On the eve of the new year I stumbled on an article on the growth of Internet. But it was New Year eve and I just put it aside. Yesterday, I picked it up again and I think it makes for a good reading. So take a look at it.

Getting closer to the inflection point

Basically, it points out that although many people in the world are not yet connected to the Internet and we are seeing an increasing growth there are signs that this is going to change in a short while, as soon as this year, 2011, someone says, or in 2013 at the latest. That is the time where the growth reaches an inflection point, a point where each year after that will see less and less people joining with respect to the previous years whilst so far has always been more joining year after year.

As shown in the figure on the left, the time of the inflection point is tied to the assumption on the final penetration of internet users, if we assume a (unrealistic) 100% the inflection point may happen in 2013 whilst it may happen this year if the final penetration ends up to be 80%.

Of course these are theoretical curves and the real ones may differ (as they differed in the past -see the white line representing the actual growth) but it is anyhow important to take note that an inflection point is due any day now.

The importance relies on the fact that along with the inflection point comes (soon after that) a change in the market dynamics. From an explosion of business we are likely to move into a consolidation, which is what has happened (still evolving) in the telecom area.

After the big bang are we going to see a big crunch? May be, but -may be- we have already had a big crunch, it just went un-noticed because of the parallel expansion. There have been hundreds (thousands) of internet companies that went out of business but they are, in general, so small that we hardly notice.

This may change after the inflection point as the ecosystem will see more and more aggregation taking place (is the emergence of the AppStore a first indication of this aggregation?) and at that point it will be easier to notice any crunch.

Will see.

The current smart phones are more than just a modern wallet. They carry both your personal and professional details, and all this information, at best, is now just an easy-crackable password away from intruders.

At worst, losing those devices can “release”products beforehand. But having your personal information stolen is more worrisome, since more and more people are using mobile banking features. According to a study by TowerGroup, this has been used by nearly 18 million users last year and its usage is expected to reach 27.4 million users this year and more than 53 million next year.

Use of NFC in Japan is an everyday experience

With the introduction of new devices with NFC (Near Field Communication) embedded, the Nexus S for example, payments will be even easier for users of such devices.

In Japan NFC is now present in over 10 million cel phones and it is being used in supermarket, newsstand and transportation. According to AdaptiveMobile, an
international company specialized in mobile security, attacks on Google’s Android smartphones quadrupled and attacks on Java based phones increased by 45%.

Mobile payment through cell phones is the natural evolution to be expected in the coming years. This is opening up new opportunities for Operators not as much in the area of taking share out of the transaction but in the opportunity of creating a personal story. Managing the data of a person for that person is a great service that can be monetized.

However, what is most interesting for n Operator in this area is the opportunity to add value in the payment transaction, beyond guaranteeing its security and easiness. When you pay your cell phone can get the information on the product you are buying and keep this information available for you at a later time when you may need it. Bought a product at the grocery store and once home you wonder how to cook it? Just browse your phone for the item and ask for the information. Got a television few months ago that now is not working properly? No need to look for the warranty and support centre: just browse the phone and click on the services associated to the item to be put in touch with the support centre having them seamlessly receive the info on the product you have problem with…

It is really a new area opening up for Telecom Operators.

Researchers of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley, have carried out an experimental demonstration of GRIN (for gradient index) plasmonics.

It is a hybrid technology paving the way to a wide range of exotic optics, including superfast computers based on light rather than electronic signals, optical microscopes able to resolve DNA molecules, and invisibility cloaking devices.

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2011/01/24/grin-plasmonics/

GRIN plasmonics combines methodologies from transformation optics and plasmonics: in transformation optics, the physical space through which light travels is warped to control the light’s trajectory (similar to the way in which outer space is warped by a massive object under Einstein’s relativity theory); in plasmonics, light is confined in dimensions smaller than the wavelength of photons in free space, making it possible to match the different length-scales associated with photonics and electronics in a single nanoscale device.

These technologies may have deep impacts on future pervasive networking and computing.

Taking into account that yesterday, January 27th, was the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I was wondering about the new way we are collecting our remembrance. The human kind has always relied on objects and visual aids to help remember the past and the important things of one’s mind or of  a collective group.

Think about the reminiscences boxes and rooms of the popes and kings, the cathedrals and books of medieval time. The archial mind of the illuminist created the science classification, the encyclopedia, the museums and other collector’s institutes. Mostly of it today has been digitalized and it’s available on internet. The computer has become our reminiscence box.

All we need to know and remember is saved there, somewhere in the virtual space. The interesting thing is that this new technology, although easier to access, has become very hard to keep. The biggest problem today is how to save all the data we produce.

The breakthrough seems to be the external data base servers that can also be used for processing programs that can’t be held in our own personal computers. When it is necessary to exchange a large number of data in real time, when the amount of bandwidth is increasing geometrically, one of the best solutions available today is to rely on an optical fiber infrastructure that allows not only the larger info exchange but also the real time interaction between personal computer and server.

According to Martin Lindstrom, in his book “Buy-ology”, 85% of our consumer habits are unconscious (see an interesting interview with the author where he gives some interesting examples).

