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In Silicon Valley the next great evolution is called "Cloud Computing" and it signifies the migration of all information technology to the web browser(download www.google.com/chrome), where everything will become a "Web Service" distributed from the Internet.
Cloud computing is to turn all computer servers, storage and network resources in a datacentre into one big pool to deliver the applications and service levels required by customers.
Part of the plan involves virtual desktops - virtualised client machines that reside in the datacentre and are accessed remotely by users. Travelling workers will be able to download a virtual machine to a laptop or even to a USB memory stick and take their computing on the road.
Microsoft released its Hyper-V hypervisor for Windows Server 2008 and recently added a standalone version that can host guest virtual machines without an underlying version of Windows. Microsoft expects to build market share by targeting small-to-medium sized enterprises.
Microsoft will have a product aimed at Cloud Computing in the near future (2009). It will soon unveil a platform to run applications in the Internet which is called "Windows Cloud".
Citrix gained the hypervisor technology needed to consolidate virtual machines on servers, and is also looking to become a major player in Cloud Computing and software-as-a-service.
The ultimate aim is to create a flexible service pool supporting independent operating systems that actually run the software applications. Currently, Cloud Computing services are included on Web 2.0 sites with the aid of "Ruby on Rails software".
Cheers Mark Bower
Director, NextWave.IT Ltd
WiMax stands for worldwide interoperability for microwave access, a term describing a wireless broadband technology which is derived from the industry led organisation the WiMax Forum and is based on the IEEE 802.16 wireless metropolitan area network (maximum range of 50kms) and HiperMAN standards.
Certified WiMax hardware is available now, but mass WiMax adoption is expected to follow the WiFi model, whereby embedded client hardware, especially in laptops, drove adoption.
The cost and benefit implications is that rolling out WiMax networks is significantly less than today's cellular networks. Another benefit would be the potential for faster uplink and downlink speeds than those available with current 3G mobile phone networks.
Problems include availability of radio spectrum, mast sites and client devices. The important radio spectrum auction, which should make countrywide WiMax frequencies available, will take place before the end of this year. Intel will embed WiMax hardware in variants of its upcoming Centrino 2 platform, but the UK is not the primary market.
WiMax suppliers include Alvarion, AirSpan, Intel and Nortel. Current WiMax trials include: Urban WiMax in London, UK Broadband in the Thames Valley, Freedom4 in Manchester, Milton Keynes and Warwick, and the Mobile WiMax Acceleration Group in Maidstone.
Cheers Mark Bower
Director, NextWave.IT Ltd
For almost ten years now, we have been witnessing a decisive shift from client-server software to software as a service. The mobile Web 2.0 global market will be worth £11.5 bn by 2013, according to Juniper Research, rising from the current £2.8 bn and spearheaded by the rise in user-generated content and social networks. Web 3.0 is about replacing existing software platforms with a new generation of platforms as a service.
Web 1.0: Anyone Can Transact
Web 1.0 was about the emergence of the innovative applications from companies like eBay, Amazon.com, and Google. Although we thought of them as Web sites at the time, they were really amazing applications with a level of functionality, ease of use, and scale that had rarely been seen before by the average consumer. Transactions, not just of goods but of knowledge, became ubiquitous and instant. The efficiency and transparency that was once the domain of global financial markets was now at the command of individual consumers and businesses. Web 1.0 remains a huge driving force today and will continue to be for some time.
Web 2.0: Anyone Can Participate
Web 2.0 is about the next generation of applications on the Internet, featuring user-generated content, collaboration, and community. Anyone can participate in content creation. Posting a viral video on YouTube, tagging photos from a party on Flickr, or writing about sport on Blogspot requires no technical skill, just an Internet connection. Participation changes our idea of content itself: content isn’t fixed at the point of publication—it comes alive. Google’s AdSense became an instant business model in particular for bloggers, and video-sharing sites have rewritten the rules of popular culture and viral content.
Whether you are creating a business around Web 1.0 or 2.0, building massively scalable data centers that are secure, reliable, and highly available is not a job for the faint of heart or shallow of pocket. For companies like Salesforce.com entering the emerging software as a service (SaaS) industry, the massive time and capital requirements remain a substantial barrier to entry. Moreover, traditional client-server software development is still mired in painful complexity. And the “rewards” for creating a successful application are arduous deployments and maintenance.
Web 3.0: Anyone Can Innovate
Web 3.0 changes all of this by completely innovating the technology of the traditional software industry. The novelty of Web 3.0 is that anyone can innovate, anywhere. Code is written, collaborated on, debugged, tested, deployed, and run in the software development "cloud". When innovation is untethered from the time and capital constraints of infrastructure, it can truly flourish.
