Showing posts with label Samsung. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Samsung. Show all posts

Thursday, January 21, 2016

Big Sitting Cash




Why Are Corporations Hoarding Trillions?
Collectively, American businesses currently have $1.9 trillion in cash, just sitting around. Not only is this state of affairs unparalleled in economic history, but we don’t even have much data to compare it with, because corporations have traditionally been borrowers, not savers. ....... it is probably earning only about 2 percent interest by parking that money in United States Treasury bonds. These companies would be better off investing in anything — a product, a service, a corporate acquisition — that would make them more than 2 cents of profit on the dollar, a razor-thin margin by corporate standards. And yet they choose to keep the cash. ........ if you buy a share in Alphabet, which has sold for roughly $700 lately, you are effectively buying ownership of more than $100 in cash. ......

General Motors is perhaps the most extreme: It now holds nearly half its value in cash. Apple holds more than a third.

....... If the companies spent their savings, rather than hoarding them, the economy would instantly grow, and we would most likely see more jobs with better pay. ....... the 1990s were a period of low unemployment and high growth. Remarkably, the United States government was able to tax all that productive corporate behavior so much that it came close to paying off all its debts for the first time in 160 years........

holding on to cash and carefully shifting it among subsidiaries, especially foreign ones, is a great tool to shrink your tax bill.

....... Google buys about one company a week, on average ..... Companies like Google and GM are holding on to far more cash — many times more — than could possibly be explained by emergency funds and tax efficiencies and M.&A. intimidation put together. ...... finance economists agree that there is a puzzle here ..... a large cash hoard is a sign of an unhealthy company. Maybe its whole industry is doing so poorly that there is nothing worth investing in ....... Corporations, it seems, may have amassed at least a good chunk of that $1.9 trillion in mysterious savings because the stock market is rewarding them for it. ........ both the executives and the investors in these industries believe that something big is coming, but — this is crucial — they’re not sure what it will be. .....

Their hoarding of it hints that they think the next transformative innovation could be just around the corner.



These trillions should go into Clean Energy and Global South infrastructure. There will be solid if not sexy returns. A 10% annual growth beats zero. A trillion going into clean energy makes global warming talk mostly history.

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Saturday, January 09, 2016

In The Tech News (3)

Ray Kurzweil’s Mind-Boggling Predictions for the Next 25 Years
By the 2020s, most diseases will go away as nanobots become smarter than current medical technology. Normal human eating can be replaced by nanosystems. ...... By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. ...... By the 2040s, non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence (a.k.a. us). Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in physical world at a whim. ...... By 2045, we will multiply our intelligence a billionfold by linking wirelessly from our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud. ..... Ray’s “Law of Accelerating Returns” and of exponential technologies. ..... Each of these technologies DEMATERIALIZED, DEMONETIZED, and DEMOCRATIZED access to services and products that used to be linear and non-scalable.






