Next Generation “Sixth Sense” game-changing wearable tech

TED has this very interesting concept from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some...


Its just matter of time after this concept becomes reality for it to be available in mobiles, etc.

Google's voicemail search

This is an interesting convergence of technologies that have now been around for some time. There are many applications on the market that does voice to text conversion and vice versa. Now google is going a step further and letting people search their voicemails.

Google Voice gives you a single number streamlining your work, home and mobile phones and lets you store transcripts of voicemail phone messages in your email inbox.

Using speech-recognition technology, it will even let you search those messages for a snippet of information just as if you were trawling a sea of emails.

It will also let you make free local and cheap international calls, as well as consult Goog411, the company's free U.S. directory enquiries service.

Google Voice is based on technology originally launched by Grand Central Communications, a company bought up by Google nearly two years ago.

The acquisition had taken so long to bear fruit that observers were starting to suspect it had come to nothing.

Like the original Grand Central product, Google Voice offers consumers a single phone number that can route incoming calls to home, office and mobile phones.

Domestic calls will be free but international calls will require users to set up a Google Checkout account. Calls to landlines in the UK will cost 2 cents per minute.

EBay's Skype offers free domestic and international calls made over the internet from one computer to another, but there is a charge to landlines and mobile phones.

Skype president Josh Silverman told analysts and investors that "chat and voice will become table stakes". He also revealed that the company is adding 350,000 new users a day and is on track to do more than 100 billion calling minutes in 2009 alone.

Google does not view the service as a threat to Skype or other telecom companies any more than its Google Talk offering, which lets users chat over the internet for free.

"This is about allowing your existing phone to work better," said Craig Walker, now group product manager for real time communications at Google and co-founder of GrandCentral.

"It's not that we are replacing your phone, we are giving [it] the ability to work better," he said.
He declined to say how many users had signed up. Google Voice is currently only available to former GrandCentral users.

Google Voice also allows all voice messages to be turned into text which will then be sent either through an e-mail or an sms.

HSPA+ to become more widely available in 2009

According to 3G Americas press release, 100 million new connections were added last year. On a worldwide basis, GSM totals 3.5 billion of the nearly 4 billion mobile subscriptions or 89% share of market at the end of December 2008. With 278 UMTS-HSPA networks in service in 121 countries, there are 290 million UMTS-HSPA subscriptions as of the end of 2008 compared to 186 million a year earlier—more than 100 million new 3G connections. UMTS-HSPA subscriptions are expected to more than double in 2009, according to Informa’s forecasts, and reach 455 million connections by the end of this year.

A survey last year by GSA showed that over 1000 HSPA devices have already been launched. Remember HSPA device could be HSDPA device only or HSDPA and HSUPA device. According to Dell'Oro group, Worldwide total mobile infrastructure market revenues grew 5% in 2008, driven by the nearly doubling and quadrupling of revenues of the WCDMA and WiMAX markets, respectively.

The focus is now moving towards HSPA+ (Release 7). HSPA+ is already becoming everyones favourite as it now has the potential to compete with LTE. The HSPA+ data rates will soon be able to rival that of LTE. No new spectrum will be required and enhancements will now allow multiple bands to be used at the same time thereby reducing the need to move to LTE for gaining higher data rates by use of higher bandwidth.

O2 Germany is planning to upgrade its network to HSPA+ by mid 2009. Vodafone also plans to upgrade its network to HSPA+ when more devices are available. Hong Kong operator CSLNWM is working with China's ZTE to upgrade their network to SDR based HSPA+ network that could easily be upgraded to LTE. Australia's Telstra has already announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it is the first in the world to offer mobile broadband service with peak rates of 21 Mbps made possible through HSPA+ technology.

