Via PCWorld

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Via Tech Crunch

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Mimosa Networks is finally ready to help make gigabit wireless technology a reality. The company, which recently came out of stealth, is launching a series of products that it hopes to sell to a new generation of wireless ISPs.

Its wireless Internet products include its new B5 Backhaul radio hardware and its Mimosa Cloud Services planning and analytics offering. By using the two in combination, new ISPs can build high-capacity wireless networks at a fraction of the cost it would take to lay a fiber network.

The B5 backhaul radio is a piece of hardware that uses multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) technology to provide up to 16 streams and 4 Gbps of output when multiple radios are using the same channel.

With a single B5 radio, customers can provide a gigabit of throughput for up to eight or nine miles, according to co-founder and chief product officer Jaime Fink. The longer the distance, the less bandwidth is available, of course. But Fink said the company is running one link of about 60 miles that still gets a several hundred megabits of throughput along the California coast.

Not only does the product offer high data speeds on 5 GHz wireless spectrum, but it also makes that spectrum more efficient. It uses spectrum analysis and load balancing to optimize bandwidth, frequency, and power use based on historical and real-time data to adapt to wireless interference and other issues.

In addition to the hardware, Mimosa’s cloud services will help customers plan and deploy networks with analytics tools to determine how powerful and efficiently their existing equipment is running. That will enable new ISPs to more effectively determine where to place new hardware to link up with other base stations.

The product also is designed to support networks as they grow, and it makes sure that ISPs can spot problems as they happen. The Cloud Services product is available now, but the backhaul radio will be available for about $900 later this fall.

Mimosa is launching these first products after raising $38 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates and Oak Investment Partners. That includes a $20 million Series C round led by return investor NEA that was recently closed.

The company was founded by Brian Hinman, who had previously co-founded PictureTel, Polycom, and 2Wire, along with Fink, who previously served as CTO of 2Wire and SVP of technology for Pace after it acquired the home networking equipment company. Now they’re hoping to make wireless gigabit speeds available for new ISPs.

Via PCWorld

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After Leap Motion's somewhat disappointing debut, you'd be forgiving for wanting to wave off the idea of third-party gesture control peripherals. But wait! Unlike Leap, Reactiv isn't trying to revolutionize human-computer interactions with its Touch+ controller—there's no wizard-like finger waggling or Minority Report-style hand waving here. Instead, the Touch+'s dual cameras turn any surface into multi-touch input device.

Touch+ was born out of Haptix, a Kickstarter project that raised more than $180,000 from backers. Over the past year, Reactiv refined the Haptix vision to eventually become Touch+.

While Touch+ certainly won't be for everyone, Reactiv is positioning the multitouch PC controller as more than a mere tool for games and art projects. The video above shows the device being used in an office meeting, acting as a cursor control for a businessman's laptop before being repositioned on the fly to point at a projected display, instantly allowing the man to reach up with his hands to circle objects on the image.

What's more, PCWorld sister site CITEWorld managed to snag a live demo with Touch+, and the founders focused on the potential productivity uses of the device: Enabling mouse-free control of Excel and PowerPoint, naturally manipulating pictures in PhotoShop, creating designs in CAD, the aforementioned presentation capabilities, and so forth.

The Touch+ works with Windows PCs or Macs, connecting via USB 2.0 or 3.0. If you choose to point it at your keyboard, the device will temporarily suspend its multitouch capabilities while you type, then resume when your fingers stop bobbing up and down.

Sound interesting? An alpha version of Touch+ is available now on the Reactiv website for $75. Until we get our own hands on the device, however, we won't know for sure how the device stacks up to competitors like the Leap Motion. 

Via PCWorld

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The Internet of Things is still too hard. Even some of its biggest backers say so.

For all the long-term optimism at the M2M Evolution conference this week in Las Vegas, many vendors and analysts are starkly realistic about how far the vaunted set of technologies for connected objects still has to go. IoT is already saving money for some enterprises and boosting revenue for others, but it hasn’t hit the mainstream yet. That’s partly because it’s too complicated to deploy, some say.

For now, implementations, market growth and standards are mostly concentrated in specific sectors, according to several participants at the conference who would love to see IoT span the world.

Cisco Systems has estimated IoT will generate $14.4 trillion in economic value between last year and 2022. But Kevin Shatzkamer, a distinguished systems architect at Cisco, called IoT a misnomer, for now.

“I think we’re pretty far from envisioning this as an Internet,” Shatzkamer said. “Today, what we have is lots of sets of intranets.” Within enterprises, it’s mostly individual business units deploying IoT, in a pattern that echoes the adoption of cloud computing, he said.

In the past, most of the networked machines in factories, energy grids and other settings have been linked using custom-built, often local networks based on proprietary technologies. IoT links those connected machines to the Internet and lets organizations combine those data streams with others. It’s also expected to foster an industry that’s more like the Internet, with horizontal layers of technology and multivendor ecosystems of products.

What’s holding back the Internet of Things

The good news is that cities, utilities, and companies are getting more familiar with IoT and looking to use it. The less good news is that they’re talking about limited IoT rollouts for specific purposes.

“You can’t sell a platform, because a platform doesn’t solve a problem. A vertical solution solves a problem,” Shatzkamer said. “We’re stuck at this impasse of working toward the horizontal while building the vertical.”

“We’re no longer able to just go in and sort of bluff our way through a technology discussion of what’s possible,” said Rick Lisa, Intel’s group sales director for Global M2M. “They want to know what you can do for me today that solves a problem.”

