Category: Emerging Technologies

Writes Rafe Needleman is his “Catch of the Day” column:

Startup Ipsil is addressing this with a low-cost Web server on a chip. The device takes electronic input and serves it onto the Internet; it can also take input from the Net and translate it into commands or data for equipment. CEO Velu Sinha says he’s “de-layered” the IP stack (the collection of protocols that handle the different functions involved in moving data between a computing device and the physical network cable) and built a Web server in just 5,000 logic gates, on one low-cost chip. In quantity, his server chip should cost less than a dollar. An Ethernet cable costs more than that.

Devices with powerful CPUs and general-purpose operating systems would not gain much from the Ipsil technology, which offers only stripped-down network functionality. But the Ipsil “IP UART,” as Velu characterizes it, could save engineers of lower-powered devices from having to support a lot of computing overhead simply to get their products online.

Velu sees the technology being applied first in low-cost IP telephones, webcams, and consumer electronics, devices in which a full-on operating system would be too expensive to support. Eventually he may build inexpensive serial-to-IP converters to get legacy devices, like manufacturing equipment, online as well.

Explains Paul Boutin on Wired News :

At its simplest, Palladium provides a tamper-proof vault for data on the desktop. “One of the areas the PC needs to grow in is its resistance to certain kinds of attacks,” said Geoffrey Strongin, platform security architect for AMD.

Those attacks include Web-based cracking and viruses, ripping CDs, modification of application programs, and sniffs of users’ passwords and other personal data, according to Strongin. “The constraint on the problem is the existing PC marketplace,” Strongin added. “We don’t want to throw out trillions of dollars in infrastructure.”

As a result, he said, Palladium was designed as an extension to current PC hardware and software, one that would allow existing software and hardware to work as usual, while enabling new applications and hardware that work with encrypted data inside the PC.

In theory, the Palladium system would be safe from any attacks short of physically opening the box and tapping into the hardware.

Quanta, based in Taiwan, has emerged as the world’s leading manufacturer of portables. It is, as the Economist writes, “is a contract manufacturera company that designs and makes gadgets but leaves the marketing (and increasingly only that) to companies with famous brands.” Quanta shipped 15.3% of the laptops in 2003.

Quanta’s CEO Barry Lam looks ahead to new areas:

His latest target, storage systems, makes some sense. Most people accept that computing power and storage are moving away from desktop and laptop computers, and on to servers stacked in back rooms.

The other two areas of interest: wireless gadgets and artificial intelligence.

A WSJ interview with Marc Talbot, SchlumbergerSema’s business-development manager for IT Network Smart Cards:

We are seeing very good growth in the smart-card market for the workplace. Companies are trying to do the combination of physical and logical access and we’ve seen major deployments in Asia, North America and Europe.

I think that trend will certainly continue.
What might be more interesting is the growth of the smart card in the home. Smart cards until very recently had suffered from the same problems that digital-video-disc manufacturers had suffered five years ago. Back then, DVD manufacturers said, “Well, we’d sell more DVD players, if there were more DVD movies around.” Movie companies said, “Well, we’d make more DVD movies available, if there were more DVD players out there.”

Smart cards have been suffering from much the same problem, in the sense that people come up with good applications for smart cards for the home user, but they can’t deploy them unless they put a reader in the PC and most PCs don’t have smart card readers because there aren’t any interesting applications for smart cards.

Future smart cards will no longer need a reader to hook up to the PC. They’ll hook up through a very inexpensive connector and that’s really going to open up opportunities for smart cards in the home

In 2001, SchlumbergerSema shipped 198 million smart cards, about 29% of the world’s total.

Smart Cards could be a useful mechanism for authentication for Thin Clients (SunRay does this).

WSJ on AlltheWeb: “Norway-based Fast Search Transfer ASA got plenty of attention last month when it announced that AlltheWeb.com , its showcase search engine, had narrowly passed Google in terms of the number of Web pages searched, at 2.096 billion to 2.073 billion. Launched in 1997, Fast also provides the search and filter technology for global portal Lycos, and provides search technology to a range of corporate customers that includes information company Reuters Group PLC, computer giant International Business Machines Corp. and online auctioneer eBay Inc.”

Says its Fast co-founder John M. Lervik: “We don’t intend to be a consumer brand. We want to be the engine under the hood. We intend to provide our technology across all sorts of portals and to businesses. When you start to become a media company, you talk to marketing and public relations types of people, and we want to remain a technology company.”

