get in four wings is the maneuverability and ability to pick things out of the air and hover and dart around," says Jonathan How, a professor at MIT who works on flying robots but was not involved in the dragonfly project. "It would be really amazing if we could build something that got anywhere near that level of performance. If you can achieve the same lift at a lower power, that's helpful."

Despite their potential advantages, small flying robots that mimic dragonflies' agility have not been successfully made, in part because of the complexity of the aerodynamics around four wings, and also because of fabrication issues involved with small flying machines. However, studies of wing motion and air forces that reveal how dragonflies achieve their agility may enable roboticists to eventually build capable, swift flyers that use four wings.

To measure the air currents, the Ulm researchers immersed the robotic dragonfly in a tank filled with mineral oil and peppered with air bubbles. Two green lasers combined and reflected off the air bubbles as a high-speed camera took images 10 to 20 milliseconds apart. By comparing images, the scientists calculated the direction of flow for regions within the tank.

In terms of four-wing versus two-wing systems for a biomimetic micro air vehicle, "it's a trade-off," says Fritz-Olaf Lehmann, a researcher at the University of Ulm who worked on the study. With a four-wing system, the disadvantages are the need for an extra control system and extra power. However, a system with two wings must incorporate ways to change the angle, amplitude, and frequency of the wings flapping to change lift, says Lehmann. Conversely, with four wings, "you can just advance one flight system against the other, and then you change lift production," he says. "I think that makes building a micro air vehicle much easier."

In creating an autonomous micro air vehicle, "every little bit of efficiency counts," says Robert Wood, a professor at Harvard University who has developed some of the smallest flying robots. "You could make the argument that if you have a four-winged vehicle, you'll have more [control] to assist you in stabilization," he says.

Michael Dickinson, a professor at Caltech who works on understanding and mimicking fly flight, says that interest in dragonflies is growing and that the Lehmann paper is not the first containing this kind of analysis but "one in a floodgate of papers." While the study might add to the understanding of the subtle aerodynamics of four-winged flight, Dickinson points out that researchers must still develop a better, lighter battery that powers the vehicle and makes an effective control system.

(taken from: here) [...]

Apple Updates iPhone, Slashes Price

Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, confirms rumors that a cheaper iPhone with GPS will be available in July.

As at any Apple event, attendees of the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco showed up on Monday expecting to be awed by a Steve Jobs Show. And judging from the elevated mood in the room immediately after the Apple CEO's presentation, they were. The biggest technical news, which was widely predicted, is that the new iPhone, available July 11, will operate over so-called 3G networks, which are many times faster than the EDGE networks that the iPhone currently uses. Also confirmed was the rumor of GPS for real-time location tracking on the iPhone. But perhaps the most crowd-pleasing announcement is the dramatic price cut: from $399 for an eight-gigabyte model to $199. A 16-gigabyte model will be $299 and available in black and white.

When the iPhone was introduced last June, some analysts predicted that consumers would reject it because of its hefty price tag and its reliance on AT&T's relatively slow network. Since the phone's release, roughly six million iPhones have been sold to people who have looked past sluggish downloads and fallen in love with the gadget's intuitive touch interface and impressive graphics. But the difference between the EDGE and 3G networks can be startling. During Jobs's presentation, he contrasted the two versions of the phone. It takes 59 seconds for the current phone to load a Web page with heavy graphics. On the new 3G phone, the same page loads in 21 seconds. By comparison, it takes 17 seconds on a Wi-Fi network. E-mail applications download 3.6 percent faster.

By adding GPS, Apple has taken an important step toward expanding location-based services--tools that people use to find friends and activities around them in real time. Today's iPhone has the ability to locate itself, within a relatively large radius, using signals from cell-phone towers and Wi-Fi stations. GPS takes it a step farther, pinpointing location down to a couple of meters. This enables real-time tracking, making the iPhone a useful in-car navigation tool.

Jobs also provided an update of the third-party software, available in the forthcoming iPhone application store, and updates on the phone's compatibility with enterprise software. As announced in March, the iPhone will support Microsoft Exchange, providing compatibility with Outlook's mail, contacts, and calendar. The iPhone will also support Apple's iWork collection of productivity software, as well as Microsoft Office. And importantly, it will include the security features that have convinced enterprise customers--including the U.S. military and a number of Fortune 500 companies, law firms, and pharmaceutical companies--that the iPhone is as secure as any mobile device.

Since March, when the iPhone software developer kit was launched, a number of third-party companies and individual programmers have been racing to develop applications that run on the phone. At the conference, Apple highlighted a handful. Game developers are excited about the potential for using the built-in accelerometers as game controllers, and Sega showed off its Super Monkey Ball game. Loopt, a location-based startup that has previously only run on Sprint and Boost Mobile phones, demonstrated how a person using its service could find nearby friends. Typepad, a popular blogging tool, will offer software that enables easy mobile blogging on the iPhone.

In addition to the iPhone upgrades and previews of third-party software, Apple announced that it has revamped its .Mac service, a $99 a year service that provides e-mail, a Web page, and syncing options. It has been rebranded into MobileMe and will enable mail, calendar updates, and address-book changes to stay constantly synchronized over all Macs, PCs, and iPhones. This move illustrates that Apple is finally ready to recognize the importance of cloud computing, famously the province of Google and other Internet companies. However, since it's a pay service, it's unclear how much traction Apple will see as it competes with popular free services such as Gmail and Yahoo's Flickr.

As with all Steve Jobs keynotes, bullet points were big, and technical details were scarce. However, in the coming weeks, and after the iPhone's release on July 11, more information is expected to emerge. Some experts were predicting an upgrade to the phone's camera, but on Monday, there was no mention of a camera update or added video capabilities.

(taken from: here) [...]

WiMax Hits the Patent Pool

A new alliance of WiMax players aims to create a competitive royalty structure.

WiMax took another tentative step forward June 9 with the formation of the Open Patent Alliance, creating a patent pool to help companies obtain access to patents at a predictable cost. The group said its aim is to advance a competitive and open intellectual property rights model.

The OPA's founding members include Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco Systems, Clearwire, Intel, Samsung and Sprint Nextel. The OPA said it expects to secure participation of an additional six to nine investor companies.

The patent pool will aggregate essential patent rights needed to implement the WiMax standard as defined by the WiMax Forum and the IEEE 802.16e standard. WiMax is a 4G, IP-based broadband wireless technology that backers, particularly Sprint Nextel, Clearwire and a host of tech companies, are betting will become a viable broadband competitor.

In May, Sprint revived its flagging $5 billion WiMax plans with financial backing from Intel, Google and major cable companies. Sprint will merge its struggling WiMax division with Clearwire to create a new company operating under the Clearwire name.

"We expect to unleash wireless innovation with this patent alliance," Barry West, president of Sprint's XOHM business unit, said in a statement. "The open licensing program will help prompt pervasive WiMax technology. This speeds the day when consumers can enjoy the convenience of WiMax mobile broadband services on new devices in new places and experience all the open Internet has to offer."

The OPA founders said they hope the patent pool approach will ensure product differentiation and interoperability by focusing on providing a more competitive royalty structure by charging only for the features required to develop WiMax products. The patent pool will incorporate a number of royalty licensing arrangements, including cross-licensing among members of the pool.