On the devices front Huawei has E182E HSPA+ slide USB stick supporting 21.6Mbps DL and 5.76Mbps in UL. Novatel surprisingly has the same specs for its MC996D modem. Qualcomm meanwhile has released a range of new HSPA+ capable chipsets. The MSM8260 supports 3GPP Release 7 HSPA+ for data rates of up to 28 Mbps. The MSM8660 adds support for 3GPP/3GPP2 multimode, and the MSM8270 adds support for Release 8 dual-carrier HSPA+ for even higher data rates of up to 42 Mbps. All three products offer full backward compatibility to previous generation networks and are pin-, software- and functionally-compatible.

Its just a matter of time before we will all be able to experience the HSPA+ speeds on our mobiles and mobile connected Laptops.

HSPA Data rates

Martin has posted a HSPA data rates table on his blog so I decided to copy it and add a photograph that I took from an Ericsson presentation ;)

• 3.6 MBit/s : Baseline HSPA with 16QAM modulation
• 7.2 MBit/s : 16 QAM, more simultaneous channels)
• 14.4 MBit/s : 16 QAM, even more simultaneous channels
• 21 MBit/s : 64 QAM modulation
• 28 MBit/s : MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output = 2 antennas) + 16 QAM, (3GPP Rel 7)
• 42 MBit/s : MIMO + 64QAM (3GPP Release 8)
• 42 MBit/s : 64QAM + Dual Carrier (3GPP Rel 8)
• 82 MBit/s : MIMO + 64QAM + Dual Carrier (i.e. 2 x 5MHz) (3GPP Release 9)
• + more in case 3GPP decides to increase the number of carriers that can be bundled in Rel 9 or beyond.

Giving up Texting for Lent

Lent, instituted by the Council of Nicaea in 325 and which for most Christian congregations runs from Ash Wednesday to Easter, commemorates the 40 days that Jesus is said to have spent fasting in the desert and rejecting the temptations of Satan before beginning his ministry.

The bishops are encouraging their parishioners to take up new forms of abstinence after the Pope emphasised in his Ash Wednesday address the importance of Lent as a spiritual build-up to Easter and praised the age-old Christian practice of fasting.

Chocolate, cigarettes and alcohol may be the predictable vices to give up for the 40 days of Lent but Italians are being urged to abstain from more contemporary pleasures, like texting, Facebook and iPods.

The Bishop of Modena, in northern Italy, has called on young Italians to give up on Fridays their addiction to sending text messages, in the run-up to Easter Sunday. Archbishop Benito Cocchi said that this would help them to "cleanse themselves from the virtual world and get back into touch with themselves".

The average Italian sends 50 texts a month, the second highest rate in Europe, behind the UK.
The bishops of Pesaro, on the Adriatic, and of Bari, in the south, have also picked up on the idea of a "text message fast" and more bishops could follow suit.

In the Diocese of Trento, in the foothills of the Alps, Archbishop Luigi Bressan has set out a type of calender of abstinence for his parishioners, with each Sunday of Lent dedicated to a different sacrifice.

He has called on Catholics to abstain from using a car, from logging into Facebook, from listening to music on MP3 players, and from playing computer games. He has also suggested that people use Lent to embrace recycling and he called for "abstinence from egocentricity".

In Venice, the bishop has suggested giving up mineral water and drinking only tap water during Lent.

Network operator '3' released a Facebook phone called INQ last year. Though I am not a fan of Facebook or for that reason the INQ, I know quite a few people are. Maybe this abstaining from the phone for a day maybe a good idea.

Joggler or Post-it?

O2 has recently released a family friendly touchscreen tablet which can act as a replacement for the post it notes many of us leave on the fridge door to communicate with our family members.


The following is from O2's website:

Managing family life can be a struggle. Introducing the O2 Joggler, a new device designed to help organise your family life a little better. Think of it as your new fridge door.

The fridge door has always done its best to organise family life. From birthdays to sports days, from pianos lessons to parents' evenings - it's all there. Somewhere.

