Tech Talk

Last year at CES, I was wow'd by a coating technology, offered by several companies, that invisibly waterproofs electronics.

Yesterday, I caught up with Liquipel’s Alex Hill to see how the technology was doing in the market, and whether or not Liquipel had sorted out possible warranty issues. (That is, would coating devices void their warranties?) Hill reported that Liquipel has completely reformulated its technology since last year, and said that the company hasn’t had any warranty issues, but is just happening to offer its own device warranties as part of its service. The company has yet to announce any deals with major manufacturers, but reports that it has waterproofed tens of thousands devices and is coating “several hundred” more daily in its Santa Ana, Calif., facility, and has licensed the technology to companies in Australia, Hong Kong, and Malaysia.

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Consumer electronics companies have envisioned the connected home for years. I’ll say up front, I’m not entirely sure I want all my appliances to talk to each other. I’m also not sure I want to be able to start a load of laundry from a smart phone when I’m not at home—should I really be thinking quite so often about laundry?

That said, I perked up when LG announced its new line of connected appliances at a press conference held in advance CES. That’s because LG’s chattering appliances are not going to be jamming up the home WiFi network as they discuss what’s in the refrigerator or the oven, instead they’ll be using near-field communications, or NFC. This communications technology is commonly used for payments in many places outside the U.S. Those of us in the U.S. are not quite so familiar with it, though it is built into some smart phones (but not iPhones...yet). LG envisions smart phones as the ultimate remote control for the smart home.

Other smart house companies are also embracing NFC. Allure Energy introduced a new generation of its home management system, EverSense 2.0, that uses NFC to spot where people (or at least their phones) are in the house, and adjusts thermostats and lighting accordingly.

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When I first saw the UrbanHello phone, last night at the Consumer Electronics Show, I laughed. A speakerphone for landline phones? The landline phone system is going away. Then I realized what it was—a product at the leading edge of the very telephony revolution IEEE Spectrum had just done a story about.

A few weeks ago we published an interview about the end of the public phone network—this is the idea that the circuit-switched network is going away, in favor of end-to-end packet-switching. And just like the transition from analog to digital television brought us HD TV, the big benefit to moving from analog telephony to digital would be HD telephony. UrbanHello is the first HD phone I’ve seen, one of the first ever.

The phone is basically a cordless handset that can communicate with any base station that adheres to the DECT-GAP standard. If the base station is part of a home’s analog (PSTN) phone network, it just works as another handset. If the base station is digital, however, and uses the emerging CAT-iq standard, then the UrbanHello unit will make an HD-quality call. The phone's keypad is cleverly hidden in the base.

The handset broadcasts the call out loud on its speaker, and frankly, sounded pretty good even in the terrible audio conditions of CES—a room packed with exhibitors and press. In a living room, using HD, it would be a huge step up from the lousy speakerphone systems we use today. UrbanHello won a CES 2013 “Innovations Award,”  and, of course, it’s a Kickstarter project.

Our interview last month made the point that HD has faced a chicken-and-egg problem: Why build products, when the networks aren’t all-IP, and why switch the networks over to IP, when there’s no obvious benefit to end-users. HD voice can’t come soon enough. It’s good to see someone getting the ball rolling.

Image credit: UrbanHello

Although the show floor doesn’t officially open until Tuesday, the advance guard of journalists arriving to cover the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas already had plenty to see by Sunday . One of the last events of the day was the Startup Showcase. Although CES is best known for revealing the latest gadgets and hardware from manufacturers around the world, the Showcase was something of a departure in that it almost exclusively featured companies offering online services of one sort or another.

The start-up that most caught my interest was Listsanity.com, currently in public beta. Listsanity is a site devoted to compiling and sharing “top ten” lists (or top five, or top twenty, or what have you). Individual lists are aggregated into master lists, so people can see what the site consensus is about the best place to see before you die, or what is the greatest 80s movie (Egypt and Back to the Future, respectively).

