Tech Talk

Paul Otellini, Intel's outgoing CEO and a 40-year veteran of the company, gave his last earnings call last week. And the results were, well, a little bit less than sanguine. The company’s profits in the first quarter of this year were US $2 billion, down 25 percent from the last quarter of 2012.

That's a pretty big decline for the world's biggest chip company. And the culprit, if you had to choose just one, seems to be declining PC sales. A few weeks ago, analysis firm IDC reported that the number of PC shipments in the first quarter of 2013 was down 13.9 percent from what it was a year ago—the steepest such decline since the company started tracking shipments in 1994. Late last week, private equity firm Blackstone said it is dropping plans to cobble together more than $24 billion to buy Dell, citing the health of the PC market as one of the reasons for the change of heart.

Intel, in theory, is in a much better position to rebound from declining PC sales than Dell is. Consumers are spending their PC money on new tablets and smartphones, and Intel has been gearing up to make a dent in the mobile market. This year, it is expected to begin releasing a series of Atom chips that boast a microarchitecture, code-named Silvermont, that is truly optimized for low power. The campaign will reportedly start with chips for low-power servers, followed by tablets, and then smartphones. (For those who want to follow along, the code names for those chips are Avoton, Bay Trail, and Merrifield, respectively.)

How much of an impact these chips will make is anyone's guess. Although Intel has already inked a few deals with mobile companies, this is a big departure for the company. "The PC is like a huge flywheel driving you in one direction," analyst G. Dan Hutcheson, CEO of VLSI Research, told me last year, not long after Otellini announced his resignation in November. The challenge for the company will be whether it can "become as light and as fast-moving as Qualcomm and Nvidia."

Ten young entrepreneurs, sponsored by Microsoft, attended Demo Mobile 2013 to give what’s called an Alpha Pitch. Alpha Pitch companies don’t quite have a product ready to launch; instead, they have a solid idea and some kind of prototype, and then get 90 seconds to convince the audience that they’re the next big thing.

Three of the ten stood out for me as especially clever, useful, or simply intriguing:, Flowbit, LightLibrary, and WordsEye.

Flowbit, from the University of California at Berkeley, is developing a low-cost package of sensors and wireless communications intended for use in water systems in developing countries. Flowbit envisions water system managers and engineers installing these boxes into their network of pipes to measure water flow, temperature, purification processes, pH, dissolved solids, and other factors, and upload that information automatically.

LightLibrary, from Harvard University, has developed a system to register the print books you own so that publishers can sell you a reduced-cost electronic version—you sign the title page and uploading a photo of that signed page for analysis. LightLibrary's concept is similar to the Ultraviolet format being promoted by some digital video companies; I hadn’t previously heard anyone suggest a similar process for books.

WordsEye, from Columbia University, seems a little goofy at first, but it could have a number of useful applications in education. To use it, you type in a description of a scene, say, a cat sits in front of a house with a flower. WordsEye pulls images from its library to create the scene. The company figures the app will initially be used to create comic illustrations to share with friends, but it could also help teach languages or grammar, because the software parses the sentence as written, so mistakes in sentence structure can lead to surprises in the rendered scene.

Photo: FlowBit cofounder Nick Lee takes the Demo stage. Credit: Tekla Perry

I’ve tried eye tracking technology before, most recently at this year's mega Consumer Electronics Show, where Tobii Technology has for a couple of years demonstrated its latest advances. Computers that respond to the movements of the users eyes are, of course, invaluable for folks who can’t use their hands. But they may go mainstream, because, like curb cuts, they can also be useful for those who don’t need assistive technology.

Eye trackers let you scroll a long document with a phone in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. They haven't, at least to date, helped much when it comes to selecting buttons on the screen, which, when it works at all, takes too much time and concentration. It's just easier to touching a button on the display itself or a mouse. But they are very cool for playing the kind of games in which you blow things up in space—you feel like you have a superpower when you can zap the person who pushed past you on the sidewalk just by glaring at them (as I discovered; see the video above).

Eye Tribe, a startup that launched at Demo Mobile this week, says its Mobile Eye Control works on the same principle as Tobii’s technology—it sends out a beam of infrared light and uses its reflection to locate the pupils in a user's face. It works well, even if you're wearing eyeglasses, though it can be confused by bifocals.

For the past 50 years, Silicon Valley has long been confused about what it takes to start a company. So says Steve Blank, cofounder of E.piphany and other companies and currently a teacher of entrepreneurship at Stanford and other universities. The culture, he explains, demanded that would-be company founders write a business plan, with five-year projections about their proposed company’s growth.

