Tech Talk

How many of you have been to Las Vegas? Were I ask this question in a reader-filled room, I’d bet a majority would raise your hands, thanks to all the trade-show action there. How many of you have taken the monorail to the MGM Grand? I’m guessing I’d see quite a few hands still raised. Now, how many of you have gotten off the monorail at the MGM Grand, walked through the hotel, and made it to the front door without spending at least 15 minutes horribly lost? Maybe I’d have one person still nodding yes, but he was probably just lucky.

Getting around inside the MGM—or any large hotel—can be a nightmare; so many seem to be designed like the inn described in the song “Hotel California”: You can check in any time you want, but you can never leave. And, to date, the navigation software on mobile devices hasn’t been able to help lost travelers find their way inside such GPS-signal-blocking giant buildings.

In the past year or so, a number of companies have put a lot of effort into developing technologies to fix the indoor navigation problem. Solutions take on multiple forms, including simple maps, dead reckoning software that gathers data from sensors already built into smart phones, systems that calculate location using signals from cell phone towers, planted locator beams, and preexisting WiFi hotspots.

As t turns out it’s this last approach that will likely get you out of the MGM—without retracing your steps several times—the next time you’re in Las Vegas. Because today, Lighthouse Signal Systems announced that it has mapped the WiFi signals covering the nearly 2 million square meters of casino and hotel space in the gambling mecca. The result is WiFi fingerprints that enable a mobile device to determine its location to within 5 to 7 meters. Lighthouse is making the signal map and its indoor navigation software available to Android developers for free; it expects to profit from taking a small share of location-targeted ad revenue as that market develops. And, though Lighthouse doesn’t claim to be particularly good at app development, it does have a free Android app, Lighthouse Locate, that allows consumers to beta test its system. (Lighthouse Locate is available on Google Play.)

One small step for indoor navigation, one giant leap towards ensuring that even if you happen to get lost in Vegas you won't stay lost in Vegas.

Photo: Lighthouse Signal Systems

Updated 5/24/2013

When I last wrote about Intel, exactly 30 days ago, the company had yet to announce a replacement for outgoing CEO Paul Otellini, and there a was a lot of speculation about the company's direction. 

A lot can change in a month. On 2 May, Intel announced the promotion of 30-year Intel veteran Brian Krzanich to the chief executive role. And earlier this week, Reuters broke the news of a "sweeping" reorganization. Krzanich himself will now directly oversee most of the main product groups, including the company's PC and mobile units. He has also formed a "new devices" group. Mobile chip guru and Palm and Apple veteran Mike Bell has reportedly been tapped to head it up. 

What will this "new devices" unit do exactly?  AllThingsD says it will focus at least in part on "ultra-mobile products" and quotes a statement from the company that "the group will be tasked with turning cool technology and business model innovations into products that shape and lead markets". PCWorld speculates the new group will focus less on playing catch-up in the smartphone and tablet markets (which are still dominated by ARM-aligned companies) than on jazzier new products, such as Google Glass.

But Intel has invested a lot in its pursuit of the mobile market. Earlier this month—what a busy month!—the company unveiled Silvermont, a chip architecture that is optimized for power consumption. We'll likely have to wait until at least the end of the year, when the first chips in the Silvermont family ship, to see whether all that hard work has paid off. 

(Photo: Robert Galbraith/Reuters)

Smartphones have replaced wristwatches as timekeepers for many teenagers and tech-savvy adults. But a new smartwatch aims to win over customers with such features as an extremely low-power processor and the convenience of wireless charging.

Dreams of wearing a smartwatch as a handy computer on the wrist, also known as a watch-phone, have captured the public's imagination going back to the Dick Tracy newspaper comic strip. Such watches hold the promise of making smartphone features conveniently available on the wrist without having to pull mobile devices out of a pocket or bag.