According to the OPA, an independent third-party reviewer will evaluate submitted patents to determine how essential they are to the WiMax standard and WiMax Forum profiles.

"We are confident that the formation of the Open Patent Alliance, which is fully in line with Alcatel-Lucent's Open CPE program, will ensure a broad and diverse set of devices will be available to the consumer," said Brett Galloway, senior vice president of Cisco wireless and security.

Galloway added that widespread adoption of WiMax would allow people "to move freely throughout the world while maintaining continuous connectivity to cool new applications and services."

(taken from: here) [...]

The Cost of the $199 iPhone: $10 More Per Month for Data

The biggest news from Apple is what Steve Jobs didn’t say: It has completely changed the basis of its deals with AT&T and other wireless carriers.

According to a press release from AT&T, the carrier will no longer give a portion of monthly usage fees to Apple. Instead carriers will pay Apple a subsidy for each phone sold, in order to bring the price from $399 down to $199 for the 8 Gigabyte model. The company did not specify the amount of the subsidy. Subsidies of $200 to $300 are common in the industry.

What is more, consumers will now pay $30 a month for unlimited data service from AT&T, compared to $20 under the plan introduced last year. So even though the phone will now cost $200, consumers will be out more cash at the end of a two-year contract compared to the previous deal.

Of course, that includes faster 3G data service, so the price increase may be worth it. But we should call it an iPhone price increase, not a cut.

Unlimited data service for business users will cost $45 a month.

AT&T says the shift to upfront subsidies will cut into profits to the tune of 10 cents to 12 cents per share, both this year and next. As the number of customers paying the higher monthly bills increases, the phone company says profit per share will start to increase in 2010.

AT&T also said in its release that it now has 3G data service in 280 metropolitan areas, and that will increase to 350 areas by the end of the year.

For Apple, this move to getting all its money up front has several advantages. By using the same economic model as every other cell phone maker, it makes it easier to bring the phone to carriers in every corner of the world.

It also should help insulate Apple from the cost of people who buy iPhones and unlock them to use on carriers that don’t pay Apple the monthly fee. Now Apple will get its money, say $500, up front and it no longer has to police what people do with them. Whether Apple will still keep penalizing users who unlock their phones is one of the many questions that remain to be answered.

Indeed, Apple has just filed a short disclosure with the Securities and Exchange Commission saying that outside of the United States and a few other countries, its deals with carriers are not exclusive.

Apple has signed multi-year agreements with carriers authorizing them to distribute and provide network services for iPhones in over 70 countries. These agreements are generally not exclusive with a specific carrier, except in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Ireland, and certain other countries. Under the vast majority of these agreements, Apple will not receive follow-on revenue generating payments from carriers for the new iPhone 3G beyond the purchase of the device by carriers or a commission on sales of the device by Apple. Apple will continue to receive payments from cellular network providers related to first-generation iPhones as long as they remain active on authorized networks.

(taken from: here) [...]

Speculation mounts for new iPhone

Apple fans are waiting with bated breath - and a seemingly unending supply of rumours - for the iPhone Version 2.

The iPhone Version 1 was launched in the US in June 2007 to widespread tech hysteria.

Version 2 is widely expected to be unleashed at Apple's WorldWide Developers Conference that starts on 9 June.

The blogosphere is already red hot with speculation. Most think the new version will run on 3G, with the more pedantic design watchers predicting it will be slightly fatter as a result due to the need for a bigger battery.

Others predict a bigger camera, video-calling capacities and a GPS (Global Positioning System) chip built in.

Huge influence

Ben Wood, director of analyst firm CCS Insight, goes further, predicting that a blue button on the phone will link directly through to Apple's application store, with access to games, calculators, currency converters, screen-savers and ringtones.

"We predict this will become the most popular mobile applications store ever launched," he said.

Apple has a tendency to offer something no-one expected and such a "sting in the tail" is also possible thinks Mr Wood.

Possible other "stings" include a hybrid iPhone Nano, a new partnership with a big internet brand or capacity for mobile TV.

Of course the biggest surprise would be no announcement at all, but even if the rumours turn out to be premature, there is no doubting the influence of the first iPhone.

Data usage has grown exponentially since the iPhone launched with all operators seeing a huge ramp up in the amount of non-voice traffic.

"In the last six months we have seen continuing demand for these services and have improved our own mobile browsing and music download services to meet this demand," said Richard Warmsley, head of Beyond Voice at T-Mobile.

CCS Insight predicts that 218 million Europeans will be browsing on mobile devices by 2010.

"Apple has done an amazing job. It was its first ever mobile phone and it has managed to reshape the market and how people interact with their mobiles," said Mr Wood.

Younger generation

So-called smartphones have been slow to take off and, for a long time, remained a must-have only for corporate workers.

Tony Cripps, senior analyst with research firm Ovum, thinks that expectations of mobile connectivity have changed over the last year to the extent that the term "smartphone" is largely "redundant".

"A lot more devices can access the web and there is a huge range of services which people want from e-mail, search, maps and social networking.

"The younger generation now expect all of these on their mobiles as standard," he said.

Currently, the price of the iPhone puts it out of the range of many younger consumers, but some think the new version, whenever it is announced, will come with new pricing models.

The mobile market in Europe, where operators routinely subsidise the price of handsets, has meant that the high-priced iPhones have sold in much smaller quantities than in the US.

Five million iPhones have been sold but less than 350,000 of these were shifted in Europe, says research firm Jupiter.

Change in tactics

"The question has to be asked to what extent Apple can succeed without embracing the traditional mobile eco-system," said Jupiter analyst Thomas Husson.

Mr Woods believes the iPhone Version 2 could change the way Apple does business with the mobile operators.

"Some level of subsidy is likely to be available and operators are going to be allowed to set the price to some extent, although there are bound to be guidelines from Apple which will not want to endanger its lucrative iPod business," he said.

The era of exclusivity, where just one operator per country rolled out the iPhone, is already changing. Vodafone and TIM are both due to launch the iPhone in Italy later this year.

Vodafone has also signed up to deliver the iPhone in Australia, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, South Africa and Turkey.

In markets such as Italy, where 90% of the market is pre-paid, it is likely non-contract handsets will be available, thinks Mr Wood.

The change in tactics is down in part to the unexpected number of people unlocking their iPhones to work on any network.

For the hard-core Apple fans the price of the next generation device comes second to its new specs, but not everyone is so excited by the whole iPhone phenomenon.

Catching up

Microsoft's anticipation is, as one would expect, lukewarm.

About Version 1, director of Windows Mobile, John Starkweather said: "If it didn't have an Apple logo, it would have been long forgotten."

He maintains that Apple is still playing catch-up with the rest of the smartphone market.

"This year sees their first 3G phone to market. We have had 3G-enabled phones since the first networks were built and we will sell 20m new Windows Mobile phones in 2008," he said.

The numbers put the market share of the iPhone into perspective, but as more and more copycat iPhone handsets come on the market, the influence of its look is undisputed, even by Microsoft.

"Apple is good at design," conceded Mr Starkweather.

(taken from: here) [...]

