The future of the biz, according the Verizon CTO Richard Lynch, lies in broadband, the copper biz is fading out. The growth of data transported by 2G systems in Verizon has basically stayed stable in the 2004-2008 period whilst 3G has moved from 0 to 4,000 TB per year and the forecast for LTE is a growth in the range of 2,000,000 TB, that is a 500 times growth and this will happen in the next 5 years. The content streamed is similarly growing, along with the User Generated Content.

In front of this figure a company like Verizon has no option but become a broadband company based on fibre and LTE.

FIOS today provides multi-room DVR, 500 television channels, 120 HD channels, 15,000 movie titles per month, widgets and 50/20 Mbps (down/up) speed. Video subscription grew from 1.6 M 3Q2008 to 2.7 M 3Q2009, and 2.2M bought data connection in 2008 growing to 3.3M in the 3Q2009, most of them happy with 10Mbps (not paying surcharge for higher speed).

Although they have plenty of fibre, Verizon looks at its biz as a wireless one and is committed to LTE, they have created an LTE Innovation center open to industry and is performing an LTE network trial, including streaming video.

Verizon is thinking on moving from proprietary shops to sell their services and devices with their own apps store and customer support to a mall paradigm where customer will find Verizon offer, can buy apps there or somewhere else, get support from Verizon or from the “geek squad”.

Openness is the way to go: it cuts costs and increase the market reach. Additionally it may incentivise Consumer Electronics to use Verizon Networks (and a good step in that direction has been the 700MHz auction).This Openness can also be seen at the level of service creation where Verizon is enabling third parties developing services making use of their data centre to get customer data like position, terminal type… and Verizon gets paid per “dip” (that is for every query related to one of their customers). IMS is seen as a way to control these accesses and maintain value in the network.

Here comes another video from Microsoft that shows its vision of future. At this time it is focused on retail. On it, the fundamental accessory for enhancing the user experience in store is the mobile terminal and, as Saracco commented in my last post, it gives the telecommunication companies many revenue opportunities.

Using the handset, the user can create a shopping list and update it when new things to buy are being remembered. As the consumer enters the market, his/her list is automatically recognized by the store system and its order is changed according to the proximity of each item. Then, a map is plotted on the mobile screen with all the items location. As the consumer pass by a product, s/he is informed in the case it is on a promotion.

Price updates are done wirelessly and they are shown in small screens in front of the products. The consumer does not need to enter an aisle to check if some product is available or not because s/he is notified by the system that also notifies the responsible for restocking it. When the product is restocked, the consumer is again notified.

Then, when the shopping is done, the system calculates the sum of all the items purchased [and also shows the amount of money saved] and the user can automatically pay for it using his/her favorite payment method.

As shown in the previous post, the augmented reality and multitouch can be applied here to make the shopping experience even easier, faster and funnier.

Google Social Search is a tool that allows users to search and find postings from their own social network or better their own social circle, the whole of relations and friends as part of a Web.

The idea is to find publicly available content from one’s own social circle. Today people have many different places where they make social connections and publish web content like blogs, status updates, twitts and pictures; people choose to publish much of this content publicly for everyone to see. Users have a kind of extended social circle. This translates to a public social web of content that has special relevance to each person, but that information is not easy to find in one single place. That’s the new experiment on Google Labs called Google Social Search that helps people find  relevant public content from their broader social circle.

Google Social Search is a surface that put content together in one single place: the way Google does it, is by building a social circle of user ‘s friends and contacts using the connections linked from the user public Google Profile, for example people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed.
To use  Social Search a user needs to sign onto his Google Account so that results are specific to him; in addition, if the user has a Gmail account, Google will also include  chat, buddies, contacts and groups; the same goes if the user uses Google Reader, the websites where user subscriptions are part of the social search results.

This is a new way to exploit the potential of user generated information and content. An individual can search in the public context of his social circle in which he trusts. A new way to leverage on the knoledge of one’s friends’ digital shadows.

