AT&T has announced the sale of the Samsung Galaxy Camera with a connection data plan. Users will be able to send photos using AT&T HSDPA fast data network to share photos at the same time they “click”!

The camera is also equipped with LTE, 4G, wireless and it is very likely that also this network will become part of the AT&T offer.

With this camera you can also browse the internet but you cannot make phone calls (at least for the time being…).

Now, isn’t this interesting? Today we have most cell phones equipped with a digital camera but the quality of the photos is not as good as that you get out of a proper digital camera.  And we have Memory card with embedded WiFi to let you send the picture you just took with your digital camera to Facebook or any where you like. Clearly this latter solves the problem of having a good quality camera and being able to immediately send your photo but we do not have WiFi connectivity everywhere, whilst we have a much more ubiquitous 3G connectivity.

So this explains this new product! Still, I am curious to see what kind of success it will have, What is most interesting to me is that it is something different from a phone, and yet it is being marketed by a phone company. Whilst I am sure that in the future we will have plenty of objects having an embedded connectivity and using such a connectivity as a way to deliver part of their functionality I see this move of AT&T as a way to affirm that connectivity is not embedded but explicit. You want to send photos, you need connectivity and hence you buy a camera from them.

Would you also buy a doll from AT&T in the future since that doll interact with your kid using connectivity to a server? Or is it something you will buy at a Toy Store with embedded connectivity?

The Intel WiFi chip that can be embedded in a normal microprocessor chip

Intel has just unveiled a WiFi sliver of silicon, as reported by Technology Review,  that can be part of a normal microprocessor chip. As of today, WiFi chips were separate from the microprocessor because of specific needs of the radio part.

The radio chips usually are based on silicon containing gallium arsenide (whilst the ones used in photonics contain erbium). This made them different from the silicon being used for microchips and hence the need to have different chips for the different functions. Each has transistors but these transistors operate at different speeds.

In turns, this leads to boards that are not improving at the same pace as the single chip (the Moore’s law applies to the single chip only, not to the board).

Few years ago scientists demonstrated the possibility to create on the same silicon sliver both the radio and the photonics part along with the silicon used for the microprocessor. This, however, is the first time that someone (Intel) has come up with an industrial manufactured chip embedding radio on the microprocessor chip.

The implications are very interesting (and you can read them in the linked article on Technology Review). Basically the single chip will follow the Moore’s law, hence it will become cheaper, will consume less power and will increase its capabilities doubling every 18 months.

The side effect is that we can expect that wherever we find a microprocessor (e.g. in over 70% of toys, to name just one area) we will find embedded connectivity. The Internet of Things has just got a significant booster!

You can’t have a network less network, can you? May be not, but this is what researchers are doing and …it works. And it is not just research in some crazy labs, it is being done in industrial settings as well. Ford Motor company has started to install WiFi transmitters and receivers in some of its models in 2010 and has recently stated that by 2015 80% of their cars will be WiFi hubs, ready to talk to nearby cars.

Researchers at MIT, Georgetown University and at the National University of Singapore are studying ways to exploit these bounty of wireless nodes moving around. Why not using each car as a network node, a network that is continuously reconfiguring as cars move around. There are issues about the connectivity and when to drop a link that is fading away and switch to a new link. Complex issues, but they are well known since, to a lesser degree of complexity, they have already been tackled for cellular networks.

However, there are also new issues that are related to the fact that this would be a really mobile networks (in a cellular network all the antennas on the poles are quite “fixed”). The strategy for routing and for the optimization of links usage is quite different and has to be worked out dynamically. There is more. Suppose that your average car has quite a bit of storage capacity on board (a quite natural assumption). Then it makes sense to assume that when a car (a passenger) wants to access some data (like the daily newspaper) it is quite probable that such a data is already available in some cars in the surrounding. So, no need to connect to the big Internet, rather let’s look for the right car.

This is also a question researchers are trying to address. What is the best strategy in distributing data/information in a car ensemble so as to maximize the probability that some nearby cars can deliver the information when needed?

It turns out that, according to the MIT … researchers, cars can be modeled through a paradigm of connected clusters by identifying as belonging to a cluster those cars that have some recurrent contact with one another. Within a cluster a car may have strong links with some (it is often within WiFi contact) and weak links with others. The same will apply to links among clusters.

Now this starts to sound like a small world paradigm….!

Indeed, in the future we can see that the cars, from the point of view of forming a network less network may behave like an ecosystem and the same rules of interactions that are played out at that level can be found in these networks.

And, in perspectives, although this is not addressed in the MIT study, it is not difficult to imagine other components in these network less networks: people with their cell phones that all of a sudden become network nodes of a dynamically fleeting network and also homes…. And what about “things”? They also are progressively connected and they also will be able to act as nodes of a networks that exist because all these nodes are there!

