Head-to-head doesn't necessarily mean competition

As we've already seen with the Motorola Xoom, releasing head-to-head doesn't mean competition, and even less so with the Nexus device which we all know will launch Ice Cream Sandwich into the market. The Motorola Xoom had more advertising behind it than any Nexus device, and probably more consumer excitement as well, but it still fell flat when compared to the iPad, mostly due to low developer support. The story will be a bit different for the Nexus Prime, but not markedly so.

Keep in mind that Nexus devices have always been niche devices. They are designed for developers, early adopters, and a generally more geeky crowd. No Nexus device has ever officially been sold by either of the two biggest carriers in America - Verizon and AT&T. Nexus devices have been offered through Google that run on AT&T, but that's a far cry from seeing it sold in the official stores across the country. The Nexus S, which had far better marketing and availability than the Web Store-only Nexus One, only sold approximately 500,000 units in its first two months in the market (based on Gingerbread OS share in February, when the Nexus S was the only phone running Gingerbread.) If the iPhone 5 sells less than 500,000 just in pre-orders, let alone half of launch day, every analyst in existence would call it a failure. 

And, that's the real point, even if Google rushes out Ice Cream Sandwich to launch in October, it'll still only be running on the Nexus Prime. The Nexus S and Gingerbread launched at the beginning of December last year, and even the Nexus One had to wait until the middle of February 2011 for the official update. Even today, a full 8 months after its release, Gingerbread is still less than 25% of the Android ecosystem. Even if Google pushed out ICS in time for October, the upgrade turnaround for manufacturers kills any illusion that ICS will ever really compete with iOS 5 at any point in its life cycle. The only possible incentive for Google to push out a product that may not be ready is the hope that other manufacturers could then have ICS devices available for the Christmas season, but that is a pretty big reach.

Rushing software means rushing hardware

Much like with the iPhone, we have to keep in mind that Google rushing Ice Cream Sandwich has impacts both on hardware and software. To rush Ice Cream Sandwich, also means to rush the Nexus Prime, and the Android ecosystem has already seen what rushing out an OS can look like, twice actually. First, while Gingerbread wasn't rushed out, it certainly felt like the Nexus S was rushed in order to launch in time for the holidays last year. This meant, that unlike the Nexus One, which drove improvements around the Android ecosystem, the Nexus S was actually a generation behind within a few months of release, because of the coming of Tegra 2 phones with qHD screens. So, instead of the Google Experience phone being the pace car for users, manufacturers and developers, the Nexus S quickly became an afterthought. 

Then, we saw Honeycomb was rushed out in order to compete head to head with the iPad 2, and because Honeycomb was rushed, so was the Motorola Xoom. As a result there, the Xoom was a little too heavy, too bland in design, and too expensive, while Honeycomb was buggy and lacking in natively designed 3rd party apps. Imagine that instead of pushing the Xoom so hard, Google had simply seeded the developer community with Honeycomb, and tested longer. The, start the Honeycomb party a few months later with the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Android 3.1 at Google I/O? Imagine erasing the Xoom from the board all together, and having the Android tablet charge begin in May with the $400 Asus Transformer, and the sleek and sexy Galaxy Tab 10.1. The three month head start for Apple seems like a reasonable trade-off for having better developer support and more consumer interest that would have come with not having an $800 beast be the first impression of Honeycomb.

That brings us to Ice Cream Sandwich and the Nexus Prime. We know that NVIDIA has already pushed back the expected release of the quad-core Tegra 3 chipsets, so if we're hoping for that to power the Prime, we'd have to wait until early 2012. Of course, the newly teased relationship between Google and Texas Instruments could mean that the Tegra 3 has already been removed from the equation. If it has, will we see the same fate for the Prime as for the Nexus S? A dual-core TI CPU would have to be really good to stand up against the first quad-core offerings that would come a few months afterwards. And, that's not even taking into account the 768x1280 screens from Samsung that we're already hoping to see grace the Nexus Prime. There's no guarantee that Samsung could bring that screen to market in time for October.

