Showing posts with label General. Show all posts
Showing posts with label General. Show all posts

Friday 13 February 2009

Off on Holidays

Off on holidays, so:
  • No new posts
  • No news comments approved

See you in a week and bit.

Sunday 8 February 2009

Patent leaders of 2008

Interesting post in rediff about top 10 patent leaders of 2008:
  1. IBM: It has become the first company to earn more than 4,000 US patents in a single year. IBM plans to increase by 50 per cent the number of technical inventions it publishes annually instead of seeking patent protection. This will make these inventions freely available to others. IBM, which earns about $1 billion annually from Intellectual Property, owned 3,125 patents in 2007. It now has a total of 40,000 patents.
  2. Samsung: ranked second in the world in terms of patents. It comes close to IBM with a total of 3,515 patents
  3. Canon: with over two thousand patents comes third in the list. It received 2,114 patents in 2008. Canon has established itself as a technology leader as it continues to be among the top five companies awarded US patents every year.
  4. Microsoft: ranked 4th in the list of patent leaders. It won 2,030 patents in 2008
    Microsoft has been criticised for applying for patents of pre-existing technologies.
  5. Intel: with 1,776 patents is ranked fifth in 2008.
  6. Panasonic: Matsushita now known as Panasonic Corp comes sixth in the list with 1,745 patents. Panasonic's vision is to build products 'in harmony with the environment'. Panasonic makes products that can be easily used by people with disabilities also.
  7. Toshiba: Toshiba is ranked seventh with 1,609 patents.
  8. Fujitsu: with 1,494 patents is ranked 8th in the list.
  9. Sony: Sony is ranked 9th in the world top patent leaders' list. It received 1,485 patents in 2008. However, Sony expects biggest-ever operating loss of $2.9 billion as the global economic crisis has led to a fall in demand for televisions, cameras and video game consoles.
  10. HP: Hewlett-Packard is ranked 10th in the list of top patent holders. HP received 1,424 patents in 2008.
Intersting to see one South Korean and four Japanese companies among the top 10 list. Its just matter of time before some Chinese and Indian companies will break through the list.

Thursday 1 January 2009

Happy New Year 2009

Happy new year to everyone. May the new year see lots of new technologies succeed. May we see lots of new mobile phones with innovative technologies. May we see operators offering bigger bundles cheaper. May we see the technologies being simplified and understandable by everyone. May we see WiMAX and LTE co-exist peacefully. May we see lots of nice new books available at a much cheaper price :) May we see nice new mobile apps making our life simpler. May we keep reading and writing blogs and exchanging ideas.

Friday 24 October 2008

LTE Femtocells: Stepping stone for killer applications

I am speaking in the LTE World Summit on 19th November and the title of my presentation is LTE Femtocells: Stepping stone for killer applications.

I am interested in hearing peoples opinions and views about this topic. You can emails me [my first name].[my last name]@yahoo.com. If you give me ideas then in return I will send you my presentation after I have presented it in the conference.

You can download the brochure from here.

Sunday 20 July 2008

We are becoming a bunch of 'Techno Time-wasters'

This one is in todays Observer:

Time-wasting is not just an irritating habit. It is an affliction that ruins millions of lives and often requires therapy and other treatment for sufferers, psychologists have warned. According to new research, one person in five now suffers from the problem so badly that their careers, relationships and health are threatened. Many researchers blame computers and mobile phones for providing too many distractions for people.

'The subject is seen as joke,' said Professor Joseph Ferrari of DePaul University in Chicago. 'But the social and economic implications are huge. These people need therapy. They need to change the way they act and think.' Ferrari says that chronic procrastination is now so serious a condition it needs to be recognised by clinicians. In a study to be published later this year, he estimates that 15 to 20 per cent of people are chronic procrastinators
He has devised a questionnaire to help diagnose the condition, which he says is 'much more common than depression or common phobias'. Procrastination also has knock-on effects - it encourages depression, lowers self-esteem, causes insomnia, and indirectly affects health by discouraging visits to the dentist or doctor. Sufferers are also more likely to have accidents at home involving unmended appliances.

Cognitive psychologist Professor John Maule, of Leeds University's business school, agreed that a significant proportion of the population were prone to procrastination, and argued that mood changes - particularly depression - might be to blame.