I’ve recently read the paper Converging Cognitive Enhancements by Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom. Authors argued that there are few resources more useful than cognitive ability. Cognition can be defined as the processes an organism uses to capture and organize information. This includes acquiring information (perception), selecting (attention), representing (understanding), retaining (memory) and using it to optimize behaviors (reasoning and coordination). Then cognitive enhancement is the amplification or extension of these core cognitive capacities through improvement or augmentation of internal or external information processing systems.

Paper captured even more my attention when they mentioned that increasing links between environment and Users is an excellent example of cognitive enhancement. Imagine many pieces of software helping people in acquiring more and better selected information, representing, organizing, correlating it, keeping multiple items in memory, performing everyday routine tasks, etc.

We see that this cognitive enhancement can be achieved through embedding communications in sensors, clothes, food packaging and other everyday objects; so, following this trend, future communications will not focus on people only, but on any networking of “people, machine and things” and, quoting Sandberg, this “increased communication will be the key to increasing social intelligence”.

On the other hand, given the growing availability of computing, communication and storage capabilities at low costs, what appears more crucial (and probably strategic) is the ability to link together these objects and pieces of information into usable concepts and associations. This might be a new “missing link” to reach Customers and thus to create new potential opportunities.

Anyway, what appears amazing to me, from another perspective, is that also scientific community (e.g. see FP7 Vth Call, Strategic Objective 1.1, closed yesterday) and many standardization bodies are recognizing the need (and the potential) of introducing (or enhancing) cognitive capabilities into future networks!

Currently, most efforts focus on cognitive radios (research in this domain is well ahead compared to cognitive networking which is just taking off). Main idea behind cognitive networking is that future networks (in order to face their growing complexity) have to embed cognitive capabilities making them self-aware of their status, capable of taking decisions (according to determined plans, policies, end-to-end goals) and acting accordingly. These autonomic decisions (with limited human intervention) will encompass self-management, self-control and cross-layer (and even cross-node and cross-domain) self-optimization of real and virtual resources. Again, cognitive networking is based on acquiring data/information (this time from the network), selecting, representing, retaining it (e.g., with a combination of statistical and semantic models) and using it (e.g., machine learning, large scale reasoning) to optimize network behaviors (e.g., optimization algorithms).

Indeed we’re talking about converging cognitive enhancements.

(paper is available at http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/converging.pdf).

Probably, the biggest problem of indoor photos -or night scene photos- is the bad quality of picture with noise. We can use a flashlight but it often does not express well the right expression of the moment; the background does not appear well, the foreground(person) is too bright to be seen naturally.

However, Image sensors has been evolved through the time. Sony, Omnivision have been designing new type of image sensor which is called Back illuminated CMOS. It’s a tweaked CMOS sensor that takes more light than ordinary one. Now, Toshiba announced another Back illuminated image sensor which is applicable for cameraphones. Here you can see how it works :

Theoretically, by using this kind of image sensor we can take brighter and less noise images even in the dark places. (Company claims that light absorption is boosted by 40%, resulting in bright pictures despite the high-density 1/2.3-inch sensor) This will bring cameraphones to be more effective gadgets for photo shooting, catching up the image quality of the advanced digital cameras such as high-end models.

Researchers at the Arizona State University have found a way to create a diode (the bit equivalent in electronics) using a single molecule. The drive towards smaller and smaller elemental component has been on for the last 40 years. Now miniaturization has reached the nanoscale (40nm is now an industrial process with 20nm on sight in the next decade and possible 4nm by the end of the decade). A single molecule is below the nm size but one has to remember that to get the number of molecules needed at a, say, 20nm scale one has to consider that they are arranged in a volume, non on a line. Hence, to create a component based on a 20nm scale with a 0.2nm molecules you need 100³ molecules, that is 1 million molecules. Note that this calculation needs to be taken with a grain of salt since many of those molecules also serve the purpose to create a substrate, still we are talking, even at that incredibly small size of a huge number of molecules.