In the next decade we will continue to have big (bigger actually) pipes but these will be connecting communications spaces resembling more to fabric than nets (in the sense of fishing nets). As this happens the role of network providers will change significantly. Players like Google and now Facebook are becoming part of the telecommunications “plumbing/piping” infrastructure and they, as the others, will make use of pervasive communications fabrics. Also the role of service providers is likely to change in this scenario. Rather than delivering a service to a terminal services will have to be delivered to an ambient using pipes to reach it and then leveraging on the local communication fabric connecting all the bit transducers available in that space. And there is more!

A single ambient/communication space will actually consist of several instances, one for each user within that ambient. And the actual transformation of bits arriving from the pipes and interacting with local bits “owned” by the ambient will be orchestrated and directed by the instance owner (that is it will depend on the specific user).

A quite different scenario for a ubiquitous internet infrastructure!

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.

I posted several times in the past news about cameras that you can wear and use to film snippets of your life. Most of the time it has been in relation to some research (HP one shot, MS myLifeBits) and the camera used was a sort of prototype.

HD camera for 400$ embedded in a sky mask

Now, I run onto Liquid Image, and let me tell you that I am impressed by the variety of mass market (read affordable) products they have embedding a camera in goggles of various shapes, including some for underwater snorkling and squba diving.

The quality of the movies taken is amazing and you don’t need to do anything. Just wear the goggles as you would for skiing or surfing and there you are. At the end of the day you can upload the movie to your media centre and share it with your friends.

And, of course, it is just a matter of time before you’ll be able to stream your own experience in HD wirelessly, thanks to advanced wireless networks like LTE.

I can easily imagine WiFi blanketing a ski slope to let people broadcast their run to their friends.

What is amazing is the easiness and the low cost! It can really become a new fancy for the new year. And just think about the amount of storage that will be needed to store all those clips. Not to mention the new apps that will spring up to manage those clips…

It is a visual world, and it is going to happen, ’cause we are visual animals.

Ozmo, http://www.ozmodevices.com/, has announced the availability of a chip, Ozmo 2000, that transforms any WiFi enabled device into a newtork node.  The chip implements the WiFi Direct  standard (not yet consolidated) allowing a direct communications among WiFi devices with no need for a base station, just like Bluetooth. It should be available in devices early next year.

WPAN: Wireless Personal Area Network

http://www.ozmodevices.com/the_ozmo_solution.php

This is an interesting evolution: cell phones having WiFi, as it is the case for most smart phones, will be able to talk one another, axchanging data, without having to go through the wireless network.

These networks-less networks have been studied by researchers and a particular form of them has been called viral networks. A viral network is made by terminals able to connect one another and through another creating dynamic networks. Imagine having one cell phone embedded in each car (not difficult to do!) and creating a viral network. A city can be completely covered by this network and people could send messages and data from one car to the next one or to the one at the other side of the town using this network. No need for a wireless network operated by a specific Operator.

Sending voice over this network may be much more problematic since every “hop” would introduce a delay and they will add up to the point that the quality degrades rapidly. However, for most data transmission this would be irrelevant.

Actually, some cars, most of them may be, may also store information and they can distribute this information on request. A completely different sort of communication paradigm can emerge: a network where the more users the more capacity is provided.

 

 

This news is not about Social Networks but about the approval given in July by the FDA (Federal Drug Administration in the USA) to a WiFi pacemaker developed by t. Jude Medical Inc, http://www.sjmprofessional.com/ . A first patient has already received the new pacemaker at the St. Francis hospital in Roslyn, NY.

The pacemaker embeds a computer that monitors heat beats and the proper working of the device. It uses WiFi to update the clinical file of the patient via Internet and in case of problems it sends an alarm.

According to dr. Steven Greenberg, the director of the St. Francis Arrhythmia and Pacemaker Centre:

““It is a tremendous convenience for the patient from even interacting with a telephone to call the doctor. On a larger scale it enhances our ability to pick up and evaluate any problems with their pacemaker and certain other rhythm disorders that could be potentially dangerous or life threatening in ways we really could not do before.

In the future, these pacemakers may be placed not just for people with slow heartbeats. We may be monitoring high blood pressure, we may be measuring glucose, we may be monitoring heart failure.

There are literally dozens of physiological parameters that now, with this wireless technology, we can leverage for the future of monitoring. So it is not just a rhythm monitor but a disease monitor.”

We are going to see many more devices monitoring our health in the future and this will go along with a shift in the next decade from curative to preventive medicine, easier on us and on the health care bill.

Of course this shift requires ubiquitous availability of access to Internet and all the security and privacy needed. The challenge will be to be able to provide this high level of control together with an openness that would stimulate the market to create new services. There is a lot that needs to be done, research, regulation, infrastructure investment. But the pay-off will be huge.

This is a strategic area for any Country. Is it going to be shaped as value chains (as health care is basically today) or as ecosystems? It is clearly so much easier to control the former but the latter have the potential to deliver better services at much lower cost.

The pervasiveness of communications infrastructure and the evolution of terminals (cell phone are on the fore front) make me bet on the latter, although I still see a major presence of value chains in this sector in the next decade.