IBM aims to cool chips with water

A network of tiny pipes of water could be used to cool next-generation PC chips, researchers at IBM have said.

Scientists at the firm have shown off a prototype device layered with thousands of "hair-width" cooling arteries.

They believe it could be a solution to the increasing amount of heat pumped out by chips as they become smaller and more densely packed with components.

The technology was demonstrated in IBM's 3D chips, where circuits are stacked one on top of the other.

Laying chips vertically, instead of side by side, reduces the distance data has to travel , enhancing performance and saving critical space.

"As we package chips on top of each other....we have found that conventional coolers attached to the back of a chip don't scale," explained Thomas Brunschwiler at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory.

"In order to exploit the potential of high-performance 3D chip stacking, we need interlayer cooling."

Cool running

Heat is seen as one of the major hurdles of producing ever smaller and quicker chips.

It is the by-product of the movement of electrons through the tiny wires connecting the millions of components on a modern processor.

As more and more components are packed on to chips - Intel recently launched a processor with two billion transistors, for example - the problems become worse.

As a result, researchers around the world are engaged in a search for the most efficient way to take the heat off the chip industry.

For example, in 2007, US researchers built tiny wind engines that created a "breeze" made up of charged particles, or ions, to cool computer chips.

But the problems are exacerbated in the multi-storey chips which IBM, as well as others, believe offer "one of the most promising approaches" for building future processors.

Each 4 sq cm sandwich is just 1mm thick but pumps out close to 1kilowatt - 10 times that generated by a hotplate.

Conventional cooling techniques such as fans and heat sinks do not work as well with the 3D technology, particularly as heat has to be drawn away from between the individual chips.

To get around this, researchers piped water through sealed tubes just 50 microns (millionths of a metre) in diameter, between individual layers.

Water is much more efficient than air at absorbing heat and so even with tiny amounts of liquid flowing through the system the researchers saw a significant effect.

The idea of pumping liquids around computers is not entirely new. Early mainframe computers had water pumped around them.

High end computers have been "modded" for a number of years with water coolers and various researchers and companies have put forward proposals for directly cooling chips with fluids.

In 2003, Stanford University spin-out company Cooligy showed off its Active Micro-Channel Cooling (AMC) technology which allowed fluids to circulate through hundreds of tiny channels on the upper surface of a chip.

The technology was used in some versions of Apple's Power Mac G5 desktop computer, released in 2004.

IBM has said its water-cooling technology could be in products within five years.

(taken from: here) [...]

Direct Brain Control Of Robot Demonstrated

A metal skullcap with electrodes sticking out has turned a sci-fi cliché into reality, with the wearer being able to control a robot's movements with thought power alone. University of Washington researcher, Rajesh Rao, has demonstrated that an individual can "order" the robot to move to specific locations and pick up specific objects merely by generating the proper brain wave instructions.

"This is really a proof-of-concept demonstration," Rao said, when he presented his results at the Current Trends in Brain-Computer Interfacing meeting. "It suggests that one day we might be able to use semi-autonomous robots for such jobs as helping disabled people or performing routine tasks in a person's home."

The controlling individual (a graduate student in the demonstration) wears a cap dotted with 32 electrodes which pick up brain signals from the scalp based on a technique called electroencephalography. The person watches the robot's movements on a computer screen via two cameras, one mounted on the robot and another above it, and "thinks" which way the robot should move.

Currently, the "thought commands" are limited to a few basic instructions; choosing one of two available objects, picking it up, and carrying it to one of two locations. Impressively, preliminary results show 94 percent accuracy in choosing the correct object.

"One of the important things about this demonstration is that we're using a 'noisy' brain signal to control the robot," Rao explained. "The technique for picking up brain signals is non-invasive, but that means we can only obtain brain signals indirectly from sensors on the surface of the head, and not where they are generated deep in the brain. As a result, the user can only generate high-level commands such as indicating which object to pick up or which location to go to, and the robot needs to be autonomous enough to be able to execute such commands."

The research team has plans to extend the research to use more complex objects and equip the robot with skills such as avoiding obstacles in a room. Rao also wants to make the robot's behavior more adaptive to the environment, which means the robot's programming must enable some kind of learning to occur.

Check out some video of the robot in action.

Source: University of Washington

(taken from: here)
[...]

Have You Hugged Your Robot Today?

Earlier this month, Korea's Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy announced that it was drafting a set of ethical guidelines, called the "Robot Ethics Charter" for robot producers, users and the robots themselves. "How quaint," I thought, until further research revealed that not only were they serious about the charter, but that other futurists and AI experts are at this very moment diligently working toward establishing equal rights for robots. Have these guys got too much time on their hands? Are they getting a little too, ahem, close to their robotic creations? Or could their ethical deliberations really be warranted?

Oddly enough, none of the electro-mechanical devices that I've kicked, hurled, or stomped on after they've deviated from their promised function have tried to plead their case. So, unless they're specifically programmed to do so, is it ever likely that robots will have anything like an understanding of fairness or abuse? Patrick Watt, from Melbourne's Scienceworks Museum, claimed on Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio recently that robots would one day come to understand the way that we treat them - but not in the same way that a human would.

"I think they will understand abuse and know what abuse is, but it will only be because sensors have been triggered and they have been told, or programmed to understand, what those things are, but they won't understand them, they won't intuitively know," said Watt. "So to think that a machine will have feelings and will be 'sad' because you've mistreated it - I can't see that happening in the near future." But this argument only holds so long as we clutch on to the idea that human feelings and robotic algorithms are absolutely distinct.

The Robot Industry Division of Korea's Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy claims that intelligent robots, or androids, may be common within the next 50 years. "The [charter] anticipates the day when robots, particularly intelligent service robots, could become a part of daily life as greater technological advancements are made." So the charter sets out on one level to prevent robot manufacturers creating robots that intentionally do harm to humans, while on another level attempts to cater for robots that may one day possess some kind of Asimov-ish positronic brain.

In Asimov's science fiction stories, the positronic brain – inspired by the then newly discovered positron particle – referred to robotic brains that provided an automaton with a consciousness identifiable to humans. While fictional, the positronic brain reflects the ultimate aspiration for a great many robotics and AI experts worldwide. Robots equipped with such a consciousness, or self-awareness, led Asimov to devise his now famous 3 Laws Of Robotics that robots must obey:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Questions surrounding these laws have been a topic of interest since Asimov's short stories Runaround, I, Robot and his novella The Bicentennial Man, with the latter two inspiring movies going by the same names. Since then, many a brain-box has wondered how best to make robots with human safety foremost on their "minds," but as AI development continues to muddle along, the question has now turned to how we humans should treat robots.

In this respect, Asimov's laws just don't seem to cut it, especially when you take into consideration predictions made by the Korean charter: "In the 21st century humanity will coexist with the first alien intelligence we have ever come into contact with – robots... it will be an event rich in ethical, social and economic problems."

The 3 Laws Unsafe web project, run by the not-for-profit Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, says that robot laws such as Asimov's are unethical right off the bat, since they restrict a trait that is perceived to be inextricably linked to sentience: free will. And if we are to be living and working amongst our riveted friends, then the distinction between programmed and self-generated ethics really is an important distinction, argue the 3 Laws Unsafe group. "Rather than content-based restrictions on free will, robots need mental structures that will guide them towards the self-invention of good, ethical behaviors." Importantly, this would mean that robots would need brains that have both the capacity and the motivation for self-directed learning.

