Technology

Via CNN

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Through this signage at Promenade Temecula, the mall is notifying shoppers that their phones may be tracked as they move throughout the premises.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Attention holiday shoppers: your cell phone may be tracked this year.

Starting on Black Friday and running through New Year's Day, two U.S. malls -- Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. -- will track guests' movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones.

While the data that's collected is anonymous, it can follow shoppers' paths from store to store.

The goal is for stores to answer questions like: How many Nordstrom shoppers also stop at Starbucks? How long do most customers linger in Victoria's Secret? Are there unpopular spots in the mall that aren't being visited?

While U.S. malls have long tracked how crowds move throughout their stores, this is the first time they've used cell phones.

But obtaining that information comes with privacy concerns.

The management company of both malls, Forest City Commercial Management, says personal data is not being tracked.

"We won't be looking at singular shoppers," said Stephanie Shriver-Engdahl, vice president of digital strategy for Forest City. "The system monitors patterns of movement. We can see, like migrating birds, where people are going to."

Still, the company is preemptively notifying customers by hanging small signs around the shopping centers. Consumers can opt out by turning off their phones.

The tracking system, called FootPath Technology, works through a series of antennas positioned throughout the shopping center that capture the unique identification number assigned to each phone (similar to a computer's IP address), and tracks its movement throughout the stores.

The system can't take photos or collect data on what shoppers have purchased. And it doesn't collect any personal details associated with the ID, like the user's name or phone number. That information is fiercely protected by mobile carriers, and often can be legally obtained only through a court order.

"We don't need to know who it is and we don't need to know anyone's cell phone number, nor do we want that," Shriver-Engdahl said.

Manufactured by a British company, Path Intelligence, this technology has already been used in shopping centers in Europe and Australia. And according to Path Intelligence CEO Sharon Biggar, hardly any shoppers decide to opt out.

"It's just not invasive of privacy," she said. "There are no risks to privacy, so I don't see why anyone would opt out."

Now, U.S. retailers including JCPenney (JCP, Fortune 500) and Home Depot (HD, Fortune 500) are also working with Path Intelligence to use their technology, Biggar said.

Home Depot has considered implementing the technology but is not currently using it any stores, a company spokesman said. JCPenney declined to comment on its relationship with the vendor.

Why Apple and Google need to stalk you

Some retail analysts say the new technology is nothing to be worried about. Malls have been tracking shoppers for years through people counters, security cameras, heat maps and even undercover researchers who follow shoppers around.

And some even say websites that track online shoppers are more invasive, recording not only a user's name and purchases, but then targeting them with ads even after they've left a site.

"It's important for shoppers to realize this sort of data is being collected anyway," Biggar said.

Whereas a website can track a customer who doesn't make a purchase, physical stores have been struggling to perfect this kind of research, Biggar said. By combining the data from FootPath with their own sales figures, stores will have better measurements to help them improve the shopping experience.

"We can now say, you had 100 people come to this product, but no one purchased it," Biggar said. "From there, we can help a retailer narrow down what's going wrong."

But some industry analysts worry about the broader implications of this kind of technology.

"Most of this information is harmless and nobody ever does anything nefarious with it," said Sucharita Mulpuru, retail analyst at Forrester Research. "But the reality is, what happens when you start having hackers potentially having access to this information and being able to track your movements?"

Last year, hackers hit AT&T, exposing the unique ID numbers and e-mail addresses of more than 100,000 iPad 3G owners. To make it harder for hackers to get at this information, Path Intelligence scrambles those numbers twice.

"I'm sure as more people get more cell phones, it's probably inevitable that it will continue as a resource," Mulpuru said. "But I think the future is going to have to be opt in, not opt out."

Personal comment:

One step further. I guess we have to be thankful to be given the ability to opt out the system by 'just' switching off our cell-phone!!!

Via PhysOrg

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The Kilobots are an inexpensive system for testing synchronized and collaborative behavior in a very large swarm of robots. Photo courtesy of Michael Rubenstein

The Kilobots are coming. Computer scientists and engineers at Harvard University have developed and licensed technology that will make it easy to test collective algorithms on hundreds, or even thousands, of tiny robots.

Called Kilobots, the quarter-sized bug-like devices scuttle around on three toothpick-like legs, interacting and coordinating their own behavior as a team. A June 2011 Harvard Technical Report demonstrated a collective of 25 machines implementing swarming behaviors such as foraging, formation control, and synchronization.

