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The launch of Apple's iPad will pave the way for a slew of rival products this year, an Arm executive said Wednesday, predicting over 50 tablet PC devices will be launched globally.

The coming swarm of tablets has even prompted Arm, Intel's main rival in the mobile microprocessor business, to rent more space at the Computex electronics trade show in Taipei this year to show off the devices, in addition to e-readers, mini-laptops and other devices that use Arm processing cores.

"The first tablet devices will launch in the second quarter by [mobile network] carriers," said Roy Chen, Arm's worldwide mobile computing ODM manager, during a press meeting in Taipei. "You'll see a lot more in the third quarter," he added.

He said many tablet-like devices will be launched in China, but companies everywhere plan to launch tablets this year, including the top 10 telecommunications network operators. He declined to name specific companies.

Like many chip makers, Arm often gains an inside view of products its chips are being used in, sometimes when asked for additional engineering support and other times due to partnership programs.

The company showed off two tablet devices at the Taipei news conference, both running Google's Android mobile OS.

One of the devices was from Compal Electronics, a Taiwanese electronics maker and the second largest contract laptop manufacturer in the world. The device carried a 7-inch screen and used Nvidia Tegra 2 chips inside, which include Arm cores. Compal is offering two versions of the device, one with Android and another with Microsoft Windows CE, and two choices of screen sizes, 7-inch and 10.1-inch. The device includes an HDMI (high definition multimedia interface) slot so it can be connected to a high-def TV.

The other tablet was simply named the Armadillo and had a smaller screen than the Compal device. It used Arm cores in chips from Freescale Semiconductor, as well as the Android OS, but was on display to show off a quick boot-up system from Japanese software maker, Ubiquitous. The software, called QuckBoot, had the device up and running instantly.

Samsung announced its new lineup of 3D TVs at a gathering of the media in Manhattan this morning.  The entry level 46-inch 3D model, the LN46C750, is coming in May for $1,700. Included is a "3D Starter Kit" containing two pairs of 3D glasses, plus a 3D Blu-ray copy of DreamWorks Animation's Monsters vs. Aliens. 

The kit will also be included with Samsung's more expensive new 3D TVs, such as the top-of-the-line 55-inch $7,000 LED model UN55C9000 (out in April ). And it will be made available gratis with Samsung's first 3D Blu-ray player as well, the $400, BD-C6900, which starts selling this month.

Following the event, I sat down with Bookeun Yoon, the Korea-based president of Samsung Electronics visual display business (who spoke through an interpreter), and Jeffrey Katzenberg, the DreamWorks Animation CEO and one of the industry's leading 3D evangelists.  DreamWorks and Samsung are teaming up on the 3D launch.  Their remarks, edited for length and clarity:

Q: 3D TVs are expensive. In tough economic times, how fast and how mainstream can these TVs become?

Yoon: There was a study carried out by the Consumer Electronics Association in the U.S. (saying) that 65% of consumers are willing to pay a 25% premium on a 3D TV today. The pricing we have decided on is based on this evidence. People predict maybe one million to seven million 3D sets will be sold this year (industry-wide). I believe a minimum of five million will be sold.

Q: But are people going to buy a 3D TV when they only recently sprung for a new HDTV as part of the transition to digital?

Yoon: When we looked at the LED-type (2D TVs) market last year during an economic crisis there were a lot of doubts about whether these would be viable. The expectation was that maybe 2 million would be sold, but last year 2.6 million were sold and our market share was 80%. Now when we look at 3D TVs (based on LED technology), the product Samsung is launching is a standardized product. This is an opportunity for the TV industry. I believe there will be 70 3D Blu-ray titles out this year. I have high expectations.

Katzenberg: I look at it in a slightly different way.  The innovation of the experience from flat screen to 3D on these new TVs is exceptional. At a 25% premium, I think consumers are going to see that as a very high value. As always happens, when a new innovation is introduced it starts at a high end. First adopters' will be driven by sports and games. And very quickly you'll see this move to the mass market. If you look at a first year of introduction and the predictions (for five to seven million 3D TV sold this year)  --  in an introductory year that is huge. (And) there's a very high multiple of that number coming in 2011.

Q: The DreamWorks Animation studio is producing three movies a year now, all in 3D. How important is it for DreamWorks and others in the industry to get 3D into the home?

Katzenberg:  For our filmmakers who spend four years making these movies, for them to have these films enjoyed the way they were created and designed on these spectacular TV sets has come much faster and of a much higher quality than we had anticipated. This is several years ahead of (expectations). Three years ago, when we made the commitment to offer all our movies in 3D, we thought the home market would be five to seven years (out). And it's here today and the quality is much greater than we had actually expected.

I think DreamWorks Animation was the first studio to commit 100% of production  to 3D; now many studios are doing more and more. We have sports channels, Discovery, ESPN, BSkyB, multiple platforms. Content creators and deliverers are committed to 3D in the home. And a lot is accelerated by how spectacular these TV sets are.

Q: Is wearing 3D glasses a hurdle for consumers?

Katzenberg: Many many many people wear glasses. What's the big deal? And if you don't wear them inside because you need them for quality of sight, in this day and age almost everybody who walks outside into sunlight wears sunglasses.  I think that stigma of wearing glasses was back to those days of cardboard red and blue goofy glasses that made you look like a dweeb. You felt like an idiot sitting next to a girl wearing those glasses.

Those days are gone. You see these new glasses -- they're beautifully styled. What is going to happen very quickly is the eyeglass companies are going to go into the business and people will make choices. Those options will be there within a year. 3D eyeglasses will become as common as the many choices as exist in sunglasses today.

Q: What will Blu-ray movies cost in 3D?

Katzenberg: You can't buy the Blu-ray 3D version of Monsters vs. Aliens or Shrek. They're exclusive to Samsung for a year. (The 4 movies in the Shrek series become available in 3D in the 4th quarter; Monsters vs. Aliens in 3D is just coming out now.)

Q: But what is your expectation about Blu-ray pricing?

Katzenberg: I don't know yet. I'm not sure what the 3D premium will be when product makes it way to the market.

Solar cells made from silicon are projected to be a prominent factor in future renewable green energy equations, but so far the promise has far exceeded the reality. While there are now silicon photovoltaics that can convert sunlight into electricity at impressive 20 percent efficiencies, the cost of this solar power is prohibitive for large-scale use. Researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), however, are developing a new approach that could substantially reduce these costs. The key to their success is a better way of trapping sunlight.

"Through the fabrication of thin films from ordered arrays of vertical silicon nanowires we've been able to increase the light-trapping in our solar cells by a factor of 73," says chemist Peidong Yang, who led this research. "Since the fabrication technique behind this extraordinary light-trapping enhancement is a relatively simple and scalable aqueous chemistry process, we believe our approach represents an economically viable path toward high-efficiency, low-cost thin-film solar cells."

Yang holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, and the University of California Berkeley's Chemistry Department. He is a leading authority on semiconductor nanowires - one-dimensional strips of materials whose width measures only one-thousandth that of a human hair but whose length may stretch several microns.

"Typical solar cells are made from very expensive ultrapure single crystal silicon wafers that require about 100 micrometers of thickness to absorb most of the solar light, whereas our radial geometry enables us to effectively trap light with nanowire arrays fabricated from silicon films that are only about eight micrometers thick," he says. "Furthermore, our approach should in principle allow us to use metallurgical grade or "dirty" silicon rather than the ultrapure silicon crystals now required, which should cut costs even further."

Yang has described this research in a paper published in the journal Nano Letters, which he co-authored with Erik Garnett, a chemist who was then a member of Yang's research group. The paper is titled "Light Trapping in Silicon Nanowire Solar Cells."

Generating Electricity from Sunlight

At the heart of all solar cells are two separate layers of material, one with an abundance of electrons that functions as a negative pole, and one with an abundance of electron holes (positively-charged energy spaces) that functions as a positive pole. When photons from the sun are absorbed, their energy is used to create electron-hole pairs, which are then separated at the interface between the two layers and collected as electricity.

