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Search Results for: "DATA"

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.

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.

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.

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.