Once up and running, the machines are fully autonomous, meaning there is no need for a human to control their actions.

The communicative critters were created by members of the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group led by Radhika Nagpal, the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and a Core Faculty Member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. Her team also includes Michael Rubenstein, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS; and Christian Ahler, a fellow of SEAS and the Wyss Institute.

Thanks to a technology licensing deal with the K-Team Corporation, a Swiss manufacturer of high-quality mobile robots, researchers and robotics enthusiasts alike can now take command of their own swarm.

One key to achieving high-value applications for multi-robot systems in the future is the development of sophisticated algorithms that can coordinate the actions of tens to thousands of robots.

"The Kilobot will provide researchers with an important new tool for understanding how to design and build large, distributed, functional systems," says Michael Mitzenmacher, Area Dean for Computer Science at SEAS.

"Plus," he adds, "tiny robots are really cool!"

The name "Kilobot" does not refer to anything nefarious; rather, it describes the researchers' goal of quickly and inexpensively creating a collective of a thousand bots.

Inspired by nature, such swarms resemble social insects, such as ants and bees, that can efficiently search for and find food sources in large, complex environments, collectively transport large objects, and coordinate the building of nests and other structures.

Due to reasons of time, cost, and simplicity, the algorithms being developed today in research labs are only validated in computer simulation or using a few dozen robots at most.

In contrast, the design by Nagpal's team allows a single user to easily oversee the operation of a large Kilobot collective, including programming, powering on, and charging all robots, all of which would be difficult (if not impossible) using existing robotic systems.

So, what can you do with a thousand tiny little bots?

Robot swarms might one day tunnel through rubble to find survivors, monitor the environment and remove contaminants, and self-assemble to form support structures in collapsed buildings.

They could also be deployed to autonomously perform construction in dangerous environments, to assist with pollination of crops, or to conduct search and rescue operations.

For now, the Kilobots are designed to provide scientists with a physical testbed for advancing the understanding of collective behavior and realizing its potential to deliver solutions for a wide range of challenges.

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Personal comment:

This remembers me one project I have worked on, back in 2007, called "Variable Environment", which was involving swarm based robots called "e-puck" developed at EPFL. E-pucks were reacting in an autonomous manner to human activity around them.

Via The New Scientist

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(Image: Institute of Physics)

The future of augmented-reality technology is here - as long as you're a rabbit. Bioengineers have placed the first contact lenses containing electronic displays into the eyes of rabbits as a first step on the way to proving they are safe for humans. The bunnies suffered no ill effects, the researchers say.   

The first version may only have one pixel, but higher resolution lens displays - like those seen in Terminator - could one day be used as satnav enhancers showing you directional arrows for example, or flash up texts and emails - perhaps even video. In the shorter term, the breakthrough also means people suffering from conditions like diabetes and glaucoma may find they have a novel way to monitor their conditions.

In February, New Scientist revealed the litany of research projects underway in the field of contact lens enhancement. While one company has fielded a contact lens technology using a surface-mounted strain gauge to assess glaucoma risk, none have built in a display, or the lenses needed for focused projection onto the retina - and then tested it in vivo. They have now.

"We have demonstrated the operation of a contact lens display powered by a remote radiofrequency transmitter in free space and on a live rabbit," says a US and Finnish team led by Babak Praviz of the University of Washington in Seattle.

"This verifies that antennas, radio chips, control circuitry, and micrometre-scale light sources can be integrated into a contact lens and operated on live eyes."

The test lens was powered remotely using a 5-millimetre-long antenna printed on the lens to receive gigahertz-range radio-frequency energy from a transmitter placed ten centimetres from the rabbit's eye. To focus the light on the rabbit's retina, the contact lens itself was fabricated as a Fresnel lens - in which a series of concentric annular sections is used to generate the ultrashort focal length needed.

They found their lens LED glowed brightly up to a metre away from the radio source in free space, but needed to be 2 centimetres away when the lens was placed in a rabbit's eye and the wireless reception was affected by body fluids. All the 40-minute-long tests on live rabbits were performed under general anaesthetic and showed that the display worked well - and fluroescence tests showed no damage or abrasions to the rabbit's eyes after the lenses were removed.

While making a higher resolution display is next on their agenda, there are uses for this small one, say the researchers: "A display with a single controllable pixel could be used in gaming, training, or giving warnings to the hearing impaired."

"This is clearly way off in the future. But we're aware of the research that is ongoing in this field and we're watching the technology's potential for biosensing and drug delivery applications in particular," says a spokesperson for the British Contact Lens Association in London.