How Design Software Will Shape Manufacturing's Future.

Autodesk, a multinational software company based in San Rafael, California, makes 3-D design software used by everyone from automotive manufacturing giants to Hollywood studios. Now it is betting that those digital tools will have an increasingly powerful role in what happens on factory floors, enabling manufacturers to embrace more flexible strategies that deliver more customized products.
Buzz Kross, who heads the company's manufacturing industry group, says the manufacturers he works with see an opportunity in new technology at a time when they sense that the boom in outsourcing to China has run its course. "There have always been companies that differentiate based on their ability to manufacture most efficiently, and others based on design and invention—it's the difference between GM and Tesla," says Kross. "Now a lot of manufacturers are leaning more to the design model.

Welcome to a Faster Web The first commercial deployment of SPDY, a protocol designed by Google to make websites faster, launches today.

SPDY, a protocol Google revealed in late 2009, dramatically speeds up Web page loading by changing the way that browsers communicate with servers. Until now, Google has only tested the research project internally and deployed it on a few of its own sites. But today, the protocol launches as a commercial product.
Website optimization company Strangeloop has built SPDY into its flagship product Site Optimizer, software that sits in between a website and its users, and adjusts the site's code to make pages load more quickly. Strangeloop's customers will have the ability to turn the protocol on easily; in tests, the protocol has sped up websites by 10 to 20 percent.
At first, this will only make a difference for people who visit websites using Google's Chrome browser (the only one that supports SPDY), but Strangeloop expects that it could end up having a big impact on mobile devices as well, since Google is likely to build SPDY into browsers designed for Android.
The speed with which a website responds to users is an increasingly important technical and economic issue. According to the content-delivery network Akamai, people only give a site three seconds, on average, to load before giving up and navigating away. Better performance often means more page views, and thus more interaction with users. For online shopping sites, this translates to higher sales.
It's not just individual sites that have an interest in speeding up the Web. Google has been working to make the Web as a whole faster, reasoning that the entire experience needs to be lightning-quick and smooth to keep people happily using its many services. Google also hopes to entice people to use more Web services and less desktop software (see, for example, its Chrome OS), and the company knows this won't be possible if they struggle with performance.
There are a lot of ways to speed up a website. Changing the protocols that determine how information gets sent over the Internet is potentially the most rewarding but also one of the trickiest. These protocols are fundamental to communication between websites and servers, so they can have far-reaching effects on website performance across all devices. However, to roll SPDY out to the entire world, all browser manufacturers would have to adopt it, and every server would have to support it, says Joshua Bixby, Strangeloop's president.

A Preview of Future Disk Drives A prototype disk drive based on phase-change memory can outperform an off-the-shelf flash hard disk .

A new type of data storage technology, called phase-change memory, has proven capable of writing some types of data faster than conventional flash based storage. The tests used a hard drive based on prototype phase-change memory chips.
Disks based on solid-state, flash memory chips are increasingly used in computers and servers because they perform faster than conventional magnetic hard drives. The performance of the experimental phase-change disk drive, created by researchers at University of California San Diego, suggests that it won't be long before that technology is able to give computing devices another speed boost.
The prototype created by the researchers is the first to publically benchmark the performance of a phase-change memory chips working in a disk drive. Several semiconductor companies are working on phase-change chips, but they have not released information about storage devices built with them.
"Phase-change chips are not quite ready for prime time, but if the technology continues to develop, this is what [solid state drives] will look like in the next few years," says Steve Swanson, who built the prototype, known as Onyx, with colleagues. It had a data capacity of eight gigabytes and went head-to-head with what Swanson calls a "high-end" 80 GB flash drive made for use in servers.
When it came to writing small chunks of data on the order of kilobytes in size, Onyx was between 70 percent and 120 percent faster than the commercial drive. At the same time, the prototype placed significantly less computational load on the processor of the computer using it. It was also much faster at reading data than the flash drive when accessing blocks of data of any size. The kind of large volume, small read and write patterns that Onyx excelled at are a hallmark of the type of calculations involved in analyzing social networks like those of Twitter, says Swanson. However, Onyx was much slower at writing larger chunks of data than its commercially established competitor.

