Google Working on Internet That’s Over 1,000 Times Faster Than Yours

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Most of the country is still waiting for the sort of super-fast gigabit internet connections available in places like Kansas City, Kansas and Chattanooga, Tennessee. But Google is already exploring the next thing: 10 gigabit per second connections, connections that are over 1,000 times faster than theaverage connection in the U.S. today.

That’s the word from Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette, who discussed Google’s 10 gigabit experiment this week at a conference in San Francisco, as first reported by USA Today. “After one gig, it will be 10 gigs,” Pichette said at the conference. “So we are already working on 10 gigs.”

The news shows that Google will continue to push for change in the world of commercial internet services, and the timing couldn’t be better.

Don’t expect Google to roll out a service any time soon. “At Google, we’re always looking to make our product better, and keep pushing the boundaries of innovation,” a spokesperson told us. “That is part of our DNA — but we don’t have plans to deliver 10 Gig speeds in the near future.” Even still, the Pichette shows that Google will continue to push for change in the world of commercial internet services, and the timing couldn’t be better.

Yesterday, cable broadband providers Comcast agreed to purchase its biggest rival, Time-Warner Cable, a move that could threaten the progress of internet services here in the U.S. Hopefully Google can keep entrenched players like Comcast in check, not only by encouraging them to increase speeds, but by pushing them to treat all traffic equally and not discriminate against certain content in an effort to boost the bottom line.

Google rolled out its Kansas City gigabit in 2012, and since then, it has announced additional services in Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah. Although this Google Fiber program has spurred some activity from traditional internet service providers like AT&T and Century Link, competitors have mostly been slow to follow Google toward super-fast connections. Instead of competing, the broadband industry has started proposing legislative roadblocks to prevent new competitors from entering their turf.

Last year, Time Warner Cable CFO Irene Esteves said that customers don’t even want faster internet speeds. Meanwhile, Verizon has halted development of its new fiber optic internet service and is focusing on wireless services instead of fixed line services. Google Fiber’s expansion pushed Century Link to announce gigabit fiber services in cities like Omaha, Nebraska and Las Vegas last year, but it’s not yet clear how many neighborhoods will ever be reached by these services.

For many cities, creating community broadband services is a more attractive option than waiting for the major players to get their act together. The public electrical utility in Chattanooga, Tennessee built the nation’s first gigabit internet service in 2009, and since then, a few other municipal fiber services have sprung up.

But in some states, there are legal roadblocks to creating such new networks. And as more communities think about picking up the slack for corporations, the more road blocks we can expect. Legislation proposed by cable company lobbyists in Kansas, for example, would not only make it nearly impossible for cities to offer their own broadband services, but would likely prohibit public-private partnerships like Google Fiber as well, according to Ars Technica.

In some states, there are legal roadblocks to creating such new networks.

Discussion of the bill has been postponed while its authors discuss how to make it perhaps a little less broad. Meanwhile, in Utah, legislation has been proposed that would prohibit cities from offering internet services outside their own borders, the Salt Lake City Tribune reports.

There’s clearly a downside to Google muscling its way into the internet service business. The company already has access to an unfathomable amount of user data through its search, email and maps services. But the upside is that the company has the money to fight draconian laws that would protect incumbent providers that are — in the words of Bernstein Research analyst Craig Moffet — “almost comically profitable.”

The real question is how Google will treat non-partners, such as smaller players and municipal networks. Google Fiber remains more of a lab for Google to test the potential of ultra-highspeed internet, and not a core business, even though Google chairman Eric Schmidt has hinted otherwise. That means it’s in Google’s best interest to fight legislation that would restrict municipal broadband networks. For now anyway.

This story has been updated to include comment from Google.

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Steve Perlman:Can Speed-Up Cell Data 1,000-Fold

Steve Perlman is ready to give you a personal cell phone signal that follows you from place to place, a signal that’s about 1,000 times faster than what you have today because you needn’t share it with anyone else.