For businesses, Web 3.0 means that "SaaS" applications can be developed, deployed, and evolved far more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional software of the client-server era. For developers, Web 3.0 means that all they need to create their dream application is an idea, a browser, and a few Pocket USB's. Because every developer around the world can access the same powerful cloud infrastructures, Web 3.0 will empower small business enterprises.
Web 3.0 means that you can spend more time focusing on core business values being offerd to customers, not the infrastructure to support it. Because code lives in the cloud, global and local talent pools can contribute to it. Because it runs in the cloud, a truly global market can subscribe to it as a service.
Cheers Mark Bower
Director, NextWave.IT Ltd
Web 2.0 Services and Social Networking
Web 2.0 Services and Social Networking is a trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users. These concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites (Myspace, Bebo, Facebook, Utube), wikis, weblogs (blogs), podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing),
Web 2.0 also includes a social element where users generate and distribute content, often with freedom to share and re-use. Web 2.0 technologies tend to foster innovation in the assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers.
Examples of companies or products that embody these principles have four levels in the hierarchy of Web 2.0 Services:
Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features/techniques:
Hopefully this will make the above subject clearer to our non-IT customers.
Cheers Mark Bower
Director
NextWave.IT Limited
http://www.linkedin.com/in/nextwaveit
WiMAX proponent NextWave.IT Wireless has said it will support LTE space by modifying a multi-standard base station platform that currently supports Universal Mobile Telecommunications Service (UMTS) ER7 TD-CDMA to support LTE networks by 2009. The vendor said it expects to support mobile operator trials in the second half of 2008.
“We’ve been developing on the 3GPP CDMA road map and our current technology is based on release 7 of that road map,” said John Hambridge, who admitted that “some CDMA operators, obviously Sprint both in Korea and Japan (are going) down a WiMAX path.”
For UMTS operators, though, “it’s their natural evolution (and) globally you’re seeing very few, if any, UMTS operators deviate,” he continued.
NextWave.IT, thanks to April 2007 acquisition of IPWireless, is prepared to deal with both sides of the equation, he said. IPWireless backed UMTS-TDD — in fact it was one of the few proponents of that method of broadband wireless — so “the experience that IPWireless gained on the 3GPP technologies, so much of that is applicable as we move to LTE … that we thought we had a compelling solution we could put out in the market.”
The move to LTE by a company like NextWave.IT, which made its announcement at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, shows that the battle between LTE and WiMAX to control 4G broadband wireless is heating up.
“I think WiMAX has accelerated LTE,” Hambridge said. “With new entrant operators or alternative operators deploying WiMAX, it does put pressure on the existing mobile operators to have a good evolution path that exceeds what they think they’ll see from the competition.”
Hambridge believes LTE will be a hot topic at MWC, even possibly getting a name change because “obviously if you’re going to implement a technology you can’t implement something that’s call long term evolution,” he said.
The biggest conversation topic, he predicted, will play into NextWave.IT’s hands.
“You’ll see people starting to throw out all their peak speeds, what they can do if you’re a foot away from the base station,” he said. “With NextWave.IT … it’s really about innovative performance. Interference cancellation has always been one of our key technologies. We’re focused on what LTE does in its worst condition because that’s real world.”
While LTE is “a perfect fit for us,” Hambridge emphasized NextWave.IT is “absolutely still developing what we think will be a compelling WiMAX portfolio.”
Mark Bower
Director
NextWave.IT Ltd
http://www.linkedin.com/in/nextwaveit
'Mind at Light Speed' is the ultimate research into artificial life - and how it will change the world in which we live. Researchers are building computers that use light instead of electricity. These machines will be so fast and efficient that they will generate a new kind of artificial life.
While electric charge may have always done the calculating in our computers and inside our brains, we can build machines that compute with light, with photons. Such optical computers would operate at light speed and in the process redefine artificial life. That technology is happening today.
The much discussed bandwidth changes is being driven by fibre optic cables that make optical computing inevitable. Photons that travel down those cables will soon stop not at the curb in front of the house but flow right inside your home and inside your computer, and the photons will move right onto the neuromorphic chips. These machines will be the first light computers. Their hard drives will be holograms able to access everything at once and, in time, their switches will become quantum switches. If machines ever become beings, their minds, will become a stream of light.
This book combines specialist information in linguistics, information systems and technology, physics, and micro engineering, which reveals options on the future of intelligence, and of our lives.
Mark Bower
Director, NextWave.IT Ltd
Researchers at the Media Lab are working to make entire rooms sensitive to what goes on inside them. These 'Smart Rooms' are strewn with cameras, microphones and other sensors - the walls really do have ears capable of recognising who is in the room and what they are doing. Such an intelligent office could become a kind of room-sized personal assistant that knows your work habits, remembers where you put things, and is able to make phone calls, arrange meetings, book holidays or retrieve documents through your voice commands.