Google Makes Web Pages Load Instantly The Chrome browser will soon silently fetch pages as you scan search results so that they load without delay.

Google is ready to make waiting for Web pages to load a thing of the past—at least for those pages found using its search engine and the company's Chrome browser. As a user peruses the list of results returned in response to a query, the browser will fetch and load in the background the page it considers most relevant. If a person does click that result, the page will load instantaneously.
The new feature, called Instant Pages, will appear in Chrome and Google's mobile browsers in "coming weeks" but can be experienced today in the developer version of the browser, or later this week in the beta version (the Chrome browser is automatically updated). A video showing the new feature in action has been posted on YouTube.
"We all have broadband, but loading a Web page is still nothing like flipping channels on your TV," said Amit Singhal, Google's head of search ranking, when he announced the new feature today at an event in San Francisco. "We will not be happy until loading a page is as fast as flipping pages in a magazine."
A year ago, Google introduced Instant Search, which loads results live as a person types into the search box. Google studies show that by reducing the time it takes to enter a query, the feature shaves two to five seconds from most searches, said Singhal. He added that Instant Pages could shorten the process of searching for and loading a Web page by a further five seconds.

New Language for Programming in Parallel Writing code for the latest multicore chips is notoriously tricky, but a new language could make it simpler, and make computers more efficient in the process.

A new programming language has been designed to get the most out of the latest multicore computer processors. If it finds favor among coders, it could provide more powerful software for many computers.
Over the last few years, as they've run up against the physical limits of miniaturization, microchip makers have shifted from increasing the power of processor cores—the part of a chip that handles data and instructions—to adding more cores to a single chip. For example, Intel's i3 and i7 processors have two and four cores, respectively.
This presents a challenge for programmers. Since most programming languages were designed for single-core chips, it can be tricky to divide tasks up and send them to each core in parallel. If a coder isn't careful, this can cause errors in the way that each core in the chip accesses the shared sections of memory.
Tucker Taft, the chief technology officer and chairman of the Boston-based software company SofCheck, designed the new language—called Parallel Specification and Implementation Language (ParaSail)—specifically for writing software for multicore processors. The language is intended to avoid the pitfalls that typically happen when working with multicore chips.
To a programmer, ParaSail looks like a modified form of Java or C#, two leading languages. The difference is that it automatically splits a program into thousands of smaller tasks that can then be spread across cores—a trick called pico-threading, which maximizes the number of tasks being carried out in parallel, regardless of the number of cores. ParaSail also does the debugging automatically, which makes code safer. "Everything is done in parallel by default, unless you tell it otherwise," Taft says.
Over the next decade, the number of cores on computer chips is expected to increase even further. "There are some machines out there with dozens or hundreds of cores now," says Taft.
ParaSail uses a number of other tricks, some that draw on languages developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s for supercomputers—machines running many individual computer chips networked together. "The design of the language itself is essentially complete," says Taft, who presented details of the language on Wednesday at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. "The first version of the compiler will be released in the next month or so." The language will work on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.
Microsoft and Intel are putting $20 million into adapting existing languages for multicore processors, so it's difficult to say if ParaSail will become widely adopted. "There are a lot of people chipping away at the problem, taking existing languages and trying to make them better at handling parallel processing," says Taft.
Taft already has a proven track record in the world of computer language development, says Denis Nicole of the Dependable Systems and Software Engineering Group at Southampton University. But he adds that "it usually takes companies the size of Sun to push new languages on the community."

Stick-On Electronic Tattoos A flexible electronic device stuck on the skin could provide irritation-free monitoring of heart, brain, and muscle activity.