Perlman — the iconic Silicon Valley inventor best known for selling his web TV company to Microsoft for half a billion dollars — started work on this new-age cellular technology a decade ago, and on Wednesday morning, he’ll give the first public demonstration at Columbia University in New York, his alma mater. Previously known as DIDO, the technology is now called pCell — short for “personal cell” — and judging from the demo Perlman gave us at his lab in San Francisco last week, it works as advertised, streaming video and other data to phones with a speed and a smoothness you’re unlikely to achieve over current cell networks.

“It’s a complete rewrite of the wireless rulebook,” says Perlman, who also helped Apple create QuickTime, the technology that brought video to the Macintosh. “Since the invention of wireless, people have moved around the coverage area. Now, the coverage area follows you.”

‘It’s a complete rewrite of the wireless rulebook. Since the invention of wireless, people have moved around the coverage area. Now, the coverage area follows you’

— Steve Perlman

Working under the aegis of a new company called Artemis Research — a mythological reference meant to paint pCell as a “moon shot” — Perlman is intent on pushing his new technology into major American cities and beyond. He says the first prototype network could launch as soon as the four quarter of this year. Some believe the technology could very well remake the wireless industry, but as with any moon shot, there are obstacles aplenty.

The project would involve installing entirely new wireless antennas atop buildings and towers across the country, as well as slipping new cards into our phones. Perlman says he’s already in discussions with some of the world’s largest wireless carriers and handset designers about the technology, but if history is a guide, the Verizons and the AT&Ts — who are still upgrading their networks to the relatively new LTE wireless technology — will be slow to make the move, if they make it at all.

“In business, there is money in scarcity,” says Richard Doherty, director of a technology consulting firm called Envisioneering, who has closely followed Perlman’s project. “The wireless business models of today are based on scarcity. Opening up the floodgates for any service, for any carrier, has tremendous implications. In our experiences working with carriers…they like to have everything defined on their terms, to have breakthroughs arrive when they want them to.”

The New Cell

One thing’s for sure: the idea is a complete departure from the current way of doing things, the sort of invention Perlman is known for. His San Francisco lab is called Rearden — a nod to Hank Rearden, the fictional magnate in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged who invents an alloy that’s stronger than steel — and this tiny tech incubator is always looking for ways of overturning the status quo. It has already given rise to OnLive, a service that lets you streams game and other software over the internet rather than installing it on local devices, and Mova, which helped transform movie and game effects by providing a means of digitally capturing facial expressions, and now, it hopes to turn the wireless industry on its head.

With today’s networks, each antenna — perched atop a building or tower — creates a massive “cell” of wireless signal. This is essentially an enormous cone of radio waves that spans several city blocks, and it’s shared by all phones in the area. But Perlman’s invention discards the arrangement, giving each phone its own tiny cell, a bubble of signal that goes wherever the phone goes. This “personal cell” provides just as much network bandwidth as today’s cells, Perlman says, but you needn’t share the bandwidth with anyone else. The result is a significantly faster signal.

“Everybody gets a little cell, that’s about a centimeter in size, around your phone. That gives you incredible density. Everyone gets the full spectrum of the channel in one centimeter of space,” explains Perlman, who often reminds us of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, not only with his enthusiasm for his craft, but with the way he punctuates his arguments with a rhetorical “Right?” — almost an insistence that you see things his way.

Like Pebbles Dropped in the Pond

In many ways, pCell is a mind-bending technology. Though it provides a personal cell for each phone, it doesn’t require a greater number of antennas. Unlike today’s antennas, Perlman’s radios can work in concert to focus signals on individual phones.

With current wireless networks, each antenna operates mostly alongside the others, as opposed to working in tandem with them. In fact, if you put two antennas too close, they’ll interfere with each other and degrade your signal. But, working hand-in-hand with principal scientist Antonio Forenza and other Rearden engineers, Perlman has developed a new type of antenna that uses signal interference to its advantage. With pCell, interference actually enhances a signal, with multiple waves combining to form even stronger waves. “You can locate the radio heads wherever you want them, rather than where it’s convenient to put them,” Perlman says, “and they all transmit in such a way that there’s huge overlap…creating an extremely high-performance signal”

Pieter van Rooyen — an inventor and former professor who has closely followed the progress of the project — compares this phenomenon to that old game where you drop two pebbles in a pond, each creates circular waves that spread out across the water, and, in some places, the waves combine to create another, stronger wave. What Perlman and his colleagues have done, van Rooyen explains, is create a system where waves combine like this at the very point where your cell phone is located. “Around the mobile phone, the waves add to each other,” he says, “and everywhere else, the waves cancel each other out.”

