Raytheon BBN working on real Star Trek tech

Interesting...

If you thought inventing the Internet was a big enough accomplishment that you can rest on your laurels, you can’t work for Raytheon BBN Technologies – the actual inventors of said Internet. DARPA agrees and is now funding Raytheon BBN in a program to create super high-capacity broadband encrypted communications technology that is all but unbreakable, and super high-resolution long-distance imaging.

Oh, and as a side benefit, it could also give you your messages or images instantly, no matter how far apart the sender and receiver are – five feet or five light years.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is really living up to its name on this one, giving Raytheon BBN $2.1 million for some seriously advanced research. The Cambridge-based deep thinkers will put the funds into two projects, both of which will use a feature of quantum physics known as quantum entanglement and both applied to using quantum-entangled light.

In the first project, given the tasty name of PIECOMM (Photon Information Efficient Communications), Raytheon BBN will try to use quantum physics to reach the limit of data density that can be packed into a stream of light. In a press release about the funding, Raytheon BBN says the applications for such communications could be in “free space optical communication links, including far-field links used in deep space.” Fire up the subspace radio, Lt. Uhura!

The second project hints at the kind of data that might be sent over that crazy-dense laser link. FINESSE (Fundamental Information Capacity of Electromagnetism with Squeezing and Spatial Entanglement) aims to create the ultimate imaging technology, using quantum states of light that don’t normally exist. And that gets to the real science fiction aspect of the projects – the potential uses of the quantum entanglement that will be at their hearts.

With quantum entangled light, each photon is connected at a quantum level to a photon in a second stream of light. If any change happens to the first particle, that change is reflected in the second particle. Because of that, any possible tampering – including simply looking at the first particle – will be known because it will happen to the second particle as well. That is a key to thesuper encryption, because any tampering could be made to change or destroy the data. But the real Star Trek item here is that the change in the light streams will occur in both at the same time, no matter how far apart they have become.

So, say you send a high-power laser pulse to a detected planet in another solar system some 10 light years away, using these systems being thought up by Raytheon BBN. Normally, you would have to wait for 20 years – 10 years out, 10 years back – to get any reflected light back, and the amount of coherent data left in the light stream would be essentially meaningless. No pictures. With a potential technology from these projects, the light stream would be able to carry huge amounts of redundant data, and it would only have to go through 10 years of possible quality degradation, because once it hits the planet in the other solar system, its twin, quantum-entangled light stream back here on Earth would change instantly to mirror what the other light stream detected. Instant Polaroids from deep space. Activate the long-range sensors, Mr. Chekov!

Of course, since the funding is coming from the Defense Department’s crazy ideas unit, and it is going to Raytheon BBN, not the old BBN Technologies that it was before defense giant Raytheon Co. bought it a little more than a year ago, one has to assume there are more terrestrial, military applications in mind for such technologies. How about instantaneous, HD-quality video imaging of any spot on the globe from a satellite, sent over an unbreakable encrypted optical stream? Or an encrypted unbreakable data stream so dense and so fast that it could be used for real-time, full-body virtual control of a combat robot from anywhere on the globe? Voltron powers, activate?

Now, how long do I have to wait for the inevitable commercial offshoots? I would be happy with a data stream fast and dense enough that my recorded TV shows on my cable DVR don’t stutter or artifact when I play them back. But Voltron sure would be cool.

Microsoft’s Push Into Gesture Technology

This is some cool stuff, Gesture Technology will bring gaming to a whole new level, no more controllers smashing flat screens!

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Prepare for Windows 8: Minority Report Edition.

Microsoft said on Friday that it was buying Canesta, a small Silicon Valley company that specializes in gesture-recognition technology.

Interest in this technology has surged because it lets people control computers and other devices through hand movements and other bodily gyrations, in similar fashion to the systems depicted in futuristic films like “Minority Report.”

Canesta makes chips that, when coupled with a digital camera, give all manner of devices a sense of depth perception for the world around them, letting them “see” in three dimensions.

Neither company disclosed the financial terms.

Next month, Microsoft will begin shipping Kinect, a $150 add-on for its Xbox gaming consoles, which uses gesture recognition to allow people to play games with body motions instead of controllers. Players flick through menus with waves of the hand and then move to make their on-screen avatars run, jump, duck, swing and dance. The 3-D technology in Kinect is from PrimeSense, a Canesta rival...

In a recent interview, Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, discussed the company’s plans to advance the gesture technology well beyond video games. “I’m excited to be way out in front and want to push the pedal on that,” Mr. Ballmer said.

Using Canesta’s technology, Microsoft and its partners could equip PCs, televisions, cars, cellphones and other devices with gesture recognition features.

Canesta has spent 11 years building chips that process images and information about distances to give devices some 3-D oomph.

Honda has invested in the company with the hopes of putting 3-D sensors into cars that could help them to detect obstacles. It could also use the technology to see the size and body shape of a person in a seat and adjust the way an air bag inflates.