It’s reminiscent of Pinterest in its design, and before I saw the site, I would have said that there’s little room for yet another social network for the general public. But Listsanity appeals to that little bit of vanity we all have about demonstrating our superior knowledge about some subject or the other (for example, clearly the greatest movie of the 80s was in fact The Breakfast Club). I wouldn’t be surprised to see Listsanity break out, at least as a novelty. The business model is similar to other social networks, offering brands user analytics and targeted advertising.

Other notable companies that rose above the Me-Too feel of many online companies included: 

• Focus@will, a music service that plays music selections designed to keep listeners focused on tasks instead of getting distracted (opening soon for public beta) 
• Voxeet, which offers high-definition audio for conference calls—the interesting feature is the ability to move participants around in a virtual audio space, which makes it much easier to figure out who is speaking during a busy call.
• Leonar3do, a 3-D virtual reality modeling system.

Leonar3do was one of the few companies at the showcase that actually makes something. The heart of the system is a free-space mouse called “the Bird.” Along with 3-D glasses, the Bird allows artists and designers to work with virtual objects as if they were physically present to be molded and sculpted (see video below). The Bird is designed for pro-users: a basic setup starts at about $500. However, the company expects to offer a free smartphone-based version of their software in the first quarter of this year.

A souped-up x-ray scanning fluorescence technique is letting paleontologists peer into the chemical hearts of ancient fossils to reveal hidden details and change the way we see animals that lived and died tens of millions of years ago.

A new study from the U.K.’s University of Manchester describes how synchrotron rapid scanning x-ray fluorescence (SRS-XRF) can unmask minute deposits of atoms that were part of the living animal. The resulting maps show details like the tiny phosphorus deposits that were once lizard teeth and the copper clusters that mark melanosomes (the organelles that store melanin, giving cells their pigmentation). The group’s previous work includes analyzing colors on petrified feathers and mapping proteins in ancient lizard skins.

The research—by Manchester’s Nicholas Edwards and other member’s of lead investigator Phillip Manning’s “Chemical Ghosts” team—took advantage of new facilities at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL). The system includes a beefed-up x-y rastering stage that quickly steps big samples (measuring up to one meter square and weighing as much as 50 pounds) through increments of 80 to 100 micrometers. While scans like this have been done before, the Stanford SRS-XRF covers about two square centimeters a minute—some 3000 times faster than previous systems (which managed about one square centimeter a day). The SRS-XRF can also examine much larger regions—up to 60 by 30 centimeters—than previous instruments. Thus, paleontologists can for the first time thoroughly examine macroscopic fossils of significant size. The SRS-XRF can scan in two regimes: a high-intensity, high-energy beam delivering 10¹⁰ to 10¹¹ photons per second at either 12 or 13.5 kiloelectron volts stimulates emissions from heavier elements like calcium, barium, manganese, iron, copper zinc, and nickel; and a lower-energy beam of about 10⁹ photons per second at about 3 keV detects lighter silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, and chlorine.

The sitter for one of the first SRS-XRF portraits was a 50-million-year-old lizard, about 8 centimeters long, found in the Green River sediments of the Western U.S. (The smaller figure at left in the photo above.)  The fossil was ambiguous. It appeared to be just a lizard’s hide: it preserved the scales in minute detail, but showed no hard tissues like bone or teeth. Paleontologists were not sure whether it was a sloughed skin or the remains of a whole animal.

SRS-XRF scans for copper and sulfur clearly showed the outlines of the scales, but the surprise came from the scans for phosphorus (shown above right). The maps of emissions from the lizard’s head showed two dotted lines—showing what were once the lizard’s teeth. (The red outlines show teeth from one jaw; the blue show teeth from the other; it is no possible yet to say which is the upper and which the lower.) Just as dental x-rays help modern forensic examiners identify a body, the unconventional SRS-XRF maps make it easier to narrow down the fossil. (For the taxonomically inclined, it appears to be a shinisaurid, possibly related to Bahndwivici ammoskius.)

For more on the analysis of ancient fossils, see Manning’s blog, Dinosaur CSI.

Images: Phillip Manning, School of Earth, Atmospheric & Environmental Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, U.K.

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. (Ecclesiastes 1:18)

Okay, that may be taking it a bit far. But it is undeniably true that expanding knowledge often uncovers the bad along with the good.

