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Money is no object for high tech traffic laws

17 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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“A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money”, Illinois senator Everett Dirksen said of Washington’s spending habits back in the 1960s. That was when a billion dollars would get you more than a cup of coffee. Heck, it might even have bought an official U.S. Air Force toilet seat back in the day.

Now, it’s only a good start on writing new rules for self-driving cars. The U.S. transportation department is planning to spend $4 billion to come up with new laws and procedures that would allow fully autonomous vehicles to operate on the nation’s roads.… More

Forget gigabits, Bell Labs says petabits are coming

16 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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What’s a petabit for, if not more grumpy cats?

The theoretical fiber speed limit continues to increase. Bell Labs says it’s successfully tested technology that has the potential for moving data through an optical fiber at the speed of 1 petabit per second. A petabit is 1,000 terabits, which in turn is 1,000 gigabits. Currently, the top speed for optical fiber is in the 10 terabit to 20 terabit range, according to Bell Labs. The technique involves multiplexing six separate transmissions on a single fiber…

Using the MIMO-SDM technique, Bell Labs aims to overcome the non-linear Shannon limit of currently deployed optical fiber.

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If you want people to buy your stuff, make stuff they want to buy

15 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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Churn.

The road to broadband nirvana has its ups and down. Adoption figures – the number of people who pay for regular broadband access – are on a general upward trend, despite a tremor in the latest Pew Research Center report. But the market is messy, and sometimes people who subscribe to in-home broadband service decide to drop it. Churn out, in industry jargon.

The Benton Foundation has crunched some existing survey numbers and concluded that the reasons people drop broadband subscriptions – become unadopters, as they put it – are mostly related to cost, with usefulness a distant second.… More

New York orders Charter to upgrade analog to digital

12 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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The New York state public service commission approved Charter Communications’ purchase of Time Warner cable systems, but added a list of conditions that included digital upgrades and speed increases. According to the decision, Charter…

…must convert their existing New York footprint to an all-digital network (including upgrading the Columbia County Charter cable systems to enable broadband communications) capable of delivering faster broadband speeds. The Petitioners will be required to offer all customers broadband speeds of up to 100 Mbps by the end of 2018 and 300 Mbps by the end of 2019.

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CES still hasn't bridged the continental divide

10 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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A lonely outpost.

This year’s rebranding of the tech extravaganza formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show saw “International” dropped from the name. It’s now just CES, although it still bills itself as a “global technology event”.

Looking just at attendees and media, it certainly is an event with global pull. But the products on display overwhelming come from companies based in developed or near-developed countries, even though the actual manufacturing is often done in the developing world.… More

Maturity comes to consumer electronics, for the moment anyway

9 January 2016 by Steve Blum

Now cats can post people pictures on the web.

“A maturing of nascent ecosystems” is one way of describing CES 2016. It was in fact one of the predictions made by Shawn DuBravac, the chief economist for the show’s organiser, the Consumer Technology Association. Translated, it means “you won’t see a lot that’s new, but you will see a lot more of what was new last year”. Spot on.

Home automation control is increasingly decentralised. There are plenty of platforms vying to integrate all your gizmos into a unified control scheme, but it’s optional.… More

Snowden tells CES crowd fighting encryption is the wrong fight

8 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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“I’ve read the emails of terrorists, I know what they’re doing, I know how they work”, Edward Snowden told a rapt audience in a CES booth yesterday. “Terrorists are already using encryption. Everybody in the world is using encryption”.

He was being interviewed by serial entrepreneur Peter Diamondus – X-Prize, Singularity and, yesterday, Human Longevity, Inc. – via a BeamPro telepresence robot made by Palo Alto-based Suitabletech. It was a promotionally convenient necessity since Snowden is a fugitive, living in exile in Russia after blowing the whistle on the National Security Agency’s massive data trawling operation.… More

Virtually new products at CES but not much else

7 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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Virtual reality is ready for a break out into the mass market, but augmented reality is not offering a compelling product to consumers yet. It was hard to find a gee-whiz proposition while wandering through the Las Vegas Convention Center today at CES, or indeed much of anything that was significantly different from last year. Except for the virtual reality headsets and the long lines of (mostly) guys waiting for their turn to try one out.… More

Regulators need to accept the new future of work

7 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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Twentieth century government and twenty-first century entrepreneurship do not mix well. That was the top line consensus at a CES panel discussion this afternoon. Moderated by Julie Samuels from Engine, a tech policy advocacy group, it included two company reps – Laurent Crenshaw from Yelp and Marco Zappacosta from Thumbtack – and Arun Sundararajan, a business professor at New York University.

“Taxes are not the issue, small businesses care much more about regulation”, Zappacosta said. As businesses expand, so does the regulatory burden.… More

The IoT hub is dead and Stringify killed it

6 January 2016 by Steve Blum
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Simple solution for home automation chaos.

Stringify has mixed the glue that will bind home automation and the other gizmos and platforms of the Internet of Things together. Two weeks ago, the Los Gatos, California-based startup launched its server-based and mobile centric meta-platform that allows consumers to control 200 products and services offered by dozens of companies via a single smartphone app.

It’s a brilliantly simple proposition: instead of using a dozen different apps to control a dozen different products, a consumer installs one app that talks to a server that talks to a dozen different servers – cloud to cloud, if you like – and makes them all work together.… More