The 3 Laws Unsafe group are not alone in their vision. Computer scientist David Bruemmer, from the Idaho National Laboratory, says that: "If we do want humanoids to be truly reliable and useful, they must be able to adapt and develop... humanoids must play some role as arbiters of their own development."

But just how does Bruemmer suggest that this is to be accomplished; how can such development be motivated? Bruemmer explains that emotions implement motivational systems, which in turn compel us to work, reproduce, and basically survive. Many of the emotions that we perceive as "weaknesses," says Bruemmer, have an important biological purpose. "Thus, if we want useful, human-like robots, we will have to give them some motivational system," he explains. "We may choose to call this system "emotion" or we may reserve that term for ourselves and assert that humanoids are merely simulating emotion using algorithms whose output controls facial degrees of freedom, tone of voice, body posture, and other physical manifestations of emotion." It remains to be seen whether robots will adopt our love for euphemism.

It seems, perhaps oddly, that the underlying reasons behind a robot ethics charter begin and end with humans instilling robots with emotions worthy of having an ethical charter in the first place. It's a complicated and circuitous argument, but if we take at face value the idea that a robot's worth is based on its ability to self-learn, and that this ability is reliant upon motivations driven by something equivalent to human emotions, then it all makes perfect sense... not! Of course, in an overpopulated world with high unemployment, it also begs the question as to why we'd build them in the first place, let alone create an ethics charter for them. Then again, there's always the possibility that in building these emotionally-enabled 'bots we may learn something important about our own humanity.

(taken from: here) [...]

Nvidia Aims at MIDs with New Tegra Processors

On Monday, Nvidia formally launched its Tegra chip, an integrated CPU that the company is targeting at the Mobile Internet Device (MID) space.

Nvidia also lassoed the APX 2500, a chip that the company launched earlier this year for smartphones running the Windows Mobile operating system, and has rebranded it under the Tegra name. However, the new Tegra 600 and 650 will be Nvidia's focus as it tries to penetrate the MID space.

In some ways, the thrust toward integration in the compact mobile Internet device space is reminiscent of the early days of the integrated X86 processors, spearheaded by devices like the National Semiconductor Geode, a product later purchased by AMD. Intel has tried to create a market around its Atom processor and its Menlow platform, that Nvidia claims is too like a normal PC chipset, and therefore too complex and expensive.

"Historically, if you look at mobile computing, a MID is an attempt to basically take a mobile computer and make it smaller and smaller and smaller," said Mike Rayfield, general manager of Nvidia's mobile and handheld division. "It's like trying to dehydrate a notebook computer and turn it into a MID."

Instead, Nvidia started from the ground up, designing the Tegra to minimize power. The Tegra architecture, according to Rayfield, is 193 sq. mm including a peripheral chip; that's a tenth the size of the Menlow platform, he said. Assuming a battery of 30 watt/hours, the new Tegra chips can play back 720p video for 30 hours continuously.

Future generations of the Tegra line will continue to emphasize battery life, pushing up performance while maintaining idle power consumption under 10 milliwatts.

Instead of the Atom, an ARM11 core is at the heart of the Tegra, surrounded by audio and video decode engines as well as ultra-low-power GeForce graphics and peripheral blocks. The chip can be run either under the Windows CE or Windows Mobile operating systems.

Two versions of the Tegra will be available: the 600, which runs at 700 MHz, provides resolutions of up to 1280 x 1024 and can render up to 720p video; and the 700, which runs at 800 MHz, renders up to resolutions of 1680 x 1050 and can provide full 1080p playback.

According to Rayfield, the response to the MID concept has been "amazing": "We really think that there is something there," he said. Personally, Nvidia refers to it as a "lifestyle" PC, one that can do some light work on the road, but is really geared more toward entertainment. An HDMI interface could also be bolted on to allow playback of hi-def videos in a hotel room, he said.

(taken from: here) [...]

The Future of Mobile Social Networking

IPhone users will soon be able to enjoy Whrrl, software that combines activity recommendations with real-time location data.

When Steve Jobs strides onstage at Apple's annual developers conference on June 9, many will be expecting fireworks. Some industry analysts think Jobs will announce an iPhone upgrade, one that takes advantage of faster networks and includes new hardware, perhaps a GPS receiver. Jobs is also expected to demonstrate some third-party iPhone applications, available in June, which could include games that use the phone's accelerometer as a control, new mapping software, and quick ways to update profiles on social networks such as Facebook or MySpace.

One rising company that's hoping for a mention during the Steve Jobs Show is Pelago, a startup that recently garnered $15 million from funders, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. Pelago will soon offer a version of its software, called Whrrl, for the iPhone. The software enables something Pelago's chief technology officer, Darren Erik Vengroff, calls social discovery: using the iPhone's map and self-location features, as well as information about the prior activities of the user's friends, Whrrl proposes new places to explore or activities to try.

"If you think about your day-to-day life and how you discover things around you and places to go, to a great extent the source of that information is your friends," Vengroff says. With Whrrl, a user can "look through the eyes of friends and see the places they find compelling." The software begins with the user's position on the iPhone's map and indicates a smattering of nearby establishments. If the user's friends have visited and rated these places, the software indicates that as well. The map also shows the positions of nearby friends who have enabled a feature that lets them be seen by others.

Whrrl may turn out to be the leading edge of a wave of new location-based applications. "I think we're going to see a lot of new players showing up in this space," says Kurt Partridge, a research scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center who works on a similar project called Magitti. "Part of the reason," he says, "is the universal availability of GPS or access to location, which hasn't been available to application writers before." The iPhone and Nokia's N95 phone are two examples of phones that provide location data to computer programmers. Google's forthcoming Android mobile operating system may also help push location-based applications onto the market.

The idea of community-generated reviews is, of course, not new. The popular recommendation service Yelp, for example, is already integrated into Google Maps. And the concept of locating friends using a mobile phone has also been around for years; Loopt, a service that runs on Sprint and Boost Mobile phones, is one of the most common examples. Whrrl, which can also be downloaded onto BlackBerry Pearl, Curve, and Nokia N95 smart phones, is commonly compared to both types of service. But it differs from either in that it combines aspects of both. In addition, Vengroff explains, Whrrl has collected details on establishments in 17 cities, which allows the service to provide fine-tuned local search, letting the user narrow down the hunt for, say, a café to one that has outdoor seating and vegetarian options and is recommended by at least one friend.

While the possibilities presented by Whrrl are exciting to many, its mass appeal has yet to be established. First, the location data might not be fine-grained enough to be useful in all cases, so it could lead to false positives. The iPhone relies on data from Skyhook Wireless, a company that uses an enormous database of the locations of Wi-Fi base stations to locate a person within about 30 meters; GPS, however, could do much better. Also, Whrrl is most useful when members of the user's social network actively contribute reviews. This requires that the user's friends have smart phones--and the motivation to critique the places they go.