The new "Agent" smartwatch has already raised more than US $300 000 on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter—easily surpassing its $100 000 goal since the project launched on 21 May. Despite its quick success, it by no means has the field to itself. It doesn't even have Kickstarter to itself—the  popular Pebble watch raised $10 million there. Apple and Microsoft are both rumored to be jumping into the smartwatch market as well.

If the Bitcoin convention held this weekend in San Jose, CA proved one thing, it's that the community is surprisingly diverse. Putting aside the appalling gender gap, you simply had no idea who you would bump into. A fashion photographer from Milan. A curious kid from Edmonton, Canada. An Australian anarchist recently transplanted to New York City.

The one person that no one expected to see in all this flurry was the head of a bank or credit union, and you certainly didn't expect to find him trying to make friends. So all in all, Jordan Modell might have been the most peculiar of all the peculiar people I met at the conference. There was, it turns out, an explanation for his crypto-tech-friendly stance.

He had arrived together with Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, to find out whether there was anything they could do to support Bitcoin entrepreneurs during this rather crazy time.

In March, the market value of all bitcoins in circulation reached one billion dollars, attracting new investors, but also closer scrutiny from regulators. Last week, Dwolla shut down an account which funds MT Gox, the most popular online bitcoin exchange, after the Department of Homeland Security served the payment processor with a warrant. (It was hardly the first problem exchanges have seen. Back in 2011, PayPal didn't wait for the regulators to act when it proactively closed the account of Coinpal, an individual who used to accept PayPal for bitcoins. In the early days, this service was one of the best ways for people to get their hands on bitcoins.)

At the conference, Kahle explained that he was there to help. A few years ago, he had convinced his long time friend, Jordan Modell, to start a credit union with him. In 2012, the Internet Archive Federal Credit Union began serving low-income families in New Bruswick, N.J. In some ways, the move came out of left field, and it seems that even Kahle was unsure how this new endeavor would fit into his role as public steward of Internet.

During a presentation on Saturday Kahle said of his credit union, "I think we've now finally discovered why we need one."

If the United States is to produce more engineering grads, universities will need to adopt creative approaches to recruit and retain students in engineering programs.

Here’s one some universities are taking: adopting the ‘redshirt’ strategy common in college athletics and kindergarten. Redshirting means delaying participation to increase readiness. Applied to engineering programs, the idea is to give high school students extra time to prepare for an engineering degree.

Anonymous sources face a huge challenge in leaking sensitive information to journalists without leaving a digital trail for government investigators to follow. The New Yorker aims to make anonymous leaks feel slightly more secure with its new "Strongbox" solution, but the system's security still ultimately depends upon the caution of its users.

The New Yorker's drop box allows sources to upload documents anonymously and provides two-way communication between sources and journalists, according to The Guardian.

Sources are able to upload documents anonymously through the Tor network onto servers that will be kept separate from the New Yorker's main computer system. Leakers are then given a unique code name that allows New Yorker reporters or editors to contact them through messages left on Strongbox.

Earlier this month, Stanford University’s Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) wrapped up a six-month contest for Stanford students, faculty, and alumni. The group awarded US $150,000 in prizes to the best entrepreneurial ventures, the best social ventures, and the best products demonstrated in a design showcase. This year, AWAIR, a medical device company that builds more comfortable breathing apparatuses for intensive care units, won the top prize in the entrepreneurial category; Anjna Patient Education, a nonprofit that developed SMS and voice systems for mobile devices that encourage patients to take better care of their health, took the social category; and ALICE, an AI tool to help construction managers schedule the myriad elements of a project, won the best product design.

The first two categories are judged essentially on their ideas, as pitched to the judges in writing and in oral presentations. But in the final category, product design, the entrants had to build something and demonstrate it at a product showcase held at Stanford this week. I confess, I didn’t get to all 50 booths; I stayed away from things like personalized wedding marketplaces, collapsible clothes hangers, and magnetic hair clips. I instead focused on things with an electrical or computer engineering angle that seemed to either be particularly useful or particularly weird. That still left plenty to look at. My five favorites included a company that uses the heat from a cooking fire to charge a cell phone, one that is using image processing algorithms to take signals from an existing land mine detector (basically just beeps) and turn them into rough sketches of what is under the ground, a company that is making a simple Bluetooth speaker sound much better than it seems like it should for the size and price by taking a room's acoustics into account, an activity tracker that lets pets get into the quantified self game, and a bracelet to let folks reach out and literally touch someone across the ether.