The World in 2025: 8 Predictions for the Next 10 Years
In 2025, in accordance with Moore's Law, we'll see an acceleration in the rate of change as we move closer to a world of true abundance. ....... A $1,000 Human Brain .... A Trillion-Sensor Economy .... the IoE will generate $19 trillion of newly created value. ...... Perfect Knowledge ... you'll be able to know anything you want, anytime, anywhere, and query that data for answers and insights. ..... 8 Billion Hyper-Connected People .... Disruption of Healthcare .... this lucrative $3.8 trillion healthcare industry with new business models that dematerialize, demonetize and democratize today's bureaucratic and inefficient system. ....... Biometric sensing (wearables) and AI will make each of us the CEOs of our own health. Large-scale genomic sequencing and machine learning will allow us to understand the root cause of cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disease and what to do about it. Robotic surgeons can carry out an autonomous surgical procedure perfectly (every time) for pennies on the dollar. Each of us will be able to regrow a heart, liver, lung or kidney when we need it, instead of waiting for the donor to die. ........ Augmented and Virtual Reality .... The screen as we know it — on your phone, your computer and your TV — will disappear and be replaced by eyewear. Not the geeky Google Glass, but stylish equivalents to what the well-dressed fashionistas are wearing today. The result will be a massive disruption in a number of industries ranging from consumer retail, to real estate, education, travel, entertainment, and the fundamental ways we operate as humans. ........ Early Days of JARVIS ... In a decade, it will be normal for you to give your AI access to listen to all of your conversations, read your emails and scan your biometric data because the upside and convenience will be so immense. ..... Blockchain
The Internet Allowed Us to Learn Anything—VR Will Let Us Experience Everything
The Internet has liberated information from the constraints of the physical world and essentially made the sharing of information free and unlimited for everyone. From communicating with friends on free Skype calls to taking university-level classes on Coursera and Udacity, our current access and connectivity dwarfs anything we’ve seen before. ....... Massive open online courses have fantastic content, yet a very low percentage of students end up finishing them. It’s great to see my friend’s posts on Instagram and Snapchat, but nothing beats being together in person. And no matter how many times I’ve read about the Apollo 11 mission, I’ve never taken a step on the moon. ....... Just as the Internet and smartphones have enabled the rapid and cheap sharing of information, virtual reality will be able to provide the same for experiences. That means that just as we can read, listen to, and watch videos of anything we want today, soon we’ll be able to experience stunning lifelike simulations in virtual reality...... And just as the democratization of information reshaped society, this is going to have a massive impact on the way we work, live, and play......... one word: presence. Presence is the phenomenon that occurs when your brain is convinced, on a fundamental and subconscious level, that the VR simulation you are experiencing is real. ...... Want to watch the Super Bowl from the fifty-yard line? Be on stage at your favorite concert? Or just visit and explore a faraway country? Well, that’s exactly what Mark Zuckerberg wants you to be able to do on the Oculus Rift. ..... Using 360-degree video and light field technology, we can now capture real-life events and distribute them to anyone, anywhere. ...... Soon you’ll be able to explore every city, watch every sports game, and explore the universe in VR. Content plus presence is an extremely potent combination. ..... Part of the great sadness of the modern world is being able to text, call, and video chat with friends and family from all over the planet but never truly feel like you’re with them. Sometimes this ghost of a connection can paradoxically be worse than nothing, being just realistic enough to make you miss your loved ones without feeling the true warmth of their presence. ......... Multi-user virtual reality can enable a specific kind of phenomenon—social presence. ...... social presence can convince your brain to believe that the other people in the VR experience are really there with you. ...... An average Tuesday night in the VR future could include dropping into a professional conference with a coworker of yours, watching a football game with your father on the other side of the country, then hopping into a VR concert with your best friend from high school—all without leaving the house.......

The rise of the Internet was one of the most profound developments of the past century. The Internet famously allowed the futurist Ray Kurzweil to conclude that “A kid in Africa has access to more information than the president of the United States did 15 years ago.”

........ Can we finally create a digital university that surpasses the quality of our oldest and grandest learning institutions?
Six Technologies That Hit Their Tipping Points in 2015
A broad range of technologies reached a tipping point, from cool science projects or objects of convenience for the rich, to inventions that will transform humanity. We haven’t seen anything of this magnitude since the invention of the printing press in the 1400s. ........ The Internet and knowledge ... As of 2015, however, nearly half of China’s population and a fifth of India’s population have gained Internet connectivity. India now has more Internet users than does the U.S., and China has twice as many. ....... Smartphones with the capabilities of today’s iPhone will cost less than $50 by 2020. By then, the efforts of Facebook, Google, OneWeb, and SpaceX to blanket the Earth with inexpensive Internet access through drones, balloons, and microsatellites will surely bear fruit. This means that we will see another three billion people come on line.

Never before has all of humanity been connected in this way.

....... Workers in the remotest villages of Africa will be able to offer digital services to the elite in Silicon Valley. ...... Doctors in our pockets ... Our $100 smartphones are more powerful than the supercomputers of the 1970s—which cost millions of dollars. ..... With better sensors, we can develop sophisticated medical devices, drone-based delivery systems, and smart cities; and, with A.I., we can develop self-driving cars, voice-recognition systems, and digital doctors. Yes, I am talking about applications that can diagnose our medical condition and prescribe remedies.
........ Apple released a watch that, using a heart-rate sensor and accelerometer, can keep track of vital signs, activity, and lifestyles ...... sensors and A.I.-based tools to do the work of doctors. ......... Bitcoin and disintermediation ..

The blockchain is not useful just for finance. It is an almost incorruptible digital ledger that can be used to record practically anything that can be digitized: birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, deeds and titles of ownership, educational degrees, medical records, contracts, and votes. It has the potential to transform the lives of billions of people who lack bank accounts and access to the legal and administrative infrastructure that we take for granted.

