Daily Bits

Arun

Broadband Internet Over White Space

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November 4th has been marked as the day when the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) puts on vote the issue of opening up the white space spectrum. This means making the spectrum from 54 to 698 MHz available for use in products that could potentially lead to high speed internet access over a wide range of hardware (even for free).

The spectrum becomes available once the transition from analog to digital broadcasts for TV Stations is completed in US (Deadline is February 2009). The companies pushing for usage of the White Space spectrum include Microsoft, Google, Dell, HP, Intel, Philips, Earthlink, and Samsung Electro-Mechanics ( The White Space Coalition ). Technically, the White Space refers to unused frequencies, buffers between licensed broadcast channels. The devices operating in this would need to sense for presence of other transmissions and only communicate over the free channels to prevent interference. And this is where the bone of contention lies. The National Association of Broadcasters, telecommunication companies and media groups contend that opening up the airwaves would cause interference with devices such as cell-phones and wireless microphones.

Devices based on the white space spectrum could communicate over wireless broadband that is accessible over long distances and penetrates obstacles.

An excerpt from ZDNet:

“The 700MHz spectrum is not enough to compete against a service like Verizon’s Fios,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president of public-interest nonprofit Media Access Project, in reference to Verizon Communications’ high-capacity network featuring fiber-optic connections to the home. “It’s only 62MHz of spectrum. So you’re going to need a lot more. That’s why it’s important to provide access to licensed as well as unlicensed spectrum.”

Rural areas are to benefit most from usage of this spectrum as the airwaves are less densely used. For companies like Google and Microsoft, the spectrum means obvious results in more usage of Internet ( More eyeballs = more potential revenue sources ). For hardware companies its an opportunity to innovate beyond the standard cellphones and laptops but make available niche devices complemented with sensors accessible over the network. And for users, it will open the floodgates to devices tailored to high speed internet access at affordable rates.

Linkedin Brings Applications to Its Platform

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LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. More like an online resume, the website lets users interact with professional contacts which could lead to new employment leads and greater professional collaboration.

Almost an year back LinkedIn had started treading along the same path as Facebook with the announcement of its Intelligent Application Platform. The purpose of the platform was to make available access to Linked In from several other websites and now the recently announced applications that will be part of the users profile.

The Nine Applications that would be available are from:

  • Amazon : A Reading list to share books with others in the network.
  • Box.net : Application to manage files online.
  • Google : Integration with Google Presentation to include presentation slides in your profile.
  • Huddle : Online workspace for collaboration.
  • Six Apart : Application to link your blogs to your profile.
  • SlideShare : Sharing Presentation from Slideshare.
  • Tripit : To know and share your travel plans with your network.
  • WordPress : Another blogging platform application.
  • Company Buzz : A linked In application to receive information on companies you are interested in.

What sets LinkedIn’s approach apart from Facebook’s Application Strategy is the way they are introducing applications with well defined utility from the professional perspective. This also means that the applications would be highly tried and tested.

The applications are intended to provide more functionality to users to portray their professional tastes. In times of growing distress in the job market, web sites oriented to help users find new opportunities will gain popularity. And LinkedIn’s recent announcement is well timed for that.

Microsoft’s Cloud Framework – Azure Services

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As expected from the Microsoft PDC 2008 Conference, there is a new cloud framework on the block and its going to run on a new Cloud Operation System – Windows Azure. The Azure services platform would be hosted on Microsoft’s data centers and provide a range of services that developers can use to create applications that will be available via the internet. Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie also mentioned how the shift to cloud services fit the time line of computing from individual machines to the cloud based computing ( and hence Microsoft’s new product).

The list of services that would be available are :

  • Live Services : Building blocks to handle user data and application resources such as search, user identity and data storage.
  • Microsoft SQL Services : For Web based database access.
  • Microsoft .NET services : The Execution Environment and for communication among applications.
  • Microsoft Sharepoint services and Dynamics CRM Services : Will be provided in future for customer relationship and collaboration focused work.

    • Windows Azure will be the operating systems on which the cloud services would be available. While currently only Microsoft’s .NET framework and Visual Studio support writing applications to run on the cloud operating system, there are plans to support other frameworks (like Eclipse) and languages ( such as Python and Ruby ) in future. More options would lead to wider adoption.

    While Amazon may have had a head start in making cloud based computing services, Microsoft has had experience in managing large content based networks. Moreover, Microsoft development tools are widely used by enterprises, a prominent reason to expect wide adoption among enterprises and developers. How well the services will scale up to demand and manage outages is yet to be seen. There are videos and SDKs available at the Windows Azure website.

    Search on Mobile

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    Search on mobile devices continues to represent several hurdles and that means opportunities for firms looking to make a mark. The interface and the input mechanism are two of the major challenges in the mobile searching space.

    An article at Technology Review mentions voice recognition, image processing and semantic technologies as forerunners to solving the web search on mobiles. As much as this points towards opportunities, there is also the mention of people looking for familiar or known brands. This implies that for a company looking to make a mark in the mobile space, a service that is already popular helps.

    Looking at the technologies side of the question, semantic analysis is what seems most promising. All of our activities on the web are always backed by some intention or motive which again comes from an activity that we indulged in previously. If only there were a single program with offline / online representation so that it could make sense of the tasks that the user was performing, it could guess or suggest tags on the things we might be interested in searching. Take the example of a coder or developer – If you are working in an Integrated Developer environment and come across an error and then open your browser window there is a very good probability that you want to do a search on that error.

    There are many computational challenges to making such a program available, that can communicate with any application that you would be working on But this is what the Semantic Web is trying to do – making web applications describe their data such that programs can use this metadata for further processing. And this will have many implications on the mobile web as well. Because when the user interface and input mechanisms seem limited, the solution has to address the problem of how to make user input on the mobile device minimal.

    Twine : A Semantic Web Application

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    Much has been said about the Semantic Web and how it would make possible a whole new generation of applications that can provide utilities based on the connections between data. Twine, developed by Radar Networks based in San Francisco, is a new service that puts to work technologies that delve into the content that a user is interested, providing suggestions and also aiding in organizing this information.

    An excerpt from Technology Review:

    Twine uses artificial intelligence–machine learning and natural language processing–to parse the contents of Web pages and extract key concepts, such as people, places, and organizations, from the pages that a user saves. The site then uses these concepts to link information and users. For example, creating a twine–a bundle of bookmarks related to a particular topic–devoted to a specialized technique in computer game design quickly led to the discovery of twines (created by other users) devoted to other areas of game design and to twines devoted to a popular game that uses the technique. It also led to other users interested in the subject. Twine is also meant to automatically generate tags, descriptions, and summaries of bookmarked Web pages.

    All the real hard technologies are working in the background. The caveat here is that users have to collaborate to let the system learn about the categorization for topics.

    Technology Does Help in Mental Development

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    How much of technology forms part of your daily routine ? Research at UCLA points to increased brain activity from technology – in this case using search engines.

    An excerpt from TechNewsWorld:

    Web search novices also showed increased activity, but to a lesser extent than their more technologically savvy counterparts.

    “The other part of the study we are analyzing the data on now is that when we took the computer naive people and gave them a chance to practice searching the Internet, within a week their brains started looking like the people who had done it for years,” Small explained.

    Locating the relevant piece of information from the barrage of results returned by a search engine can be an intensive mental activity. This is owing to the fact that results returned by search engines seldom the most desired and a lot more tweaking, query refining and browsing is required to locate the exact information.

    It would take many more years before a conclusive research can be done on the effect of technology on mental development. But it would suffice to say that a small dose of technology could do a lot of good.