If most of the time we don’t know why we do or buy things, how accurate can be the surveys that have been made in the last decades?

For sure they had and still have their value in market segmentation and products launching, but more is needed, specially if we think that a very big number of new products (more than 40% in the USA) disappears before the end of their first year of existence, and almost all of them seemed fitting for potential customers in previous surveys with experimentations or questionnaires.

Many efforts in a deeper understanding of our consumer behavior are being done. Neuromarketing approach is one of them, which goes straight and literally inside our minds. Although it has a great potential accuracy, this technique is very complicated, expensive and is carried out in artificial scenarios.

The question, so, remains: How could we have more trustful insights about consumers in order to, not only describe, but also predict their behaviors?

Some interesting researches are being done at Media Lab, and I particularly liked two of them to help in this matter:

The first one is being developed by the Human Dynamics Laboratory, led by Alex Pentland, and one of the main feature of this research is its ability to quantify the non-verbal aspects of human face to face interactions, which have been shown to be highly predictive of the outcome of interpersonal exchanges of the most diverse kinds, what they call “Honest Signals”, not only, but mainly because they are collected in natural environments where real life situations happen (for further information: http://hd.media.mit.edu/)

And the second one is similar to the technology commented in the post Watch out, the ads is watching you… (December 22nd, 2010 by Roberto Saracco). It has being developed by the Affective Computing Laboratory, led by Rosalind W. Picard. It argues that people express and communicate their mental states through facial expressions, vocal nuances, gestures, and other non-verbal channels. And because of that they developed a computational model that enables real-time analysis, tagging, and inference of cognitive-affective mental states from facial video. Applications range from measuring people’s experiences to a training tool for autism spectrum disorders and people who are nonverbal learning disabled, but I think it could also be used as a managerial tool (a version of this system is being made available commercially by the spin-off Affectiva, indexing emotion from faces.

In my opinion these kinds of improvements in the field of consumer behavior researches could be interesting and useful in helping us to gain a better control of what and why we buy and, on the other side, help companies to develop products more valuable in the eye of consumers.

There is an increasing interest for modernizing the current electric grid used in most of the world, because of economic and environmental factors. The need stems from the inefficiency of the current grid structure.

Picture from the interesting article: Smart Grids and the Cloud, why are they linked?

Electrical energy transmission between the power plant and the final consumer generates heat (as any form of “work” of course) and this reduces the amount of energy that is available at the point of utilization. The heat is generated by the electrical currents, the bigger it is the more heat is generated. This is why transmission lines carry the energy at high voltage, to decrease the amount of current being transported. Rather than having a distribution grid connecting far away points (longer lines means more heat generated) it would be better to have meshed networks with many generation points to shorten the path from the generation to the consumption. Smart grids are right on the spot. But, of course, this would require increasing the number of generation point and this is where alternative energy sources may come handy (like home production through solar panels).

With the increasing use of technology increases the demand of electricity. According to EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration – Independent Statistics and Analysis), the document International Energy Outlook 2010 – Highlights (http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/highlights.html) states that:

“World marketed energy consumption increases by 49 percent from 2007 to 2035 in the Reference case. Total energy demand in the non-OECD countries increases by 84 percent, compared with an increase of 14 percent in the OECD countries” where the reference case is a scenario assuming that current laws and policies remain unchanged throughout the projection period.

In this scenario, we expect a growing energy production. According to the Renewable Global Status Report 2009 nowadays  a large percentage of global electricity is generated by power plants based on fossil fuel. This is responsible for large amounts of CO2 and CO emission which contributes to global warming. This motivates a series of research related to alternative energy sources.

Making it easy to use alternative energy sources is both an ecological as an economic issue.

The problem today is that in general alternative energies are costlier than fossil ones and their production/transport may also have some undesirable side effect. With advances in technology, alternative energy sources may become increasingly accessible and economically viable, while traditional sources such as fossil and nuclear become increasingly expensive. The limited availability of oil, natural gas, coal and forest reserves, and the disposal of nuclear waste are increasing the cost of energy over time, making alternative energy sources more interesting and stimulating the adoption of smart grid.

The work to be done remains significant (the spread in cost today is 2 to 3 in favor of fossil fuels and also there is a need to find convincing biz models for micro generation. Here is where Telecommunications can contribute and this is what we are studying at the Future Centre.

In the future can be economically viable a car that uses hydrogen as fuel.

The idea to use water as a fuel seems an evolution of the scientific fiction “Back to the Future” in which Dr. Brown was putting banana peel in the fuel tank of Velorium, the time machine. But it isn’t something new. The Indian business man Ratan Tata will finance a project to create a car that uses water as fuel. This car will use a technology developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – the MIT, in which water is used to produce hydrogen and this in turns to obtain energy.

The energy that comes from hydrogen in this way is completely clean. When the hydrogen is burning energy is released and the product of combustion is water. We don’t have any CO₂ emission and imagine how amazing is it!