For four blissful years, the exchanges that trade in bitcoin operated within a cloud of legal uncertainty, awaiting the day when the regulatory beast would awaken to its new opponent. Now, that day has come. This week, the Department of Homeland Security took a quick and hard strike at MT Gox, the largest online exchange, serving its payment processor Dwolla with a warrant (later obtained by ars technica) to seize the MT Gox account. Dwolla is one of the preferred ways of getting government currencies in and out of MT Gox and the news caused temporary tremors throughout the Bitcoin community. Trading volume spiked and the exchange rate bobbled down to $106 before climbing back up.

These exchanges are the supply lines for Bitcoin, which has steadily increased in value over the last year. With one supply line down in the U.S., many people will be looking for alternatives. And soon they will find them.

Two brothers, Mark and John Russell are scheduled to unveil a new automated exchange kiosk this weekend at a Bitcoin conference in San Jose, CA. They're calling the machine Robocoin. It will provide a physical place for people to convert their dollars to bitcoins and vice versa.

As has been reported this week, the Kepler planet hunting space telescope, may have to end its mission earlier than hoped, due to the failure of the system that keeps it pointed in the right direction. That system consists of four reaction wheels, which are basically electric motors attached to fly wheels. By speeding up or slowing down, they transfer angular moment to the satellite, rotating it around its center of mass.

Kepler’s mission is find exoplanets by staring, unmoving, at small patches of space and look for periodic dips in the brightness of the stars there. Those dips could mean the presence of planets. But without at least three working reaction wheels—Kepler is down to two—the satellite can’t steer it’s gaze or keep it from gently drifting in the solar wind.

According to David Cooper, CEO of Microsat Systems Canada Inc., in Ottawa, Ont., a provider of reaction wheels for small satellites, there are two main classes of things that can go wrong with reaction wheels—mechanical and electrical. And that means Kepler's pointing system was probably damaged either by the shock of launch or in space by radiation.

I dream a dream of perfect calibration: A single chip embodying the “metrological triangle”—with built-in, reproducible, quantum standards for the volt, ohm, and ampere, completely defined by just two universal constants, Planck’s and the electron charge.

We’re two-thirds of the way there: Thanks to quantum Hall resistance and Josephson voltage measurements, the ohm and volt can be practicably defined within 10 parts per billion. Both, however, depend on empirical measures of current, typically via watt-balance measurements that are accurate to only 100 ppb. (Watt balances, in their turn, depend on the definition of the kilogram, which is still evolving, related initiatives like a Compton-wave definitions of mass.)

That leaves the amp, waiting for a way to produce exquisitely accurate currents.

Single-electron pumps (SEPs—not related to the “Someone Else’s Problem” invisibility field invented by Douglas Adams) produce extremely precise currents, sending electrons leaping one at a time from quantum dot to quantum dot across a series of potential barriers. It’s something like a line of backpackers—each bearing just one electron charge—picking their way across a stream single file by hopping from stepping-stone to stepping-stone.

Researchers use oscillating voltages to drive the current, but there are built-in challenges. Lower frequency pumps—metallic fixed-tunnel barrier systems and normal/superconducting hybrid turnstiles—work in the megahertz range. These can move only a few million electrons per second through the pump, and produce picoampere (pA) currents that are difficult to detect. Semiconductor-based tunable barrier pumps operate at gigahertz frequencies, producing a thousand times as much current—but electrons need some finite time to step from stepping stone to stepping stone. Like the backpackers trying to cross the stream too fast, the jostle and bump and some fall into the stream, disrupting the regular flow of current.