Because of its superior photo-electronic properties, silicon remains the photovoltaic semiconductor of choice but rising demand has inflated the price of the raw material. Furthermore, because of the high-level of crystal purification required, even the fabrication of the simplest silicon-based solar cell is a complex, energy-intensive and costly process.

Yang and his group are able to reduce both the quantity and the quality requirements for silicon by using vertical arrays of nanostructured radial p-n junctions rather than conventional planar p-n junctions. In a radial p-n junction, a layer of n-type silicon forms a shell around a p-type silicon nanowire core. As a result, photo-excited electrons and holes travel much shorter distances to electrodes, eliminating a charge-carrier bottleneck that often arises in a typical silicon solar cell. The radial geometry array also, as photocurrent and optical transmission measurements by Yang and Garrett revealed, greatly improves light trapping.

"Since each individual nanowire in the array has a p-n junction, each acts as an individual solar cell," Yang says. "By adjusting the length of the nanowires in our arrays, we can increase their light-trapping path length."

While the conversion efficiency of these solar nanowires was only about five to six percent, Yang says this efficiency was achieved with little effort put into surface passivation, antireflection, and other efficiency-increasing modifications.

"With further improvements, most importantly in surface passivation, we think it is possible to push the efficiency to above 10 percent," Yang says.

Combining a 10 percent or better conversion efficiency with the greatly reduced quantities of starting silicon material and the ability to use metallurgical grade silicon, should make the use of silicon nanowires an attractive candidate for large-scale development.

As an added plus Yang says, "Our technique can be used in existing solar panel manufacturing processes."

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation's Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems.

About DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research for DOE's Office of Science and is managed by the University of California. For more information, visit http://www.lbl.gov.

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Most communications service providers (CSPs) are currently focused on offering backhaul communication solutions to utilities looking to delve into the smart grid, but that doesn't mean they're not equipped to offer more. According to Bill Ablondi, Parks Associates' director of home systems, there's room for telcos - amongst the IT companies and home-area network vendors - to carve a niche in remote energy management (REM), with or without the help of a utility.

At its recent Smart Energy Summit event, Ablondi said the shared sentiment was that energy demand is growing faster than supply. This is driving the move toward smartening up the electrical grid, but REM services don't depend on the presence of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), the first step most utilities are taking today. They can be sold, or offered free of charge, as part of a CSP's bundle. The utilities are only exploring the market because they need to shed their peak loads, he said.

"[Telcos] could provide monitoring and the ability to control things over the Web in the home whether you are in the home or not," Ablondi said. "It could make sense because these types of systems could be set up before utilities decide on their approach to the home-area network. There are only a few trials out there right now, but the technology is capable of monitoring consumption on the circuits in the home or helping a consumer change the temperature setting on a water heater or the HVAC system to save energy."

For CSPs, their motivation stems from the potential for additional ARPU from their existing networks or, at the least, the ability to increase stickiness amongst their customer bases. Consumers have indicated they are willing to pay in the short term for longer-term savings. Parks found that 80% to 85% of households are willing to pay $80 to $100 for cost-saving equipment if they are guaranteed to save 10% to 30% off their monthly electricity bill.

On the other hand, only 15% to 20% of consumers are likely to sign up for time-of-use or demand response programs, and 35% do not want utilities to control systems in their home no matter what the potential savings, Parks found. That doesn't imply that they would want a CSP either, but they would be more amicable to a remote energy management platform that ties into their existing services.

"The question is, will energy management be a viable standalone service?" Ablondi asked in Park's webcast today. "We, at this point, feel it's better to collect that with other services consumers already pay for. Then there's the possibility of adding some value for the consumers." more...

The D'Arcinoff Group (DG) signed a letter of intent today to use the former Metaldyne plant to house the headquarters of a wind turbine parts and components manufacturing company in New Castle, Rep. Tom Saunders (R-Lewisville) said.

The business will replace the vacant plant to bring nearly 1,800 new jobs to the New Castle area.

DG is a U.S. owned investment and alternative technology development company based in the Washington, D.C. area. It is comprised of transportation, defense, and energy industry veterans that rely upon strong relationships with industrial participants to develop strategic synergies wherever possible.

Michael Darcy, CEO of DG said that he has already applied for a loan from the Export-Import Bank of the United States and is awaiting reply on whether funding for the plant will be granted. Darcy expects to hear from the loan bank within the next 60 days.

The plant would be a training facility of a wind turbine-manufacturing program called Advantage Wind Turbines. DG said they have plans to bring back some of the people laid off from the Metaldyne plant within the last year to staff the new company.

"Although this is only a step in what could be a potentially long process, and nothing is guaranteed, the news of DG wanting to bring jobs and invest back into the Metaldyne plant in New Castle is great news," said Rep. Saunders. "Just the talk of the possibility of 1,800 new jobs within the next two years brings hope to the people in the community."

The FTTH Council Europe released new figures yesterday for European FTTH penetration. The new data shows a market that is dynamic, if not as robust as the industry might hope.

The FTTH Council keeps tabs on the global economies where FTTH penetration has reached 1% of homes. Fifteen economies have achieved this status in Europe, the FTTH Council Europe reported. FTTH stalwarts Sweden, Norway, and Slovenia maintained their places in the top five in 2009; however, Lithuania jumped to the council’s number one spot with an 18 percent FTTH penetration rate. All four countries boast penetration rates greater than 10 percent, which the FTTH Council proclaimed "a significant milestone.”

Meanwhile, France and Portugal made the 1% penetration list for the first time. The council expects this rate to increase rapidly because both countries also rank in the top 10 economies in terms of FTTH availability.

The FTTH Council Europe has partnered with market analysis and consultancy firm IDATE to produce these rankings, as well as ancillary data regarding the European FTTH market. For example, Europe has reached 2.5 million FTTH subscribers -- 3.5 million if Russia one also considers Russia. Seven countries account for 77% of this total -- in descending order of total subscribers, Sweden, Italy, France, Lithuania, Norway, The Netherlands, and Denmark.

FTTH Council Europe President Karel Helsen noted that France became the second European G-20 country to reach the list, following Italy. "It is up to Germany and UK to increase their efforts to follow as soon as possible," Helsen urged.

While Germany and the UK, among other countries, may be lagging in terms of penetration, the figures show how quickly FTTH penetration is spreading worldwide. Two years ago, the FTTH Councils of North America, Europe, and Asia reported that there were only 14 economies in the world in which FTTH had reached a 1% penetration rate.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal regulators are hoping to find more wireless spectrum for mobile broadband services by reallocating some airwaves now assigned to television broadcasters and others.

Under a long-awaited proposal outlined by the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday, broadcasters and other existing spectrum holders would voluntarily give back some spectrum and share in proceeds raised by government auctions of those airwaves to wireless companies.

Wireless carriers have been clamoring for more spectrum as their customers increasingly check e-mail, update Facebook and watch video on the go. Broadband services are already choking in some markets, and next-generation services will tax wireless networks even more.

"Although the potential of mobile broadband is limitless, its oxygen supply is not," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a speech at the New America Foundation in Washington. "Spectrum - our airwaves - really is the oxygen of mobile broadband service. Without sufficient spectrum, we will starve mobile broadband of the nourishment it needs to thrive."

Finding more wireless spectrum will also be an important piece of the FCC's plan to bring affordable high-speed Internet connections to all Americans, particularly in rural America, Genachowski said. That plan, mandated by last year's stimulus bill, is due to Congress next month.

Genachowski said the broadband plan would include a proposal to finance wireless networks through the federal Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes telephone service in poor and rural areas through a surcharge on long-distance bills.

The FCC plan would set a goal of freeing 500 megahertz of wireless spectrum over the next decade. That would include spectrum licensed to companies through government auctions as well as unlicensed spectrum open to all, such as airwaves used for Wi-Fi networks. The wireless industry currently has about 500 megahertz of spectrum available for licensed use.

Genachowski said broadcast television spectrum is particularly attractive for broadband because those airwaves are not being put to efficient use even though they contain "billions of dollars of unlocked value." TV broadcasters hold nearly 300 megahertz of spectrum, but use that spectrum mostly to serve the 10 percent of American homes that still rely solely on over-the-air TV signals.