........ Engineering of life ..... CRISPR gene modification .. an ancient system that protects bacteria and other single-celled organisms from viruses, acquiring immunity to them by incorporating genetic elements from the virus invaders. ..... to edit the genes of plants to produce more-nutritious food and require less water. ...... The drone age ... You can expect Amazon and Walmart to deliver your groceries and Starbucks to bring you your morning latte via drone. And they will monitor traffic and crime, perform building inspections, and provide emergency assistance in disasters. ...... These are an even bigger deal for the developing world. Large sections of Africa don’t have roads; remote towns and villages can’t get medical supplies; and large cities are clogged with traffic—much of it for delivery of small goods. Drones will solve many of these infrastructure problems and reduce pollution and traffic. They will also allow the constant monitoring of the Earth’s changing climate and wildlife ecology. ......... Saving the planet with unlimited clean energy ...... Solar and wind capture are already advancing on exponential curves, installation rates regularly doubling and costs falling. .......

By, 2030, solar capture could provide 100 percent of today’s energy; by 2035, it could be free—just as cell-phone calls are today.

....... We are also seeing similar advances in battery storage. Combined with the advances in energy, large swaths of the planet that don’t presently have electricity have the potential to light up in the early 2020s. Having unlimited, clean energy will be transformative for the developing world—and the planet.
Stay Tuned for the Technological Transformation of Governance
Just as early waves of technological innovation in education and health care simply attempted to digitize old practices — putting an analog class into a MOOC or a patient’s file into the cloud — early forays into governmental technology involved bringing civil services online and enabling citizens to follow government protocols on websites instead of in buildings. .....

new governance technologies preparing to reroute lines of authority and change what it means to be a citizen in the 21st century.

....... Others are helping teams to build consensus and budget together, dynamically and elegantly. Still others are creating operating systems for political parties that are already winning seats in government. .....

Whether we're facing climate apocalypse on Earth or colonizing Mars, the deciding factor between human civilization being extractive and oppressive, or cooperative and generative, will be how much we as a species have practiced the skills of equitable collaboration on a day-to-day basis — hearing diverse viewpoints and synthesizing them, consciously understanding the flows of power dynamics, and designing in the key factors of human wellness.

......... Human beings have been sitting in circles listening to one another for millennia, but software and the internet allow us to scale up these practices in a way we never have before. ....... Cobudget for funding and Loomio for decision-making. ........ Many of the worst aspects of command-and-control, mechanistic, hierarchical governance are consequences of limited communications technologies. If we can make distributed cooperation just as efficient, the need for those old governance forms — which cause a lot of human suffering in the name of efficiency — could be obviated. ..... The key difference is: are you privatizing everything, or are you building the commons? The real distinguishing factor isn't the governing practices, which may be similar to a point, but the governing purpose. Are we building in service of the people and the community, deeply rooted in social values and human rights, or are we in service of private interests, which only answer to their own internal logic of profit and power? ....... Already, in our network, Enspiral, where we run businesses in service of positive social outcomes, we constantly have to 'hack' company structures to make them reflect how we actually want to work. We're sticking to the law, of course, but there's some legal gymnastics involved and we're constantly having to blaze a trail. Are we a community? A company? A charity? None of the current forms actually quite fit, and the distinctions seem contrived. ........ One of the protections against government corruption in democracies is that the moment of the vote is hidden and blind. ......

the very idea that our key moment of agency as a citizen is ticking a box every three or four years is the insane part

..... Our 'democratic' system is another example of something developed a couple hundred years ago because of very limited communications technology — election dates in the US are still determined by how long it took people to go on horseback between cities. ..... What's actually incredible is when you create a society where people not only feel safe being open about their political opinions, but they genuinely discuss them with different people, and their opinion can evolve through that interaction — they can change their minds.

When citizen deliberation is possible, that's when truly amazing solutions can emerge, from synthesizing different views.