It comes as a staggering advance, then, the results of these Arizona researchers, led by N.J.Tao, that have shown how to create a diode using just a single molecule. The feat is accomplished by using asymmetrical molecules that respond differently depending on the interaction applied.

Asymmetrical molecule used as a diode

The technique developed by Tao’s group relies on a property known as AC modulation. “Basically, we apply a little periodically varying mechanical perturbation to the molecule. If there’s a molecule bridged across two electrodes, it responds in one way. If there’s no molecule, we can tell.”

It is interesting to note that this group of researchers operates in the Biodesign Institute, that is the department looking at how Nature works.

The application of these discoveries are still far away (10 years?) but it is nice to know that we have still a way to go ahead of us.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091013110042.htm

When Wolfram announced Alpha, its marvel search engine able to calculate results based on the information sought (you type Moon Earth and it gives you the average distance, the orbit parameter and calculates the actual distance at the time of the question) there was a lot of commotion by web users. They reached 2.8 million hits a day. But after a few months the hit fell to 200,000.

Now Wolfram has announced a plan to revive interest on its engine. The plan calls for releasing application programming interface to let other parties to develop applications based on the results that Alpha provides. An iPhone application has also been announced.

According to the news published by Technology Review:

It will be interesting to see how third-parties leverage the depth of Wolfram Alpha’s knowledge in math, science, geography, and engineering beyond the simple search-engine-like interface that now confronts users. Right now, the engine has a ways to go to meet the goal of its brainchild, the physicist Stephen Wolfram, to “make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone.”

It is also interesting, from our point of view, to see that the biz shifts to ecosystem as a way to harvest new wealth.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24254/?nlid=2439&a=f

At a meeting, a professor from the London Business School said that one of her students was asked by a recruiter to be accepted as his friend on Facebook so that he could see who he was in the social life!

This is pretty scaring, particularly so because I am told it is becoming usual. In the past we would have considered unfair were we asked about our age. Now we are being asked for prying into our social life.

A previous post talked about the new eBook device “nook” introduced by Barnes & Noble. The announcment follows the book price war between Amazon and WalMart that happened just one week before. I’m wondering if the publishing industry is entering a 2nd business evolution after the internet era. In this post today, however,  I just focus on the eBook reader market.

Amazon says that people using Kindles now buy 3.1 times as many books as they did before owning a Kindle. Sony says that its eBook customers download about 8 books a month, on average. These numbers show  a 6.7 books purchasing increase with respect to the average American buyer in 2008. I still worry about the near future growth of the eBook market, although I really want to have one for myself as well. Consider these two aspects :

1. Recession is a 2-side sword for the eBook sales. One advantage of the eBook sales is the changing in the cost structure; because of that they can tag a much lower price than traditional book, and more customers are aware of the lower price tag. On the other hand customers will tight their gadget expense during recession.

2. The sale growth of ebook readers might slow down if there is no more fundamental materials to be offered in the near future. Addressing new cosntituencies like the education and corporate market. The particular market sector couldn’t sustain the whole business.

The following chart shows the basic perspective of the eBook market for some major players.

The cool thing that hit me after studying these eBook devices is that I discovered that most of them had already solved my concerns related to the customer behavior part. For instance, you can find beautiful Text Highlight and Note functions in Sony’s PRS-600SC. And “Lend-me” function in Nook. Purchasing availability when traveling abroad on Kindle.

London College of Fashion (LCF), based in London’s übertrendy Soho district, and UK telecoms firm BT made some interesting predictions. What about clothes peppered with plastic LEDs that let you change the fabric’s pattern?

The idea is that plastic LEDs could be woven into a fabric, connected by soft circuitry. It would then be a breeze to change your patterns to this season’s colours.

According to their prediction clothing will become part of a “personal area network”, a digital bubble in which the gadgets in your clothes communicate with your handhelds. Organic wiring will be used in garments to connect different devices, such as memory chips storing photos, and thin, flexible “e-paper” displays that will screen the images.