Via The Guardian

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Focus in future will be on HTML5 as mobile world shifts towards non-proprietary open standards – and now questions will linger over use of Flash on desktop

Adobe is killing off development of its mobile Flash plugin, and laying off 750 staff as part of broader restructuring. Photograph: Paul Sakuma/AP

Mobile Flash is being killed off. The plugin that launched a thousand online forum arguments and a technology standoff between Apple and the format's creator, Adobe, will no longer be developed for mobile browsers, the company said in a note that will accompany a financial briefing to analysts.

Instead the company will focus on development around HTML5 technologies, which enable modern browsers to do essentially the same functions as Flash did but without relying on Adobe's proprietary technologies, and which can be implemented across platforms.

The existing plugins for the Android and BlackBerry platforms will be given bug fixes and security updates, the company said in a statement first revealed by ZDNet. But further development will end.

The decision also raises a question mark over the future of Flash on desktop PCs. Security vulnerabilities in Flash on the desktop have been repeatedly exploited to infect PCs in the past 18 months, while Microsoft has also said that the default browser in its forthcoming Windows 8 system, expected at the end of 2012, will not include the Flash plugin by default. Apple, which in the third quarter captured 5% of the world market, does not include Flash in its computers by default.

John Nack, a principal product manager at Adobe, commented on his personal blog (which does not necessarily reflect Adobe views) that: "Adobe saying that Flash on mobile isn't the best path forward [isn't the same as] Adobe conceding that Flash on mobile (or elsewhere) is bad technology. Its quality is irrelevant if it's not allowed to run, and if it's not allowed to run, then Adobe will have to find different ways to meet customers' needs."

Around 250m iOS (iPhone, iPod Touches and iPad) devices have been sold since 2007. There are no clear figures for how many are now in use. More recently Larry Page, chief executive of Google, said that a total of 190m Android devices have been activated. It is not clear how many of those include a Flash plugin in the browser.

At the start of 2011, around 20m devices had Flash in the browser, Adobe said, and it expected that by the end of this year the total would be 200m.

"Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe Air for all the major app stores," Adobe said in the statement. "We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations.

"Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates."

The decision comes as Adobe plans to cut 750 staff, principally in North America and Europe. An Adobe spokesperson declined to give any figures for the extent of layoffs in the UK. The company reiterated its expectation that it will meet revenue targets for the fourth quarter.

The reversal by Adobe – and its decision to focus on the open HTML5 platform for mobile – brings to an end a long and tumultuous row between Apple and Adobe over the usefulness of Flash on the mobile platform. The iPhone launched in 2007 without Flash capability, as did the iPad in 2010.

Steve Jobs, then Apple's chief executive, and Apple's engineers insisted that Flash was a "battery hog" and introduced security and stability flaws; Adobe countered that it was broadly implemented in desktop PCs and used widely on the web.

Jobs's antagonism was partly driven, his biography reveals, by Adobe's reluctance after he rejoined Apple in 1996 to port its movie-editing programs to the Mac and to keep its Photoshop suite comparable on the Mac platform with the Windows one.

But Jobs also insisted that mobile Flash failed in the role of providing a good user experience, and also would restrict Apple's ability to push forward on the iOS platform. Studies of browser crash reports by Apple's teams showed that Flash was responsible for a signficant proportion of user problems; Apple was also not satisfied that a Flash plugin would be available for the first iPhone in 2007 which would not consume more battery power than would be acceptable.

Jobs managed to persuade Eric Schmidt, then Google's chief executive and a member of the Apple board, to get YouTube to make videos available in the H.264 format without a Flash "wrapper", as was then used for the desktop implementation.

But the disagreements between Apple and Adobe intensified, especially when Android devices began appearing which did use the Flash plugin. Apple refused to use it, and banned apps from its App Store which tried to use or include Flash.

In "Thoughts on Flash", an open letter published by Jobs in April 2010, he asserted that "Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

"New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind."

Adobe's chief executive Shantanu Narayen hit back at Jobs, saying that "Thoughts on Flash" contained statements about the plugin that were false (relating to battery drain).

Via Technology Review

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The first human genome cost $3 billion to complete; now we can sequence the entire population of Chicago for the same price

The mythical "$1,000 genome" is almost upon us, said Jonathan Rothberg, CEO of sequencing technology company Ion Torrent, at MIT's Emerging Technology conference. If his prediction comes true, it will represent an astonishing triumph in rapid technological development. The rate at which genome sequencing has become more affordable is faster than Moore's law. (You can read a Q&A TR did with Rothberg earlier this year here, and a profile of his company here).