......... What can users of SMS-enabled mobile banking in Africa teach us about how our apps could work? People in warzones and disaster areas know a ton about decentralized networks, because centralised infrastructure fails them. Activists threatened by oppressive governments have heaps to teach us about privacy, identity, and leveraging online communications tools for effective action and resistance. ....... most people in this space are running completely analog processes using technologies like neighborhood meetings and science-fair like exhibitions of citizen-generated ideas. They are willing to pound the pavement.
Cosmology Is in Crisis — But Not for the Reason You May Think
a growing zoo of subatomic particles...... We still have no idea what the vast majority of the universe is made of. We struggle to understand how the Big Bang could suddenly arise from nothing or where the energy for “inflation,” a very short period of rapid growth in the early universe, came from. But despite these gaps in knowledge, it is actually human nature — our tendency to interpret data to fit our beliefs — that is the biggest threat to modern cosmology. ....... explanations for the nature of dark energy range from proposals to scrap Einstein’s theory of relativity, the addition of a new fundamental field of nature, or even that

we may be seeing the effects of neighboring parallel universes

. ....... only those papers that agreed with the status-quo were being accepted by journals. ...... Blind analysis is the most straightforward and obvious thing to do ..... By using these three approaches — blinding, systems engineering and transparency — the next generation of cosmology experiments should be able to convince people that confirmation bias is not a factor in understanding the cosmos. Without them,

by looking to the heavens, the most interesting thing we may find is ourselves.

On the Origin of Truly Innovative Ideas
The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea....... But few companies actually try crazy ideas — especially the most successful ones...... The same conditions that increase the rate of biological evolution also drive the greatest rate of idea generation. ...... "speciation" is very similar to "ideation," or the formation of new ideas. ..... High-pressure environments incentivize people to try crazy 'Hail Mary' ideas, and while most fail, if one works, it is usually a true innovation. ..... Place your "innovation team" outside the mother ship, far away from the hordes that will tell them how "crazy" their ideas are. True innovation is massively disruptive and the average employee hates disruptive change. Steve Jobs isolated his Macintosh team far away from the rest of Apple and proudly flew a pirate flag above the building.
The Recipe for Generating Crazy, Innovative Ideas in Companies
it's important for "ideas to have sex." ..... This is how new ideas are made — I merge your idea and my idea and it becomes something new and valuable. ...... if new idea generation is a function of "idea interaction," then the rate of people interacting matters a lot. ...... In the 1950s, 7% of the population lived in cities..... Today, a little over 38% of people live in cities.....By 2050, 70% of the world’s population will live in cities........

doubling a city's population drives a 15% increase in income, wealth and innovation.

...... Jobs was very particular about where the bathrooms were placed in Pixar's office because he wanted "serendipitous personal encounters" to occur. ...... ask people to pick a spot and sign up to give a 10-minute talk on any subject, personal or professional. ..... Make sure you have a communication outlet that allows ideas to bubble up from anywhere, across disciplines and layers of the organization. ....... when you ask them to deliver 10x performance, with severely limited resources (i.e. 1/10th the budget and 1/10th the time), it drives invention and innovation. ...... Musk did this with Tesla, creating an epic car company with no legacy, no unions, no old factories and no old approaches. ....... Create hyper-constraints on your team. Set a difficult goal driven by a powerful massively transformative purpose and incentivize them to try new ways of attacking the problems you want solved ....... if you want true innovation, give the hardest, craziest challenges to the youth (or at least youthfully minded) in your company. ...... At what age do you think most Noble Laureates do their prize winning work? Not win their medal, but actually publish the research? .... Turns out, it's in their mid to late twenties...... "The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible… and achieve it, generation after generation." ...... Where in your organization do you allow your teams to try crazy ideas?

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Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Innovating The Smartphone Battery

If my smartphone battery gave me four times more juice, it might last a full day of rigorous use. But it doesn't.

Battery is hard to do, but worth trying. But maybe Samsung should plot to move to one of the next big things: rHealth.

In fast food it is not McDonald's that is number one. The Chinese restaurants collectively are bigger. The same seems to be true of smartphones. Samsung is like McDonald's. It is number two.

Samsung’s Future Is Bleak Because Phones Themselves No Longer Matter
With the possible exception of radically improved battery life, hardware differences become about subtle preferences, not clear-cut metrics of superiority.


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Saturday, May 24, 2014

OnePlus: The China Angle

English: Jack Ma speaks during The Future of t...
English: Jack Ma speaks during The Future of the Global Economy: The View from China plenary session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Tianjin, China 28 September 2008. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
And there is this whole Jack Ma angle. Alibaba showed up in America with a bang. This guy is not even a coder. And he has created this ecommerce behemoth in China. Like I said at one point, Jack Ma is the new Jack Welch.

A lot of what we think about China gets colored by the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. There are genuine issues of free speech and democracy, but one can not stop but take a good look at some genuine innovation that is coming out of that country.