Genachowski stressed that the FCC's proposed "Mobile Future Auction" program would be voluntary for broadcasters and would allow them to retain enough spectrum to continue providing a free, over-the-air signal.

Still, the proposal has run into substantial opposition from the broadcast industry.

"As a one-to-many transmission medium, broadcasters are ready to make the case that we are far and away the most efficient users of spectrum in today's communications marketplace," Dennis Wharton, executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters, said in a statement. "We look forward to working with policymakers to help expand the rollout of broadband without threatening the future of free and local television."

Other pieces of the FCC proposal would allow other companies that hold wireless spectrum - including mobile satellite companies that provide communications services over satellite connections - to use their spectrum to deliver broadband or transfer their airwaves to other users.

In addition, the plan would encourage more use of unlicensed spectrum and new technologies that allow multiple users to share spectrum.

CTIA-The Wireless Association, a trade group, praised the new FCC proposals as "essential to the wireless industry's ability to continue to provide and expand Americans' access to broadband anywhere and anytime."

WASHINGTON (AP) - The government's plan to provide fast Internet connections to all Americans will have to include some basic instruction in Web 101, according to a new survey of Internet users and non-users.

The Federal Communications Commission's first-ever survey on Internet usage and attitudes concludes that those who aren't connected today need to be taught how to navigate the Web, find online information that is valuable to them and avoid hazards such as Internet scams.

The study, being released Tuesday, comes less than a month before the FCC is due to hand Congress policy recommendations on how to make affordable, high-speed Internet access a reality for everyone. The findings are certain to shape the policy recommendations in that plan, which was mandated by last year's stimulus bill.

The Obama administration has identified universal broadband as critical to driving economic development, producing jobs and expanding the reach of cutting-edge medicine and educational opportunities.

Part of the FCC broadband plan will focus on building networks in parts of the country that lack high-speed access - particularly rural America. Among other things, the plan will propose using the fund that subsidizes telephone service in poor and rural communities to pay for Internet connections and finding more airwaves for wireless broadband services.

But the survey findings show that the FCC plan must also focus on teaching people how to use the Internet and convincing them that it is relevant to their lives, said John Horrigan, FCC consumer research director and author of the survey.

The survey found that 35 percent of Americans do not use broadband at home, including 22 percent of adults who do not use the Internet at all. Of that 35 percent, 36 percent say it is too expensive, while 19 percent do not see the Internet as relevant to their lives. Another 22 percent lack what the FCC calls "digital literacy" skills. They fall into a category that includes people who are not comfortable with computers or who are scared of "bad things" on the Internet.

Among people who do not use broadband, 65 percent say there is too much pornography and offensive material on the Internet, 57 percent say it is too easy for personal information to be stolen online and 46 percent say the Internet is too dangerous for children.

The FCC's findings were based on telephone surveys of more than 5,000 adult Americans conducted in October and November of last year. The survey found that 78 percent of American adults use the Internet, including 6 percent who don't have a connection at home but get access at work or somewhere else, and 74 percent have Internet access at home, including 6 percent who use a dial-up connection.

Other findings include:

- Americans on average pay nearly $41 a month for broadband, and 70 percent of users pay for broadband as part of a bundle of telecommunications services.

- Among those who do not subscribe to broadband because it is too expensive, more than half said they would be willing to pay an average of $25 a month for the service.

- Only half of all rural Americans have broadband and one in 10 rural Americans who do not have broadband say it is not available where they live.

For questions asked of the larger group of 5,005 adult Americans, the margin of error was plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.

Diamonds are renowned for their seemingly flawless physical beauty and their interplay with light.Now researchers are taking advantage of the mineral's imperfections to control that light at the atomic scale, generating one photon at a time.

A team of engineers and applied physicists from Harvard University, the Technical University of Munich and Texas A&M has sculpted a novel nanowire from diamond crystal and shown that the wire can act as a source of single photons. The team reported its findings online Feb. 14 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

To create their diamond nanowire device, the researchers took advantage of the same physical processes that give some colored diamonds their hues. For example, when a diamond appears blue or yellow, the pure carbon of the diamond crystal has been sullied by scattered impurities that were incorporated into the carbon while the diamond was forming. Atoms of boron result in a blue diamond; atoms of nitrogen yield a yellow diamond.

The interloping atoms are trapped within their solid-state host, causing the perfect diamond latticework to bend to accommodate the imperfections and ultimately changing the electronic states in the atoms. In jewelry, the result is stunning color. In the nanowires, the result is a device that can generate a high flux of individual photons.

"The diamond nanowire device acts as a nanoscale antenna that funnels the emission of single photons from the embedded color center into a microscope lens," said lead researcher Marko Loncar of the School for Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard.

For the device, the researchers focused on diamond engineered with Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) centers, where nitrogen atoms are adjacent to vacancies in the surrounding diamond crystal lattice. Researchers have known about NV centers for some time, and have demonstrated their utility for quantum communications, quantum computing, and nanoscale magnetic-field sensing. But until now, researchers had not engineered the diamond host, yielding a complete device that can be integrated into existing technologies.

"Using a standard manufacturing process, the team has achieved the unique combination of a nanostructure with an embedded defect, all within a commercially available crystal," said Dominique Dagenais, an expert in NSF's Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems who is familiar with the team's work. "The resulting device may prove easy to couple into a standard optical fiber, Dagenais added. "This novel approach is a key technological step towards achieving fast, secure computing and communication."

The current product is an array with thousands of diamond nanowires--each only a few millionths of a meter tall and 200 billionths of a meter in diameter--sitting on top of the macroscopic diamond crystal from which they came.

Because the NV centers are not uniformly distributed in the original diamond crystal, each wire has its imperfection in a different location, resulting in varied coupling between the NV centers and the diamond nanowire antennas. In the future, a technique called ion implantation could be used to generate the defect centers at predetermined locations, optimizing the devices.

"This exciting result is the first time the tools of nanofabrication have been applied to diamond crystals in order to control the optical properties of a single defect," said Loncar. "We hope that the greater diamond community will be able to leverage the excellent performance of this single photon source."

Loncar's co-authors included graduate student Tom Babinec, research scholar Birgit Hausmann, graduate student Yinan Zhang, and postdoctoral student Mughees Khan, all at SEAS; graduate student Jero Maze in the department of physics at Harvard; and faculty member Phil R. Hemmer at Texas A&M University.

What is driving green building in homes? Pike Research, www.pikeresearch.com, Boulder, Colo., has released the Energy Efficient Homes study, which examines the U.S. market for energy-efficient products and services in both new home construction and remodeling industries.

According to Pike, as new home sales and remodeling activity slow, residential product and service categories have experienced a drop in business, but coming out of the recession a positive outlook about green products and services for homes is emerging.

The research highlights growth potential for key residential energy efficiency areas. While this does include Energy Star, research also shows home energy auditing and the home improvement market will also grow.

The home energy auditing business will triple from 2009 to 2014, growing from $8.1 billion to $23.4 billion. While there are a number of ways homeowner can do home energy audits, some whole home automation systems can track energy trends.

Pike Research shows the energy efficient home improvement market will grow from $38.3 billion in 2009 to $50.2 billion in 2014. This will include electrical systems, appliances, and HVAC (heating, ventilating, and air conditioning) systems, among others. Automated home technology can also help track some of the energy efficient trends in these systems.

Clint Wheelock, managing director, Pike Research, points to a few factors that will continue to make green building a top priority including new environmental awareness among consumers, government incentives, utility energy efficiency programs, and new offerings and rebates from product manufacturers.

1. Is structured wiring relevant in today's new home construction?

Definitely yes. It's common to hear end user refer to wireless as "good enough" because the Internet has become such an important center in our lives. But at the same time many of these users have not considered the important of the emerging technologies that have a mandatory reliance on a hard-wired structured wiring system in the home. Nothing is faster than a hard-wired home network today. Not 3G, not N, G or B Wi-Fi. If the end user wants the speeds and bandwidth necessary to support today's modern consumer electronics, make sure a wired-network is the backbone for the structured wiring system.