But really, Blank told a rapt audience of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and start-up wannabes at Demo Mobile 2013 this week, the only place writing a business plan should be discussed is “in the English department, as creative writing.” The only place outside of Silicon Valley where five-year plans based on complete unknowns have been required was the Soviet Union, he said, “and look how that worked out.”

Instead, startups should expect to go from failure to failure. Because on the first day, you don’t have a plan. “You have a series of untested hypotheses,” he says, “or that’s what I tell my students at Stanford. Outside of Stanford we call them eff’n' guesses.”

To support this plan-less approach to entrepreneurship, Blank brought a series of entrepreneurs to the stage to talk about their experiences.  Matt Brezina, CEO of Sincerely, a company that turns personal photos into mailed greeting cards, said the company launched a number of different apps under different brand names as tests of concepts, including a photo printing service and stock greeting cards, before coming up with the concept of personalized greeting cards, that is now commercial as the product “Ink.” He found his first test market by mining his roommates’ Facebook pages; the company did later market research by walking across the street to a shopping mall and stopping shoppers to show them paper mockups, wireframes, and other early app designs. “Malls have people who buy stuff,” said Brezina, “and they’re my customers.”

Three months after battery fires led to the grounding of Boeing's worldwide fleet of 787s, deliverance appears to be at hand: the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration seems happy with Boeing's proposed fix. According to The New York Times, the 50-odd planes already delivered will need only modest retrofitting in the form of extra insulation and a new venting system for the lithium-ion battery packs.

Lithium-ion batteries store more energy per unit of weight and of volume than the older, nickel-cadmium batteries, but that wasn't the main reason why Boeing opted for them. After all, batteries make up only a tiny share of an airliner's weight, even for the 787, which relies more on electricity for its operation than any other airliner in history. Designers liked the lithium-ion technology, rather, because it charges faster than nickel-cadmium and—ironically—because it was supposed to require less fuss. Of course, the problem with lithium-ion batteries is that are volatile. That's a fancy way of saying that once in a while, they explode in flames. 

Two months ago Boeing's archrival Airbus announced that its upcoming A350 airliner—an answer to the 787, both technologically and commercially—would revert to the tried-and-true nickle-cadmium battery. Airbus still exerts tight control over every step in making its planes. Boeing, however, ceded to its vendors not only much of the manufacturing but also a lot of design work for the 787. Some industry analysts blame the battery problems on this strategy.

Photos: NTSB, Boeing

As a telecommuter, I’m on the far end of a lot of conference calls. Unfortunately, high quality video conferencing hardware is a bit beyond our budget. We’ve tried a staff-built, two-camera contraption, but mostly we rely on voice-only calls. Which, from my end, are really hard to follow.

Altia Systems, a Silicon Valley company that launched at Demo Mobile this week in San Francisco, has organizations like mine squarely in its sights with a US $600 video conferencing "puck" and cloud-based conferencing system that it calls PanaCast. The puck has six cameras in it and audio inputs (BYO microphones). The system collects the video and audio, stitches them into a 250-degree panorama, compresses the data, and transmits it over the Internet, working in real time over Wi-Fi, 4g, or even 3G connections.

When my kids were younger, whenever one seemed to be coming down with an illness, I did two things right away: I took the child’s temperature, and I called the teacher to ask what was going around the classroom—because the odds were, my kid was getting whatever his classmates already had. (Later, when we were living in a more networked world, I would send a quick e-mail to the class parent list to get that information.) Invariably, the teacher or parents could tell me a lot about the illness of the month—what and how serious it was, and how long it would last.

I always knew I wasn't the only parent relying on these kinds of quantative and qualitative data when my kid gets sick. And sure enough, Kinsa, a New York City startup, has wrapped both of these approaches together in a single app, the Kinsa Smart Thermometer, which it launched at Demo Mobile this week. The app's thermometer connects to smart phones through the audio port (a cheaper way to go than Bluetooth). Your temperature appears on the phone display, and the app saves the temperature and any symptom information you enter. It also lets users create private communities, like parents of children in the same classroom, to track illnesses going through the community, and offers even more general “what’s going around” tracking for broader geographic areas—similar it seemed, to the pollen count data provided by local weather sites. The gizmo will initially sell for $25, about the cost of an old-fashioned, non-networked electronic thermometer.

Follow me on Twitter @TeklaPerry.