The system can target your phone in this way because the device is constantly sending out its own wireless signals. And, Perlman say, the system can target myriad devices in the same area. Inside his Rearden lab, he showed us the technology streaming video to eight different iPhones sitting almost on top of each other.

‘Five Bars Everywhere’

It was certainly an impressive demonstration. Perlman and his team even streamed ultra-high-definition “4K” video to massive flat screens, showing that the bandwidth provided by the technology can take us beyond what we can currently do on our phones. But perhaps more importantly, Perlman aims to ensure that today’s phones simply work as you expect them to — that calls aren’t dropped and texts aren’t delayed, that you never hit a dead zone, that you can still use the network when an emergency hits and thousands of people jump on at once. “If AT&T adopts it and turns it on in San Francisco ,” Perlman says. “Everywhere I go, I get five bars and I can stream HD video on an iPad.”

That’s something most of us would like to see. The question is whether Perlman can get the major carriers or other deep-pocketed outfits to install the necessary infrastructure. Perlman says the technology has an advantage because it works works with existing cell phones, and he tells us that “every major carrier and platform maker is circling us, all to see if they can have it.” But phones will require new SIM cards, the tiny removable circuit cards that control a phone’s connection to a network. And more to the point, it will require a whole new world of antennas. These antennas are relatively small, but rolling them out would still require an enormous capital investment — an investment the big carriers are unlikely to make any time soon.

But even someone like Richard Doherty, who questions whether the big carriers will embrace the technology in the near future, believes that pCell will shake up the industry in one way or another. “This is not just a breakthrough technology. It can both empower and upset many established industries,” Doherty says, “This is a story we’ll all be watching for weeks and months to come.”

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Apple's iPhone 5S boosts fourth-quarter sales in China

New data shows the company's market share rose to 7 percent -- and that's even before the China Mobile deal.

Apple's iPhone 5S has proven to be popular in China.

The company sold a record number of smartphones in the country during 2013's fourth quarter, according to data from research firm IDC reported by The Wall Street Journal. These numbers were reportedly driven by demand for the iPhone 5S.

Apple's China market share rose from 6 percent in the third quarter of 2013 to 7 percent in the fourth quarter. This put it in fifth place for smartphone makers in the country, coming in behind Samsung, Lenovo, Coolpad, and Huawei, respectively. Samsung had 19 percent market share and Lenovo had 13 percent.

China is the world's largest smartphone market and Apple has long been trying to get a foothold there. Consumers in the country havetended toward phones on Google's Android operating system, which have a more varied price range.

However, Apple may see its China market share grow even more in coming years. In January, the company entered a partnershipwith China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier with 760 million customers. Analysts expect this partnership to account for somewhere between 15 million and 30 million more iPhone sales in 2014.

Last quarter, Apple reported record iPhone sales worldwide with 51 million smartphones sold. While these numbers were high for the company, analysts predict Apple's growth to slow over the next couple of years because of a saturated US smartphone market.

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Samsung begins move away from Android? Next Galaxy Gear smartwatch to run on Tizen

New version of the Gear to run on Tizen?

By tech2 News Staff /  19 Feb 2014 , 09:38

Despite the poor show put up by the Galaxy Gear, Samsung hasn’t given up hope on its smartwatch offerings, and is all set to launch a new version of the device.

While the original Gear is an Android-based smartwatch, the Gear 2, which will also be known as the Galaxy Band, is likely to run on Samsung’s own Tizen OS. People familiar with the matter told CNet that Samsung would unveil the new Gear smartwatch at the Mobile World Congress and it will run company’s Tizen software.