2. Does a home buyer pay more for a pre-wired home --- if so, approximately how much does it add to the cost?

The benchmark for a basic structured media system that includes telephone, video and data distributed network remain around 1% of the value of the home. The costs of basic structured wiring system in new construction remains relative to the cost of the home. The costs will always be lowest during the new construction phase, when the walls are open and the drywall has not been installed. This is a good time to consider stepping up to the Gigabit and HOME 6 data networks along with an active video distribution network, as these technologies will maintain the longest performance benefits to the homeowner. It took the market around three years to begin the transition from CAT 5e to CAT 6. Over the life of a new home, three years is a short amount of time.

3. What are the benefits to a home builder who pre-wires his homes?

Because the wires and cables reside in the walls, they are the most costly elements to upgrade after the drywall is up. If a contractor installs the fastest and most advanced cables available at the time of construction, then future upgrades become more profitable. For example, if a contractor installs CAT 6 cabling in a home, but terminates the data connectors with HOME 5e, then they have an upgrade path. They can come back to the homeowner in the future and provide a relatively low labor-cost upgrade by replacing the connectors with HOME 6 connectors.

4. With the growth of wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi, is structured wiring still necessary?

Wireless networking is valuable because of its convenience factor. But, wireless remains a secondary system that retains a reliance on a hard-wired structured wiring system. The wireless needs to connect to something from the ISP, right? Nothing today is as fast as a wired Gigabit data network in the home. Likewise, nothing is more reliable. It certainly is convenient to access the Internet over Wi-Fi using a smartphone, laptop of netbook. It really is a trade-off between convenience and performance. Although an "N" router may appear to be "good enough" today, as more consumer electronic technologies place a reliance on Internet access, today's wireless technologies may not have the necessary bandwidth to support all the simultaneous connections. Wired networks do perform best today and have excessive bandwidth to continue to support advanced uses. more...

In a typical year, millions of houses are built. Each house will last 50 to 100 years. Today each new house encumbers society with a debt of energy required to operate it over its life. The vast majority of houses built today are old-fashioned energy hogs and each one is a missed opportunity.

Energy visionaries have set their sights on homes that create more than they consume. In ten to twenty years, every new building could be a "zero-energy building,” or "net zero.” The technology exists today; all we lack is the proper motivation.

A  zero-energy building is one that creates more energy than it consumes over the course of a year. In order to achieve this feat, a zero-energy building will be small, efficient and grid-connected. Here are some key attributes:

• Smart design is the key. Homes must be designed for their climates and sited to take maximum advantage of nature’s gifts of sun, wind, water and light. Designs must make the highest and best use of material.
• Small homes use less energy. All modern needs (and many of our desires) can be accommodated in 400 to 500 square feet per person.
• Highly efficient structures that incorporate super-insulation and air-tight shells will not need central heating systems. Insulation uses no energy and never wears out .
• Renewable energy generation, such as photovoltaic (solar electric) panels or wind generators , will be essential. These systems must be connected to the utility grid. They will generate more energy than the building needs on summer days, but will require some energy from external sources at night and during winter.

The challenge is no longer technical. The equipment and know-how exist today. What we need is a commitment to this destination and a clear roadmap showing how to get there.

One big obstacle for designers and builders is that they don’t have a good way to estimate the efficiency of their projects during design. A number of proposals are now under review to establish a building efficiency metric and labeling system. One of these is the Energy Performance Score, which is simply an estimate of how much energy a building would use each year. A typical new home may have an EPS around 120. An "efficient” home might be 50, while a zero-energy home would be, well… 0.  You can see that we have a long way to go from our current practice to reach zero energy.

Since on-site renewable energy generation may not be possible for all building sites, ultimately some homes would have to generate excess energy. And despite our yearning for decentralization, we will always need a utility grid with central power generation.

Enterprising young designers from around the world put net zero  principles into practice every year for the Solar Decathlon, a competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. Twenty teams of college and university students compete to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house.

Zero-energy doesn’t have to be expensive. Many Habitat for Humanity chapters around the U.S. build very efficient homes. In Bend, Oregon, where I work,  the local Habitat projects use small size, high efficiency and solar energy to achieve EPS ratings as low as 23. With annual energy bills of only a few hundred dollars, this is truly affordable housing. From there, it’s just a small step to true zero energy.

Bruce Sullivan, Green Building Consultant with the Earth Advantage, Inc., has been involved in energy efficient construction since 1983. He has worked for the Oregon State University Extension Service, Eugene Water & Electric Board and Iris Communications, Inc. In 1996, he established Oikos.com, one of the world’s first web sites dedicated to green building. In 2006, Bruce’s personal high-performance residence, built by SunTerra Homes, was honored with the NAHB Research Center’s EnergyValue Housing Award and the NAHB Green Building Award. Bruce is based in Earth Advantage’s Bend office. He can be reached at bsullivan@earthadvantage.org.

Motorola Inc. said it would split into two publicly traded companies by the first quarter of next year, the company's latest attempt to reinvigorate its disparate businesses.

The Schaumburg, Ill., company has long sought a break-up but recently shifted its strategic plans. The change was reported by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.

Motorola Thursday said it will group together its core handset unit with the unit that makes television set-top boxes, placing them under co-Chief Executive Sanjay Jha.

Fellow co-CEO Greg Brown would oversee a separate company selling two-way radios, bar code scanners and gear for telecommunications carriers.

"We have been at times a drain on resources on other businesses, and we've reduced shareholder value," Mr. Jha said on a conference call, adding the split would add value to both companies.

Under the plan, the two companies would each account for roughly half of Motorola's current sales, which were $22 billion last year.

They will share the Motorola brand. Mr. Jha's company will own the brand, and license it out for use to Mr. Brown's business.

The break-up will occur as a tax-free dividend of shares in a new company to existing Motorola shareholders.

Two years ago, the company said it intended to spin out its handset unit by the third quarter of 2009 and hired Mr. Jha to run it. But the unit's slumping sales and deep losses forced the company to put that plan on hold.

More recently Motorola's board and its bankers explored a sale of the set-top box business, but failed to get offers that they felt were attractive enough.

Investors, including billionaire activist shareholder Carl Icahn, have long pushed for a break-up of Motorola, because there are few natural connections between the various divisions.

"What they do in the next six months would either validate these plans or cause a train wreck," said Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner.

The separation comes as the company looks to turn around its various flagging units. The higher profile handset unit has shown some signs of life with the success of its Droid smart phone, which benefited from a heavy push by Verizon Wireless.

The unit, though, remains under pressure as it changes its focus to a more profitable segment of the cellphone market, but still faces competitive pressure from the likes of Apple Inc.'s iPhone. Mr. Jha said last month he expects the unit to return to profitability by the fourth quarter, putting it on a sounder footing for the spinoff.

"They're doing well on their smart-phone strategy, and there remains a lot of opportunity there," said Matthew Thornton, an analyst at Avian Securities LLC.

The various other businesses continue to see declines as a result of weakened consumer and government spending. Customers have held back spending on entertainment, keeping sales of new set-top boxes in check. Local governments, many of which are facing budget deficits, are less inclined to invest in new public-radio systems.

Mr. Brown's company will assume Motorola's outstanding debt, which is expected to be about $3.3 billion at the time of the split.

(Indianapolis) –For the second year in a row, Indiana has ranked at or near the top of a national survey tracking the installation of large scale wind developments in the United States in 2009. In the last two years, Indiana has gone from 50th to 13th among wind-producing states.

According to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), Indiana installed 905 Megawatts (MW) of wind power in 2009. That puts Indiana second only to Texas for the year. In 2008, Indiana was singled out by AWEA as having the fastest wind power growth in the U.S.

"The business-friendly environment we’ve created is leading to success for more renewable energy installations in Indiana,” said Lt. Governor Becky Skillman, who oversees the Office of Energy Development (OED). "Low costs, low regulation, and local government sophistication regarding wind power issues has kept development levels increasing.”

The AWEA Year End Market report for 2009 shows a total of some 10,000 MW of wind power was installed during the year, bringing the total amount of wind power in the United States to 35,000 MW. Indiana’s 905 MW increase was second to Texas, where nearly 2,300 MW became operational.

The full AWEA report is available at http://www.awea.org/publications/reports/4Q09.pdf.