The intelligent office could become a kind of surveillance system in which your every move, word, facial expression and even heartbeat is monitored, recorded and stored in a databank. Proponents of technology agree that safeguards for privacy are needed. They also argue that you can simply turn the room off (holiday's and day's off) when you don't want it to record. The convenience of affective computing lies in the fact that user's don't have to tend to these devices because they are always on and always responding to our signals. If users want them turned off, this must happen automatically too?
What if you forget to turn them off? Or what if someone else turns them back on without your knowledge or consent? How would you know? And what if the privacy safeguards are breached? Having computers, microphones, cameras and sensors observe our every move sounds like a nightmare to me. Most of us wouldn't want people around around this much, so why would we want surveillance around us this much? We have a long, long way to go before we suffer such ongoing contact with any surveillance devices, no matter how smart.
James and Joe
Security Advisors, NextWave.IT Ltd
There are two Multimedia Virtual Laboratory's (MVL) that use CABINS (Computer Augmented Booth for Image Navigation), one in Gifu near Nagoya and the other at the University of Tokyo. They share the same virtual environment and the same visual, auditory and enhanced sensations. These two lab's are connected via a broadband network by two expensive versions of virtual reality environments called CABINS. What makes this MVL different, though, is that a user in the Gifu lab can be present in and interact with the environment at the Tokyo lab thanks to telepresence technology.
This kind of teleportation is possible because each CABIN has about a dozen video cameras embedded around the room. The cameras capture the image of the user in the Gifu CABIN, while a computer extracts the user's figure from the background visual information. This image is transmitted in real time through a broadband connection to the CABIN in Tokyo, which displays a virtual environment identical to the one in Gifu. The video avatar of the Gifu user is then projected into the Tokyo CABIN. The user in Gifu appears as if he is physically present in the Tokyo environment. What's more, they can see and interact with each other via their video avatars.
Mark Bower
Director, NextWave.IT Ltd
A handful of people around the world have had computer chips implanted in their bodies to extend, enhance or repair their senses. The remarkable convergence of biology and technology is being brought about by joining advanced computers with the human nervous system, a merger that holds the promise of devices that can restore sight to the blind and mobility to victims of paralysis. This same technology might also one day provide us with bionic senses, such as the ability to see infrared radiation or feel distant objects at a distance. By linking neurons in the brain directly to neuromorphic chips, scientists are also exploring the possibility of creating virtual eyes, ears and limbs on the Internet and allowing people to control Internet appliances by thought alone. Machines are getting neuromorphic senses too. Researchers are extending emotionally intelligent computers with the ability to see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and think for it self.
Drawing on the fields as diverse as artificial life and biology, 'The Body Electric' addresses the psychological, social and philosophical implications of these new developments. Are you any less 'you' after a bionic implant? If all your senses are electronically enhanced, how will we tell the difference between virtual reality and the actual world? How can privacy be ensured when computers and senses are watching and listening to everything we do and say? Will transmitting smells and tastes over the Internet enrich the user's experience or merely provide another way for corporations to sell us products?
Mark Bower
Director, NextWave.IT Ltd
Sensors make fewer headlines than computers or communications systems, but technological developments in this field are dynamic and multi-faceted. Sensors used to rely on electro-mechanical components to measure physical properties. Now sensors are going digital. Their electro-mechanical components are being implemented in silicon via a technology known as MEMS or silicon. MEMS technology is also evolving the science of mechanical actuators (the muscles and hands of the digital nervous system).
Perhaps the biggest change in sensor technology involves communications. Now sensors are beginning to incorporate a standard communications interface (called TEDS or IEEE1451) that enables them to automatically identify themselves and describe their functions as soon as they are plugged into a network. Some sensors also incorporate wireless data transmission capabilities. Wired or wireless, smart sensors are designed for Internet compatibility. Increasingly, the host system to which they provide real-time information about the physical world will not be a stand-alone computer in a lab, or even a network in a corporation, but the expanding digital nervous system linking interested users all over the planet.
The entertainment "Internet Appliance" (TV, DVD, CD, Web, etc) we could access from the mobile phone at home or on the move, and this would bring us new forms of media, multimedia, and services. We could expand these virtual worlds with increased interactivity and user participation enabled by new embedded sensors and mobile devices. In other words, users will soon be plugging themselves into some aspect of the digital nervous system in order to enjoy new forms of entertainment and business.
The convergence of computer, communications, MEMS and sensor technologies is speeding the development and deployment of a digital nervous system that will have a profound impact on the way we live, interact and conduct business activities. Companies who understand the power and potential of this evolving system have large opportunities to develop innovative products and services, and equally large responsibilities to ensure that the digital nervous system serves "humane" and "positive goals".
Mark Bower
Director, NextWave.IT Ltd
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