Tech Talk

The phrase "content is king" is back again. A recent survey performed by Nielsen/NetRatings for the Online Publishers Association (OPA) found that Internet users are spending 47 percent of their time online interacting with content sites in 2007, a number that has risen by over a third from what it was four years ago. In contrast, consumers are now spending less time using e-mail (33 percent), making commercial transactions (15 percent), and performing search tasks (5 percent). As recently as 2003, e-mail communication accounted for 46 percent of typical Internet usage, the OPA stated yesterday on its own content Web site.

The publishing trade group's Internet Activity Index divides consumers' online interests into the four categories noted above: content, communications, commerce, and search. It said that the Internet has evolved to the point where these four areas have established unique business models, which it called "a natural and healthy segmentation of the marketplace." Its Activity Index tracks usage rates of each in an attempt to provide "a benchmark for charting the relative impact of changing market dynamics on these segments." The analysis of Nielsen/NetRatings examined data from a large number of leading Web properties and Internet applications to derive its results.

In a press release yesterday, the OPA stated that the growth of consumers' time spent viewing content has risen steadily over the four-year period under review.

"The dominant role of content is driven by several important factors," said OPA president Pam Horan. "The first is the online transition of traditionally offline activities, such as getting news, finding entertainment information, or checking the weather. Quality content sites see a consistent pattern -- major news drives traffic spikes, but traffic remains consistently higher even after the event. Major news events such as Hurricane Katrina and high-profile seasonal events such as the NCAA Final Four Basketball tournament are clearly driving consumers to engage more deeply with online content."

She added: "New online features and communities are also leading consumers to spend a larger share of their online time with content. Consumers spend considerable time with social networking sites, which serve not only as places of content but are also increasingly important communications vehicles."

So, as consumers are growing more comfortable with the new medium, they are using it to supplant routine offline activities and investigate popular new entertainment and educational ones, rather than simply perform the often work-related tasks that brought them to the Internet in the first place. It's not a revelatory finding, but we at least know now that what we suspected was taking place is, in fact, really taking place.

Nokia just doesn't get much attention in the U.S., both for better and for worse.

While the whole world is watching the iPhone (and blogging about it; we're as guilty as anyone), Nokia keeps quietly charging ahead. Some analysts are forecasting Q3 sales of 1 million for Apple's $500-$600 iPhone, but let's put that in context. In Q2 this year, Nokia sold 1.5 million N95 phones at about $750 each.

This is, by the way, one sweet phone, and it does some things that the iPhone can only dream about. Things like 3G, GPS, and video. It also does some of the same things, in some ways better. It has a 5 Mpixel Carl Zeiss camera and can upload pictures directly to Flickr and other websites; an MP3 player, and a Web browser. The rest of the world has noticed, and is buying it in droves.

In fact, the rest of the world is buying all kinds of Nokia phones in droves. As was widely reported,

Nokia sold 100.8 million phones in the quarter, more than its three closest rivals combined, and estimated its market share at 38 percent, above analysts' consensus of 37.7 percent.

The Finnish company has a strong lead in emerging markets such as China and India, which it has been fiercely defending.

"Emerging markets are the key issue; they are ahead in Africa, in China ... everywhere you look it's emerging markets, they have a wider distribution network there, they are reaching more consumers," said Neil Mawston from Strategy Analytics.

An article in Cellular News puts Nokia one point lower, but confirms the fact of its astonishing dominance:

Nokia 37.0%

Samsung at 13.7%

Motorola 13%

Sony Ericsson 9.1%

LG 7.0%

They're all having great years, in fact, except Motorola, whose Razr line is wearing thin (pun intended). Overall Motorola unit sales are down 31% compared to a year ago. Sony Ericsson is doing well, and LG even better, with its Chocolate and enV phones. (My daughter has the Chocolate. She's no longer enamored with it, but it's selling well. A friend's son recently got the enV, and loves everything about it.)

The good news for Nokia is that it's not just the good news that's relatively overlooked in the U.S. Consider Microsoft's XBox repair woes, which have been widely reported, including a big feature ("Xbox 360 Out of Order? For Loyalists, No Worries") in yesterday's NY Times.

Microsoft expects to end up repairing a third of the "11.6 million 360s already in the hands of consumers."