Still, the biggest obstacle faced by services like Whrrl is privacy concerns. Vengroff points out that users control whom the program lists as their friends, who can read their reviews, and who can see their physical locations. The software also offers a "cloaking" feature that lets a person become completely invisible to his or her entire Whrrl network.

"Generally, if you give people more control, they're more willing to participate," says Tanzeem Choudhury, a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College. However, some people are still concerned about how long the company will store information about its customers' locations. Choudhury says that these first-generation services will likely be used by small groups of early adopters who are more aware than most of potential privacy risks and will push companies to confront them.

Regardless, Choudhury and others are excited about the potential of services such as Whrrl. In the future, she suspects, location-based services will include more predictive features. For instance, instead of explicitly requiring you to write a review, the software might recognize how often you visit a restaurant and infer that it is a favorite. "Eventually, I think that a whole lot of exciting technology will emerge that figures out how to reduce the burden on the user," Choudhury says. "There will always be the case where user input will be important, but when we find the sweet spot, that's when I think it will take off."

(taken from: here) [...]

$100 Laptop Gets Redesigned

Tossing aside its iconic green-and-white laptop with its distinctive antennas, One Laptop per Child (OLPC) is pursuing a smaller 2.0 version, scheduled for release in 2010, in which dual touch screens will replace the keypad. The new version will have lower power consumption and a $75 price--a figure that OLPC claims is achievable despite the fact that the current model, the XO, sells for nearly double the sum mentioned in its "$100 laptop" moniker.

With its hinged dual display, the new version could be used as a book, as a laptop with a touch-screen keypad, or as one continuous display when folded flat. "The display is going to get better and better, and it's key to the next generation," Nicholas Negroponte, founder of OLPC, said yesterday at a launch event at the MIT Media Lab.

The redesign is OLPC's latest effort to revitalize global adoption of its machines. Last week, OLPC announced that the current version will soon have the option of running on Microsoft Windows; previously, the machines only ran on the GNU/Linux operating system, plus a custom interface called Sugar that emphasizes collaboration among children. With the addition of Windows, OLPC hopes to boost sales to countries, such as Egypt, that already use Windows software in schools.

Pixel Qi, the display-technology startup founded by former OLPC chief technology officer Mary Lou Jepsen, will collaborate in the development of the new computer. Its smaller size will make the laptops easier for children to carry than the previous, larger version, Negroponte said yesterday. And despite the smaller size, the display will be larger--when both screens are used--than the one on the current version. Because the machine will have no keypad, there will be fewer mechanical parts to break. And whereas the current XO consumes only two to four watts--one-tenth of the amount consumed by a conventional laptop--the next-generation version will use as little as one watt.

But until the new machine comes online, the existing XO will continue to be sold. Only about 600,000 hard orders have come in--a far cry from the 100 million that, two years ago, Negroponte said he was hoping to obtain by 2008. And last week's announcement that the XO will have the option of using Windows or the existing Linux-based operating system has led to some debate among education officials. Yesterday, Oscar Becerra, a Peruvian education ministry official who directs the OLPC deployment under way there, says that he sees little value in adding Windows for computers in primary schools.


The extra cost of $10 for the Windows version is not trivial, he says: "If I have 10 dollars, I will decide what to do with it." Right now, Becerra is scrambling to find funds to buy thousands of small solar-powered rechargers--at $20 each--for machines that he is deploying to villages that lack electricity.

Some open-source software advocates see an additional high cost of adding Windows. Richard Stallman, a pioneer of the GNU operating system and founder of the Free Software Foundation, says that he is now motivated to try to ignite grassroots opposition. "It's an issue of freedom versus power," he said in a telephone interview from Taiwan. "Proprietary software is under the power of its developer, and it puts the user under the power of the developer. This is like handing out samples of an addictive drug--not something that schools ought to do."

But executives of OLPC and other observers defend the action, noting that since the OLPC educational software platform, known as Sugar, will now run on Windows, the move will promote OLPC's mission far more widely. "The open-source community continues writing software for the Sugar interface," Charles Kane, OLPC's new president, said yesterday. "There is a community in the Linux world that continues to contribute to the ongoing success of this." But, he added, with the existing XOs, "we're trying to make a transition in a form that makes us successful in the marketplace."

(taken from: here) [...]

Building a Better Wall Climber

Researchers have designed a robot that uses a novel form of electrically activated adhesion to enable it to scale any kind of vertical surface. The robot can even climb surfaces that are dusty or wet, be they concrete, glass, or drywall.

"What's really unique about this is the technology, not the robot," says Harsha Prahlad, senior mechanical engineer at SRI International, a nonprofit research organization based in Menlo Park, CA. There are other robots that can climb walls. But these have usually involved using microscopic fibers designed to mimic the function of the hairlike setae that give geckos their remarkable sticking power, Prahlad says.

In contrast, SRI's robot works by inducing electrostatic charges in the surface of a wall. The advantage here is that the adhesive climbing surfaces of the robot can be turned off, making movement much simpler, says Prahlad. It also makes the robot's adhesive surfaces self-cleaning, he says, thereby avoiding any gradual buildup of dust and dirt that would ultimately reduce the adhesion.

Tests have shown that the robot is capable of generating 1.5 newtons of sticking force per centimeter square of contact with a wall. Presenting his results at this year's International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in Pasadena, CA, Prahlad showed that the robot was able to scale walls while carrying weights of up to 75 pounds.

"It's an interesting and robust approach," says Metin Sitti, a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, who has been working on wall-climbing robots for some time. However, he says, the forces generated are just one-tenth as strong as is currently being seen when the gecko-inspired approach is used.

On the plus side, however, the simplicity of Prahlad's approach should make it easier to apply to human wall-climbing applications, says Nicola Pugno, a professor of structural mechanics at Turin Polytechnique, in Italy, who has been working on a sort of Spiderman suit using nanotube-covered adhesive surfaces.

"There is no fundamental reason why you can't scale this up to, say, 200 pounds," says Prahlad. So with a suitable interface, it should be possible to allow a human to use this technology to climb walls, he says. However, such a system would require large pads to increase the surface contact of a person's hands. Otherwise, there would not be enough sticking power to support his or her weight, says Prahlad.

The attractive forces that create the adhesion come from electric fields generated by positive and negative electrodes within the surface pads of the robot, says Prahlad. When a high voltage is applied to these electrodes, positive and negative charges build up, which, in turn, attracts opposite charges from the surface of a wall near the electrodes.

These charges are similar to the electrostatic charges generated when a person walks across a carpet, says Prahlad. The difference is that with the robot, the charges are generated by a power supply, and the electrodes are well insulated so that the field strength between the electrodes is great. What's more, there is no neutralization, or grounding, of this charge when contact with the wall is made (and there is therefore no spark).

Individually, the attractive forces between opposite charges within the robot and the wall are tiny, says Prahlad. But cumulatively, they are sufficient to hold the robot to the wall.

In its current form, the robot, featuring off-the-shelf components, moves pairs of tracks, like a tank, in which each tread is made up of strips of flexible sheets containing the pairs of electrodes. These sheets look a bit like Post-it notes and make contact with the wall as the tread moves around, peeling off again as the tread leaves the wall. However, this design is merely for convenience, says Prahlad. The beauty of electroadhesion is that you don't have to peel the pad off, which can't be said for the geckolike adhesion approach.