Quanta Computer, a Taiwanese company that manufactures laptops for many of the major brands, has also invested in Canesta and expects to build laptops this year with 3-D camera modules. Manufacturers use the technology to give robots on their assembly lines some visual smarts.

“We have a really broad mission to enable everyday devices with the ability to see, and enable natural user interfaces across all kinds of devices,” said James Spare, chief executive of Canesta, who is a former Microsoft executive. “There is no other company more committed to natural user interfaces than Microsoft,” Mr. Spare added.

Canesta’s investors have poured about $60 million into the company over the years.

Analysts have described PrimeSense’s technology as cheaper to put in place than that of Canesta. However, they have also said that Canesta should be able to build less expensive and more sophisticated products over time because it designs a very specialized type of chip geared toward the 3-D recognition jobs.

Last year, Microsoft acquired 3DV systems, a company with similar gesture recognition technology. That deal coupled with the Canesta purchase may prevent competitors from acquiring these 3-D abilities and cut off potential intellectual property squabbles. Canesta has secured 44 patents in this area and has more pending.

Historically, Microsoft has worked with chip partners like Intel and Nvidia rather than building its own products, so the Canesta purchase is something of a shift.

Apple has been scooping up chip makers as well so it can improve the engines that power devices like the iPhone and iPad.

Target to sell Facebook Credits gift cards

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook is coming to a Target (TGT) store near you.

The social-network giant is getting into the gift card business, starting Sunday, with Facebook Credits cards.

The new Facebook gift cards will be available in values of $15, $25 and $50 at all of Target's 1,750 retail stores and at Target.com. Two or three more national retailers will start selling the cards in coming months.

This will be the first time Facebook has had any presence in a retail store. Facebook already has an arrangement with online-payment services PayPal and MOL to purchase Facebook Credits.

Facebook is banking that a sizable chunk of its 500 million members will purchase the cards and use them on their favorite social games, applications and virtual goods.

The gift cards, which look and work like Apple's iTunes cards, were created by GMG Entertainment, which also produced iTunes cards. Target carries iTunes cards, too.

More than 200 million people play free social games on Facebook each month, according to Facebook. And many of them are beginning to spend money on premium goods and services associated with those games.

"We think (the cards) will be incredibly popular as a holiday gift," says Dan Rose, vice president of partnerships and platform marketing at Facebook.

The cards can initially be used on more than 150 social games and applications, including titles from gamemakers such as Zynga (FarmVille, FrontierVille), CrowdStar (Happy Aquarium, HelloCity) and PopCap Games (Bejeweled Blitz). Facebook gift cards do not replace Zynga's existing game cards.

Target — which already sells more than 30 gift cards for online games, such as FarmVille — expects the markets for online gaming and digital music to continue to grow, says Mark Schindele, senior vice president of merchandising at Target. He also noted that Target has more than 1.5 million fans on its Facebook page.

By year's end, Facebook expects to have gift card credits available for its thousands of games. At least 19 games on Facebook have more than 10 million active users a month.

Facebook is expected to rake in an estimated $1.3 billion in online advertising revenue worldwide this year, up 92% from 2009, eMarketer says.

Facebook's entry into the growing prepaid gift card market could prove lucrative. The domestic prepaid gift card market is expected to reach $86.2billion this year, compared with $80.6billion in 2009, according to Mercator Advisory Group.

/// Donna asks?

So, will you purchase facebook credits?

How Steve Jobs beats presentation panic

Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from CIO.com. Visit CIO’s Macs in the Enterprise page.

...What Jobs did next, according to Carmine Gallo, author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, was vintage Jobs (and a model for how presenters should deal with stage crises): He did not panic. He did not look hot under the collar of his trademark turtleneck. Hishours of practice and intimate knowledge of every inch of every slide made him comfortable enough so that he could jump around to another part of the presentation (in this case, to look at photos). Jobs “trouble shooted” his problem by asking the audience (and, presumably, his back-stage engineers) for a little networking assistance. “You know, you could help me out. If you're on Wi-Fi, if you could just get off,” he pleaded, to roaring audience laughter. “I’d appreciate it. We're having a little problem here.”

And he sprinkled in several more bits of humor to diffuse any audience insecurity. “I’ve got time,” he joked, while waiting for the audience to “police each other.”

/// My comment:

Live demonstrations do NOT always go as well as rehearsed, so it's critical for the presenter to be prepared to work around these types of issues. They must be able to retain the audiences attention and get the message across. We all know technology isn't 100% perfect all the time.