Physicists usually rely on electromagnetic magnetic fields to harness the power of plasma, the fourth state of matter, in fusion power experiments. But University of Missouri researchers have managed to create rings of plasma that can hold their shape without the use of outside electromagnetic fields—possibly paving the way for a new age of practical fusion power and leading to the creation of new energy storage devices.

Traditional efforts to achieve nuclear fusion have relied upon multi-billion-dollar fusion reactors, called tokamaks, which harness powerful electromagnetic fields to contain the super-heated plasmas resulting from the fusion reactions. The ability to create plasma with self-confining electromagnetic fields in the open air could eliminate the need for external electromagnetic fields in future fusion experiments, and with it, much of the expense.

The researchers created plasma rings about 15 centimeters in diameter that flew through the air across distances up to 60 centimeters. The rings lasted just 10 milliseconds, but reached temperatures greater than the sun's fiery fusion core surface at around 6600 to 7700 degrees K (6327 to 7427 degrees C). Plasma physicists suspect that magnetic fields are still involved—but that the plasma rings create their own.

"This plasma has a self-confining magnetic field," said Randy Curry, an engineer and physicist at the University of Missouri in Columbia. "If one can generate and contain it without large magnets involved, of course fusion energy would be an application." But the researchers' success in creating self-contained plasma rings came as a surprise. "We did not expect that," Curry says.

The researchers had been working with exploding wires that vaporize when pulsed power is applied and release a cloud of plasma energy. They had previously only succeeded in making clouds of plasma that lasted less than a millisecond, Curry said.

Just when you thought you knew what mobile computing meant—smart phones, of course, and more recently, tablet computers—the definition has changed. It now includes just about anything connected to the Internet that you can pick up and move. Unless it’s a full-fledged computer, then it’s not mobile. Even it it is. I think.

To judge by Demo Mobile 2013, held this week in San Francisco, just about everything is a mobile device: smart watches—a new one is announced every week, it seems—Google Glass, a smart thermometer, and a web-conferencing system in a puck. (The latter two were announced here at the conference.)

These devices are, presumably, already useful doing whatever it is they are individually designed to do. But what would happen if they could all easily connect up and do things together? In a science fiction movie, they would likely take over the world. But—a more likely scenario—in the hands of creative engineers, hobbyists, and even kids, they could do some really cool and useful things that we have yet to imagine.

With the horrifying images of the Boston Marathon bombing still much too fresh in our minds, and with citywide marathons coming up this weekend in London, Hamburg, and Salt Lake City, law enforcement officers and citizens everywhere are asking how to prevent the tragedy from being repeated.

As Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs adjunct professor Abraham Wagner observed last year, on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, there’s “no magic bullet or perfect solution to this thorny problem.”

There are basically two ways to ferret out would-be bombers: early intelligence and onsite detection. Both have technical and procedural dimensions. Steady improvements on both fronts since 2001 seem to be reducing the probability that terrorists will succeed, though the effectiveness of available strategies and techniques is still woefully short of 100 percent. Wagner says that police and intelligence work have uncovered about 45 plots since September 2001, and may have discouraged a number of others.

Intelligence

Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) are probably the most effective tools for stopping terrorism. Human intelligence may account for most of the success so far, but technology plays a part—albeit a controversial one. Signals intelligence—monitoring digital traffic (who sends what and how much to whom) and even intercepting messages on cell phones, e-mail, and social media—can provide advance warning. Communications monitoring efforts (like Carnivore, which debuted in the early-2000s, but was reportedly replaced by a commercial packet-sniffing tool) have generated negative headlines and lawsuits as well as investigative leads. The FBI’s Stingray cell phone monitoring program provoked privacy suits that are still being reviewed by U.S. District Courts. And the National Security Letters issued by the FBI—which force firms, including those who operate e-mail and cellular telephony services, to turn over customer information without notifying the customers—are coming under increased scrutiny.

On the broader front, counter-terrorism developers have constructed data mining packages that look for suspicious patterns of information access. (JP Morgan Chase reportedly used Palantir Technologies tools to detect efforts to hack into client accounts and then trained the all-seeing-eye on itself to detect suspicious behavior among its own employees.)

Surveillance cameras—increasingly a feature of the urban environment—can certainly help human operators spot suspicious activity, but automated image analysis works best on scenes that are relatively static: detecting motion in a quiet warehouse, for example, or tracking moving objects in the wide open spaces of the American southwest.

Facial recognition software does wonders in the movies, but even when it works, you need to know the face to find the face. And, as we’re discovering in Boston, shaky, low-res cell-phone images don’t really give facial recognition software enough to work with.