One of the most cited examples of IoT’s potential is the so-called connected city, where myriad sensors and cameras will track the movement of people and resources and generate data to make everything run more efficiently and openly. But now, the key is to get one municipal project up and running to prove it can be done, Lisa said.

The conference drew stories of many successful projects: A system for tracking construction gear has caught numerous workers on camera walking off with equipment and led to prosecutions. Sensors in taxis detect unsafe driving maneuvers and alert the driver with a tone and a seat vibration, then report it to the taxi company. Major League Baseball is collecting gigabytes of data about every moment in a game, providing more information for fans and teams.

But for the mass market of small and medium-size enterprises that don’t have the resources to do a lot of custom development, even targeted IoT rollouts are too daunting, said analyst James Brehm, founder of James Brehm & Associates.

There are software platforms that pave over some of the complexity of making various devices and applications talk to each other, such as the Omega DevCloud, which RacoWireless introduced on Tuesday. The DevCloud lets developers write applications in the language they know and make those apps work on almost any type of device in the field, RacoWireless said. Thingworx, Xively and Gemalto also offer software platforms that do some of the work for users. But the various platforms on offer from IoT specialist companies are still too fragmented for most customers, Brehm said. There are too many types of platforms—for device activation, device management, application development, and more. “The solutions are too complex.”

He thinks that’s holding back the industry’s growth. Though the past few years have seen rapid adoption in certain industries in certain countries, sometimes promoted by governments—energy in the U.K., transportation in Brazil, security cameras in China—the IoT industry as a whole is only growing by about 35 percent per year, Brehm estimates. That’s a healthy pace, but not the steep “hockey stick” growth that has made other Internet-driven technologies ubiquitous, he said.

What lies ahead

Brehm thinks IoT is in a period where customers are waiting for more complete toolkits to implement it—essentially off-the-shelf products—and the industry hasn’t consolidated enough to deliver them. More companies have to merge, and it’s not clear when that will happen, he said.

“I thought we’d be out of it by now,” Brehm said. What’s hard about consolidation is partly what’s hard about adoption, in that IoT is a complex set of technologies, he said.

And don’t count on industry standards to simplify everything. IoT’s scope is so broad that there’s no way one standard could define any part of it, analysts said. The industry is evolving too quickly for traditional standards processes, which are often mired in industry politics, to keep up, according to Andy Castonguay, an analyst at IoT research firm Machina. 

Instead, individual industries will set their own standards while software platforms such as Omega DevCloud help to solve the broader fragmentation, Castonguay believes. Even the Industrial Internet Consortium, formed earlier this year to bring some coherence to IoT for conservative industries such as energy and aviation, plans to work with existing standards from specific industries rather than write its own.

Ryan Martin, an analyst at 451 Research, compared IoT standards to human languages.

“I’d be hard pressed to say we are going to have one universal language that everyone in the world can speak,” and even if there were one, most people would also speak a more local language, Martin said. 

Via The Register

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Google is attempting to shunt users away from old browsers by intentionally serving up a stale version of the ad giant's search homepage to those holdouts.

The tactic appears to be falling in line with Mountain View's policy on its other Google properties, such as Gmail, which the company declines to fully support on aged browsers.

However, it was claimed on Friday in a Google discussion thread that the multinational had unceremoniously dumped a past its sell-by-date version of the Larry Page-run firm's search homepage on those users who have declined to upgrade their Opera and Safari browsers.

A user with the moniker DJSigma wrote on the forum:

A few minutes ago, Google's homepage reverted to the old version for me. I'm using Opera 12.17. If I search for something, the results are shown with the current Google look, but the homepage itself is the old look with the black bar across the top. It seems to affect only the Google homepage and image search. If I click on "News", for instance, it's fine.

I've tried clearing cookies and deleting the browser cache/persistent storage. I've tried disabling all extensions. I've tried masking the browser as IE and Firefox. It doesn't matter whether I'm signed in or signed out. Nothing works. Please fix this!

In a later post, DJSigma added that there seemed to be a glitch on Google search.

If I go to the Google homepage, I get served the old version of the site. If I search for something, the results show up in the current look. However, if I then try and type something into the search box again, Google search doesn't work at all. I have to go back to the homepage every time to do a new search.

The Opera user then said that the problem appeared to be "intermittent". Others flagged up similar issues on the Google forum and said they hoped it was just a bug.

While someone going by the name MadFranko008 added:

Phew ... thought it was just me and I'd been hacked or something ... Same problem here everything "Google" has reverted back to the old style of several years ago.

Tested on 3 different computers and different OS's & browsers ... All have the same result, everything google has gone back to the old style of several years ago and there's no way to change it ... Even the copyright has reverted back to 2013!!!

Some Safari 5.1.x and Opera 12.x netizens were able to fudge the system by customising their browser's user agent. But others continued to complain about Google's "clunky", old search homepage.

A Google employee, meanwhile, said that the tactic was deliberate in a move to flush out stick-in-the-mud types who insisted on using older versions of browsers.

"Thanks for the reports. I want to assure you this isn't a bug, it's working as intended," said a Google worker going by the name nealem. She added:

We’re continually making improvements to Search, so we can only provide limited support for some outdated browsers. We encourage everyone to make the free upgrade to modern browsers - they’re more secure and provide a better web experience overall.

In a separate thread, as spotted by a Reg reader who brought this sorry affair to our attention, user MadFranko008 was able to show that even modern browsers - including the current version of Chrome - were apparently spitting out glitches on Apple Mac computers.

Google then appeared to have resolved the search "bug" spotted in Chrome.