Data congestion thwarts Steve Jobs' iPhone demo By Jordan Robertson, AP Technology Writer | June 7, 2010 SAN FRANCISCO --Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs was thwarted Monday in his attempt to show off how clearly the newest iPhone displays Web pages, apparently because too many people were clogging the airwaves at the conference where he was on stage. Jobs tried three times during his keynote to do a side-by-side comparison of the iPhone 4's screen resolution versus its predecessor's. He was trying to call up The New York Times' Web page, but it wouldn't load because too many devices in the room were operating over Wi-Fi, swamping the frequency. Jobs switched to backup phones for the demonstration, but he was still stymied. "Well jeez, I don't like this," Jobs groused. He abandoned the demo while staffers investigated. Technological glitches at technology conferences are common, but less so at Apple's carefully choreographed events. Last month at a demonstration of Google Inc.'sInternet television technology, Google representatives had trouble showing how easy it was supposed to be to switch back and forth between browsing Web content and TV programming. Google pleaded with attendees to shut off their wireless connections, as did Jobs on Monday. He asked bloggers and other people in the room to turn off their wireless connections and put their computers on the floor. "I think bloggers have a right to blog, but if we want to see the demos we're going to have to do it," he said. The demos immediately after that went smoothly. But a later demo of a video-calling feature that requires a wireless Internet connection was sluggish at times.

FCC's broadband reclassification: What's next?

The U.S. Federal Communications will move quickly to claim some regulatory authority over broadband after Chairman Julius Genachowski announced the agency would reclassify broadband as a regulated service.

The FCC will vote on an item to start the process of reclassifying broadband transmission as a regulated, common-carrier service in the next month or so, Bruce Liang Gottlieb chief counsel to Genachowski said Thursday.

FCC statement on "Third Way" for broadband policy

The FCC announced Wednesday that it would move to reclassify broadband from a largely unregulated information service to a regulated common-carrier service in response to an appeals court decision in April. The court ruled that the agency does not have the authority to enforce informal network neutrality rules in a case involving Comcast's throttling of peer-to-peer traffic.

Follow link for rest of article.

But does this really ensure an open Internet w/ net neutrality rules?

MIT admissions as easy as pi

By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff

Last Sunday afternoon, at precisely 1:59, every MIT applicant worth their salt logged on to a special admissions website to check their fates. Just 1,611 students got in, a record low admit rate of 9.7 percent. But a weightier number filled students’ minds: 3.14159…, or pi, the Greek letter symbolizing the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter.

Yes, in true Geek fashion, MIT released its admissions decisions at a time that would hold a deeper meaning for only those mathematically inclined enough to apply – on Pi Day, March 14, 1:59, as an homage to the mathematical constant.
"We thought it was pretty neat and fitting,'' said Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions and a 1986 MIT graduate. "Pi is a special number. And this is one way for us, as a science and technology centered place, to celebrate it."

Call it MIT’s version of March Madness.
Applicants were e-mailed a clever note last Thursday, instructing them how to check the status of their applications “a minute before 2 p.m.” “Receiving your decision online is as easy as pi,” the message said.
Though there was no explicit reference to Pi Day, Schmill said, "Most of our applicants are clued in."
This is the second year in a row that the university has been able to release its decisions on Pi Day (coincidentally the birthday of Albert Einstein). But MIT is not making Pi Day admissions -- and rejections -- a tradition just yet. It lands on a Monday next year. And, Schmill said, "We won’t release decisions when our applicants are in school."

NBC OlympicsTaps Cisco for IP Video Network

NBC is partnering with Cicso to provide a “media-aware” IP video network infrastructure during the network’s all HD broadcast of the Winter Olympic Games from Vancouver, Feb. 12-28. The combined solution, which consists of or a private network, Cisco IP video infrastructure and medianet “media aware” technology (Cisco’s brand name for its technology to optimize video over IP), will enable real-time editing NBC content in multiple international and domestic locations and will allow GB-sized files to be transmitted between locations and then delivered to video screens. A high-bandwidth, high performance connection between Vancouver and NBC studios in New York will give shot selectors and editors the ability to edit video as it is being captured in Vancouver.

Cisco Flip Video cameras will also be used by NBC correspondents for shooting on-the-fly video during the Games. NBC will also test the Cisco Media Data Center and Cisco’s Unified Computing System to support production and video archiving. “Cisco is providing all our local data routers for our LAN in and around Vancouver, and for our WAN on the international AT&T data circuits to NY, NJ, Burbank, and Las Vegas,” said Dave Mazza, NBC Olympics’ senior vice president of engineering. “Those circuits are carrying a number of file-based workflow from EVS, Omneon, and Avid and also a large amount of IP-based video from Tandberg.”

Love the media aware IP networking, because yes, we all know that video signals can require very high bandwidths, typically up to 8 Mbits per sec for MPEG 2 encoded HDTV channels and approximately 3 Mbps for MPEG 4. It is imperative that the IP network be optimized so it will deliver the quality of experience (QoE) needed for great picture quality, without degradation.
We all know viewing pixilated images is like being on a cell call with poor quality. I know many of cell phones that learned how to fly & swim because of this, though this might be a bit tougher to toss a 50" flat panel TV into your swimming pool, or out your window. lol!