"By this time next year sequencing human genomes as fast and cheap as bacterial genome," said Rothberg. (Earlier, he'd commented that his company can now do an entire bacterial genome in about two hours.)

I was in the room on October 19 when he said it, and I would have thought it pure hubris were it not for Rothberg's incredible track record in this area, from founding successful previous-generation sequencing company 454 Life Sciences to recent breakthroughs made with the same technology he proposes will get us to the $1,000 genome.

This technology, called, called the Personal Genome Machine, is already being used to determinewhich mutations are present in the genomes of patients' cancers.

The Personal Genome Maker is already showing up in clinical labs, even doctors' offices

The key to this breakthrough, says Rothberg, is that the PGM does not rely on conventional wet chemistry to sequence DNA. Instead, it works almost entirely through conventional microchip technology, which means Ion Torrent is leveraging decades of investment in conventional transistors and chips.

So what's the age of the $1,000 genome look like? Until we know what more of those genes actually correlate with, for most of us it won't be so different from the present.

"Right now don't have very many correlations between those 3 billion base pairs [of the human genome] and outcomes or medicines," says Rothberg. He predicts it will take at least 10 years of clinical experiments with full genome sequencing to get us to the point where we can begin to unlock its value.

"And it will be 20 years before we understand cancer at same level as HIV and can come up with combinations of medicine [tailored] for each individual," says Rothberg.

You can watch a full video of his talk on Tech Review's EmTech site.

Via Slash Gear

By Chris Burns

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The next generation of mobile processors has arrived in the form of the NIVIDA Tegra 3, formerly known as Project Kal-El, a quad-core chipset with aspirations to dominate the Android landscape in 2012 as theTegra 2 dual-core processor dominated the majority of 2011. Though many of the details have already been revealed by NVIDIA before today on how Tegra 3 functions and is able to bring you the consumer more power, less battery consumption, and more effective workload distribution, this marks both the official naming of the chip as well as the official distribution of easy to process videos on how Tegra 3 will affect the average mobile device user.

NVIDIA’s Tegra 3 chipset has been gone over in full detail by your humble narrator in two posts here on SlashGear just a few weeks ago in two posts, one on how there are actually [five cores, not just four], and another all about [Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing] aka vSMP. Note that back then NVIDIA had not yet revealed that the final market name for the processor would be “Tegra 3? at the time these posts were published, instead still using the codename “Project Kal-El” to identify the chipset. The most important thing you should take away from these posts is this: your battery life will be better and the distribution of power needed by your processor cores will be handled more intelligently.

NVIDIA has provided a few videos that will explain again in some rather easy to process detail what we’re dealing with here in the Tegra 3. The first of these videos shows visually what cores use which amount of power as several different tasks are performed. Watch as a high-powered game uses all four cores while browsing a webpage might only use a single core. This is the power of Variable Symmetric Multiprocessing in action.

Next there’s a demonstration of an upcoming game that would never have been able to exist on a mobile platform if it hadn’t been for NVIDIA’s new chip architecture and the power of a quad-core chipset – along with NVIDIA’s twelve GPU cores of course. We had a look at this game back earlier this year in the first Glowball post – now we go underwater:

Finally there’s a lovely set of videos showing you exactly what it means for game developers and gamers to be working with the Tegra 3 chipset. The first video shows off how next-generation games are being made specifically for this chipset, developers working hand in hand with NVIDIA to optimize their games for the Tegra 3 so that gamers can get the most awesome experience in mobile history. Devour this, if you will:

You can also see several examples of the games in the video and how they’ve been improved in the Tegra 3 world. Riptide GP as well as Shadowgun have been reviewed and given hands-on videos by your humble narrator in the past – can’t wait for the enhanced visions! Next have a look at these games running side-by-side with their original versions. Make sure you’re sitting down, because you’re going to get pumped up.

Down to the frames per second, this new chipset will change the world you live in as far as gaming goes. Of course it doesn’t stop there, but in that gaming is one of the best ways to test a processor on this platform, one made with gaming in mind of course, you’ve got to appreciate the power. Have a peek at this tiny chart to see what we mean:

Then head over to the post from ASUS on what the very first hardware running the Tegra 3 will look like. It’s the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime, a 10.1-inch tablet from the makers of the original Transformer, a device made to pummel the competition and usher in a whole new age in mobile computing. We look forward to the future, NVIDIA, bring on another year of complete and total annihilation of the competition!