We’ve been hearing about Samsung’s Tizen-based devices for some time now. The smartphone was initially slated for launch in 2013, but later reports claimed that Samsung has pushed the launch to 2014. Now, news has it that the company will be unveiling the Tizen-based smartwatch along with some other Tizen products, most probably a phone and camera.

According to the report the company is also developing fitness bands. This could also mean there is a possibility that the Galaxy Band could be a new device altogether and run on Android, while the Tizen-based Gear 2 could be an improved version of Gear. Samsung refused to respond to the rumours about the Tizen-based smartwatch by stating it doesn’t want to comment on rumours and speculations.

Other Tizen-based devices also slated to launch at MWC

Samsung had kickstarted the year by teasing us about its upcoming Gear successor. Later rumours pointed at a fitness-focused smartwatch dubbed the Galaxy Band, which could be a differentiator from the defamed Gear series. TheGalaxy Band is expected to be loaded with sensors for capturing data on motion, pressure and temperature, all of which are essential for fitness trackers. The device will connect with Samsung Galaxy devices (and presumably other phones) via Bluetooth LE.

A previous report had also claimed that the final public release of the Tizen and smartphones running the OS will only be in Q3 of 2014. But now it seems that the company won’t wait that long. This could be prompted in part, by the not-so-satisfactory sales of the Galaxy S4, which has caused the company to push forward with the Galaxy S5, which is also likely to launch at its  “Unpacked 5″ event this week.

Is Samsung Trying To Dump Google?

After Google acquired Motorola, Samsung may have been pushed to believing in building its own ecosystem.  However, the twist in the tale came this year when Google sold Motorola to Lenovo.

Last year J.K. Shin, Samsung CEO had said how he plans Tizen to be everywhere, and looks like this is just the beginning. However, at the Unpacked event, Android could still take centre-stage if the company unveils the Galaxy S5.

It should be noted that earlier this year when Samsung gave a glimpse of its new Touch Wiz UI, it looked like a blend of Flipboard and Microsoft’s Metro. Google then had a series of meetings with the phone maker and soon we saw a leaked image of the revamped Touch Wiz UI that seems to have taken a whole lot of inspiration from Google Now. So, will Samsung dump Google? Not yet, we must say.

However, Samsung could still venture beyond its current role as a hardware player and compete with Apple and Microsoft with a unified device solution. This is critically important in business use, because CIOs prefer unified solutions that are tightly integrated and far more secure.
Today, Samsung plays host to Google’s Play store on its devices and loses influence over the intrinsic lifestyle of its users. If Samsung gets Tizen right, it will directly be able to tap in to new revenue streams through the sales and delivery of applications, media, messaging and other products similar to Google’s Play store without having to miss out on profits as it currently does.

It remains to be seen if Tizen’s supposed low cost and high benchmark quality has what it takes to persuade consumers to shift away from Google. And even as Samsung attempts to fill the Tizen landscape with new and innovative apps it is very likely that the mobile device space is just one of the many new device verticals that is about to become the battleground for the next all-out tech war between giants.

The Technical Steering Committee managing the Tizen Association includes a collection of 10 industry partners as its board members, many of them industry heavyweights: Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, KT Corp, LG, NTT Docomo, Orange, Samsung, SK Telecom and Vodafone.

What is Tizen?
The Linux community conceptualized Tizen in 2012 as an ongoing project within the Linux Foundation, under the Tizen Association. Tizen is an open source, standards based software platform aimed towards various mobile operators and technology manufacturers. Tizen differentiates itself from other mobile operating systems through its immense scalability and developer friendly features. And to give you a clue about Tizen’s real purpose, the utility of the software extends far beyond mobile devices, developed for tablets, netbooks, automobile systems and televisions as well.

The operating system is an effective merger between two Linux based platforms – LiMO (Samsung and Vodafone) and MeeGo (a mix of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin), with parts of Samsung’s defunct Bada OS as well.