China is getting global in a big way. OnePlus is the newest example where a Chinese company is out to eat the lunch of companies like Apple, Samsung, and Google. China is not just the back end factory for your front end brand name. We live in era when people display their status more through their phone than their car or house. If there OnePlus is going to do well, all bets are off.

OnePlus is making smartphones the way smartphones are supposed to be made.

OnePlus: The Company
Culprit: Kitkat
OnePlus One Launch Keynote
OnePlus One
The $50 Phone
The Chinese Are Coming
Jack Ma Is The New Jack Welch
The Alibaba IPO

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Sunday, May 18, 2014

OnePlus: The Company






As interesting as the phone is the company itself. It is a new company coming out of nowhere. It is Chinese origin. Something like this is known to happen more in software than in hardware. You come out of nowhere to bring the top product in the market. This is quite telling.

When Jack Ma of Alibaba has become the new Jack Welch, and China is about to overtake America to become the number one economy in the world, it is quite a statement that this Chinese hardware startup is putting this phone in our hands. And it is following Google’s Nexus business model. The idea is to make no money in the beginning. Google can afford that, but how can a hardware startup? That also is how software companies launch. They make money much later.



The direct sell model is what Dell did for PCs decades ago. That should be even more possible for smartphones. They are physically smaller.



This is also a window into the future of manufacturing, not just smartphones but pretty much everything. Smart manufacturing is where consumers are involved in more and more aspects of the process in intelligent, engaged ways. The result is greater satisfaction.

Smart manufacturing adds a whole new dimension to manufacturing, just like green/clean manufacturing does.



From Oppo to OnePlus: a new company wants to build the next great smartphone
New OnePlus One mobile promises to topple Samsung, HTC and company
For those prices you'd be forgiven for assuming that the One will be a mid-range device, however, OnePlus is putting the One out there as a "2014 Flagship Killer." In short, it's taking aim at devices like the Samsung Galaxy S5 and the HTC One M8 – and its specs list appears to back up all the big talk..... The first OnePlus One handsets will be available from Friday, with the first 100 applicants able to buy a device for $1 in return for smashing their current handset(!).
Revelation that OnePlus is Oppo’s sister company causes uproar – is it deserved?
For a company that’s not even six-months old, OnePlus has done pretty well so far. Portraying itself as an ambitious startup eager to disrupt the status quo with an affordable, no-compromise device, OnePlus managed to create a huge amount of hype around the OnePlus One. In terms of publicity and engagement, the launch of the phone was a smashing success...... But OnePlus has also been shrouded in controversy for the past weeks. From calling out competitors before releasing an actual device, to building hype to dangerous levels, to holding an unclear and, some think, wasteful and dangerous contest, the company offered lots of ammo to its critics...... OnePlus Technology, one of the companies set up to make and sell the OnePlus One, is fully owned by Oppo Electronic, which also owns Oppo Mobile, the company that effectively makes Oppo phones. Another company, OnePlus Trading Corporation is fully owned by OnePlus CEO Pete Lau, but this company can only sell devices and has no R&D or manufacturing activities. ...... On Reddit, in two threads (1, 2) that ballooned over the weekend, some users complain that OnePlus was misleading about its status as an Oppo sister/daughter company, and that in portraying itself as a feisty startup, the company lied to its fans........ Others don’t seem to care at all, focusing on what an amazing proposition the $299 One is.
OnePlus: The little smartphone company taking on Samsung, HTC and co