But according to a BBC report, Nokia will be fixing four times that many phones:

Nokia admits mobile battery issue

Nokia is offering to replace 46 million batteries for its mobile phones after reports of overheating while charging.

The article says,

"I think this will hurt Nokia's brand a lot and that's the most precious asset Nokia has," Jyske analyst Soren Linde Nielsen told Reuters news agency.

Maybe elsewhere. But American consumers will have to start paying attention to Nokia first.

As astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour replaced a faulty gyroscope on the International Space Station (ISS) during a spacewalk today, senior mission control officials back on Earth debated their options in responding to a small gouge in the underside of the orbiter discovered yesterday. NASA announced this morning that its experts are considering a number of responses to the gash, caused by a ricocheting piece of insulating foam from the shuttle's external fuel tank shortly after lift-off. With two more spacewalks planned this week, the space agency could order astronauts to attach a temporary shielding panel over the hole, or apply a coating of special protective paint over it, or fill the 3.5-inch gouge with a hardening glue.

The damaged area, near the shuttle's right main landing gear door, was identified during an inspection routine performed prior to the docking maneuver that joined the Endeavour with the ISS. Educator-astronaut Barbara Morgan assisted in a procedure using a laser-imaging device attached to the shuttle's robotic arm to beam 3-D pictures of the gash down to the Mission Control Center in Houston yesterday. Early word from NASA managers is that the damage is not critical to the safety of the ship when it descends through the atmosphere on re-entry for landing.

In the meantime, routine mission work continues as planned. Today, the crew of Endeavour is busy off-loading tons of cargo for the ISS and swapping out one of the control moment gyroscopes that determines the altitude of the space station. Yesterday, they carried out the centerpiece of the mission, known as STS-118, by attaching an enormous truss to the solar-array wings of the ISS, NASA said in a separate statement. Unrelated to the damaged thermal tile, the space agency decided to extend Endeavour's stay at the ISS by two days, bringing the visit to 10 days. The decision was made upon the successful connection of a new power coupling, called the Station-to-Shuttle Power Transfer System, which enables the shuttle to run on electricity supplied from the very solar array the astronauts are augmenting.

Endeavouris now scheduled to undock from the ISS on 20 August and land in the United States two days later. A number of educational programs will be presented from the orbiting platforms by Morgan in the days ahead.

Mesh networking is moving the mainstream. The Financial Times has an interesting piece ("Knit your own network") about a Mountain View, Calif., start-up, Meraki, which has "designed a low-cost mesh networking system that anyone can set up and manage." The author describes how easy it was to set up a mesh in and around his suburban home. He reports that "not only is Meraki the easiest wi-fi I have ever set up, it is also one of the best performing and simplest to manage."

Mesh networking a way of solving a critical problem - how do access points, whether a cell tower or a Wi-Fi router, connect to the Internet as a whole? In your home, your Wi-Fi router is connected to your cable or DSL modem. That means coverage is limited to the distance from the modem that the router can transmit to and receive from.

For few years now, some manufacturers, such as Apple with its Airport line of Wi-Fi routers, let you daisy-chain routers. Packets from the backyard hop through the further one to the one connected to the router. The fundamentals of that hopping were worked out in the 1990s for the U.S. military in research funded by Darpa. That research first hit the commercial world in the form of routing equipment developed by Mesh Networks, a Florida company that Spectrum wrote about in June 2003 ("Broadband a go-go"), and then again in January 2005, in the context of a large Las Vegas installation ("Viva Mesh Vegas").

Subsequently, Mesh was bought by Motorola, and meshing was incorporated into the IEEE 802.11 standard that underlies Wi-Fi (see "Wi-Fi Nodes to Talk Amongst Themselves"). The goal was to get routers from one manufacturer, such as Linksys, to mesh with those of another, say Apple, as easily as they do with ones from the same company.

In that sense, the Meraki routers are a step backward. Instead of cobbling together routers from diffferent companies, you use multiple Meraki routers. They are cheap though; buying new ones isn't a great hardship for most households - if you have so much real estate you need more than one router, you can probably afford these.

