How many times did you call your wife in a mall to find where she ended up (or vice versa)? It happens to all the time.

Now there is these system by Navizon that is exploiting WiFi localization on the assumption that people leave the WiFi on, on their smart phone.

Take a look at system in action:

By triangulation Navizon spots the smart phone

To work it requires a number of WiFi antennas spread around the place, and this is reasonable assumption in a large space like a mall. By triangulation it can achieve a remarkable precision on where a smart phone is (and the purse holding it). The app uses this information to guide you to interception, with a user interface that really reminds of the radar.

This apps just show the many things that can be done with a smartphone. May be you might wish this app not to be on your wife smart phone if you are trying to hide yourself in the vastness of the mall, but those are the downturns of technology.

Beyond jockeying, it is clear that privacy issues go hand in hand with localization services and in this case there is now opt out solution. Either you switch it off (at least the WiFi part) or you can be tracked.

Netgear has announced the availability of its next generation WiFi router for next month. At a cost of 200$ you get WiFi transmission at 1.3 Gbps!

The Netgear - R6300: 1.3 Gbps

It is the first implementation of the new 802.11ac standard (yet to be ratified, but technology is faster than standard organizations….). This is three times faster than the 802.11n.

Of course, the question is what can we do with that kind of capacity! Even considering that the WiFi area can be populated by several devices, that each of them interfere with the others so that the net capacity diminishes significantly, we are still dealing with a lot of capacity.

I guess this router is future proof, at least for a 5 year future, since it will be able to accommodate ultra high definition screens with bandwidth request in the order of 50 to 100 Mbps (and you may have more than one in your home or in a Starbuck coffee shop…

The new iPad is still not requiring this sort of bandwidth (nor are broadcasters thinking of delivering this ind of resolution yet…). At the end of this decade may be we will have screens and broadcasters supporting 8k video signal and the 50-100 Mbps will be needed.

Of course, screen and broadcasting is not enough if you do not ave a big enough pipe, and that means a fibre. No point in attaching a 1.3 Gbos router to an ADSL line. Most fibers today are used for 100 Mbps (the few exception, in residential market, are in Hong Kong plus some experiment in Korea and Japan), and my bet is it will take till the end of this decade to see a diffusion of 1 Gbps links in the residential market.

Can you tell a glass of sparkling mineral water from Alka Seltzer, a “just ripe” melon from one that should be eaten only after a few days?

A NASA developed sensors for your iPhone to sense the environment

We perceive our environment through our eyes and they can only detect certain light wavelengths. Actually there are many more wavelengths available (and insects are able to exploit some of them). What if we insert in our cell phone a sensors that can be used to look at what is around detecting a much larger wavelength set? This is what some researchers at the Media Lab are trying to do.

Already today digital camera sensors (and the one in our cell phone are derived from those) can detect a broader wavelength set than the one detected by our eyes, and this is why manufacturers overlay on the sensor a filter to cut out those extra wavelengths. Remove that filter and you can get more data from the filter that would actually let a computer see more and discriminate characteristics in the environment (current sensors can detect infrared wavelength so a computer can get information on temperature of the object in the image…).

New sensors can be developed to intercept much broader wavelength spectrum and there may be a system of filters that can be over layered to restrict wavelengths depending on the purpose of the photo. There might even be sensors having individual pixel with different sensitivity to wavelength (or with different filter over layered) and these can be selected via software, thus allowing the detection of different characteristics in objects.

This is what people at the Media Lab are working on, embedding a sensor in your cell phone you can use to find out more about your environment. To this filter a glass full of Alka Seltzer would look very different from one filled with sparkling mineral water, a ripe melon looks different from one you are not supposed to eat for a few more days…

More specialized sensors are also in the making, such as the one shown in the photo, developed by NASA to fit your iPhone. This sensor plug in the iPhone port and can detect a number of substances in the environment. An app in your phone (or in the web for more serious analyses) can process these data and give you a quite different view of the place you are in.. It can also be used to create a map of the environment as more and more cell phone report data. Get ready for a new way to look around yourself!

Ever heard of the “Ultimate Brain Quest” project? It is a project initiated at the MIT by Sebastien Seung aiming at creating a complete map of the neuron connections in a human brain. For the time being it is focussing on a rat brain but do not underestimate the challenge, even at a rat brain level.

A single cubic millimeter of brain material contains some 100,000 neurons and about 1 billion connections! Examining this ball of twine would require an (estimated) hundred thousands person-years. So what can be done, given the fact that so far a completely automatic way for unraveling these connections has not been found?

Researchers at the MIT have decided to leverage on the willingness of thousands, and they hope soon millions of people, to participate in the quest and have developed an on line tool, eye wire, that let people analyze the tiny slices of brain (1/1000 of a hair thickness) placed on the website and color the slices one after the other thus creating the image of a neuron connection. This process, difficult to be performed by a machine, is reasonably easy for the human eye and has already produced results.