Indiana has five privately developed wind farms in operation generating over 1,000 MW of wind power. A sixth facility is under construction, and a number of other wind farms are proposed. It is projected that there could be approximately 3,000 MW of wind power in operation in Indiana by 2013. 1 MW of electricity is enough to power 300-500 Hoosier homes. In addition to the farms themselves, 11 Hoosier companies manufacture wind turbine components. These companies employ 1,000 Hoosier workers. That number is expected to jump by at least 500 in 2010.

"Wind power is just one facet of Indiana’s energy portfolio,” said OED Director Brandon Seitz. "We continue to add alternative and renewable fuel projects and facilities including wind, solar, biomass and clean coal.”

The Office of Energy Development (OED) was created in December 2005 as an extension of the Indiana energy office. Under the leadership of Lt. Governor Becky Skillman, OED is responsible for the state’s energy policy. For more information visit www.energy.in.gov. or follow OED on twitter, IndianaEnergy. Save The Date: WIndiana 2010 July 21-22, Indianapolis.

For updates from the Lt. Governor and the agencies she oversees, please sign up at www.in.gov/lg/

This year we are attempting to set a Guinness World Record™ for the "Largest online maths competition.”

Help us to set the record by registering for World Maths Day today!  Don’t forget that teachers and parents can participate this year too.  This year’s event has a brand new format with exciting new levels so make sure you register and get plenty of practise before 3 March!

Let us know what you are doing to help us Unite the World in Numbers and set a new World Record!

The organizers of Supercomm have decided to pull the plug on this year's event, citing poor financial projections for the telecommunications tradeshow.

Supercomm is owned by the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and USTelecom, trade groups serving telecom and broadband providers. The 2010 event had been scheduled for Oct. 26-28 at Chicago's McCormick Place convention center.

"ExpoComm Events LLC has elected not to renew the contract to manage a Supercomm event in 2010 after careful review and counsel with co-owning Supercomm associations, TIA and USTelecom," the organizations said in a brief statement released Monday.

ExpoComm Events is jointly owned by E.J. Krause & Associates and Reed Exhibitions.

Last fall's Supercomm 2009, held in Chicago, was managed by ExpoComm Events. The show's organizers claimed more than 6,000 people attended and that the floor comprised more than 120,000 gross square feet of exhibit space. The show, first held in 1988, was disbanded in 2005 after TIA and USTelecom each decided to produce its own show. In 2006, TIA launched Globalcomm and USTelecom launched TelecomNext, according to Tradeshow Week.

The groups subsequently decided to team up again, staging a show called NXTcomm in 2007 and 2008 before reviving the Supercomm brand with last year's event.

There won't be a Supercomm this year. The question now is when we'll see the next one.

In a terse statement released this morning, Reed Expo's EXPOCOMM Events LLC, which had taken over management of the show last year and moved it from June to October, said that it would not renew its contract to produce Supercomm in 2010.

"The SUPERCOMM co-owning associations have also decided against producing a SUPERCOMM event in 2010," added the release.

Those "co-owning associations" would be TIA and USTelecom, which partnered on the show for 18 years, split to do their own events after the 2005 Supercomm, then reconciled in late 2006 to produce NXTcomm in 2007 when their individual shows failed to meet expectations. NXTcomm was renamed Supercomm for 2009 in an attempt to regain the old mojo. Apparently, it didn't work.

We'll provide more details as they become available.

At three separate industry events last week, engineers said they are gearing up to deliver in 2011 chips that can handle serial data streams running at 25 Gbits/second to drive next-generation 100 and 400 Gbit/second networks. But they say it's still a mystery how—or if—they can deliver follow-on components for the terabit networks today's Internet data centers are already demanding.

The kinds of jobs required to run today's Web 2.0 services such as Google and Facebook can completely overwhelm current 10 Gbit/s Ethernet links in the warehouse-sized data centers those companies use. Such data centers could use hundreds of 100 Gbit/s Ethernet links today, although standards for such networks are still being completed.

"There are no 100 Gbit Ethernet products I can use now," said Donn Lee, a member of the networking team at Facebook, speaking to the Ethernet Alliance at an event here. But the kinds of MapReduce/Hadoop jobs Facebook developers and others use "can drive tremendous needs for bandwidth with just the press of a button," Lee said.

Facebook is not alone. Google and others have said they will need Terabit Ethernet products as early as 2013.

That's because today's big Internet data centers use three or more tiers of networks to aggregate and link traffic from warehouses of standard PC servers. Today's servers typically use Gbit Ethernet on their motherboards, driving demand for 10 Gbit links to aggregate traffic from seven-foot racks of servers and Terabit Ethernet to link multiple rows of racks.

Server motherboards are just starting to migrate to 10 Gbit Ethernet links, driving needs for even faster aggregation nets. With networking pressures rising in the data centers, carriers and service providers have been joining chip and systems companies at the table in next-generation Ethernet standards meetings.

For example, Amazon.com, Comcast, Google, Netflix, Sprint and Verizon have participated in the IEEE 802.3ba group that is setting the 100G Ethernet standards. "This is very different from when we were looking at 10 Gbit Ethernet," said John D'Ambrosia, chairman of IEEE 802.3ba who has worked on several generations of Ethernet standards.

In response to complaints reporting a loss in black level performance in its plasma TVs over time, Panasonic has issued a statement.

It admitted that "background brightness will increase," but described the change as "automatic" over the TVs' lifespan and part of normal operation in order to "achieve the optimal picture performance throughout the life of the set."

It also said that newer plasma TVs will include a "more gradual change in Black Level over time," but made no mention of a fix for existing plasma TVs, whose owners first noted the issue at enthusiast Web site AVS forum.

Here's the entire statement as e-mailed to CNET, entitled "Automatic Control of Contrast over Operational Lifetime."

Panasonic Viera plasma HDTVs deliver exceptional picture performance throughout the lifetime of these products. Various elements and material characteristics of all electronic displays change with use over time. In order to achieve the optimal picture performance throughout the life of the set, Panasonic Viera plasma HDTVs incorporate an automatic control which adjusts an internal driving voltage at predetermined intervals of operational hours.

As a result of this automatic voltage adjustment, background brightness will increase from its initial value. After several years of typical use, the internal material characteristics will stabilize and no additional automatic voltage adjustments are required. The Black Level at this stabilized point will yield excellent picture performance.

The newest Viera plasma HDTVs incorporate an improved automatic control which applies the voltage adjustments in smaller increments. This results in a more gradual change in the Black Level over time.

More questions than answers
I first contacted Panasonic seeking comment on January 11 , and the company has not responded until this statement, which was e-mailed to me Wednesday, February 3. Though arguably better than silence, the statement leaves too many major questions unanswered. more...

After the recent approval of regulations by the California Energy Commission (CEC) that set energy-efficiency limits in California for televisions, several other states have introduced similar legislation. Since the start of the 2010 legislative session, states such as Massachusetts, New York, Wisconsin and Washington have all introduced energy-efficiency bills that regulate televisions, with some bills including other consumer-electronics products. The bills in Washington and Massachusetts set size limits for televisions and establish energy-use limits for televisions in standby and on-mode. This is a list of the states with energy-efficiency bills and their corresponding bill number:

• MA -- House Bill 3124 and Senate Bill 1524 concerning electronics
• NY -- Assembly Bill 9387 concerning televisions
• WA -- House Bill 2416 and Senate Bill 6489 concerning electronics
• WI -- Senate Bill 450 and Assembly Bill 649 concerning electronics

The Vicksburg District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Miss., are asking the fiber optics industry to bid on a contract to provide several thousand feet of fiber optic cable and related supplies.

The solicitation number for this federal request for quotation (RFQ) is W912EE-10-T-0021. Specifically, the Corps of Engineers needs:

-- 6,880 feet of Corning outdoor fiber optic cable, part number FAN-BT25-06 or equivalent;
-- 8,000 feet of Belden multi-conductor cable, part number Belden 5300F1 or equivalent;
-- 48 UniCam multimode composite ferrule connectors;
-- 10 Corning buffer tube fan-out kits, part number FAN-BT25-06 or equivalent;
-- nine NVT-214A-M video transceivers, part number NV-214A-M;
-- eight Corning wall-mountable fiber connector enclosure, part number WCH-02P-1215T or  equivalent; and
-- eight NVT-NV-872 active video receivers, part number NV-872-A.