You start by plugging one Meraki Mini adaptor â'' a $49 (£24) box about the size of a deck of cards â'' into your cable or DSL broadband connection. This first adaptor operates as an internet â''gatewayâ'' and shares the connection with the other adaptors that make up the network and act as â''repeatersâ'', extending the reach of the signal.

Each Mini needs to be plugged into a power socket and has an indoor range of between 100 and 150 feet (30-45 metres). They come with suction cups so they can be mounted on a window. Like most wi-fi networking equipment today, they use the 802.11g standard, providing data rates of up to 54Mbps (megabits per second).

The company also has a waterproof router designed for the outdoors, which is, as far as I know, a first for home networking.

The outdoor adaptors, which cost $99 each, come in a weatherproof case and are powered using a long Ethernet cable, which plugs into a special adaptor and from there into the mains. Meraki is about to launch a solar panel and battery pack to power outdoor adaptors â'' ideal for remote locations.

The writer is greatly impressed by Meraki's ease-of-use:

The final step is to log on to Merakiâ''s Dashboard web-based network management tool, register each of the adaptors and give your mesh network a name. Once this is done, the mesh network is up and running. Sensibly, each adaptor is designed to download any updates from Meraki automatically.

Lastly, the company's model goes beyond simple home networking.

Merakiâ''s free integrated billing model allows network owners to set internet connection charges and collect automatic payments. In effect, this means anyone can set up a commercial mesh hotspot. The billing module includes tools for assessing revenue models and making sure the network is operating cost-effectively.

If Meraki's gear can get more and more Wi-Fi nodes up and accessible, it'll be a good contribution to the ultimate goal of ubiquitous high-speed access. The more ways we can get it - EV-DO and HSDPA from cellular companies, WiMax from cellular and cable companies, and meshed Wi-Fi - the better.

One of the most intriguing (but too briefly discussed) ideas at DARPATech 2007 was the use of hydrogen sulfide to induce a state of suspended animation. Such a state would primarily serve the purpose of buying time: even a brief period of suspended animation after a fatal hemorrhage would allow time to transport a fallen soldier to safety.

Hydrogen sulfide gas can shut off an organismâ''s need for oxygen and induce hibernation. Given that the toxic gas is responsible for the odor of flatulence, Iâ''m not shocked that the two are related.

This is not a new idea. Check out this February 2007 interview with Tony Tether at Danger Room for more on the topic.

If you use a Blackberry, Treo, or iPhone, you know the addictive satisfaction of having access to e-mail and the Web anywhere. Instead of scouring the countryside for Wi-Fi hotspots, you just fire up your device wherever there's a phone signal, which is pretty much everywhere these days. For me, using an iPhone on AT&T's outdated EDGE network has whetted my appetite for faster data rates. So it was particularly disappointing to read a recent story in the Washington Post dissing the rapid development of one a true broadband cellular network.

Here at Spectrum we're used to the breezy way the general press writes about complex technologies, but the Post's treatment of an important story - Sprint's bold move into mobile WiMAX - does a great disservice to both that project and the underlying technologies.

The Post's headline was "Struggling Sprint Pushes Its Chips Toward WiMax: Survival May Depend on Untested Service." I'll leave to the business press the issue of whether Sprint is struggling, but to say that it is pushing its chips, implying all of its chips, toward WiMAX is misleading in the extreme. We'll turn to that presently, but more importantly, the idea that WiMAX is untested is just bizarre.

First, let's just remind ourselves what WiMAX is, since the Post article offers only one, rather hapless half-sentence: "WiMax is similar to better-known WiFi technology." Back in 2004 I wrote an article, "WiMax and Wi-Fi: Separate and Unequal," entirely devoted to disabusing publications like the Post of that notion. In fact, it starts out by taking two pubs to task - Business Week and the Washington Post!

"Think of it as Wi-Fi on steroids,â'' Business Weekrecently enthused. The Washington Post, in a story under the headline â''Wi-Fi Expands,â'' similarly confused the two standards. â''The technology will grow more powerful, too, as a type known as WiMax that sends signals up to 30 miles hits the field,â'' the paper reported.