A new company called OnePlus would work with fan-favourites CynogenMod on the new no-compromise device ..... On paper it will take on Samsung and HTC’s new smartphones spec-for-spec. Rarely do we come across a no-name company that has piqued the intrigue of customers so rampantly. ...... OnePlus claims the 3100 milliamp-hour battery will power the One for a whole day in spite of its top-end specs. ...... US$299 for the white 16GB and US$349 for the black 64GB model, will be released in 15 markets commencing from the 25th of April.
OnePlus One: China Rolls Out a Full HD Phone
The handset's striking feature the CyanogenMod 11S version based on Android 4.4 KitKat, which shows it is going to tap some of the smartphone categories like Nexus.
OnePlus One: A high-end device that may kill Nexus 5, iPhone 5S
OnePlus, a phone company founded last year in China, on Wednesday announced its first Android phone called OnePlus One, a flagship device that will be sold at a price of just $299. Despite its price, which is lower than even the price of Google Nexus 5, on paper OnePlus One looks every bit like a flagship device with good design and powerful hardware. ..... OnePlus was founded by Pete Lau in December 2013. Lau was earlier vice president at Oppo, a phone company that has made a name for itself in China by selling attractive and high-end phones at affordable prices. ..... For OnePlus One, the firm has tied up with Qualcomm for the core hardware. For software, it has tied up with Cyanogen Inc, a group that modifies Android to make it more suitable for older devices as well as to make it more feature rich. ..... OnePlus One is powered by Snapdragon 801 quad-core processor running at 2.5GHz. It has 3GB RAM, option of 16GB to 64GB internal storage, 5.5-inch screen with 1080P resolution, 13MP camera with F2.0 aperture and Sony image sensor, 5MP front camera, 3100 mAh battery, NFC and stereo speakers. The device weighs 162 grams and has a thickness of 8.9mm. While the shell of the phone is made using plastic, OnePlus says that wood, Kevlar and denim backcovers will be available as accessories. ...... The phone runs a custom version of CyanogenMod based on Android 4.4. ..... the price is the real appeal of OnePlus One. The other flagship phones like iPhone 5S and Galaxy S5 cost over $600.
Chinese smartphone startup OnePlus aims at developed markets
a venture backed by the people behind OPPO, a Chinese consumer electronics brand where the core team of OnePlus is from. Pete Lau, founder of OnePlus, was VP at OPPO in charge of Blue-ray DVD players. OnePlus will take advantage of OPPO's smartphone manufacturing capability. ...... OPPO is a spinoff from BBK, one of the most famous consumer electronics makers in China in the late 1990's and early 2000's. BBK's VCD player was one of the most popular back then. The establishment of OPPO itself several years ago was for international expansion. ..... The OPPO smartphone, positioned as a premium brand for women, is one of the most profitable smartphone makers (including Xiaomi ) in China. Different from Xiaomi, OPPO has a whole supply chain, from factories to R&D. The company promises to use the highest quality components and the best hardware available. It's a smartphone brand that has been trying to be creative. OPPO Finder, launched in mid-2012, claims it's the thinnest smartphone around the world No. 1, the latest flagship model released in September 2013, has a touch panel on the back, a rotating camera, and an accompanying accessoire. ....... OPPO phones, according to Mr. Lau, have sold well in Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia. But the OPPO Blue-ray DVD player turned out to be a more successful product line as an international brand. OPPO's are sold well in high-end DVD and Blue-ray player markets in the US and Europe....... To design good quality Blue-ray players for international markets, Pete Lau invited designers from various countries. This time he has already had employees from 12 countries. He doesn't think there is too big a difference between producing an international Blue-ray player brand and one for smartphone and other mobile gadgets.
Newcomer OnePlus aims to disrupt the smartphone industry with ‘truly outstanding’ devices