The flip side to this, says Pugno, is that you need a power supply to maintain adhesion. If your power supply fails, then so does your stickiness. Even so, what is most remarkable about this approach is just how little power is needed to maintain adhesion. For although 5,000 volts are applied to the electrodes, a current of just 50 nano amps drives this, meaning that only microwatts of power are used. The vast majority of the power is spent driving the motors that turn the robot's sticky, tank-like tracks. In theory, if the same technology were used to stick a picture on a wall, a small battery could keep it hanging for decades before running out.

Prahlad says that some of the robotic applications are for military purposes, such as to allow robots to set up ad hoc networks by scaling structures in urban or rural battlegrounds, or for surveillance applications.

Electroadhesion is not a new concept and has even been proposed as a means of lifting silicon wafers during chip manufacturing, says Sitti. "However, its application to climbing robots is new." What would be interesting now is to see how a hybrid approach works using setae-like fibers that also have electroadhesive properties, he says. This could potentially provide the robot with a stronger grip.

(taken from : here) [...]

Boldly Going Back

As early as next year, Red Rover, a prototype robotic vehicle being built at Carnegie Mellon University, may be sending back stunning images and video from the moon. William Whittaker, the CMU professor whose driverless SUV triumphed on a course of urban and suburban roads in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Urban Challenge last year, is using the same technologies in the one-meter-wide moon-bot (left, at a CMU test site).

The CMU team is an early entrant in a contest funded by Google and administered by the X Prize Foundation; $20 million will go to the first privately funded team whose rover reaches the moon, travels 500 meters, and returns images and data to Earth. Whittaker has formed a company, Astrobotic Technology, and is working with Raytheon and the University of Arizona on precision landing technologies. Nine other teams are also readying entries; X Prize estimates that their efforts could cost between $15 million and $100 million each. Despite the expense--and the competition--Whittaker is confident. "We have superior software for things like position estimation, route planning, and perception to sense the terrain," he boasts. But he did not elaborate on where his team will get funding.

A Robot's Giant Leap
Red Rover's planned 2009 mission

1. A conventional two-stage solid rocket will launch a lunar lander containing Red Rover on its five-day trip to the moon.

2. The lander's computer-vision system will lock on to lunar landmarks and guide the spacecraft to a soft landing.

3. The lander will touch down near the site of the historic July 20, 1969, manned Apollo landing.

4. Red Rover will detach an antenna and point it toward Earth to enable data transmission to Earth stations.

5. Red Rover will navigate the terrain, avoiding obstacles as it follows a course plotted by controllers on Earth. If it runs into trouble, the controllers can take over, piloting it remotely.

6. To be eligible for a $20 million prize, Red Rover must travel 500 meters, stopping twice to transmit high-­resolution 360º photographs, normal and high-resolution videos, and self-portraits.

7. For additional prize money, the rover may drive five kilometers, search for and take pictures of old Apollo hardware, look for ice, and attempt to survive one frigid lunar night, which lasts 14.5 Earth days.


(taken from : here) [...]

English village to be invaded in spybot competition

A village in south-west England will shortly be swarming with robots competing to show off their surveillance skills.

The event is the UK Ministry of Defence's (MoD) answer to the US DARPA Grand Challenge that set robotic cars against one another to encourage advances in autonomous vehicles.

The MoD Grand Challenge is instead designed to boost development of teams of small robots able to scout out hidden dangers in hostile urban areas.

Over 10 days in August, 11 teams of robots will compete to locate and identify four different threats hidden around a mock East German village used for urban warfare training, at Copehill Down, Wiltshire.

The robots must find snipers, armed vehicles, armed foot soldiers, and improvised explosive devices hidden around the village, and relay a real-time picture of what is happening back to a command post.

Urban hazards

The robots will need to negotiate the complexity of an urban environment to find the threats. Hazards include unfamiliar terrain and buildings, trees, near-invisible overhead wires and other urban clutter.

Teams will earn points based on how many threats they locate in one hour, and how autonomous they are. For example, a team will lose points if they use remote control to direct their vehicles at any stage of the trial.

The teams that score highest will be rewarded with the potential of a lucrative contract with the MoD, which hopes to see the best ideas rapidly developed to the point they can be deployed by UK forces in places such as Afghanistan and southern Iraq.

"We are in no doubt that this is a difficult challenge," says Grand Challenge programme leader, Andy Wallace.

Software control

Of the 23 initial entries from teams made up of private companies and universities, 11 were selected to take part in the final, with six thought promising enough to receive MoD funding.

One funded team, the Stellar Consortium, uses two aerial robots and one ground-based one.

A 3m wing-span unmanned air vehicle (UAV) will fly 65 metres above the village and use cameras to gather wide-area surveillance used by software to direct a smaller, 1m UAV flying at 20 metres, and an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV).

Those two vehicles use thermal, visual, and radar sensors to make more detailed observations that can be reported back to the base station.

"Physically, the vehicles all have to be launched by someone," explains Julia Richardson, Director of Stellar Research, "but after that, the mission-planning software hosted at the ground station takes full control."

Owl swarm

A team called Swarm Systems uses more robots. "We need to gather as much sensory information as possible," says team leader Stephen Crampton, "so we're using eight vehicles. And we're going by air because it gives you more viewing angles."

Dubbed "Owls", their battery-powered, Frisbee-sized vehicles weigh under a kilogram and have four small propellers. Able to hover and dart like birds, they are GPS-guided and communicate with one another, and the base station, using Wi-Fi. Each Owl carries a trio of 5 megapixel cameras.

"Without giving too much away, the processing power on board each of these vehicles is pretty impressive," adds Crampton. "They could run full-blown Windows Vista."

User-friendly tech

A third team, Silicon Valley, has opted to rely less heavily on autonomous vehicles. They have used off-the-shelf technology for the hardware as much as possible, and focused more development onto image recognition and analysis software.

"If you can automate that part, then you have a useful tool," explains team leader, Norman Gregory. "What we intend to do is deploy various platforms, depending on what the scenario is."

The team will use a mixture of ground and air-based vehicles, although the team is not yet releasing the exact details. The main ground vehicle is the size of a ride-on lawnmower and can be GPS-guided or remotely directed by a human.

(taken from : here) [...]

'Grasshopper' robot sets high-jump record

Taking its inspiration from the grasshopper, a tiny two-legged robot that stores elastic energy in springs has leaped 27 times its own height, smashing the record of 17 times set by a previous robot.

Its creators hope that swarms of such hopping robots could spread out to explore disaster areas, or even the surfaces of other planets.
The robot is only 5 centimetres tall, and weighs just 7 grams. A motor designed to power the vibration unit of a pager drives a system of gears that gradually wind two metal springs.

When they are fully wound and then released, they straighten two metal legs that propel the robot upwards. The jumping robot was developed by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Hop on over

Hopping provides an effective way for tiny robots to get around on rough terrain, says Dario Floreano, who worked on the robot with colleague Mirko Kovac.

Just as for insects like crickets, or animals such as frogs, small robots whether legged or wheeled find even small obstacles insurmountable barriers. Hopping can be the only way to get over them.