WiMax, in fact, is not a Wi-Fi extension. Wi-Fi is a local-area networking standard developed by the IEEE 802.11 working group and is designed to be used indoors at close range, to distribute Internet access to a bunch of computers in a home or an office. WiMax, on the other hand, is a wireless replacement for a wired broadband connection. That is, itâ''s a new way to get Internet access into the home or office in the first place, and to do so more cheaply and easily than through the wires of telephone companies or cable providers.

Here it is, three years later, and the Post is still putting the same shoe in its mouth. And a new one too - that WiMAX is untested. Does the Post really think a major cellular carrier is going to spend $3 billion deploying a nationwide network without testing it first?

WiMAX, based on the IEEE"s 802.16 standard, has been around for the better part of a decade now. (Without patting ourselves on the back too much, Spectrum's first feature article about 802.16 is dated June 2003.) Yes, mobile WiMAX is newer, but a version of it known as WiBro has not only been tested but deployed in Korea. (See for example, "South Korea Pushes Mobile Broadband: The WiBro scheme advances.")

Yes, the version Sprint will be using, so-called Wave 2 of mobile WiMAX, is even newer, and the WiMAX Forum hasn't completed it's conformance and compatibility testing requirements yet, but Wave 2 is being field tested even as I write this by.... you guessed it, Sprint. The carrier expects to conduct two noncommercial launches by the end of the year, in the Washington D.C. and Chicago areas, and to begin commercially launching in those markets in the first half of 2008.

According to Ali Tabassi, vice president of technology development at Sprint Nextel, this is par for the course. In fact, a few years ago Sprint conducted trials of a similar technology, provided by Flarion, in Raleigh, N.C., with more than 6000 customers. The Flarion wireless broadband service and WiMAX are based on the same core technology for the air interface, OFDMA, which determines the way they cram more and more individual phone calls into a limited amount of radio spectrum.

If this all seems like semantics, lets consider what's at stake here. Sprint is trying to create a fourth-generation wireless network that will break new ground by using the Internet Protocol for both voice and data, and deliver a true wireless broadband service, everywhere in the United States, that moves data at up to 10 megabits per second. That's a rate that most of us don't enjoy even from our DSL or cable broadband service, and it would really make the Web sing on an iPhone.

By the way, Sprint's $3 billion plan sounds like a lot of chips placed on number ".16" at the roulette wheel of wireless investment, but a little perspective is needed. According to Tabassi, Sprint currently spends $7 billion to maintain and enhance its current network. In other words, Sprint still has a lot of chips stacked up on its side of the table.

Back to the important question. Will Sprint's network be pioneering, or well-tested? Both, says Roger Marks, chair of the IEEE 802.16 Working Group on Broadband Wireless Access. "Sprint is certainly a pioneer here, and creating an innovative product that works for the consumer will present interesting challenges. The underlying technology, though, is not a major gamble because they are making use of a broadly-supported standard - IEEE 802.16 - and will benefit from the mobile WiMAX certification process being finalized in the WiMAX Forum. Also, the mobile 802.16 technology has been not only tested but also widely deployed in Korea."

The weight of a soldierâ''s pack is about 15 to 20 percent batteries. That extra 27 pounds or so adds to a soldierâ''s fatigue. Worse, those batteriesâ'' (by definition) limited life means that a missionâ''s length depends completely on battery capacity. During this morningâ''s Strategic Technology Office (STO) presentation, program manager Douglas Kirkpatrick laid out STOâ''s plans for liberating soldiers from energy dependence. Among more traditional ideas like extending battery life, making batteries smaller and lighter and squeezing more life out of solar cells, Dr. Kirkpatrick proposed feedstock-flexible energy sources. Like Doc Brownâ''s Delorean in Back to the Future, a truck could run on rotten banana peels. If bananas are out of season, vegetable oil or algae can also do the trick. The goal is a flexible biofuels converter that adapts to its environmentâ''it eats what itâ''s given and doesnâ''t complain about its dinner. If the mission is in truly arid territory, Dr. Kirkpatrick envisions supplementing the converter with a portable algae farm.

This might be a good time for DARPA to pencil in a meeting with ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency that is about to be created in the Department of Energy. This morning President Bush signed into law H.R. 2272, the America COMPETES Act. Among its many provisions, the bill authorizes the creation of ARPA-E, which will do for energy what DARPA has done for cutting-edge military technology.

