Daily Bits

Arun

Broadband Over Power Line

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The recent news around opening up of White Space spectrum was significant because it allowed introduction of devices that could provide broadband internet access over fairly large distances. These would bring the internet to rural and less accessible areas.

A similar technology that promises to increase access to internet is Broadband over power line. The appeal of broadband over power lines is that rural areas are not commercially attractive areas for companies to create dedicated internet infrastructure. But power companies already have established stretches of power lines. At its core Broadband over Power lines is about sending data over the power lines on a frequency that does not interfere with the frequency of electric current. A modem plugged into the socket at the receiver end decodes the signal and routes the packets to computers.

An excerpt from News.com:

In recent years, new modulation techniques supported by other technological advances have helped BPL evolve. Most services today are capable of delivering between 512Kbps and 3Mbps of throughput, which is comparable to most DSL offerings.

In rural areas in particular, BPL technology could finally bring high-speed Internet access to people who otherwise couldn’t get it. Traditional phone and cable companies often find it too expensive to deploy new infrastructure to provide service to the far reaches of rural America.

The impediments in adoption of Broadband over power lines has been the limited speed as compared to cable or DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) and interference with other radio frequencies. Recently IBM bagged a $9 million worth project from International Broadband Electric Communications Inc to install equipment that could potentially provide internet access to 340,000 homes in Alabama, Indiana, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Latest developments in this field also include technology to detect presence of other signals in a frequency before transmission. Many projects in past years have failed to provide complete implementation of this, but that is no reason to lose hope in a technology that could potentially provide access to a wide majority excluded from Internet as we know it.

Video Chat in Gmail

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Using a plugin, now users of Gmail can have video and voice chat with their contacts over Gmail. Techcrunch reports that this latest enhancement comes from the acquisition of a Swedish company called Marratech.

An excerpt from InformationWeek:

To install the plug-in, click on the “Options” menu in Gmail’s left-hand navigation bar chat pane. There you’ll find an “Add voice/video chat” menu option that will initiate a one-time installation download, assuming the service has been activated on your account. Once the download is complete, reload the Gmail page and you should see that the “Options” link has changed to become a “Video & more” link.

The feature added is a simple interface and does not support calls to phones networks and voice recording (yet). Its great to have all the features of email, voice, video and SMS also available from the same place. Marratech specializes in web meeting software, hence the expectation that very soon there will be some kind of virtual meeting place available via Gmail as well.

The plug-in used for Video chat is proprietary and supports FireFox, IE and Chrome on PC and Firefox on mac. Support for linux is slated for a later date.

VMware’s Mobile Virtualization Move

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We had mentioned mobile virtualization few months back. Now, VMware’s purchase of mobile virtualization company Trango Virtual Processors, based in Grenoble, France seems a definite move into a market that is very promising. The first mobile phones with this technology are expected to be available in 2010. The importance lies in the latest developments in mobile field. Google’s Android initiative, Nokia making the Symbian OS open source are some compelling reasons for companies to try to move from proprietary mobile software to open source ones. And virtualization attempts to address the migration issue.

This is best summarized in VMware’s mobile initiative:

As these capabilities increase, a mobile phone user’s persona—applications, pictures, videos, music, emails, bank info, credit card information, PIM all put together—is becoming much richer and more valuable than ever before. You want your persona to be portable so that it can transfer seamlessly when you upgrade to a new phone.

Supported OSs include Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0, Linux 2.6.x, Symbian 9.x, eCos, µITRON NORTi and µC/OS-II.

Virtualization has many advantages on the security front. With mobile devices, users are more isolated from what is happening behind the scene. Unlike PCs where you could have applications running that indicate more memory use or slow down, the limitations bore more threat from malicious applications running in the background. Virtuazation provides tighter control over what resources applications access and hence better control over devices.

The advantages of mobile virtualization are for businesses as well. Companies could develop their mobile applications on software stack that address a virtualized hardware and deploy it across multiple devices. It also allows easy porting of applications and data across devices.

A Music Player from MySpace ?

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MySpace Music, the one stop for all music aficionados, could be graduating to a mp3 player, a la iPod. The suggestion was made by the MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco in a talk with Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. The MySpace Music service has been very successful if you consider the figures.

An excerpt from Reuters:

People streamed music more than 1 billion times in the first few days and have created 80 million playlists since the launch, DeWolfe said. Five million bands upload their music to the site.

But will the service be able to make a dent to the success of the iPod. Several attempts such as Microsoft’s Zune have not made much of difference. What could be the benefit of a MySpace backed mp3 player ? It could provide a platform for young artists to further their fan base. Also, by adding support for syncing with Linux, Windows and other operating systems the music player could boast a wider platform support than iTunes.

Social Network friendly features could be an added plus. With MySpace having initially started as a online space for music artists, this would be more like going back to their old days. The metrics are definitely favorable for introducing mobile devices tailored to social networking use but what MySpace will be figuring out is whether they are better off doing partnerships with handset makers, including direct support for cell-phones with Music Store support. Would you be interested in owning a device that carried your MySpace network too ?

iPhone, The Gaming Platform

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Apple’s iPhone has been a hit with the masses hooked to mobile internet. And hand-held gaming is one big market that the iPhone is touted to impact majorly. Games have been one among the most downloaded applications on from the AppStore and Apple stands to benefit from the easy centralized business model that it first introduced with its iTunes Music Store.

Sony and Nintendo are the current world leaders in the hand-held gaming segment. While the sale of iPhones could rival that of Nintendo’s DS consoles or Sony’s PSP, it would be a long while before Apple’s revenues from the games alone are substantial.

The iPhone’s interface has great many innovations but some of them are chagrin to the serious gamer e.g. lack of buttons. But recent events may pave a new coming for the age of hand held communication devices that also double up as awesome game consoles. T-Mobile’s G1 did show the kind of direction that technologies are bound to take. Innovations in one phone, when popular will be immediately taken up and replicated by other vendors as well. The Web based application store model means that users have access to their favorite applications / games at dead cheap rates.

The latest announcement of opening up of White Space to allow devices which could potentially provide broadband like internet over airwaves is another interesting development. Apple has its proven credentials in the Hardware + Software space. Apple could be leveraging this new development to further expand the reach of its applications-from-the-internet business model.

Google Crawlers Now Index Text from Images

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Google announced that its web crawlers are now capable of indexing textual data from images. Google’s interest in Optical Character Recognition had been evident in the past few years. Now, they are one more step closer to making all the information in the world searchable.

Google Blog aptly summarizes the new technology:

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document– so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world’s information accessible and useful.

Early this year Google had made public details on a patent it had filed to read text from images and video. This also implied that text recognized from Google Map View and Street View could also eventually shop up on search results. The applications of this technology are immense. But the next progression is what will make all the difference.

Already technologies exist that index speech spoken in videos. With addition of capability to index the text in videos as well, product oriented search will become all more relevant. This might be great news for the business model driving search engines but raises several privacy issues as well.