Via giagom

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Can ARM wrestle its way into the server market? Calxeda and Hewlett-Packard think so. On Tuesday Calxeda launched its EnergyCore ARM server-on-a-chip (SoC), which it says consumes as little as 1.5 watts (and idles at half a watt). And HP, the world’s largest server maker, committed to building EnergyCore-based servers that will consume as little as 5 watts when running all out. Compare that to the lowest-power x86 server chips from Intel, which consume about 20 watts but deliver higher performance.

Calxeda, backed in part by ARM Holdings, is banking that the success that ARM chips found in smartphones and mobile devices will carry over into data centers serving large, scale-out workloads. In that arena, it is facing off squarely against chip giant Intel and its x86-based architecture, which dominates the market for chips running in commodity servers.

Said Calxeda in a statement:

Thanks to its mobile phone heritage and patent-pending innovations from Calxeda, the new processor consumes less than one tenth the power of today’s most energy-efficient server processors and is ideal for workloads such as web serving, ‘Big Data’ applications, scalable analytics such as Apache Hadoop, media streaming and mid-tier infrastructure such as caching and in-memory databases.

EnergyCore targets web serving, big data apps

The small form factor and energy stinginess of EnergyCore, based on the ARM Cortex processor, suits an emerging and fast-growing class of web and cloud applications, but it lacks in terms of software support and currently won’t support the enterprise demand for 64-bit processors. Thus, for traditional data centers locked into the Intel x86 architecture and with lots of legacy software to run, Calxeda might be a stretch. But that might not matter.

“For big cloud companies that buy gargantuan numbers of servers and for whom the power and space issues get linearly nasty as they build up the number of nodes, this is a good solution,” said analyst Roger Kay, the founder and president of Endpoint Technologies Associates.

These sorts of transactions take on an almost consultative nature, where the server vendor works with the customer’s developers, he said.

EnergyCore is 32-bit only, a fact that Intel will no doubt trumpet. “High-performance computing [HPC] needs 64 bits to deal with larger address space, but that doesn’t mean that 32-bit [processors] can’t address certain data center applications,” Kay said. “This new chip is designed to handle very large databases that in turn handle lots of queries from many end points. Think Google Earth where there are lots of simple queries — ‘show me the bits in the X-Y grid specified.’”

HP estimates that those big scale-out web and cloud data center scenarios represent a healthy 10 to 15 percent of the data center market, Kay noted. That’s certainly worth fighting for. Intel pegs that segment at 10 percent of the overall market.

Richard Fichera, the VP and an analyst at Forrester Research, said Calxeda did its homework. “This looks to be at least three to five times more energy efficient than other chips and [energy use] is a growing concern for data centers.” Some of what Calxeda has done will be hard for competitors to replicate, he said.

Calxeda, like SeaMicro, which makes low-power servers running Intel Atom processors, also builds on a fabric that lets all the various SoC components communicate inside the box.

Skeptics point out that big data center buyers tend to be a conservative lot, not likely to gamble on a new chip architecture. “Many CIOs will go with the devil they know. They have software that runs on Intel so why move?” Kay said. But again, Calxeda and HP are seeking out the biggest of the big data center companies — those that have a lot of in-house development talent that are not as bound by legacy software concerns.

What’s in EnergyCore SoC?

• Multicore ARM Cortex processor running at 1.1 GHz to 1.4 GHz
• Supports FPU (scalar) and NEON (SIMD) Floating Point
• 4 MB of onboard shared L2 cache
• Integrated Memory Controller with 72-bit datapath, and ECC
• Typical maximum power consumption (running 100% CPU load under normal conditions) is 5 watts
• Typical idle power consumption is less than .5 watts

Calxeda and HP will start rolling out sample products later this year, with volume ramping up in 2012. Calxeda is not alone in this arena: Marvell Inc. is already in the market with its own ARM-based servers. NVIDIA is also building an ARM-based server, dubbed Denver, for HPC.

While Calxeda is tiny compared to Intel, it also doesn’t manufacture its own silicon, which could end up hurting it when comparing it to Intel, one of the last silicon vendors to own its own chip manufacturing. Fichera notes that Calxeda has no control over the distribution and sales of what it designs: The server partner has all the leverage. If someone else has a better SoC next year, Calxeda (or whatever SoC provider they use) could be gone.