One of the main criticisms of ARPA-E has been the lack of a market for products that will result from its innovations. Unlike DARPA, which has the Defense Department as its main customer, ARPA-E would rely on a diaphanous clientele to adopt its products.

But as this morningâ''s STO presentation clarifies, the energy problem is everyoneâ''s problem. A joint DARPA/ARPA-E effort would give ARPA-E its first guaranteed customer, and it might solve that program manager shortfall that DARPA seems to be struggling with.

Tony Tether just announced that the Urban Challenge will take place in Victorville, CA at the George Air Force Base. The 36 teams going to the qualifying event on October 26-31 will be whittled down to 20 by the November 3 final.

Stanford, whose "Stanley" won the 2005 Grand Challenge, made the team again. See the full roster.

At 10:45 a.m. PST on Thursday 9 August, DARPA director Tony Tether will announce the semi-finalists and location for the DARPA Urban Challenge, an autonomous vehicles competition in which cars controlled solely by on-board computers will race each other through an urban environment with moving traffic and obstacles. The Urban Challenge takes place on November 3 of this year in an as-yet undisclosed location with as-yet unidentified participants. To watch the announcement, go to the live webcast.

The grand prize for autonomous navigation of the 60-mile course in under six hours is $2 million. John Voelcker has written about the previous DARPA Grand Challenges for Spectrum and will be covering the Urban Challenge this fall.

Tether said that while DARPA has all the drivers they need to simulate a clogged downtown environment, theyâ''re still looking for volunteers to be pedestrians. (I think he was kidding?)

Even when the exhibition hall was almost empty on Tuesday night, the Revolutionizing Prosthetics booth was surrounded three layers deep by admirers. DARPA's "bionic" arm was demonstrated by Jesse Sullivan, an electrician whose arms had to be amputated at the shoulder after he accidentally touched an active cable. The prosthetic arm is the result of a $50 million effort led by Johns Hopkins' Applied Physics Laboratory and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Though it is in the second phase of a program that is due for completion in 2009, the Proto-1* demonstration already looks like a finished product. Jesse is recognizably wearing a prosthesis, but after about five minutes talking to him, I couldnâ''t shake the conviction that he was wearing a robot-colored glove over a fully functional human armâ''like a kid on Halloween night in a skeleton suit.

I grew up watching The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, so I always thought the key to a convincing bionic arm is having some kind of convincing coverâ''skin that looks real enough to fool the eye. Now I think you could forego any â''naturalâ'' cover. Itâ''s not necessary. If the movement is as smooth and easy and intuitive-looking as Jesseâ''s arm, your brain fills in the gaps and convinces you that thereâ''s a real arm lurking under a robot suit.

Jesse is able to control the arm with residual nerves surgically connected to his pectoral muscles, which link to a processor in the arm. Not only does he control the arm, but it provides sensory feedback as well: Jesse said that he could feel pressure when I squeezed his index finger. Which is to say, the â''index fingerâ'' of the prosthesis. The Proto-1 arm has 22 degrees of freedom and 80 sensors. Johns Hopkins' Stuart Harshbarger says it took Jesse about an hour to start to use the limb intuitively. I can't imagine what it will be like when the team starts working with models that work via electrodes surgically implanted into the cortex.

The revolution here might be less about the person fitted with the new limb, and more about the people around him or her. In the 1946 movie The Best Years of Our Lives, Harold Russellâ''s character isolates himself from his family and from greater society because the people around him canâ''t face what has happened to him and donâ''t want to be confronted with the reality and profoundness of his injury. Most of the wounded soldierâ''s trauma comes from the pain of watching peopleâ''s faces change when they perceive the massive injury he has sustained.

A prosthesis that removes the separation of mechanical tool versus organic outgrowth of the human body functions as a psychological rather than a mechanical tool. The prosthesisâ'' four fingers donâ''t even move independently but I still intuitively went for Jesseâ''s hand as I left, to shake hands goodbye. The persistence of the illusion was incredibly stubborn. And is that really a misapprehension? Jesse says that sometimes when he moves the arm, it feels like heâ''s moving his phantom limb and the prosthesis is just along for the ride.

* The original blog post misidentified the arm as Proto-2. The arm demonstrated at DARPATech was the Proto-1.