Companies interested should submit price quotes no later than 12 Feb. 2010. Send quotes to Leah McCain at the Army Corps of Engineers Vicksburg District by e-mail at Leah.B.McCAin@usace.army.mil, or by post at U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ATTN: Leah B. McCain, 4155 East Clay St., Vicksburg, MS 39183.

For questions or concerns, contact Leah McCain by phone at 601-631-7905, or at the e-mail address above. More information is online at https://www.fbo.gov/spg/USA/COE/DACA38/W912EE-10-T-0021/listing.html.

Fiber-optic technology proved popular once again in the latest round of U.S. rural broadband stimulus funding. At least nine of the 14 projects announced today will use fiber for middle-mile or last-mile networks.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced today the 14 Recovery Act Broadband Infrastructure projects that will receive $309,923,352 through funding made available by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. An additional $3,551,887 in private investment brings the total to $313,475,239. Altogether, Congress awarded USDA $2.5 billion in Recovery Act funding to help bring broadband services to rural un-served and underserved communities.

This is the second major funding announcement. The first occured in mid-December.

This most recent list of funded projects, part of the Department of Agriculture's Rural Utilities Service (RUS) Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP), includes: more...

NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. -- Mindspeed Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: MSPD), a leading supplier of semiconductor solutions for network infrastructure applications, today announced the first in a family of highly integrated and cost-effective application-specific SoC solutions targeting the low-power requirements and heavy processing demands of an unprecedented variety of emerging next-generation mobile broadband basestation platforms, from enterprise femtocells to macrocells.

Mindspeed(R)'s Transcede(TM) family of processors helps provide the critical, structural underpinnings for the rapidly evolving Mobile Internet, which has been called the next great computing cycle capable of delivering 10x growth in user devices, as compared to previous cycles. The Transcede processor family delivers a new class of high-performance silicon designed to meet the huge increase in basestation diversity and computational complexity caused by the Mobile Internet's migration from a voice-centric 2G/3G mobile network to a data centric 3G+/4G mobile network. This new class of silicon will enable the development of a wide range of equipment, some for deploying services to a handful of subscribers and others for serving hundreds or thousands of subscribers. It replaces today's traditional approach, which combines a complex, expensive and inflexible set of general-purpose digital signal processors (DSPs) plus field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and network processing units (NPUs).

"This is an important milestone for Mindspeed, as we take our deep expertise in carrier-class, multi-core processing from our widely-deployed voice-over-IP platforms and extend it to key initiatives in the rapidly growing wireless-infrastructure market, especially in China and other high-growth markets," said Raouf Halim, chief executive officer of Mindspeed. "Wireless carriers are upgrading their networks to 3G and 4G so they can meet the growing demands of what IDC recently forecasted will be one billion mobile devices accessing the Internet over the next four years, while working with limited available radio spectrum.

"Our Transcede family of SoCs is the first to provide such a high level of integration aimed specifically at meeting this increasingly difficult challenge," Halim added. "Manufacturers can now build a wide variety of platforms, from picocells to macrocells, that leverage the same Transcede device and Mindspeed's scalable software architecture."

The Transcede family of SoCs integrates an unprecedented 26 programmable processors into a single device, including two ARM(R) Cortex A9(R) multi-core symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processors, 10 CEVA(R) DSPs, and 10 DSP accelerators. The solution fully supports the complete processing needs of single- and multi-sector basestations using the wideband code-division multiple access (W-CDMA), long term evolution (LTE), LTE time-division duplex (TD-LTE, in China), time-division synchronous code division multiple access (TD-SCDMA, in China), and/or WiMAX air-interface standards. The Transcede family of SoCs can deliver three sectors of LTE processing in a single device, while still providing substantial processing headroom, allowing manufactures to deploy their own value-added features as part of an overall Transcede-based solution.

Today's Juniper/Polycom partnership to offer combined networking/IP video solutions is more than just a reaction to Cisco. It's a recognition that bandwidth-rich IP is now deep enough into enterprise and carrier networks that true video applications will — at last — begin to become a reality.

Let's look at the business realities behind this technology agreement. The economy — not to mention terrorism concerns — continues to tamp down business travel, yet companies rely on collaboration more than ever to get business done. The Web and social media trends are pointing to more and more real-time collaboration, while consumer video sites like YouTube show the power of easy video sharing.

But putting collaboration and video together is still in its early phases. Enterprise-class videoconferencing certainly isn't anything new, but it remains a specialty app. More ad-hoc video conferencing, via things like Apple iSight or Skype or GoogleTalk set-ups — show the power of more ubiquitous IP video, but remain largely in the realm of techies and teens.

But the big push by major IP networking vendors such as Cisco and Juniper — along with telecom service providers including AT&T, Verizon and others — into true enterprise IP video capabilities holds the promise to make IP video mainstream.

Two major opportunities loom large: one, weaving IP video capabilities into today's IP PBX/IP phone corporate desktop set-ups; and two, integrating IP video into vertical industry solutions, especially in industries like health care, where interacting via video rather than just text or voice adds so much to the communications equation.

Today's Juniper/Polycom hook-up and Cisco's recent acquisition of Tandberg may most immediately effect the battle over IP video behind the corporate firewall, within the enterprise. Both pairings will also likely offer IP video-as-a-service directly, as well as ultimately with service provider customers.

Indeed, like all enterprise applications, IP video in the long run may be best delivered and most affordably consumed as a managed service delivered by service providers. That's why telecom operators should be paying close attention to the sudden, intense attention this market is receiving from heated rivals Cisco and Juniper.

The emergence of IP video will require service providers to make some partnership bets as well as begin to look more closely at embedding video capabilities in the vertical solutions they cook up. The network needs attention too, as prioritization of enterprise IP video streams and the quality of experience guarantees service providers can offer on real-time video, in particular for links between enterprises, will be a competitive must-have.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has taken an active and financial role in plans for both the smart grid and broadband development, and it’s now encouraging the two industries to use one another. Speaking Thursday to attendees of the Cleantech Investor Summit, FCC energy and environmental director Nick Sinai said that the FCC will make specific recommendations on how to bring broadband to the smart grid through the National Broadband plan due to Congress in March.  

According to a report from green blog Earth2Tech, the recommendations will center on three areas: how to promote open standards and commercial networks, how policies can encourage utilities to provide their customers with real-time open access to energy data and ways to use federal spectrum bands for utilities’ smart grid deployments.

Earth2Tech reports that Sinai said the FCC will look at ways to remove disincentives to using commercial networks as many utilities have maintained they need to build their own networks to be successful in the smart grid. For those utilities that do build their own private networks, Sinai said the FCC will encourage them to operate in the same band in order to drive down costs and encourage open standards. The FCC is working with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) to look at available federal spectrum bands, Sinai said.

These recommendations support an approach that Successful.com CEO Craig Settles recommended after the first round of smart-grid stimulus funds were doled out last October. Community broadband projects that got green lighted in the first round of broadband stimulus fund grants will have a better chance at success if they show how their proposals can be bolstered through partnership with a utility. It’s an idea that more utilities are embracing given the steep costs of deploying a private network and the enthusiasm from the telecom industry surrounding the grid.

The major carriers in the US have had initial reviews with the FCC’s utilities practice group to outline their plans for broadband connectivity and are in the process of providing more detail, according to Sprint’s national program manager for utilities Robert Gustin. He said that Sprint has seen increased business stemming from the Department of Energy’s smart-grid stimulus grants and is working with its more than 100 utility partners to explore how WiMax can play a role in their deployments going forward.

"Every one of our engagements with utilities is unique,” Gustin said. "They may have a different regulatory environment. They may be in a different position financially. It just depends how diversified they are, whether they have global reach or are only here domestically…Every business case is unique, but we have a very good idea of the applications we have to resolve – network coverage, network reliably, bandwidth issues, get the cost points of data transport – these are all very important parts of it.”