Case in point: the San Diego-based developers of mobile, Web-linked environmental sensors found in a pilot study that “The people who are doing the most to reduce emissions, by biking or taking the bus, were the people who experienced the highest levels of exposure to pollutants.”

But the study also found that knowledge is power: once the personal-air-quality device users could “see” the pollution hotspots lurking in their daily lives, they took steps to reduce their exposure—by shifting cycling routes to side-streets, standing away from bus exhausts at bus-stops, and, in one instance, persuading the boss to install air filters in the office ventilation system.

CitiSense is a project of a University of California at San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering team led by professor William Griswold. They’ve created a mobile environmental detector, basically a plastic box of sensors and telemetry about the size of two decks of cards. The package includes three electrochemical gas sensors (which use less power than the semiconductor metal oxide alternatives) that detect the common pollutants nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), carbon monoxide (CO) and ozone (O₃) along with temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure. The sensor pack links to the user’s cell phone via Bluetooth, and uses the phone to track the user’s location via cell-tower triangulation and GPS. The prototypes cost around a thousand dollars to produce, but that should come down to about two hundred per unit, or even less, over time.

The user can monitor environmental data on CitiSense’s Android smartphone app. The app also feeds the information to the CitiSense Web site, which helps users visualize and analyze their own data by time and place. And the research team can aggregate anonymized data to understand regional air quality in unprecedented detail. (San Diego, for example, has just ten stationary “official” environmental monitoring stations.)

Beyond the sensor pack design, the challenges are smartphone power management and data quality assurance.

Real-world data are dirty, Griswold notes: “Sensors will differ. Sensors will fall. People will breathe on them.” Sensor readings will fluctuate for any reason or no reason at all. CitiSense team members developed a solution that preserves the data integrity in the face of all this uncertainty—a latent variable Gaussian regression analysis that helps fill in the blanks left by dropped data. (They describe the technique in a paper for the 2011 IEEE conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing).

As anybody who regularly uses a Bluetooth headset and GPS knows all too well, radios are power gluttons. They drain the phone battery fast enough that CitiSense study participants got two phone chargers—one for home and one for office—to keep them online. The designers are still working on optimizing battery life. Possible solutions include a hybrid positioning system that uses cell tower triangulation when the user is more or less stationary, and then switches on the GPS when it senses that the user is on the move.  And they are looking to reduce Bluetooth power consumption by caching data on the sensor and transferring it to the phone in periodic batches (though the user retains the option of calling for immediate real-time readings).

CitiSense joins an increasing number of Web-enabled, mobile, environmental-monitoring systems that include pollution-sensing kites over Beijing and radiation-tracking buses in Japan.

Images: Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego

In 1975, Steven Sasson, an electrical engineer at Kodak, became the first person to pick up a digital camera and take a picture. Sasson, an electrical engineer hired to develop electronic controls for film cameras, built a prototype digital camera as part of his experiments with a CCD chip developed by Fairchild Semiconductor. His research kicked off decades of digital imaging innovation that Kodak turned into a fat patent portfolio, but not business success.

While Sasson’s original digital imaging patent expired in 1995, many of the company’s advances, like algorithms that improved the sensitivity of sensors to light, are much newer. And, it turns out, valuable. Yesterday, Kodak announced that a group of companies including some that usually compete instead of cooperate—like Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Samsung—purchased 1100 of Kodak’s digital imaging patents for a disappointing US $525 million. While lucrative, the sale fell far short of a hoped-for $2.6 billion windfall, in part because of a ruling earlier this year that ended Kodak’s efforts to charge royalties to Apple and RIM for using its technology to preview images on digital cameras. Kodak still holds some 9600 other patents, and retains the right to use the patented digital imaging technologies in its own products.

The group also includes Amazon, Adobe Systems, Fujifilm, Huawei, HTC Corp., RIM, and Shutterfly and is led by Intellectual Ventures Management and RPX Corp.

Spectrum profiled Sasson’s work as one of our Top 11 Technologies of the Decade in a January 2011 feature, "Digital Photography: The Power of Pixels."