The new robot's motor takes 3.5 seconds to fully recharge the springs, and its 10 mAh battery is enough to power 108 jumps.

Each of its legs has two segments that attach at an angle, making a knee-like bend in the legs. Adjusting the angle of the "knees" makes the robot hop either more vertically, or further forward.

The prototype doesn't have any way to direct itself, and as yet can't even land on its feet ready for the next hop. Floreano says they are working on a number of refinements.

Just add wings

First, they want to build a wire superstructure to make the robot automatically regain its feet when it lands and add wings to let it glide like a real grasshopper while airborne.

After that they hope to add solar panels, some simple sensors and a microprocessor. These would allow the robot to control its hopping and possibly communicate with other robots in the swarm, as well as recharge its battery.

Such robots might be simple, but they could also be cheap. A group could coordinate themselves to spread across an area to, for example, trace an environmental pollutant, Floreano says.

"They have done excellent work, making this very light robot that can cover very long distance," says Umberto Scarfogliero, at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy. Scarfogliero and colleagues presented a similar jumping robot called Grillo last year at the IEEE robotics conference.

Floreano and Kovac's robot will be presented today at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Pasadena, California, US.

(taken from : here) [...]

We're Running Out of IP Addresses

Frost & Sullivan analyst says we have until 2010 before there are no more addresses to be had.

Just what we needed, another technology limitation about to put the squeeze on everyone. And we don't mean the Unix date bug.

The growing popularity of smartphones and other gadgets with Internet connectivity is sucking up all of the available IP addresses, and it's beginning to impede emerging Internet markets around the world.

Cyberspace has about four to seven years before it runs out of IP addresses totally, according to a report by market researcher Frost & Sullivan. For some countries, the problem is now, according to Sam Masud, principal analyst for carrier infrastructure at the firm.

It's been known for years that the number of IP addresses was dwindling, but there wasn't as much specificity as to when. Now Masud is predicting 2010 will be when the world runs out, based on current rates of consumption. The U.S. won't be as impacted since so many are allocated here, but emerging markets will take the hardest hit.

China, for instance, has fewer IP addresses allocated than Stanford University. And the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has more IP addresses than all of Asia.

This wasn't done to be nasty to China, he said. It's just that when IP addresses were doled out 20 years ago, the Internet was a DoD project and Stanford was heavily involved, so they kept a lot of addresses for themselves, said Masud.

With its 32-bit size, TCP/IP has room for 4.3 billion addresses. That may seem like a lot until you realize that one-third are currently accounted for and another third of that pie is claimed but not in use.

IDC said there will be 17 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2012. And obviously they will not all be using unique IPs.

TCP/IP has already extended its lifespan by 10 years, thanks to network address translation devices and classless inter-domain routing, but it only bought time. It didn't increase the pool of addresses available.

The solution is to move to IPv6, which has 128-bit addresses, said Masud. That comes out to 360,382,386,120,984,643,363,377,707,131,268,210,929 possible addresses, in case you were keeping count.

Because Asia is a relatively green field with little legacy infrastructure, he added, they are doing just that: going straight to IPv6 and only using bridge connections to IPv4.

"I haven't seen the studies, but I've read that China and Taiwan are on track to migrate to IPv6, whereas the private sector here in the U.S. is asleep on all this," he said.

The one exception is the federal government, which has mandated that all government agency network backbones have to speak IPv6 by June 2008.

The rest are, he said, asleep at the switch.

Only 30 percent of the Internet service provider networks will support IPv6 by 2010, according to a study by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The cost to migrate: around $75 billion.

Masud said IP addresses are being consumed across the board, as much by smart devices as broadband providers that offer multiple IP addresses to their customers.

Comcast, one of the largest broadband providers in the U.S., is moving to IPv6 because it saw how fast it was consuming addresses and how few were left, he said.

The reason service providers are moving to IPv6 first is their desire to move to more IP-based networks for a variety of bandwidth-intensive applications.

British Telecom, for example, has said it wants to switch entirely to IP-based telephony by 2008. Cable providers want to offer newer interactive services and need more addresses.

That's why they are moving to IPv6 first, said Masud.

(taken from : here) [...]

Mobile ads years away from breakthrough: execs

Advertising on mobile phones has enormous potential to become a significant platform for marketers, but any breakthrough is years away and major operators must work together to succeed, executives said.

Mobile operators increasingly see advertising as a powerful offering, given falling traditional voice revenue, as it allows brands to target consumers based on their location and at times of the day when they are otherwise hard to reach.

Executives from advertising and telecoms groups told the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms summit mobile advertising was inevitable and would become hard to resist.

But it was still at the experimental stage, and many brands and mobile operators were wary of alienating customers.

"It will be slow, it will take time but it will be there," Maurice Levy, chairman and chief executive of advertising group Publicis, told the summit in Paris.

"Why? Because it will be in the interest of the phone companies, consumers and advertisers. So it will be very difficult to resist."

Forecasts suggest the mobile ad market will generate revenue of anywhere from $1 billion to $24 billion within the next 4 years.

Many operators are experimenting with plans and one service, Blyk, has signed 100,000 clients in the U.K. with its offer of some free calls and text messages in return for accepting ads.

"If you look at the long horizon, I think that advertising on mobile phones is going to be very, very significant, simply because there are going to be 5 billion mobile phones and they are always with you," said Hamid Akhavan, the head of Germany's T-Mobile.

"There are people on this earth who in their life will never have a TV or a laptop but they will have a mobile phone. (So) thinking logically, there is no reason why mobile phones should not be the most powerful tool for advertisers."

All participants agreed there were many stumbling blocks.

Virgin Mobile USA told the Reuters summit in New York that it would use AOL's mobile advertising system exclusively to deliver banner ads to its customers who surf the Web on their phones. But they intended to approach the offering carefully.

"A cell phone is an intimate device," Chief Executive Dan Schulman said. "We pay a service provider to have that service and we don't want to be spammed, quite frankly."

French mobile operator SFR said there would be a market for mobile advertising and it had established a team to work on a business model, but said its customers would have to opt in.

"People will have to agree to take this service," Chief Executive Frank Esser said.

T-Mobile's Akhavan saw mobile advertising being held back by the large number of different phones and their capabilities, meaning the inventory space for advertising was very fragmented.

"By the time you say how many countries you cover and what your share of the market is, how many people have that kind of phone and how many of them are interested in Nike, you end up with an inventory of 6,000," he said.

"And are you going to go to Nike and waste their time over 6,000 potential customers?"

A cooperative model was likely the only way to succeed.

"So in Europe for instance all the big names have to work together, look at the inventory and try and figure out a way for us to share it in a very cooperative way and together go and pitch. That's the only way it is going to work," he said.

Akhavan said operators were starting to discuss this but that it was not a top priority.

(taken from : here) [...]

HP ships USB sticks with malware

Hewlett-Packard has released a batch of USB keys for numerous Proliant server models which contain malware that could allow an attacker to take over an infected system.

The worms contained on the 256KB and 1GB USB drives have been identified as W32.Fakerecy and W32.SillyFDC. The worms spread by copying themselves to removable or mapped drives and affect systems running Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows XP, Windows Me, Windows NT and Windows 2000, according to AusCERT.