This must be the fastest evolution of a technical conference in history. It started last October with the bare germ of an idea for a Smart Grid conference. Then (fanfare!), on January 19, the joint IEEE/National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Innovative Smart Grid Technologies conference opened at the NIST facility in Gaithersburg, Md., drawing roughly 700 attendees to its three days of panels and technical sessions.

Not only that, on the first day of the conference, NIST issued the 145-page "NIST Framework and Roadmap for Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, Release 1.0.” It’s an initial list of standards, a preliminary cybersecurity strategy, and other elements of a framework for an interoperable Smart Grid.

The document follows last June’s "Report to NIST on the Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Roadmap” from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).

The new NIST report’s executive summary says that it "describes a high-level conceptual reference model for the Smart Grid, identifies 75 existing standards that are applicable (or likely to be applicable) to the ongoing development of the Smart Grid, specifies 15 high-priority gaps and harmonization issues (in addition to cyber security) for which new or revised standards and requirements are needed, documents action plans with aggressive time lines by which designated standards-setting organizations (SSOs) will address these gaps, and describes the strategy to establish requirements and standards to help ensure Smart Grid cyber security.” more...

Intel has designs on the nascent home energy management business, following Google, Microsoft, Apple, Panasonic, and dozens of smaller tech companies.

Intel last week launched a Web site dedicated to its Home Dashboard Concept, a touch-screen display designed to help families control and reduce energy use. The Atom-based device will let people record video messages to other family members and, through third-party applications, let people look up information on online yellow pages or track packages over the Internet.

For Intel, the energy dashboard is another attempt to crack into the consumer electronics market. "Computing in the home is going to be a lot more than just the PC," Intel CEO Paul Otellini said during a brief demo of the energy dashboard at CES.

Seeing a potential new revenue source, other tech companies are jockeying into home energy management with different technology approaches, a situation that's creating a crowded market of suppliers and myriad choices for consumers. Pike Research forecasts that there will be more than 28 million energy displays installed by 2015, with 11 million people accessing home energy data from Web-based dashboards and 2.6 million from mobile phones.

A patent application from Apple, unearthed last week, described a system to optimize power for a network of electronics, such as laptops, solar chargers, and iPods.

Apple characteristically is taking a somewhat unique approach, relying on a power line standard that would allow a dedicated Apple device to efficiently send power to plugged-in devices. Consumers could track electricity use and get ideas on how to reduce consumption through a small LCD screen, according to the patent.

Microsoft and Google have developed Web applications for tracking home energy use, although they differ significantly in features.

Microsoft is seeking to partner with utilities installing smart meters to offer its Hohm application to customers, who can get online access to utility bills and real-time snapshots of electricity use. For every consumer, though, Hohm provides recommendations on how to cut electricity and gas consumption, based on a lengthy questionnaire.

Google's PowerMeter, by contrast, is geared mainly at surfacing usage information to help consumers find ways to cut back on bills. It has signed on with a few utilities and smart meter makers to offer the energy-tracking dashboard through smart meters. It also offers that data through a home-monitoring device called The Energy Detective (TED) from Energy Inc., a company that 3M's venture arm invested in last week. more...

Barriers to the take-up of cloud computing by enterprises are falling and previously reluctant companies are starting to use the cloud to deliver their IT services, say analysts.

According to sourcing consultancy TPI, traditional barriers are being broken down and large enterprises are beginning to implement plans for cloud computing.

Arthur Bolton, director at TPI, says, "Cloud computing has been seen as only relevant for small and medium-sized companies. But we are seeing this change and large enterprises we work with are engaged in work to implement cloud computing."

Big companies are still in early adopter phase. But the fact that they have begun demonstrates that companies have found ways to overcome barriers to entry, he says.

Bolton cites four key barriers to large companies adopting cloud computing: security, functionality, flexibility and auditing.

Security fears are diminishing and functionality gaps are being filled, but flexibility and auditing remain major stumbling blocks.

Security - the barriers are coming down

Security has always been seen as the biggest barrier to putting applications in the cloud. Trusting a supplier with business-critical data has been a step too far for many large companies. Businesses have been rightly afraid that their data might fall into the wrong hands if they lose control of its security.

But Bolton says this is changing. He says suppliers of cloud computing do not want customers auditing their security but they do not mind independent standards organisations doing so."They are now willing to put in place security that meets industry standards such as ISO," he says.

Functionality - the barriers are coming down

When moving from an in-house service to one in the cloud there will inevitably be gaps in functionality, says Bolton. A cloud computing service will not have all the features of the in-house service and businesses will have to fill gaps. But Bolton says, "Suppliers are working pretty hard in coming up with new releases of products that increase functionality. Customers are having to fill fewer gaps."

Flexibility - barriers not moving

Cloud computing is sold as a way to make it easier and cheaper to increase or decrease the volume of services used. But Bolton says in practice this is not the case for large enterprise services.

To make cloud computing work, businesses will need be able to pay for services as they use them. When business is good and they use a lot they pay more. When sales volumes are low, they will use less ERP and will therefore pay less. They can increase and decrease usage seamlessly.

But Bolton warns that true pay-as-you-use models do not exist for enterprise software.

Auditing - barriers will never move but there is an answer

Suppliers of cloud computing will never want customers auditing their systems. But they could be given control over the audit. "If they can agree on the audits customers will have more confidence," says Bolton.

Cloud computing has yet to take off in the large corporate sector. It is short of a poster boy in the form of a household name going public about a project.

This would kick-start the adoption of cloud services within large companies. The deal will need three characteristics. It will need to be a multimillion-pound deal signed by a FTSE 100 company that provides business-critical applications in the cloud.

After a flurry of announcements from programmers, operators and TV set-makers at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show about their plans to launch new 3D high-definition channels, network engineers and technology vendors are now grappling with the reality of how to produce and deliver 3D content cost-effectively using as much of their existing 2D infrastructure as possible.

"There are always the minor details of how to implement things,” said Ahmad Ouri, chief marketing officer for Technicolor, which has created a platform for producing 3D Blu-ray discs in Los Angeles as well as a 3D testbed in London for broadcast applications such as live ingest and logo insertion. "It's always easier to announce things and figure out how to do it after the fact.”

The newly formed MPEG Industry Forum 3DTV Working Group held its first meeting at CES, to discuss a standards-based model for transmitting 3D to the home; vendors such as Panasonic and JVC showed professional 3D production equipment alongside consumer products in their booths at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Network executives could also be seen checking out the latest 3D sets all across the CES floor, some of which have the ability to convert 2D to 3D content directly in the set.

There are plenty of networks in hurry-up mode, though some are further ahead than others. After two years of testing, ESPN plans to launch its 3D channel, ESPN 3D, in June. That's about the same time that DirecTV will introduce three 3D channels (two linear, one on-demand) with content from CBS, NBC, MTV, AEG, HDNet and Fox Sports. And Discovery will launch a new 3D channel in partnership with Sony and IMAX next year.

CBS Senior VP of East Coast Operations Bob Ross said that CBS is still in the early stages of formulating its 3D plans. He was canvassing the floor at CES, checking out myriad 3D sets as well as new professional 3D gear, such as a Panasonic 3D HD camcorder with two lenses for capturing the left- and right-eye feeds necessary for 3D. "I've seen more 3D than I can take,” Ross said.

There is much to figure out. According to Ross, CBS still isn't sure what 3D format it will deliver. The choices are full resolution to each eye, which would require more bandwidth; or frame-compatible 3D, which uses spatial compression to squeeze 3D within standard HD capacity by putting the left- and right-eye images either side by side or one on top of the other. "You either have to give something up to do it, or double the rate,” he said. more...

PARTY STARTERS: The words "Internet connectivity" showed up on lots of audio and video products at CES. The Sony Dash (available in April for $199) is a bit of both - a table-radio-sized, Wi-Fi connected device with a 7-inch color touch screen.

Building on Chumby architecture, Dash will deliver movies and TV shows from Netflix, free Internet radio stations and instant access to more than 1,000 "apps," including popular social networking, news, weather, traffic, sports and more. I wanna wake up with one!