Photo: Kodak engineer Steven Sasson pioneered digital imaging in 1975. Credit: David Yellen

With outdoor mapping tools widely available and generally successful (Apple’s recent mapping debacle being the exception that proves the rule), technologists are pushing forward the state-of-the-art in indoor navigation, likely to be a hot area for advances throughout 2013.

This week, KAIST, The Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, announced a development that definitely is a step, so to speak, in the right direction: a new method to build a map from Wi-Fi radio signals without accompanying GPS tags or manual inputs of map coordinates. Most current systems need GPS signals to fully interpret the data coming from Wi-Fi routers.

Dong-Soo Han, a professor in KAIST’s Department of Computer Science, and his research team used software embedded in smartphone apps to upload a Wi-Fi fingerprint, that is, information about the current set of Wi-Fi signals and signal strengths available to the mobile device at that moment. Users were asked to input their home and office addresses. The mapping system developed linked the geographic coordinates of those locations to the Wi-Fi fingerprints most frequently collected by the smartphones, combining that information with those from other users to create an overall Wi-Fi radio map of a selected geographic area. Such maps could be used as the basis of indoor navigation or indoor location-based services (that, for example, send a coupon when you pass a particular restaurant in a shopping mall). Han’s team tested the system in four areas of Korea with mixed residential and commercial locations.

In a press release, Han is quoted as saying, "Although there seem to be many issues like privacy protection that have to be cleared up before commercializing this technology, there is no doubt that we will face a greater demand for indoor positioning system in the near future."

Mike Stanley, a systems engineer at Freescale Semiconductor, told Spectrum that “Using measured Wi-Fi signal strengths to develop Wi-Fi fingerprints is an area that has been receiving attention from researchers, and is certainly a valid approach for indoor environments."

Stanley grimly questioned, however, one possible use of Wi-Fi mapping information envisioned by the researchers, that is, for emergency rescue operations. It could be difficult, he pointed out, to find victims under piles of rubble using Wi-Fi fingerprints when the rubble “may very well contain the remains of the Wi-Fi base stations upon which they based their fingerprint analysis.”

Image: ST Microelectronics

To no one’s surprise, but apparently to some countries’ dismay, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and 52 other countries have failed to sign on to a draft treaty that would have updated a 1988 U.N. accord that, given the technology of the day, mostly governed international telephone calls. The treaty was proposed at a 12-day conference held by the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union.

There seems to be some confusion about what signing the treaty would have meant. Fox News’s headline—“U.S. refuses to sign U.N. Internet regulations”—for example, was wrong in a number of key respects. First, the ITU is not a regulatory body. Second, what was proposed was a treaty, which is just a starting point for regulations. Third, even had the U.S. representative, Ambassador Terry Kramer, signed the treaty, it would have then gone for ratification to the U.S. Senate, which has been something of an elephant graveyard for past treaties. There’s no reason to think the Senate would have looked at this treaty any more kindly than, say, the Kyoto Protocol.

Nor should there have been any confusion about the U.S. position going into the conference. I had a chance to interview Kramer a few days before it began. I asked him whether a successful conference outcome, from the U.S. point of view, would be essentially the inertial one of not changing anything. He answered in the affirmative:

We need to view as success here, realizing “Let things go,” that things can operate well without it. Think, in this case, the last time these [International Telecommunications Regulations] were reviewed was 24 years ago. And so if you look what’s happened in those 24 years, the mobile industry’s gone from almost 0 percent penetration to almost 100 percent, and in developing markets, 70 percent of the population have got a mobile. If you look at the Internet space, it was almost nonexistent in ’88, and now it’s one of the fundamental ways we deal with one another. And you say, “Okay, as we’re looking at these ITRs, tell me exactly what’s broken?” And the reality is, there’s very, very little broken.

Rightly or wrongly, the U.S. position is that any changes to the Internet may interfere with the free flow of information with and across the borders of repressive governments, and with the ability of network engineers to react quickly to emergencies when managing the net. The U.S. take was ably parroted by the New York Times in an editorial on Wednesday when it said,

[A] group of countries led by Russia and China are trying to use the deliberations, the first in 24 years and taking place under United Nations auspices, to undermine the open spirit of the Internet.