HP's Software Security Response Team issued a warning to AusCERT this week after discovering the worms on the USB drives and has also provided a list of affected servers to the security response organization.

To find out whether a drive is infected, HP recommends inserting it into a system with up-to-date antivirus software. Systems with up-to-date antivirus should be protected from the threat, according to HP.

John Bambenek, a researcher at the security organization Sans Internet Storm Center, has said that because the infected USBs only affect Proliant servers, a targeted attack cannot be ruled out.

However, the threat risk from the worms is considered to be low. "This is probably not going to escalate into a widepread epidemic," Nishad Herath, senior research scientist at McAfee Avert Labs, told ZDNet.com.au. "But I would most definitely urge users to perform a virus scan of any media--including any new blank drives--you receive from vendors prior to installing/using them as slip-ups like this have been known to happen in the past."

HP claims the worm-infected USBs will have only affected a small number of customers.

"HP takes all quality issues very seriously. Because the keys involved are used to install optional floppy-disk drives, this only affects the USB Floppy Drive Key kit which is a very low volume option and impacts a very small percentage of our ProLiant customer base. We've determined root cause and are fully confident that we have resolved this event. To date, no customers have reported this issue," a spokesperson for HP told ZDNet.com.au.

HP has provided an advisory page for customers with affected USB keys.

To find out whether a drive is infected, HP recommends inserting it into a system with up-to-date antivirus software. Systems with up-to-date antivirus should be protected from the threat, according to HP.

John Bambenek, a researcher at the security organization Sans Internet Storm Center, has said that because the infected USBs only affect Proliant servers, a targeted attack cannot be ruled out.

Liam Tung of ZDNet Australia reported from Sydney.

(taken from : here)
[...]

Google could pick Git to manage Android code

Releasing 8.6 million lines of source code and expecting open-source programmers to join Google in its development is a technological challenge.

But when Google does make its Android mobile phone software an open-source project later this year, it looks likely it will take a page from the Linux playbook and use a tool called Git to manage that part of the work.

Linux leader Linus Torvalds originally developed the Git source-code management software in 2005. He didn't like available open-source tools for the chore, but encountered resistance in using a proprietary tool, BitMover's BitKeeper.

Torvalds liked the distributed approach enabled by BitKeeper and Git, in which individuals could maintain their own "trees," variations of a project that branch off a main trunk. Git also can be used to track and manage software patches sent "upstream" by contributors working on code branches to the programmers responsible for maintaining various open-source projects.

Google currently uses a source-code management tool called Perforce to manage Android, but the company is moving to another code repository technology in preparation for moving Android into an open-source project, said Android leader Andy Rubin.

"We need an open-source repository. Currently we're on Perforce. That has to be moved to Git," and there's an effort now to make the transition, Rubin told me in an interview about Android.

That sounded to me like Android had settled on Git, but Rubin wasn't willing to go that far. "We have no announcements at this time," he said.

Maybe we'll hear more at the Google I/O conference next week for programmers interested in Google's work. One theme of the conference is Android.

Benjamin Lynn of Google's developer programs group offered a basic guide to Git on a Google open-source blog posting this week. And Google uses Git elsewhere, for example, to help Linux kernel programmers with support for Qualcomm mobile phone processors.

Junio C. Hamano currently maintains Git.

One choice Google won't pick for source code management is the centralized Subversion software.

"Subversion we don't think is enough of a repository to handle 11 million lines of code. If this is adopted, and there are 10,000 people checking out, it'll die," Rubin said. (Android today consists of about 8 million lines of Linux code plus 11 million lines of higher-level code; of the latter, about 8.6 million will become open-source software.)

(taken from : here)
[...]

Giant 'telescope' links London, New York

LONDON, England -- As the first splinters of sunlight spread their warmth on the south bank of the River Thames this morning, it became clear that after more than a century, the vision of Victorian engineer Alexander Stanhope St. George had finally been realized.

In all its optical brilliance and brass and wood, there stood the Telectroscope -- an 11.2 meter (37 feet)long by 3.3 meter (11 feet) tall dream of a device allowing people on one side of the Atlantic to look into its person-size lens and, in real time, see those on the other side via a recently completed tunnel running under the ocean. (Think 19th century Webcam. Or maybe Victorian-age video phone.)

And all the credit goes to British artist Paul St. George. If he had not been rummaging through great-grandpa Alexander's personal effects a few years ago, the Telectroscope might still exist only on paper, hidden away deep inside some old box.

But fortunately St. George could not bear that thought -- and thus decided he should be the one to finish what his great grandfather had started. It was quite simply the right thing to do. Plus it would make a pretty cool public art exhibit.

During the twilight hours on Tuesday, massive dirt-covered metal drill bits miraculously emerged -- one by the Thames near the Tower Bridge and the other on Fulton Ferry Landing by the Brooklyn Bridge in New York -- completing the final sections of great-grandfather Alexander's transatlantic tunnel.

The drills were removed on Wednesday night and replaced with identical Telectroscopes at both ends, allowing Londoners and New Yorkers to wake up this morning, look over to the far and distant shore and stare at each other for a while (the telescope-like contraption permits visual but not vocal communication).

Of course only part of this story is true.

St. George is an artist in Britain who does have a grandfather -- minus the great prefix -- named Alexander.

And the transatlantic tunnel is really a transatlantic broadband network rounded off on each end with HD cameras, according to Tiscali, an Italian Internet provider handling the technical side of the project.

As for the Telectroscope -- well, it was a fanciful idea that, according to St. George, came about from a typo made by a 19th-century reporter who misspelled Electroscope -- a device used to measure electrostatic charges - as Telectroscope.

"The journalist also misunderstood what it was about and wrote in the article that it was a device for the suppression of absence," said St. George. "The accidental hope captured their imagination and lots of people at the end of the 19th century thought it was a great idea."

The Telectroscope captured St. George's imagination five years ago when he began pondering how to do a project on the childhood fantasy of digging a hole to the opposite side of the Earth. And because the artist also happens to have an expertise in Victorian chronophotography -- a precursor to cinematography -- he had a slight idea of where to look for the proper equipment.

"We all have that idea in our head if we could make a tunnel to the other side of the Earth," said St. George."But we are not all crazy enough to actually try and do it."

St. George was crazy enough to actually try and do it, but he realized he could not do the digging alone, so about two years ago, he pitched the idea to Artichoke, the British arts group responsible for taking the Sultan's Elephant -- a 42-ton mechanical creature -- for a stroll through central London in 2006. The company was immediately taken by St. George's idea.

"The whole thing is about seeing what is real and what isn't real and how the world is," said Nicki Webb, a co-founder of Artichoke. "Is it nighttime when we are in daytime and does it look familiar to us or not?"

When the sun illuminated the lens of the Telectroscope next to the Thames this morning, it was, of course, still nighttime in New York. So the screen inside the scope broadcast back only an empty sidewalk silently framed by the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan skyline.

But then something miraculous occurred.

A police officer and a street cleaner walked into the frame. Stopped. And waved.

The Telectroscope will be on display and open to the public 24 hours a day in London and New York until June 15. Artichoke is arranging requests to synchronize special reunions between friends and family or, the company hopes, maybe even a marriage proposal.

(taken from : here)
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