Clearly you cannot just produce hydrogen from water: you need to inject energy in the system and that amount of energy is obviously (the second law of thermodynamics is there to remind us) greater than the amount of energy that will be later released by burning the hydrogen. So, the crucial point is to use some sort of “freely available” energy to extract the hydrogen from water.

Hence, one of main challenges is the efficient hydrogen production. Nowadays the majority of processes that produce hydrogen focus on the hydrolysis, but other processes use natural gas and others sources (and most of them produce CO2!), like, unbelievably, starch. If we can produce it at low cost using hydrolysis, we can have the best renewable energy ever because from water we take hydrogen and from the hydrogen combustion we have water, in a perfect cycle (but don’t forget that we need energy to activate and maintain the process!). The reason for consuming energy in this hydrogen extraction cycle is that it is easier to transport hydrogen than solar energy and hydrogen packs much more energy than a battery.

The real benefit in terms of CO2 would come from using solar, wind or another ecological source of energy to extract the hydrogen. However a big challenge remains, that is safety, because the hydrogen, even in low concentration, is very much flammable.

American and Swiss researchers from California Institute of Technology created a device that uses solar energy and water to produce hydrogen using cerim oxide. Today, the efficiency isn’t high – only 0.7%, but they hope it may reach approximately 20% and be, in the future, economically viable. If it becames true we can have an energy revolution.

Think about the world without the language barriers in which you can speak to overseas without the

Babelfish

necessity to care about the mother tongue of the interlocutor. This concept remits to the Babelfish from the Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Many efforts have been made by large companies such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft to bring this scenario to the reality.

IBM started a project in 2001, that was completed in 2004, called The Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator (MASTOR), “The system is the first Speech to Speech system that allows for bidirectional (English-Mandarin) free-form speech input and output“. More recently, Microsoft Research released a demo video about its realtime time translator telephone that works in English and German, the native languages of the two engineers responsible for this project. Google also is working in an Android application for realtime translation that could make any language Lingua Franca.

It is hard to think about accurate translations for the next few years since languages are so unique that you can’t translate something with its literal meaning. Aside the efforts, the average end user is not constantly talking overseas, and personally, this services could generate an invaluable portable translator when you’re on vacation.

Many applications could be developed if we have the high capacity Internet access provided by the optical fiber at home. One of them would be online high definition games with multiple players.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_eye

Star Trek Online Game

Nowadays, online games don’t exploit all our sight capability. The human vision is composed by binocular and peripherical vision, ranging from about 120 to 170 degrees, once we take into account the saccadic movement of the eye. On the vertical, we have a field of view of 135 degrees. Based on this information and assuming a 30-inch display and an observer at 30 cm from it, we would use just a field of 90×74 degrees.

http://www.icf.at/en/6000/how_much_bandwidth.html

According to the reference above, it would take about 15-20 Mbit/s to stream a single HD video but of course we can compress it to 10 Mbps without significant loss in quality. Now, imagine how much would be needed to simulate the feeling of immersion in an online game. This kind of game is rendered on a remote server that sends the HD video to the player. To have a sense of immersion in the game, fully exploiting our eyesight, we would need to receive at least three HD videos horizontally! And the double is needed to cover also the vertical! Thus we need about 60 Mbit/s to be immerse in game!

You might wonder about using a larger screen. Indeed moving to a 100″ screen would provide the sense of immersion in terms of vision angle. However, the HD resolution is too low with respect to the one of our eyes and if we were to look at such a big HD screen from a distance of 30 cm we would see plenty of pixels, red blue and green dots rather than a smooth image. To get  smooth image where no pixel is seen we need to move to the 4K standard (8 Mpixels) and that would require 70 Mbps of bandwidth.

Additionally, in many on line games, like point and shoot, what the player wants is the capability of looking in different directions, as he would do in a room by moving his head. This requires more screens. Whichever way you look at it true on line gamers are bandwidth hungry!

A lot of improvements need to be done in visual perception area and even more in what is related to games, to make this market more attractive. Of course, it is not just a matter of bandwidth, the careful design of the interface plays (!) a major role in this area.

Smart Grid Graphic

In a scenario where the energy consumption and the cost of energy production are rising, it’s necessary to consider alternatives to upgrade the current electric grid, and the smart grid is for sure a very good option. This term has been used since, at least, 2005 after the publication of the article “Toward a smart grid” by Amin and Wollenberg. The central idea of a smart grid can be seen on Wikipedia.

With the development of technology to produce electricity using micro-power generators, consumers assume a new role in the network as potential producers. Thus, as the concept of the invisible hand of Adam Smith, the network becomes a market scenario with variation of electricity supply and demand and, so, consequently its price could change.

Another big gain for the energy consumer-producer, in the smart grid scenario, is the use of 2-way communications in the grid. Nowadays, we can also use the network for transmitting data and voice. With smart meters, we can have control on the spending for electricity in each socket and light in our home. There are also pilot projects, such as Google Power Meter which uses smart meters and home appliances, that allow consumers to control their energy costs from remote.

We hope that, with the use of smart grids, the price of electricity will not increase so much as it would do in the current scenario. So we might have better economical expectations, since nearly all is based on energy availability to produce goods and services.