The O2 Joggler works with an interactive online calendar and your mobile phone so every family member will know who needs to be where by when. O2 numbers even get text message reminders. Much more than an interactive calendar, the O2 Joggler runs a number of family-friendly applications to support family life and keep your family in the loop, including:

• Includes up-to-the-minute news, sport, traffic and weather updates
• View and load music, videos and photos
• Let everyone in your selected family group know what's going on and who's doing what with your shared O2 Calendar. Set up and update events and, if you are on O2, you can send text reminders to your chosen O2 phone numbers.
• View and load your photos from a USB memory stick which can be inserted into the side of your O2 Joggler. You can save your favourite photos on your O2 Joggler and display them as a slide show on the screen.
• Challenge yourself to a game of Japanese Sudoku.
• Store and watch your favourite videos.

The seven-inch touchscreen device connects wirelessly or via Ethernet cable to home broadband, meaning no SIM is required – and therefore there’s no additional monthly cost. It features a calendar to store appointments and deadlines, and will send text messages as reminders.

While the device can be used by anyone regardless of which network they’re on, the Joggler will only sent info to O2 mobiles – so Junior won’t get the reminder if he’s on Orange, T-Mobile or any other network. For O2 customers, their Joggler will be able to send 50 free text messages a month.

The oddly-named Joggler will be available from early April, for £149.99 or free for O2 customers if taken instead of a handset upgrade. Corporate customers will not be allowed to upgrade to the Joggler, so they'll have to pay out to get one.

Somehow I am not convinced if this device will be popular big time though its failure can easily be blamed on the current financial crisis. Somehow the features remind me of Femtozone services and maybe the Femto application developers can include some features from this into their Femtozone apps :)

LTE can get us out from the current recession

Hello everybody. Just in case you guys thinking where I am then I can tell you that I just returned back from my holiday last week.

Everybody is aware how the market situation is getting worse and there is no doubt it has started affecting the telecomm companies as well.

One of the major doubts I have been carrying from the past few weeks was, what will happen to LTE now after seeing the worsening state of the economy.

As I have mentioned in my previous blogs that the companies are toying with idea of considering HSPA+ as one of the option in case they can’t afford LTE in the current climate.

However I firmly believe that the success of LTE is very important not only for people like me but for the industry as well.

I think with WiMax loosing its grip it’s a very good opportunity for the telecomm giants to leapfrog the competition and work feverishly towards the launch of LTE.

The early signs are that LTE is getting a go ahead from most and the mobile industry is really pushing LTE

It is estimated that there will more than 50 million mobile users by the end of 2013. With the no of users growing at a rapid pace in India and china and other Asian countries these numbers sounds reasonable enough.

This growth rate would be remarkable given that the original standardization and specification process for Long Term Evolution (LTE) aka '4G' only envisages commercial deployment in the 2011-2012 timeframe. It would appear that the mobile industry is once again doing what it does best, overhyping new technology whilst it is still in development.

I suppose in the current climate the only excitement is that the announcements about LTE are arriving almost daily, each more positive than the next.

CDMA operator Verizon Wireless has already announced its intention to migrate its network to LTE, Motorola plans to focus on LTE, perhaps at the expense of WiMAX and so it goes on.

Recently T-Mobile step up the pressure on equipment vendors, when it stated it will not deploy HSPA+ to further boost its mobile broadband throughput but will instead skip this technical evolution and invest in LTE.

And now the news is that Nokia is affirming it’s commitment to LTE and says that it would have device for LTE networks by 2010.

Nokia affirmed its commitment to Long Term evolution (LTE) technology and said it would have devices for LTE networks in 2010, according to a company executive. By doing this Nokia in my view is dismissing WiMAX as a 4G standard. I believe one of the major reasons why Nokia might be thinking that way is because of WiMax’s lack of backwards compatibility and an unclear roadmap.

I hope all this news regarding LTE materializes and kicks off a nice decade ahead. However only time will tell whether the LTE hype is justified or if the mobile industry is about to get another dash of cold reality.