The Times continued:

[N]ow they want international law to endorse their control and censorship of the Internet and possibly even tighten control in ways that would make it harder for users to get information online and allow governments to monitor Internet traffic more readily.

An even more disturbing idea, from the U.S. standpoint, to have the ITU take over management of the Internet’s domain name system from ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), was withdrawn on Wednesday, only a few days after it was proposed. Control of the system for matching Internet addresses to domain names, and therefore to the Web addresses we’re used to using, would make it easier for repressive regimes to cut a nation off from the Internet, especially if, unlike, say, Egypt or Syria, the nation has more than a handful of backbone links to the outside world.

While the U.S.’s “refusal” is getting the headlines, it’s far from the only country to withhold support. In fact, as the BBC noted, it was joined by more than 50 countries:

Negotiators from Denmark, Italy, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Greece, Portugal, Finland, Chile, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Costa Rica and Kenya have said they would need to consult with their national governments about how to proceed and would also not be able to sign the treaty as planned on Friday.

In total 89 countries have signed the treaty and 55 have either reserved the right to do so later or ruled out ratifying it altogether.

That’s a lot of dissent considering that, as the BBC article also notes, the ITU originally promised not to bring to a vote anything that didn’t already have full consensus.

Image credit: ITU

Discussions of the future of chipmaking—particularly at a fundamental device conference like the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM)—tend to focus on engineering challenges. How small can we make this transistor? How fast will it switch? How much energy will it leak when it’s off? 

But even here the economic side of the equation can’t be ignored: after all, the best transistors won’t do the world any good if they’re too expensive to make. On Tuesday at IEDM, GlobalFoundries CEO Ajit Manocha drove home some of the issues that make the future of the chip industry more than a little murky.

By Manocha’s count, TSMC, GlobalFoundries, Intel, and Samsung are the only companies left pursuing the manufacturing technology needed to make the most advanced chips. Two of those companies (TSMC and GlobalFoundries) are foundries, which offer their chipmaking services to other firms. Manocha categorizes the other two, Intel and Samsung, as integrated device manufacturers (IDM’s), manufacturing their own designs, although Samsung, and to a lesser extent, Intel, also make chips for others.

This chipmaking complement is notable because it’s quite small. Once upon a time (about 12 years ago), Manocha said, there were a good 20 companies making advanced chips. Now “the list has shrunk…to four.”

This consolidation is driven primarily by cost. R&D is getting more and more expensive. And the cost of building a new fabrication plant is getting exceedingly steep: GlobalFoundries, for example, expects to spend about US $6.9 billion on the company’s new fab in upstate New York.

There are more challenges to come. Last week, outgoing Intel CEO Paul Otellini noted two significant hurdles coming up. One is the transition to 450-mm wafers from 300-mm wafers, a move that could drive the cost of new chip fabs to an even more staggering $10 billion. Then there is the transition to extreme ultraviolet lithography, which may one day save a lot of steps in patterning chips but will also add to the expense.

According to a transcript posted to the website Seeking Alpha, Otellini described those upcoming hurdles as a “chasm” that not every company may be able to cross. “I think you will likely see the structure of the industry evolve pretty dramatically over the next 4 to 5 years.”

The foundries, not unexpectedly, don’t look very healthy in Otellini’s crystal ball. Intel, which leads the field in R&D spending, has traditionally been the first with new transistor technologies like new gate stack materials and, more recently, 3-D transistors. In the past, Otellini said, other companies could follow suit by reverse engineering what Intel has done. Now, “you get to the dimensions that we are at today, and reverse engineering destroys the part in a way that you can't analyze it..it's becoming more difficult for everybody to, sort of, ride the coattails.”

To stay in an increasingly fast-moving game, Manocha envisions foundries will have to evolve into “virtual IDM’s” collaborating very early and very closely with customers and other companies that are part of the chipmaking ecosystem. As chip design and the underlying devices get more complex, it seems like that level of collaboration will be vital. 

But will it be enough to keep the foundries competitive? Could their business model eventually displace vertically integrated ones like Intel's? These are old questions. But given the extreme consolidation of the field and the quickening pace of manufacturing process development, they’re taking on a new level of urgency.

(Image: Intel)