Making waves: In the hunt for invisibility, other benefits seen | Reuters

By | September 18, 2015
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Making waves: In the hunt for invisibility, other benefits seen | Reuters:

SINGAPORE | BY JEREMY WAGSTAFF

A new way of assembling things, called metamaterials, may in the not too distant future help to protect a building from earthquakes by bending seismic waves around it. Similarly, tsunami waves could be bent around towns, and soundwaves bent around a room to make it soundproof.

While the holy grail of metamaterials is still to make objects and people invisible to the eye, they are set to have a more tangible commercial impact playing more mundane roles – from satellite antennas to wirelessly charging cellphones.

Metamaterials are simply materials that exhibit properties not found in nature, such as the way they absorb or reflect light. The key is in how they’re made. By assembling the material – from photonic crystals to wire and foam – at a scale smaller than the length of the wave you’re seeking to manipulate, the wave can, in theory, be bent to will.

This makes metamaterials the tool of choice for scientists racing to build all sorts of wave-cloaking devices, including the so-called invisibility cloak – a cover to render whatever’s inside effectively invisible by bending light waves around it.

‘The invisibility cloak was just one more thing we were discovering – that we have all this flexibility in this material and here’s another thing we can do,’ David Smith of Duke University, widely regarded as one of the founding fathers of metamaterials, said in a telephone interview. ‘But we’re equally interested in seeing this transition in making a difference in people’s lives.’

Indeed, Smith’s own journey from laboratory to factory illustrates that while metamaterials have for some become synonymous with ‘Harry Potter’ cloaks, their promise is more likely to be felt in a range of industries and uses, from smaller communication devices to quake-proof buildings.

BENDING LIGHT

At the heart of both metamaterials and invisibility are waves. If electromagnetic waves – whether visible light, microwave or infrared – can be bent around an object it would not be visible on those wavelengths. It was long thought you couldn’t control light in this way with natural materials as their optical properties depended on the chemistry of the atoms from which they were made.

It was only when Smith and his colleagues experimented with altering the geometry of material in the late 1990s that they found they could change the way it interacted with light, or other kinds of wave – creating metamaterials. With that, says Andrea Alu, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, scientists found ‘it may be possible to challenge rules and limitations that were for centuries considered written in stone.’

The past decade has seen an explosion in research that has built on Smith’s findings to make objects invisible to at least some forms of light.

‘There have now been several demonstrations of cloaking at visible wavelengths, so cloaking is truly possible and has been realized,’ says Jason Valentine of Vanderbilt University, who made one of the first such cloaks. These, however, have limitations – such as only working for certain wavelengths or from certain angles. But the barriers are falling fast, says Valentine.

In the past year, for example, Duke University’s Yaroslav Urzhumov has made a plastic cloak that deflects microwave beams using a normal 3D printer, while Alu has built an ultra-thin cloak powered by electric current.

INVISIBLE ARMY?

Funding much of this U.S. research is the military.

Urzhumov said in an email interview that the U.S. Department of Defense is ‘one of the major sponsors of metamaterials and invisibility research in the U.S.’ The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which commissions advanced research for the Department of Defense, has funded research into metamaterials since 2000, according to the department’s website.

Military interest in metamaterials was primarily in making a cloak, said Miguel Navarro-Cia of Imperial College London, who has researched the topic with funding from the European Defence Agency and U.S. military.

But an invisibility cloak needn’t be a sinister tool of war.

Vanderbilt’s Valentine suggests architectural usage. ‘You could use this technology to hide supporting columns from sight, making a space feel completely open,’ he said.

Other potential uses include rendering parts of an aircraft invisible for pilots to see below the cockpit, or to rid drivers of the blind spot in a car.

Military or not, this is all some way off.

‘Most invisibility cloaks, essentially, are still in the research stage,’ says Ong Chong Kim, director at the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Superconducting and Magnetic Materials.

MAKING WAVES

Ong and others say that while metamaterials may not yet be making objects invisible to the eye, they could be used to redirect other kinds of waves, including mechanical waves such as sound and ocean waves. French researchers earlier this year, for example, diverted seismic waves around specially placed holes in the ground, reflecting the waves backward.

Ong points to the possibility of using what has been learned in reconfiguring the geometry of materials to divert tsunamis from strategic buildings.

Elena Semouchkina, a pioneer on cloaking devices at Michigan Technological University, points to screening antennas so they don’t interfere with each other, protecting people from harmful radiation or acoustic pressure, and even preventing buildings from destruction from seismic waves.

Metamaterials could also absorb and emit light with extremely high efficiency – for example in a high-resolution ultrasound – or redirect light over a very small distance. This, says Anthony Vicari of Lux Research, ‘could be used to improve fiber optical communications networks, or even for optical communications within microchips for faster computing.’

COMMERCIAL USES

Indeed, there’s clearly a growing appetite for commercializing the unique properties of metamaterials.

One of the first to do so was the new defunct Rayspan Corp, a California-based company whose antennas found their way into WiFi routers from networking manufacturer Netgear Inc and a superflat smartphone from LG Electronics Inc.

The antennas were smaller, flatter and performed better than other options, but integrating them into the rest of the phone proved difficult, said former Rayspan executives. A spokesman for LG said the project was no longer active and LG had no plans to apply metamaterials in other products.

‘One thing from my experience as an entrepreneur is that technology gets very excited about what it’s doing in the lab,’ said Maha Achour, who co-founded Rayspan, ‘but the reality when you commercialize things is completely different.’ The company’s patents have since been sold to an undisclosed buyer.