Researchers have made stretchable, ultrathin electronics that cling to skin like a temporary tattoo and can measure electrical activity from the body. These electronic tattoos could allow doctors to diagnose and monitor conditions like heart arrhythmia or sleep disorders noninvasively.
John A. Rogers, a professor of materials science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has developed a prototype that can replicate the monitoring abilities of bulky electrocardiograms and other medical devices that are normally restricted to a clinical or laboratory setting. This work was presented today in Science.
To achieve flexible, stretchable electronics, Rogers employed a principle he had already used to achieve flexibility in substrates. He made the components—all composed of traditional, high-performance materials like silicon—not only incredibly thin, but also "structured into a serpentine shape" that allows them to deform without breaking. The result, says Rogers, is that "the whole system takes on this kind of spiderweb layout."
In the past, says Rogers, he was able to create devices that were either flexible but not stretchable, or stretchable but not flexible. In particular, his previous work was limited by the fact that the electronics portions of his designs couldn't flex and stretch as much as the substrate they were mounted on.
The electronic tattoo achieves the mechanical properties of skin, which can stand up to twisting, poking, and pulling without breaking. Rogers's tattoo can also conform to the topography of the skin as well as stretch and shift with it. It can be worn for extended periods without producing the irritation that often results from adhesive tapes and rigid electronics. Although Rogers's preliminary tests involved a custom-made substrate, he also demonstrated that the electronics could be mounted onto a commercially available temporary tattoo.
The prototype was equipped with electrodes to measure electric signals produced by muscle and brain activity. This could be useful for noninvasive diagnosis of sleep apnea or monitoring of premature babies' heart activity. It also might be possible, Rogers says, to use the tattoos to stimulate the muscles of physical rehabilitation patients, although this use wasn't demonstrated in the paper.
To demonstrate the device's potential as a human-computer interface, Rogers mounted one of the tattoos on a person's throat and used measurements of the electrical activity in the throat muscles to control a computer game. The signal from the device contained enough information for software to distinguish among the spoken words "left," "right," "up," and "down" to control a cursor on the screen.
The device included sensors for temperature, strain, and electric signals from the body. It also housed LEDs to provide visual feedback; photodetectors to measure light exposure; and tiny radio transmitters and receivers. The device is small enough that it requires only minuscule amounts of power, which it can harvest via tiny solar cells and via a wireless coil that receives energy from a nearby transmitter. Rogers hopes to build in some sort of energy-storage ability, like a tiny battery, in the near future. The researchers are also working on making the device wireless.
Ultimately, Rogers says, "we want to have a much more intimate integration" with the body, beyond simply mounting something very closely to the skin. He hopes that his devices will eventually be able to use chemical information from the skin in addition to electrical information.

Google's Vision for TV Proves a Turnoff

Google's hopes of becoming a force in television by releasing software that brings Web video and other online content—including ads—to the small screen appear to be fading fast. In recent months, stores and distributors selling one flagship Google TV device returned more of them than they sold as consumer demand fell.

That embarrassing statistic appeared in a July 28 earnings announcement released by Logitech. The announcement covered the fiscal quarter ending June 30. The company's Revue set-top box was announced in partnership with Google when the search giant introduced its TV software last October. Sony was also part of the launch, and sells television sets with Google TV built in.

But Google TV devices have gained little traction. They launched to poor reviews citing them as difficult to use, and met opposition from broadcast and cable networks wary of the Web content might undermine their hold on viewers. Competition from less expensive machines from Apple and Roku, as well as from game consoles, has been intense.

Logitech chairman and acting CEO Guerrino De Luca told analysts that Google TV has "not yet fully delivered on its own promises." His company had already cut the price of the Revue from $299 to $249. Now the price will be slashed to $99, on par with Apple and Roku's Internet TV devices. Logitech has other challenges, such as distribution problems in Europe that led to flat revenues. However the first Revue price drop and the returns cost Logitech $34 million, and contributed to the departure of De Luca's predecessor, Gerald Quindlen.