A neuron connection singled out through crowd sourcing in eye wire

There are of course plenty of wonders in this project, a lot of technology and plenty of debate if even assuming that a complete mapping of a human brain will ever be feasible we may end up with plenty of data (storing the data about a single cubic mm of brain matter requires about 1 PB, a complete human brain would then approach 1ZB of storage!) but very little meaning (by the way, how can we be sure that the wiring of one brain is basically the representative for all other brains?). If you like to explore these issues you may want to read Connectome, by Sebastien Seung. In the book he makes it clear that the idea is to derive meaning from the observation of the wiring and use this meaning to guide in the understanding of the brain. At that point the wiring can become (almost) irrelevant and researchers could focus on the semantics of the brain.

The reason for my post on this subject, however, is because of the use of crowd sourcing that is being made. The web is really providing us with a tremendous intelligence-power ready to be tapped. And some researchers are already starting to leverage that. As  some city planners are doing, asking people to tell what is good and what is wrong as they move around the city, as politicians are starting to do to prepare a legislation program, as doctors are doing to become aware of potential epidemics or dangerous substances…

The web, and each of us, is changing the world.

Still from the Media Lab, an amazing camera that can see around the corner and record light as it … moves. Take a look at the video:

Amazing, isn’t it. It really shows that we are more constrained by the limit of our imagination than by physical constraints. What is also impressive is that the tools being used in this experiment are still quite expensive but so much cheaper than they used to be just two years ago when certain devices where developed with military use in mind. I would expect some of these technologies to be available in our mass market products in just a few more years.

I am here at the yearly Media Lab meeting looking at what is new, ideas and prototypes. The intellectual challenge is not to remain hooked on dreaming about the future but to place all these (crazy) ideas in perspective asking yourself what of these can fly and become common experience.

Take as an example WristQue.

WristQue, your key to control your Smart House

WristQue is an electronic wristband that can connect you to your smart space (a smart office, a smart home). it comes equipped with sensors and communications capabilities. It is a curved plastic box printed by a 3D printer containing a microprocessor and sensors to detect temperature, humidity and light plus a sideband communications system that double up as a localization device. It is being tested in the Media Lab, a smart building brimming with sensors everywhere that can tell how many people are in the room and quite often who they are (if like myself have loge in the building and carry a RFId tag).

It has been designed to be cheap and easy to use (it only has 3 buttons) and its easiness is possible because of the software that manages the smart ambient and integrates all information. The research team who designed it, the Responsive Environments group, explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction and perception, while developing new sensing modalities and enabling technologies that create new forms of interactive experience and expression.

Now, I feel that at least one piece of the puzzle, in making this a reality, is ok: the focus is on the user experience. However, there are other pieces that need to fall in place to make it a success, such as the availability of a smart space (an ambient equipped with sensors and with a software able to transform sensors’ data into useful information and act upon it) and the availability of interesting application. True, we never though 20 years ago that a television set has to have a remote control and now we could not live without it, but still wearing a bracelet all day to trim the home temperature makes very little sense to me…

We have seen the increasing power of software in terms of virtualizing hardware. Of course the hardware does not disappear, software needs chips to run on, but it may become irrelevant where these chips might be. And moreover, the chips being used may be some that have not been developed to run that specific software.

Now a company, Nicira, is taking a step forward and aims at virtualizing the network, and not a small one: its goal is to virtualize all telecommunications network(s)!  Take a look at their vision of a software based network.

Its founder was at Cisco for several years and now is on a war path to make Cisco switches a thing of the past. Not sure if that is going to happen, I asked a colleague of mine to comment on this, but clearly the software and the flexibility that it brings changes the way we look at objects. Their characteristics, be it a digital camera or a tablet, are no longer perceived in terms of usage as dependent on the object hardware, rather on the software that we can run on it.

Clearly, if, and it is a big if, this approach can extend to networks there will be several casualties along the way. Operators have to really ponder the implications. No way to get rid of wires and antennas but all the value that is today inextricably connected to the management of those hardware pieces may shift to software and to those that are able to provide the most effective one!

I posted just yesterday news on NinjaBlocks and how they have been funded through Kickstart. Now let me give you another example of an idea being funded through Kickstart that has reached almost 6 million $ in funding: Pebble. And they asked for just 100,000 $! The same observations I made on NinjaBlocks in terms of this new way (crowd sourcing financing I would call it) apply here.