Considered an extremely flexible environment for application development in HTML5, Tizen’s touted to provide apps cross-platform accessibility. In plain English, that means the Tizen development framework allows developers to write once and use anywhere (with minimal extra effort), great for a scenario where though Android and iOS are the biggies in the mobile OS space, there’s BlackBerry 10, Windows Phone and now many others like Firefox and Sailfish too.

The latest Tizen 3.0 release boasts of Linux-HTML5-based programming that claims the ability to sustain a 3D user interface and an extremely scalable performance threshold, capable of working with just 256kb of RAM. It is also designed to be compatible with Android and iOS.

Who runs Tizen?
The Technical Steering Committee managing the Tizen Association includes a collection of 10 industry partners as its board members, many of them industry heavyweights: Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, KT Corp, LG, NTT Docomo, Orange, Samsung, SK Telecom and Vodafone.

The interest in the OS surged last year as the first Asian developer’s conference took place in Seoul and Samsung made new announcements regarding its investments in Tizen.

Samsung and Tizen
Samsung as a leader of the Steering Committee has made significant investments in the Tizen development process. At the Asian developers meet Samsung announced its partnership with Intel, Fujitsu, Huawei, Here (Nokia mapping service), Konami, McAfee, Panasonic, Sharp, The Weather Channel, smaller start-ups such as Appbackr and 26 other companies to standardize the future hardware platform across numerous device categories while it finds innovative apps for Tizen.
In order to accelerate the app development goal Samsung also set a late 2014 deadline for a product launch and eagerly announced funding for developers to populate an as-of-yet barren applications market place. This move by Samsung isn’t surprising when you consider that it is the only large mobile device manufacturer that doesn’t have autonomy over its own software.

The mobile operating systems’ market is shared between the four companies–Apple with iOS, Google with Android, Microsoft with Windows Phone and BlackBerry, with Google taking lion’s share and iOS second. Microsoft and BlackBerry are small players. And 63 percent of all Android mobile devices in the market are manufactured by Samsung according to Localytics.

Companies like Apple and Microsoft are also experienced players in the hardware-software convergence, with Apple’s hardware accompanied by iOS 7 is making waves in the market while Microsoft’s acquisition in Nokia has shown a 156 percent growth in consumer adoption since third quarter of 2012.

Samsung remains the only hardware giant without its own software and is woefully dependent on Google’s Android OS.

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Google Glass 2 Release Date, Features & Price: Competitor Icis Has Better Looks & Specs than Google's?

Google Glass now has a valid competitor in the form of Laforge Optical's smartglass called Icis, which the company CEO describes as "fashion-friendly" prescription glasses.

"Our biggest competition is Google Glass but our approach is different, because we focused on creating a device that people don't mind being seen in," Laforge Optical CEO and Founder Corey Mack toldCNet.

"Style is a subjective thing and currently the bar is set pretty low," Mack continued, obviously referring to Google's smartglass.

According to its website, Icis is available in three styles: Semi-Rimless, Flat Top and Classic, with more designs to be added soon.

Instead of requiring users to look up to the right like Google Glass, Icis displays information outside of the user's central gaze, on the peripheral vision.

The prescription eyewear displays notifications from the user's smartphone via the device's very own app called SocialFlo. According to Icis' website, the app "enables you to choose which applications your smartspecs will communicate with."

Icis users also won't have to mutter to themselves for the smart glass to function. "Swipe the temples (side of the frames) to do a variety of things including taking pictures, recording video, and changing display modes," says the device's website.

Just like Google Glass though, Icis is still a work in progress. Laforge Optical, the makers of the Google Glass competitor, has started raising funds for their wearable device via indiegogo.com. The fund-raising started February 18 and will end March 20.

Funders can choose among several funding options, from as low as $25 for 5 NFC Quick Tags to as high as $820 for an Icis early beta kit. With an estimated delivery date of August 2014, the Icis early beta kit includes a pre-production prototype of the device which the funder will have for 6 months.

Icis early beta kit funders will have free upgrade to the Icis beta kit when it is released but will have to add $200 for an Icis BOLD upgrade. The Icis BOLD is Laforge Optical's higher end smartglass which, according to their website, "offers a higher resolution display than that of Icis, as well as finer degrees of customization."

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