Research by Professor Piers Steel from Calgary University indicates that the incidence of chronic procrastination has risen dramatically in recent decades, from one person in 20 to one in four, as new technology has come to dominate our lives. Even the beeps notifying the arrival of email are said to be causing a 0.5 per cent drop in gross domestic product in the United States, costing the economy $70bn a year.

Ferrari, however, is less convinced that new technology is to blame for time-wasting. 'People have wasted time for centuries,' he said. 'Lots of people, particularly people who often have to work under time constraints, put work off because they kid themselves that they work best when under pressure, when there's a deadline.

'Studies have shown this isn't true. They're conveniently forgetting the times when it all went horribly wrong - and selectively remembering the odd occasion when things went well under severe time pressure.'

Once, humans probably did have stronger excuses for delaying chores that didn't need immediate attention, say brain scientists such as Alan Sanfey at Arizona University, whose work has shed light on the evolutionary origins of procrastination.

It appears that the brain is divided into two parts. One triggers 'automatic responses' which take precedence over everything else - such as fleeing sabre-toothed tigers. The other governs 'deliberate responses' - writing that report due next week or booking a visit to the optician. Evolution has dictated that the former take precedence. Today there aren't any sabre-toothed tigers, but we still put things off.

Saturday 21 June 2008

Life has become busy

Couple of days back Ravi sent me a mail asking why I have not been blogging regularly recently and have in fact received many queries on my 3G4G website as to when I would be updating it.

There is no simple answer to these questions as at present I am extremely busy and finding it very difficult to update the site. This was the main reason I started blogging as its far less time consuming then the website. As for now, I cant see getting some good time slot till the year end to do both these tasks so please bear with me.

Thursday 8 May 2008

Top 100 Telecom Blogs



Found this link for Top 100 Telecom Industry blogs. Surprisingly this blog was at No. 60 (atleast when I saw ;)). There are other interesting blogs which may interest you. Have a look here.

Tuesday 25 March 2008

Those Engineering days

I still remember my university days as an engineering student. Over the weekend i read couple of funny posts on engineers:

First is "Top 5 Reasons It Sucks to Be an Engineering Student". The best reason i like is:

1. Every Assignment Feels the Same: Nearly every homework assignment and test question is a math problem. Only a few courses require creativity or offer hands-on experience.

The other one, " Understanding Engineers" is posted by me after receiving in an email. My favourite in this was:

Understanding Engineers - Take Three
A priest, a doctor, and an engineer were waiting one morning for a particularly slow group of golfers.

The engineer fumed, "What's with those blokes? We must have been waiting for fifteen minutes !"

The doctor chimed in, "I don't know, but I'venever seen such inept golf!"

The priest said, "Here comes the greens keeper.Let's have a word with him."

He said, "Hello, George! What's wrong with that group ahead of us? They're rather slow, aren't they?"

The greens keeper replied, "Oh, yes. That's agroup of blind fire fighters. They lost their sight saving our clubhouse from a fire last year, so we always let them play for free anytime."

The group fell silent for a moment.

The priest said, "That's so sad. I think I will say a special prayer for them tonight."

The doctor said, "Good idea. I'm going to contact my ophthalmologist colleague and see if there'sanything he can do for them."

The engineer said, "Why can't they play at night?"

Sunday 17 February 2008

Our future Hi-Tech world


Back in 1986, i used to subscribe to a magazine called "2001" in India. One of its prediction that i still remember is that we would have prototypes of Flying cars and cars that would run solely on solar light by the year 2000. Now its already 2008 and none of these seem to have come absolutely true.

Anyway, one of my colleague pointed out an article from PC Magazine titled, "My High-Tech Life in 2032". Some interesting bits from that:

It's the year 2032, and I just received a gentle nudge from Galt, our telepresence android robot (and hear my wife's voice piping through it—I wish she wouldn't keep doing that). Roughly 5 feet tall and with the strength of a preteen, Galt has limited autonomy. It can navigate my home on a Segway-balanced body and use its telescoping arms to choose matching clothes for me to wear each day. Its vision system picks up infrared fabric codes on the backs of my pants and shirts to ensure a proper match-perfect for color-blind people like myself.


Galt has been programmed to know my morning routine, so it takes the OLED sheet ITV, an 8-by-10-foot, 3-millimeter-thick flexible screen that uses millions of organic light-emitting diodes, and quickly attaches it to the bedroom wall so I can watch ITV while I get dressed. Small eyelet hooks are on the walls of each room where I use the screen.