Blog: Advanced C++ with examples

This has nothing to do with Mobiles or 3G and 4G but for lots of people who get involved in different C++ coding and reviewing, etc. Here is the link to the blog:

http://advancedcppwithexamples.blogspot.com/

SMS hailed as enablers of next-generation offerings

Text services make money and complement new rich services, says new research.

The study, conducted by Direct2Mobile found that mobile operators believe SMS will become the enabler that underpins next generation offerings, with all those surveyed claiming they are developing their messaging infrastructure in order to introduce new value-added services.

Of all the services cited, mobile social networking and mobile applications lead the way with 75 per cent of operators expecting to invest in them over the next 12 months. Mobile broadband is not far behind with 65 per cent expecting to make investments over the next 12 months, closely followed by location-based services, IM/presence and the mobile internet (which 50 per cent of operators stated would be a priority for the 12 months ahead).

Jay Seaton, CMO at Airwide Solutions, said: “Revenues from SMS have become a substantial and strategic income stream for mobile operators worldwide. However, recent market changes are placing an ever greater pressure on operators to deliver new and richer services that will not only complement voice and text services but also boost ARPU and help improve market share.”

Networks may have to bundle Femtocells along with contract phones

"Tom Prescott, 32, took Orange to court after they refused to cancel his 18- month contract, even though he could not get a signal either at his Richmond home or in his office. "I felt bullied by the company, and dealing with Orange was awful. I hope people who have the same problem now realise they can do something about it."

Tom Prescott took his phone network (Orange) to court and won £500 for "lack of signal" in his home, there will be a sense of greater urgency in the industry.

The attitude of other mobile operators wasn't likely to be very different - before the lawsuit, anyway. If you complain that a call got dropped, and expect to be taken seriously, then you're mad. Most companies would have taken Orange's attitude: "Coverage is outside our control."

The Court disagreed. It said that if you sell an 18 month contract to a victim who neither lives nor works in an area where you can provide coverage, then it really is your problem, not theirs.

The trouble is, 3G phone technology simply doesn't work well enough for them to be able to fix the problem. Very simply, if the phone mast is blocked by brick or concrete walls, then very little of a 3G wireless signal will get through.

That was Prescott's problem: he couldn't make calls, and he couldn't receive calls. So naturally, he asked for his money back. Orange took the view that if the phone worked, and the network was in place, and if he could actually use the phone out in the street, then they'd done all anybody could expect. So they refused - an error of judgement commercially, but a complete disaster in PR terms.

And all operators are staring at the same disaster, if they don't change their business habits.

Not just one or two phone users have the problem; in some areas, claims of providing coverage are close to fraudulent. They can get away with it if the old 2G GSM network provides backup coverage, of course. But after this, even that may be called into question.

We know how to solve the problem. Simply, 3G operators have to put a private mast into your home. These are very small mobile phone cells. Smaller than microcells, smaller even than picocells, they are called femtocells. They are limited to short range: inside the building, and perhaps the gardens.

Question: who will provide your femtocell? Orange? Cingular? Clearwire? France Telecom?

Wrong Answer: "If I provide the customer's femtocell, they'll have to use my service! They'll never be able to switch! Muhahahaha!"

Better answer: "...it's going to cost us, but we have to make sure that this mini-mast works with any phone. Otherwise, nobody is going to see any point in using it."

Best Answer: "We have to change roaming regulations! The whole business model needs radical reform, so that we do NOT create logjams for our customers."

Here's the problem, rather neatly summarised by consultant Dean "Disruptive" Bubley: "These operators are living in a dream world of one operator per household. It isn't going to be true even of single people living alone."

Most households have phones from several operators.

The teenagers have friends on the same network, so that they can have free SMS texting chats together. Tell them "use another network" and have your face eaten off. It's not the money (they'll say) - "That network isn't cool."

The parents often have phones provided by employers (no choice there). And
there are "private" lines which they use because they always have. "Everybody knows that number," they say.

Yes, you can move a number from one network to another. No, it isn't a picnic. And anyway "why should I?" is the common response.