Google TV is not finished, though. Apple TV soared in popularity after a similar price drop last September, and Google says it's not giving up. "We launched Google TV with a firm belief that bringing the power of the Web into the living room will significantly enhance the television experience," a spokesman said in a statement. "We believe in this now more than ever."

A new version of Google TV will soon be released for new and existing devices later this summer. These devices may come with a simpler interface (consumers and reviewers have complained that the current version is too complicated).

Google appears to have long-term plans, too. It recently acquired SageTV, which makes software to turn a personal computer with a TV tuner card into a media center capable of recording, pausing, and streaming shows to devices around the home. Observers said Google bought the company more for the talent of its management team than its product, but it will take more time to apply that expertise to new software.

Is Your Internet Connection as Fast as You Think It Is? An FCC report says ISPs don't always deliver the speeds they promise, but they're getting better at it.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission released its first comprehensive study of broadband speeds across the United States on Tuesday. The study revealed that many Internet providers still advertise speeds higher than they deliver.
The report, "Measuring Broadband America," was commissioned as part of the FCC's efforts to promote improved broadband services across the United States. According to the Internet networking company Akamai, the U.S. ranks 14th in the world in terms of average Internet speeds, behind the Czech Republic, Latvia, and Belgium. Some U.S. ISPs have also been criticized for delivering Internet speeds that are lower than those advertised to users. The new report suggests that most providers now operate within 20 percent of their advertised speeds, even during peak hours; that's an improvement over the figures recorded in a 2009 report from the FCC.
The report also quantified the effects on home broadband connections of peak-time Internet traffic, which happens between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. While fiber-optic connections were barely affected, cable and DSL users saw decreases of about 5.5 percent and 7.3 percent in download speeds, respectively.
The report highlights two metrics as most indicative of broadband service quality: throughput, measured in megabits of data per second (Mbps), and latency, measured in milliseconds, which is the time it takes for information to travel across a segment of a network. On faster networks, the effects of latency are proportionately more noticeable.
While other reports, including that of Akamai, have taken a wide view of broadband use around the world, this study offers a more in-depth examination of services in the United States. Shane Greenstein, a professor of management and strategy at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, says this kind of report is needed. "We did not have a mature electricity industry until everybody agreed on how to measure use of electricity. And we cannot reach a similar state in our broadband industry without a similar agreement. This is a big step towards that, even though we still have a longer conversation in front of us."
The report is the result of a collaborative study with 13 major ISPs, including Comcast and Verizon; academics and other researchers, including from MIT; and consultants and consumer organizations. SamKnows, an analytics company, was selected to administer the FCC's broadband performance testing initiative.
According to the report, the FCC examined 6,800 homes and "conducted 13 different tests in each home, multiple times per day, over several months, to produce more than four billion data points from more than 100 million tests of broadband performance."
The report also quantifies the connection speeds required by consumers for various tasks. For basic Web browsing—"accessing a series of Web pages, but not streaming video or using video chat sites or applications"—a speed of one Mbps is sufficient, says the report, which also found that after 10 Mbps, there's no significant increase in page download speeds for basic Web browsing.
Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative, points out that some providers seem much better at delivering their promised speeds than others. "This study is indicative of the need for some sort of truth in ISP advertising," he says.
Meinrath also says that because the FCC did not release this data in advance, his group and other third-party researchers are only now beginning to review the data. He expects thorough analyses to take a few days.
A statement by FCC chairman Julius Genachowski summed up the FCC's perspective: "I expect broadband providers will look closely at the data we're releasing today and ensure they're providing accurate, relevant, and easily understandable information to consumers about their services. Providers should be aware that this survey isn't intended as a one-time thing."