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Sunday, June 16, 2013

Google Balloon: More Promising Than Google Fiber, Google Glass And Google Car

I am psyched about this, what can I say? I am as psyched as I have been about Android, perhaps more so.




Google launches Internet-beaming balloons
the flimsy helium-filled inflatables beam the Internet down to earth as they sail past on the wind. .... the balloons were the first of thousands that Google's leaders eventually hope to launch12 miles into the stratosphere in order to bridge the gaping digital divide between the world's 4.8 billion unwired people and their 2.2 billion plugged-in counterparts ..... "The power of the Internet is probably one of the most transformative technologies of our time." .... Google's balloons fly free and out of eyesight, scavenging power from card table-sized solar panels that dangle below and gather enough charge in four hours to power them for a day as the balloons sail around the globe on the prevailing winds. Far below, ground stations with Internet capabilities about 60 miles apart bounce signals up to the balloons. ..... The signals would hop forward, from one balloon to the next, along a backbone of up to five balloons...... Each balloon would provide Internet service for an area twice the size of New York City, about 780 square miles, and terrain is not a challenge. They could stream Internet into Afghanistan's steep and winding Khyber Pass or Yaounde, the capital of Cameroon, a country where the World Bank estimates four out of every 100 people are online..... The signals travel in the unlicensed spectrum, which means Google doesn't have to go through the onerous regulatory processes required for Internet providers using wireless communications networks or satellites ..... in the next phase of the trial they hope to get up to 300 balloons forming a ring on the 40th parallel south from New Zealand through Australia, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina. ..... "It's a very fundamentally democratic thing that what links everyone together is the sky and the winds," said Richard DeVaul, an MIT-trained scientist who founded Project Loon and helped develop Google Glas ..... they wouldn't interfere with aircraft because they fly well below satellites and twice as high as airplanes ...... The balloons would be guided to collection points and replaced periodically. In cases when they failed, a parachute would deploy. ..... "For every person online, there are two who are not. By the end of the decade, everyone on Earth will be connected" ...... "The nutritional and medical information, farming techniques, democratic principles those are the wonderful parts of it," he said. "But you also have everyone wanting to drive a car, eat a steak, drink a Coke." .... the balloons were invisible in the sky except for an occasional glint
Can Google Fly Its Internet Balloons Wherever It Wants?
a network of high-altitude balloons ...... to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster ...... balloons can be “steered by rising or descending to an altitude with winds moving in the desired direction.” ......... hundreds of balloons flying at a latitude of approximately 40 degrees south, which would take them over a lot of open ocean but also include transits over New Zealand, southern Argentina, and southern Chile. ...... “approximately two thirds of the world’s population today doesn’t have Internet access.” ..... a truly global system of Google-operated Internet access balloons
Introducing Project Loon: Balloon-powered Internet access
We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below. It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster. As a result, we hope balloons could become an option for connecting rural, remote, and underserved areas, and for helping with communications after natural disasters. ...... how to control their path through the sky. We’ve now found a way to do that, using just wind and solar power: we can move the balloons up or down to catch the winds we want them to travel in. That solution then led us to a new problem: how to manage a fleet of balloons sailing around the world so that each balloon is in the area you want it right when you need it. We’re solving this with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power. ..... We imagine someday you'll be able to use your cell phone with your existing service provider to connect to the balloons and get connectivity where there is none today
Google Loon: Google's Second Most Important Project
a phalanx of balloons that sail in the stratosphere like low level satellites ..... winds in the stratosphere are slow and that’s what makes Loon feasible ..... balloons will use solar power to move the communications equipment between layers of slow moving winds ..... Google is wrestling with how to be an infrastructure player, in order to bring more customers to its core business. ..... Google Fiber, one of its three telco infrastructure projects, is too slow-build to matter in the near future. In White Spaces, the use of excess TV spectrum, Google is in a tight battle with Microsoft, especially in Africa where Microsoft seems to be moving ahead with rural access, much faster than Google has. ....... Samsung’s moves into 5G wireless...... Winds in the stratosphere are generally steady and slow-moving at between 5 and 20 mph, and each layer of wind varies in direction and magnitude ..... Project Loon uses software algorithms to determine where its balloons need to go, then moves each one into a layer of wind blowing in the right direction. By moving with the wind, the balloons can be arranged to form one large communications network ...... by the time it rolls out, if it works, the world will have moved beyond 3G, the capacity Google expects from its balloons ..... makes Loon Google’s second most important project, behind one that gets very little press – White Spaces for rural, developing areas.
Who Should Be Scared Of Samsung's 1Gb+ Wireless Technology?
one reaction to the news was that cable is dead..... wireless could displace fixed line, and is a threat to cable companies that have been slow to upgrade their networks .... the world’s first adaptive array transceiver technology operating in the millimeter-wave Ka bands for cellular communications. The new technology sits at the core of 5G mobile communications system and will provide data transmission up to several hundred times faster than current 4G networks…5G mobile communications technology is the next generation of the existing 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) network technology. 5G will be capable of providing a ubiquitous Gbps experience to subscribers anywhere and offers data transmission speeds of up to several tens of Gbps per base station ..... over 500 billion devices to be connected to the Internet by 2020 and diversity in the network is key to enabling all that activity ..... the aim is for 10 Gbps transmission ..... Samsung has perfected an extraordinary capability to innovate and advance itself across a wide range of activities ...... developing significant and deep partnerships with telco carriers ..... direct carrier billing for apps bought via Samsung devices and services such as Hub ..... Samsung is producing a new philosophy that emphasizes end-to-end support for its carrier clients. ..... end-tend from chip to infrastructure. ..... Samsung and Google are developing a deeper partnership ...... the company most likely to produce the important innovations in display, battery and processors ..... As Google improves its own UI design capabilities, Samsung becomes better allied to what is beginning to look like the world’s leading software company. This is a significant partnership. ..... What Google showed this week and Samsung has been demonstrating for a while is that innovation is now a different game – much broader in scope, often more narrow in focus, but incredibly fast. Apple is looking outpaced.

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