NYT writes about the increasing use of RFIDs in :
Tollbooth Technology Meets the Checkout Lane

From gas stations to grocery stores to fast-food chains, merchants are experimenting with payment systems for a harried marketplace. Using radio frequency identification – or RFID – the systems automatically identify customers, who have set up credit or debit accounts with the issuer, and charge them for their purchases.

The RFID payment systems are similar in some ways to stored-value cards and the programmable “smart cards” used by Starbucks and a growing number of merchants. Those cards automatically deduct money for purchases from prepaid accounts or charge them to a personal account.

But RFID systems are much faster than other types of payment. There is no fumbling through a wallet, no punching in personal identification numbers, no signatures and, most certainly, no Web browsing. All that is needed is a tiny device called a transponder that might hang on a customer’s key chain and is waved in front of an electronic reader like a magic wand.

Writes Business Week:

Although radio-frequency identification, or RFID, has been used for years to track high-value goods such as car subassemblies in a factory or electronic components in a warehouse, only recently has the technology become cheap enough to deploy in high-volume retail environments. As costs come down, “RFID technology is opening up to new applications like [mobile] commerce, baggage tracking, and in-store uses,” says Deepak Shetty, an analyst at Frost Sullivan.

What makes RFID so hot in an otherwise tepid technology market? Compared with bar codes–the 30-year-old industry standard for product identification–RFID systems require less manipulation by humans even as they hold more useful data. Whether powered by a battery or an external signal, all RFID devices contain a computer chip able to store hundreds of characters of data (vs. just 12 or 15 characters for a bar code) plus a tiny antenna that communicates with a receiver.

The oft-quoted application example for RFIDs is in supermarkets where shampoo bottles or cereal boxes will have built-in RFID chips (costing no more than a few pennies) which would broadcast to the “smart shelf” whenever they are picked up, thus providing a real-time update to inventory management systems.

Three applications I’d like to see:
– in libraries, to prevent mis-filing of books
– embed the chips in luggage so one knows exactly when the bags is coming after arriving at airports (or even if they have gotten on the flight!)
– finding the TV remote and the cellphone

The vision of computing as a utility is becoming real. IBM has launched a service called called Linux Virtual Services. Writes the WSJ:

It will allow customers to run a wide variety of their own software applications on mainframes in the Armonk, N.Y., company’s data centers and pay rates based largely on the amount of computing power they use.

Under the IBM plan, companies that have applications, such as a database, can move the applications to the new service. The applications would run in an IBM data center on an IBM zSeries mainframe running hundreds of virtual Linux servers at the same time. IBM says such virtual servers don’t interfere with each other and provide as much security as physically separate servers would.

IBM will charge customers about $300 a month for what it calls a “service unit.” Three service units are equal to the computer power of a midrange Intel Corp. server. Since a single-processor mid-range Intel server costs less than $5,000, the IBM offering doesn’t make sense on the basis of purchasing cost alone.

Adds News.com: “The service is one of the clearest examples of the move toward “utility computing,” a trend that IBM rivals Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems are also advocating. By pooling large numbers of servers connected over the Internet, these computing companies envision a future in which customers don’t have to worry about the headaches of administering complicated computers, just as they don’t have to know how to run a power plant today.”

Good concept — something I have written about in the past (SME Tech Utility). The opportunity lies in emerging markets, and with the utility having a distribution point on the enterprise LAN.

From eServer Magazine, a story on Grid Computing and what IBM is doing:

Rather than countless PCs sharing tasks, imagine a large cluster of mainframes and other servers acting as a single integrated computing system that can be accessed by home- or business-based PCs. Beyond simply sharing files and information, users can access an extensive grid of high-end enterprise computers via the Internet, using idle compute cycles to crunch massive amounts of data. Certified users could access super-computing resources, computing clusters, data-storage systems, data sources and even network with other grid users. Taking it even further, users could create entire virtual organizations with complex business processes running remotely. The only costs involved are likely to be those charged to lease grid resources.

From the NewYork Times,an article on the future direction of supercomputing — At Los Alamos, Two Visions of Supercomputing:

By 2010, scientists predict, a single chip may hold more than a billion transistors, shedding 1,000 watts of thermal energy – far more heat per square inch than a nuclear reactor.

The comparison seems particularly apt at Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico, which has two powerful new computers, Q and Green Destiny. Both achieve high calculating speeds by yoking together webs of commercially available processors. But while the energy-voracious Q was designed to be as fast as possible, Green Destiny was built for efficiency. Side by side, they exemplify two very different visions of the future of supercomputing.