Cracking Open Chrome OS

Today at Black Hat, a computer security conference in Las Vegas, researchers described how they were able to steal data from Chrome OS, an operating system built by Google that requires the user to do almost everything via the Web. By using the operating system's Web-based design against itself, the researchers were able to get access to users' names and passwords, and even banking information. While the specific vulnerabilities they exploited can be closed, the researchers say there is no way to block the broader threat.
Google has touted Chrome OS as a revolutionary approach to computing, and emphasized its security. Since applications run on the Web, users won't run out-of-date software, which commonly leaves them open to security vulnerabilities. The system is also automatically updated, and little is stored on the user's computer. If a malicious piece of software tries to get onto a Chrome computer, Google can remotely restore the operating system to a pristine state. These aspects should make it less vulnerable to viruses and other threats.
But the researchers, Matt Johansen and Kyle Osborn, from the Web application security company White Hat Security, demonstrated that moving to the Web comes with its own set of dangers. "There is no access to the hard drive, but we don't care," says Johansen. "We're after information. We're not trying to build a botnet on your Chromebook."
The pair used common hacking techniques. They were successful almost immediately with a method called cross-site scripting. This involves injecting a Web page with code that runs in the browsers of visitors to the site. The code then performs malicious tasks on those visitors' machines.
Chrome OS is designed to limit the damage this technique could cause. It does this via a technique called sandboxing, which is meant to prevent what's happening in one browser tab from affecting another. Johansen and Osborn used cross-site scripting to attack Chrome OS's browser extensions, which typically add new functionality.
In Chrome OS, extensions are more powerful than in other browsers, and aren't subject to the same sandbox rules as browser tabs. That's because they exist, in part, to provide functions that affect multiple tabs. "You're talking about a super pared-down version of the operating system," says Osborn, "and they're trying to rebuild functionality through extensions."
The researchers found that extensions can get broad access to what's going on in users' browser tabs. As such, someone could use them to steal usernames and passwords, cookies, and browsing history information, including information that comes from sites that don't have vulnerabilities themselves.

Five Ways Apple Should Spend Its $76 Billion

Last week, Apple reported that it now has reserves of $76 billion in cash, short term securities and long term securities. As many wags pointed out, that's more than the cash-strapped U.S. government has left. On Tuesday, Apple also briefly surpassed Exxon Mobil to become the world's most highly valued company, at more than $340 billion in stock-market valuation.
With tens of billions of dollars to throw around and super-high investor confidence, shouldn't Apple reinvest in some cutting-edge R&D that could make it even more successful?
Apple has already shown the value of introducing unique new technologies for its products: the iPhone's advanced touchscreen and the MacBook's one-piece aluminum case, for example. Apple has also begun bringing CPU chip design and production closer to home, giving it another technological advantage.
So it wouldn't be a stretch for Apple to spend some of its cash on bringing new technologies into existence that competitors couldn't touch. Never mind buying Hulu or some other company. Here are five ways could Apple actually invent the future, and thwart other makers of phones, tablets, and computers.
5. Color screens that work in the sunshine
As much as I love printed books, I'd much rather tote a skinny little iPad for my on-the-go reading. But here in sunny Los Angeles, I can't see the color screen when I try to read outdoors. There's no way to read a book on a tablet at the beach, or in the park.
Of course mobile displays for reading in direct sunlight are already available, such as those on Amazon's Kindle, but they're only black-and-white, and they refresh at a painfully slow, page-turning speed. Now that a large chunk of my media consumption is in color, these displays don't cut it. Surely a daytime color display isn't impossible. With Apple's spare cash, could a breakthrough be around the corner?
4. Wireless network quality
Before Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPhone in 2007, he and his company pulled off a feat most pundits would have considered impossible: They got AT&T to change the way its voicemail system worked. Instead of forcing users to listen to all messages in order—a throwback to cassette-tape answering machines, and also good for getting customers to run up their minutes—the iPhone let its users view all messages onscreen at once and play only those they tapped.
But iPhone owners still complain bitterly about the quality of wireless service. AT&T drops calls, and Verizon won't let you make a voice call and use an Internet app at the same time. The audio quality of voice calls on any phone, through any carrier, seems to have gotten worse rather than better. If Apple could fix these issues, iPhone calls could become a premium feature rather than a joke. It might require a multi-billion-dollar investment in wireless network infrastructure, but we know who's got the money to spend.