I set the car to autopilot and begin cruising out of the driveway. Magnetic/electric guide wires embedded in the road keep my car on track. A dozen cameras and motion- and laser-guided distance sensors manage traffic and road signs, and GPS 2.0 does the navigating. A tap on the tiny Bluetooth receiver in my ear connects my PC phone. My boss needs third-quarter projection numbers now, so I pull out the trifold PC, fold down the sides, and pull the screen out from the base. EV-DO Revolution-Z securely connects me to my office network, and soon I'm working in Moho, Microsoft's Web-based spreadsheet app. The smartest thing Microsoft ever did was buying the Zoho online suite in 2012. I like how smoothly it runs on the Google OS.

I'm halfway through August projections when an instant message pops up. I pull out the flexible screen addition from the side of my 8-by-10-inch roll-out screen, which gives me a 2-by-2-inch extra bit of screen real estate, and dock the message window there. It's my buddy John, asking me how I'm feeling. Yesterday I had a little medical procedure: 16 computer-guided nanobots scrubbed their way through my 65 -percent-occluded arteries. (I only passed the final ones this morning-that was a bit uncomfortable.) I tell John I'm feeling fine and log off.


This Acer/Gateway/Lenovo (they merged in 2017) ThinkFold is running a bit slow today. It's not the memory; I have about 128GB of available RAM and the 2-terabyte, solid-state drive has more than enough room. Perhaps it's the remastered 1977 miniseries Roots I'm downloading in the background? I pause the download and the ultralight system speeds up.


At the office, I step into the data room, slide on the TrueVue VR goggles, and start digging through terabytes of data to find a report and financial project from 1998. I push aside useless data with my hands and create a query so the system can find the right data on its own.

Ed from IT drops by with a new phone for me. It looks a bit like a pen but snaps apart into an earpiece and a section I can put in my pocket. There's no keypad; instead I "dial" it by tapping out mini codes. I program it to call my wife on two short taps. A tap, brush against the surface, and two more taps put through a call to my best friend. I take the new phone and drop my old one into the desktop grinder. All my gadgets are now totally biodegradable, so I expect it'll end up fertilizing someone's garden.

I notice a red glow coming from my left arm. It's my RF chip. Red means my son, Daniel, is in the building and probably coming up for a surprise visit. He works in Broadway's VR Theater, playing 15 separate virtual characters on a 360-degree stage. The audience is both local—people who attend the show in person, putting on the VR goggles and Bose noise-canceling headsets—and global. I've seen 26 of his performances from the comfort of my desk. He's very good.


Daniel's visit is nicely timed, since an e-mail is just arriving from my daughter, Sophie. She's dumping her latest boyfriend. On my 180-degree, 3,048-by-1,028-pixel, curved ViewSonic screen is an alive mail, with a video of her and Brad walking on the beach. While we watch, Sophie uses Liquid Resize to remove Brad and seamlessly stitch the beach back together. It's as if he was never there. But wait, she's not done. She has another clip of her dog on the beach and, as Dan and I watch, she's added Scruffy to the shot so it looks as if he's walking alongside her. Nice.

Thursday 3 January 2008

Happy New Year

Its still not too late ... HAPPY New Year to everyone.

Wednesday 5 September 2007

Back to work


Had been enjoying the sun in sunny Istanbul for a week now and back to work to find over 200 mails in my different Inboxes. Will take some time for me to get back to the routine.
By the way, the photo is taken just outside Blue Mosque (known as Sultanahmet).

Thursday 31 May 2007

3G -> 3.9G


There seems to be confusion when people discuss terms like 3.5G, 3.75G so i decided to define them. I am sure people who have objections will comment.
Lets first start with 2G systems:
2G = GSM
2.5G = GPRS
2.75G = EDGE
Then moving onto 3G systems:
3G = WCDMA, R99 (i am not looking at other technologies but similar mapping will apply)
3.5G = HSDPA
3.75G = HSUPA
3.8G = HSPA+ (HSPA Enhancements)
3.85G = 'HSPA+' + MIMO
3.9G = LTE
4G = NOT WiMAX

Tuesday 15 May 2007

Moving here from old blog (15/05/07)

Finally i have decided that it is difficult to maintain my blog application myself and it has too many limitations so i am moving here from my old blog site at:
http://www.3g4g.co.uk/Blogs/