Skype videophone technology moves into the living room this year as a feature of new, Internet-connected Panasonic and LG TVs. Should be great for (displaced) family reunions.

BEST E-READER: At least a dozen brands, including Samsung and RCA, jumped into the growing e-Reader market at CES, with most products copping the look and e-ink technology of Amazon's Kindle.

Digital picture frame maker Sungale had the cheapest at $169 - bet it's down to $99 by year's end.

Doing my heart good was the Sprint Skiff, also backed by publishing giant Hearst. This ultrathin, 11.5-inch touch-screen tablet will wirelessly deliver your daily newspaper and favorite magazines in a format that closely resembles the print versions - down to type styles and page layout.

Full color screen versions with animated graphics are also in the "works," if Apple doesn't co-opt the market with the much-rumored iSlate.

EVERYTHING'S COMING UP HIGH TECH: Ford is marketing to the tech-savvy auto buyer as the voice- and touch-screen-activated Sync control system expands later this year with a next-generation version called MyFordTouch.

New features include a Wi-Fi hub for back seat (only, we hope!) Web surfers and connected game players.

Texas Instruments, Whirlpool, Sensory and Tyco Electronics used CES to preview a near-future "Magic Kitchen" operated with voice command, face recognition and the wave of a hand. Phase one will feature an Internet-connected display, projected onto the countertop, serving up recipes and appliance-operating manuals, plus news, weather and more.

ECO-TECH: Lots of "green" consciousness was oozing at this year's CES. Most exciting was a display of Panasonic's highly efficient Residential Fuel Cell, already available in Japan for about $6,000.

This refrigerator-sized power plant makes electricity from natural gas and hydrogen (from the air), storing the power in a battery and using the processing heat to warm a 53-gallon water tank to 149 degrees. Bring it on!

Owing to the Great Recession of 2009, we are all intimately familiar with the impact the global economy can have on individuals Americans near and far, from U.S. Capitol corridors to the Wall Street trading floors to the Silicon Valley laboratories to our very own kitchen tables where the financial distresses of the past year were often debated.

But brewing behind the scenes is another economic battle of global proportions, one that also impacts each American on a personal level but has received comparatively little attention from the Obama administration – U.S.-China global trade relations.

China is now the world’s top exporter, with the country’s customs agency releasing figures Sunday showing its 2009 exports exceeded $1.2 trillion. This past year, China also emerged as the world’s largest automobile market and the world’s biggest steel manufacturer. 

China’s growing global dominance causes particular concern in light of numerous policy disagreements heating up in Washington. Friction is building between the United States and China, and it’s time for all of us to pay attention. We are on the brink of a trade war with an uncertain behemoth, and recent policy decisions from Washington are fanning the flame.

In the past few months, the United States has imposed anti-dumping duties on Chinese-made pipes and high tariffs to discourage the import of Chinese-made tires. Likewise, China has reciprocated with government regulations that would grant preference to technologies with intellectual property indigenous to China, excluding the U.S. technology industry at large from selling to the Chinese government. The Chinese government has also imposed tight Internet controls on its 300 million users, blocking popular U.S. sites such as YouTube and Facebook and making it exceedingly difficult for individuals to register their own Web sites. more...

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January 7, 2010

Military photonics experts at Picometrix LLC in Ann Arbor, Mich., are developing a fiber optic test system for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter under terms of a $3 million Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) phase-2 Air Force contract, announced today.

Picometrix experts will develop a prototype terahertz quality fiber optic handheld scanner based on the Picometrix fiber-coupled T-Ray 4000 photonics instrument to ensure proper fit of the radar-evading coated exterior surfaces of the F-35 Lightning II jet fighter. Picometrix is a subsidiary of Advanced Photonix Inc.

The contract continues feasibility research that Picometrix finished in 2009. If successful, the phase-2 dedicated T-Ray 4000 prototype system would lead to deployment of several production electro-optical systems in phase-3, company officials say.

The U.S. Navy, Air Force, Marines, and U.S. allies say they plan to buy more than 3,000 F-35 aircraft from 2013 through 2035. The F-35 will have a combination of advanced stealth with supersonic speed and high agility, sensor fusion, network-enabled capabilities, and advanced sustainment.

The handheld scanner that Picometrix develops under this contract will be a plug-in accessory to the system, making it an option for the company's T-Ray 4000 instrument. The scanner could be used for any aircraft, and could be adapted for other applications such as measuring coating thickness, subsurface inspection, surface topography measurements, measurement of coating tapers, and coating cure states.

A handheld scanner could also be applicable for homeland security applications such as airport personnel scanning for explosives and suicide bombers, Picometrix officials say. For more information contact Picometrix online at www.picometrix.com.

Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) Chief Executive Ivan Seidenberg said the company's profit fell more than analysts expected in 2009, blaming the drop on pension payments.

While he characterized 2009 as "a good, solid year for us," he said profit would be down roughly 13 cents to 15 cents a share from 2008, when the company earned $2.54 a share.

"Most of that will be pension headwinds," he said at a Citi conference in San Francisco.

Analysts had forecast that Verizon would post lower earnings in 2009 -- although not as low as Seidenberg's comments suggest. They estimated, on average, that the company would earn $2.45 a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

The company shares closed 2.86 percent lower on the New York Stock Exchange.

Seidenberg, however, offered an upbeat assessment of the mobile business, saying the company added more subscribers than the 1 million it expected in the fourth quarter

"In light of a very difficult economy, we saw good sustained growth there," said Seidenberg, whose company introduced the highly touted Droid smartphone during the final months of the year.

He also expressed interest in taking full ownership of Verizon Wireless through a buyout of partner Vodafone Group Plc (VOD.L), which owns 45 percent.

The future of Verizon Wireless has been among the most talked about issues facing both parent companies. Analysts have raised several possibilities, including a buyout by Verizon, a sale to the public, or simply a merger of the two parent companies.

Seidenberg said he would consider a buyout of Vodafone, but only "if the price were right." But he also downplayed the prospects of such a deal, at least in the near term, saying it was "not a high priority on our radar." more...

LAS VEGAS, Jan 6 (Reuters) - AT&T Inc (T.N) wants to add wireless links to car entertainment systems and consumer devices to keep track of everything from parcels to wandering children, according to a top company executive.

Glenn Lurie, AT&T's head of emerging devices, has been working to expand the company's mobile service beyond phones, forging deals to add wireless services to almost 20 consumer devices, such as e-readers, mini-computers and digital photo frames.

Thanks to a host of forthcoming gadgets, the business could bring in as much as $1 billion in annual revenue over the next few years, Lurie told Reuters ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The trick is to find ways to keep growing even as the vast majority of the U.S. population already own cell phones. That means more devices. In the next few years, Lurie said, there could be as many as three wirelessly connected devices for every person in the United States.

So far AT&T has deals with personal navigation device makers and several e-reader vendors, including Kindle supplier Amazon.com (AMZN.O) and bookseller Barnes & Noble(BKS.N). Lurie said he sees more business from the next generation of existing product categories this year.

The executive also expects 2010 to bring a host of new location-aware devices -- ones that use global positioning systems (GPS) to track an item, a person or a pet. A wireless connection then informs the device owner of its location. more...

STMicroelectronics has introduced a multi-touch controller IC for resistive touchscreen applications.

It is wrong to assume that the world of touch control is moving entirely to capacitive touch technology.

The older resistive technology cheaper, with established high-volume products which have improved in performance over the past few years in terms of durability and display transparency.

Resistive technology is already widely used in PDAs and similar touch-enabled devices and the screens are readily available in standard LCD sizes.

The availability of multi-touch control which detects up to ten simultaneous touches with fingers, nails or stylus is an important new feature for resistive technology.

The STM32TS60 controller combines the ARM Cortex-M3 based STM32 microcontroller architecture with PMatrix Multi-Touch technology from ST's partner Stantum.

"It provides a very low power, highly reliable alternative to capacitive touchscreen solutions," said Jim Nicholas, General Manager of ST's Microcontrollers Division.

The STM32TS60's high EMI immunity makes it suitable for use in multi-function wireless products such as mobile phones, notebook PCs, netbooks and mobile Internet devices.

FCC Test Update
January 1, 2010

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