But for Pebble I want to share some thoughts on what it means in terms of new ways of conceiving a product. But first take a look at Pebble so that you know what I am talking about:

Pebble will be sold at a 150$ price tag. That’s not peanuts for a plastic watch whose screen is made of eInk. What makes it worth the price (at least for the inventors and for the people funding it) is that it creates an open environment, an ecosystem, where people can create applications making it a continuously evolving device. Much more than a watch, as you have seen on the video! And what you see there is just a fraction of the many applications that will surely be invented if this watch is going to be a market success (the more successful, the more people will develop apps and in a never ending spiral the more successful it will become).

Pebble talks to iPhone and to Androids smart phones and makes use of the capabilities they have, like connecting to the web, detecting motion (through the gyroscope all smart phones have), detecting location and so on. This is the first “smart” new way of creating objects. Rather than packing features in the object let it discover what is available in its environment. This leads to cheaper objects that at the same time are reacher in functionality.

Secondly, rather than inventing all the features, Pebble comes with just a few of them. The crucial ones are those that let Pebble grow over time by getting apps created by anyone. It creates an ecosystem and leverages the strength of hundreds of thousands of developers (that over time will become millions…) and their creative genius.

Thirdly, Pebble is one of the first objects to embed communications and processing capabilities “just in case”, that is for supporting communication with the ambient and features that have not been conceived at its design time. In the future my bet is that many objects (the trends is towards “all” the objects) will be designed in this way. And as this happens we will see a new layer being created to make it possible the portability of apps across a variety of objects. This is an intermediation layer and I think it may become to Telecom Operators what today is the network, an important source of revenues.

The more I browse the Internet the more amazed I am. Take as an example the Ninja Blocks.

A Ninja Block

These are smart objects that can be easily programmed to perform a certain task, like switch on the light is the baby starts to cry in the crib or send an alarm and take a picture if someone is taking something from your desk drawer.

They can connect to the internet and programming them is a matter of a few clicks, most of the time downloading a set of actions someone else has already programmed. This is because they use Arduino, an open source electronic board used by hobbyists.

The way to program these devices is based on ifttt (if this then that), an intuitive way of accomplishing actions on the internet (if you are not familiar with this approach take a look at the website and start doing your own programming in a few seconds). So, this is the second amazing thing: the fact that creating complex sets of actions has become very very easy!

And then there is a third amazement. The idea of creating NinjaBlocks (the inventor is Mark Wotton) required (as all ideas) some capital money to be transformed into reality. How do you get seed money? Well, on the Internet, of course!

He put the request for seed money on Kickstarter in January and within 72 hours he managed to get is 24,000$ funding sought. By the end of the campaign, on March 10th, he got 103,000$!

Kickstarter is a new way to fund and follow creativity, as they announce it on their website. You go there and you see what ideas are available and you decide what you want to fund. This is what Kickstarter says about itself:

Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week, tens of thousands of amazing people pledge millions of dollars to projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields.

A new form of commerce and patronage. This is not about investment or lending. Project creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work. Instead, they offer products and experiences that are unique to each project.

All or nothing funding. On Kickstarter, a project must reach its funding goal before time runs out or no money changes hands. Why? It protects everyone involved. Creators aren’t expected to develop their project without necessary funds, and it allows anyone to test concepts without risk.

Each and every project is the independent creation of someone like you. Projects are big and small, serious and whimsical, traditional and experimental. They’re inspiring, entertaining and unbelievably diverse. We hope you agree… Welcome to Kickstarter!

Don’t you find all this amazing? I surely do. There is no more excuse not to build up your own future!

I have reported several times in these posts of the increase in resolution for digital cameras. Sensors are getting more and more packed and deliver more and more details. But this news is quite different!

All digital camera sensors detect photons, that is an electro-magnetic field in the range of 400 (red) to 789 (violet) THz. Detecting electro-magnetic field below 50 GHz is the task for antennas. In between these two figures there is very little that can be used by the “mass market”. The problem is that the transistors cannot work beyond 40 GHz using normal (cheap) silicon.

A THz sensor

Now a group of researchers from IEMN, STMicroelectronics in France, and the University of Wuppertal in Germany have found a way to create a detector working in the THz range.

The sensor produced has just 1024 pixel, nothing if you compare it to the sensors we got used to have in digital cameras. However this sensor represent a revolution in price, and as you know those are the true revolutions!

Up till now a one pixel sensor to detect THz cost some 10,000 $, whilst this sensor has a cost comparable to the one of a digital camera, a decrease in price of about 100,000 folds!

What can you photograph with such a sensor? Well, you can take a picture of an object “behind” a wall of bricks, you can tell by looking at the picture what are the materials used in the object.

The crucial part, as I mentioned, is the fact that this sensor can be produced using usual silicon foundries at a low cost. That will allow a progressive increase in performance (more resolution) and along with it open up more fields of applications (and generate more data!). Al of this using very little power: a USB port is enough to power it.