Steve Perlman's startup Artemis is finally going to try and prove it can build a better, faster wireless network in tech-centric San Francisco. The project will be the first large-scale test of a potentially transformative—yet so far almost entirely hypothetical—technology Artemis calls pCell.
See also: 5 Things To Know About pCell, A Bold Scheme For Superfast Data
If Artemis can make good on its claims, it could upend the wireless industry as we know it. If not—well, it'll have a hard time explaining away its failure.
I Left My Signal in San Francisco
According to the Artemis announcement, Dish Network will lease a portion of its mobile spectrum in San Francisco, which the satellite TV provider purchased at auction last year. Over the next two years, Artemis will deploy pCell transmitters around the city, creating a new next-generation network designed to provide a “leapfrog in spectral efficiency,” as the company's latest white paper says.
Artemis says many existing cellphones will be able to tap into the new network just by swapping in Artemis SIM cards, including the latest batch of iPhones and most new Android handsets. Of course, it hasn't yet said anything about how much it (or Dish) will charge for such a network, or how its users will be able to stay connected outside of San Francisco.
We first heard about Artemis and its vaunted pCell wireless technology about a year ago. The company says that its system differs from traditional cellular networks by exploiting the interference that comes when a large number of signals collide, rather than trying to minimize it.
Normally, such interference leads to cellular dead zones. Artemis, however, says its transmitters will combine “interfering radio waves to create an unshared personal cell (a ‘pCell') for each LTE device, providing the full wireless capacity to each user at once, even at extremely high user density” (emphasis in the original).
So far, pCell tests have been successful during indoor, highly controlled tests. Whether or not pCell can succeed in the real world remains to be seen.
Fool Me Once …
Artemis's founder and CEO Steve Perlman is making some pretty bold claims with pCell, and you could be forgiven for viewing them skeptically. After all, Perlman's previous ventures haven't exactly worked out according to plan: He founded WebTV -- For more information read the original article here.
Move over, Touch ID. Qualcomm has a new entrant in the fingerprint-scan wars that—according to the company—could leave Apple's existing technology in the dust.
On Monday Qualcomm unveiled its Snapdragon Sense ID technology, which it says can scan your finger even if it's a little wet or dirty. It will also function through "glass, aluminum, stainless steel, sapphire, and plastics," meaning that smartphone makers can integrate the feature right into their hardware.
The problem with adapting Hollywood technologies like fingerprint scanning to real life is that consumers often find them less dazzling than on the screen. Apple's Touch ID fingerprint recognition, for instance, won't work if you've hurt your finger or even if it's just sweaty.
See also: Apple's Touch ID Fingerprint Scanner Is Still Hackable, But Don't Panic
Qualcomm's take on the fingerprint reader is ultrasonic, and uses sound waves to identity a user's unique fingertip. The press release goes into the scientific details:
QTI's ultrasonic-based solution uses sound waves to directly penetrate the outer layers of skin, detecting three-dimensional details and unique fingerprint characteristics, including fingerprint ridges and sweat pores that are not possible to detect with current capacitive touch-based fingerprint technologies.
ReadWrite's Adriana Lee tested out the feature at Qualcomm's booth at Mobile World Congress. The "holes" you can see in the fingerprint ridges are her sweat glands, visible with the sensor's fingerprint mapping technology.
A more accurate fingerprint reader doesn't just mean fewer rejected swipes. It also makes it more difficult for bad guys to fake a user's fingerprint.
Snapdragon Sense ID will be built into Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 810 and 425 chips, and also available as a standalone part for manufacturers. Technology devices that utilize the fingerprint sensor technology should be available as soon as the later half of 2015.
Photos by Adriana Lee for ReadWrite
The slickest, watch-iest Android Wear device so far made its appearance Sunday at Mobile World Congress. Made by the Chinese company Huawei and set for a June release in 20 countries around the world, the simply named Huawei Watch (say that 10 times fast) might be Android's best Apple Watch competitor yet.
If, that is, it weren't for one small problem.
Powerful Shortcomings
The Huawei Watch's specifications aren't that different from those of other Android watches. But a few of its features could make a big impact in the watch's overall performance:
- 1.4-inch AMOLED sapphire crystal display with 400 x 400 pixel resolution at 286 ppi
- 4GB of internal storage
- 512MB of RAM
- Qualcomm APQ8026 1.2GHz processor
- Heart rate monitor, 6-axis motion sensor, and barometer
- 300mAh battery
The main difference here lies in the higher resolution screen—which Huawei says makes it the “highest resolution Android Wear watch”—the heart rate monitor, and the 300mAh battery. That's one of the smallest batteries featured in any Android watch so far—and it's paired with some power-hungry features.
For comparison, the Moto 360—which has taken grief for its underwhelming battery life since its release last September—has a slightly larger display, heart rate monitor, and a 300mAh battery (despite a spec sheet that lists 320mAh). The G Watch R has a slightly smaller display, heart rate monitor, and a 410mAh battery.
Style Over Substance
What the Huawei Watch might lack in terms of battery, it could redeem with pure style. A sapphire crystal display means it will resist the scratches that come with everyday wear and tear. There have been more than a few regretful bumps on my Asus ZenWatch as I reach into the fridge to grab the milk, so the Huawei Watch's tougher display could be one of its best features. It doesn't hurt that the Huawei Watch's round design simply looks great, and will come in gold, silver, or black style choices.
There are still a few months between now and the supposed June release window, so maybe Huawei could swap in a -- For more information read the original article here.
You can't really blame your IT staff for inflicting a private cloud—actually just a corporate data center with a fancy new name—on you. In some ways, their jobs depend upon it. Self-preservation is a powerful incentive.
Of course, your CIO's job is only truly threatened by the public cloud if she chooses to fight it, or mindlessly continues to believe she can build a better cloud than Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. For 99.999% of enterprises, building your own cloud or data center may be a comforting way to stick with old habits, but it's generally going to be the wrong decision.
While there are certainly workloads that will perform better or need to be secured within the four walls of your firewall, the reality is that most infrastructure belongs in the cloud.
No, You Can't
It's a convenient fiction that public cloud is unreliable compared to private IT. But let's be clear: it's fiction, not fact.
Here's the reality on public cloud up-time: last year Amazon Web Services managed 99.9974% uptime despite hefty growth and unparalleled pressure on its infrastructure. Google was even better at 99.999% uptime. (Microsoft Azure performed a bit worse, though still quite well, according to the Cloud Harmony data.)
This is better than most enterprises can boast and, as AWS is demonstrating, the public cloud providers keep getting better at uptime.
In other words, public cloud costs considerably less than data center resources (even if dressed up as "private cloud")—a huge advantage, by Actuate executive Bernard Golden's estimation:
But it also performs better. And, most important of all, public cloud computing offers dramatic improvements in convenience and flexibility.
Sure, there are companies like Uber and Facebook that may be able to run infrastructure more efficiently than AWS or Microsoft, but these are the exceptions, not the rule, as Golden goes on to note.
Cloudy Forecast For IT Jobs?
None of which need threaten IT professionals. After all, "cloud" doesn't translate into "unemployment." Instead, it translates into "leverage."
Take AccuWeather, for example, which discovered that the public cloud gave it the opportunity to highly leverage the relatively small IT staff it had. As Christopher Patti, vice president of Technology at AccuWeather, told CIO.com:
We don't have a gigantic staff. In the past it took a serious amount of time to provision equipment. Now my development staff can go to the -- For more information read the original article here.