The lessons have been learned. Now, the focus has shifted to using metamaterials in products in markets where they can more easily gain a commercial foothold.

Smith, who built the first metamaterials in 1999, has led the charge, teaming up with Intellectual Ventures, a patent portfolio firm, to spin off two companies: Kymeta Corp, making flat-panel antennas for satellite communications, and Evolv Technologies, which hopes to make a lighter, faster and portable airport scanner – with no moving parts. Kymeta, in partnership with satellite operators Inmarsat and O3b Networks, hopes to ship in early 2015.

The two fields were chosen from a shortlist of 20 potential markets, Smith said. ‘They’re the same metamaterials behind the cloak, but we were looking for more near-term applications.’

WIRELESS CHARGING

The next likely consumer use of metamaterials could be in the wireless charging of devices, an area attracting keen industry attention.

Mark Gostock of ISIS Innovation Ltd, an Oxford University research commercialization firm, said he was in talks with several manufacturers to license ISIS’ technology. Samsung Electronics has filed several patents related to metamaterials and wireless charging, but declined to comment for this article.

Other companies that cite metamaterials in their patent filings include Harris Corp, NEC Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co and Panasonic Corp.

Eventually, says Wil McCarthy, chief technology officer of Denver-based smart window maker RavenBrick LLC and holder of a patent he hopes will bring metamaterials to polarizing windows, metamaterials will be incorporated without much fanfare.

‘The people buying these products will have no idea how they work, and won’t know or care that they’re doing things that were previously considered impossible,’ he says.

(Editing by Ian Geoghegan)”

(Via.)

Software as Silo

By | October 29, 2013
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Software is a funny thing. How important is it?

Apple has just announced it’s giving most of its away for free — effectively costing it some $900 million in the short term. Samsung has just convened its first developer conference in the hope of persuading more people to write software for its devices. Microsoft, known for its Office and Windows software, has just bought a phone manufacturer — Nokia — and promises a new raft of its lacklustre Surface tablets. Google, known for the money it makes off its software, has promised more Glasses, and owns a cellphone maker, Motorola. Amazon, which sells stuff, also makes tablets and e-readers, and is rumoured to be getting into a phone.

What companies are increasingly recognising is that software is everything but not on its own. To succeed in this new world of ubiquitous devices, you need to own as much as possible of what is loosely referred to as the ecosystem. That means hardware, software, and the services that make both hardware and software come to life.
Think a phone where you can take videos, edit them into a short movie at literally the push of a button, and then share them with friends with another push. Or a tablet that lets you and control see your company’s inventory or fleet of trucks in real time.

But this isn’t easy. It requires expertise in very different areas — areas that until recently were regarded as best considered separate industries. Focus on what you’re good at, the mantra used to be. Now, it’s more like: you’ve got to be good at all these things, or you’ll die. Think HTC, which makes great devices but hasn’t succeeded in building the software and services that makes those devices stand out.

Some companies can be good at all three, but it’s a fast-moving game. Think BlackBerry, which was good at both hardware, software and services for a while, with its email service, its own operating system and its keyboard-bound devices. But the world moved on, and BlackBerry didn’t move quickly enough.

So now it looks like Apple is heading the pack. But it too, is vulnerable. The world has been captivated by the phones and tablets it creates, but some detect a sense the company, without Steve Jobs, quite understanding where to go next. It’s likely to be an Apple TV, which should be interesting.

Samsung is late to the game, dangerously so. It dominates the world of phones, but has been slow to build software and services to bridge those devices to its other products — computers, TVs, fridges, etc. Only this week has it really embraced developers and tried to make it easy for them to do this. Samsung’s future hinges in being able to rid itself of its dependence on Google’s Android operating system — either by building an operating system of its own, or a suite of apps that run on top of it that make a Samsung device so much more valuable than one from LG, Sony, HTC or Huawei.

Then there’s Microsoft. By making its operating system and much of its software free, Apple has thrown down the gauntlet to its old rival. It’s not saying these products have no value: it’s saying that software is what makes hardware compelling, and so we’re effectively making the two one single product. For Microsoft, still largely a software player, that’s quite scary. No wonder the company is betting heavily on building its own hardware.

In some ways this is good for the consumer, in some ways not. On the one hand we’re already seeing the hardware basically controlling the software — automatically updating itself, optimizing itself for the user. On the other, the goal here is clear: bind the user to a single stack of hardware, software and services, increasingly isolated from each other. A Samsung phone may be a great device to control your TV with, layering little apps atop the screen, but don’t expect it to work with your LG smart TV. And don’t bother trying to use Apple’s AirDrop feature to send a file to your Samsung phone.

The bottom line is that these companies are being hugely innovative, moving the puck at impressive speed. But in their efforts to escape becoming commodities, they’re pushing us into silos. Nice silos, very nice silos, but silos that make me think more of the past than the future.

Autopsy as a Service

By | October 29, 2013
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This is a piece I’ve recorded for the BBC 

Is it possible to disrupt a business that is, well, dying? 

Malaysian entrepreneur Matt Chandran thinks so. He wants to revive the post-mortem by replacing the scalpel with a scanner and the autopsy slab with a touchscreen computer.

He believes his so-called digital autopsy could largely displace the centuries-old traditional knife-bound one, speeding up investigations, reducing the stress on grieving families and placating religious sensibilities. And, he hopes, change the way not only pathologists but also doctors work. 

He is confident there’s money in what he calls his Autopsy as a Service — basically conducting a post mortem via a scanner and some pretty advanced 3d imaging software.  The first of his company’s digital autopsy facilities will open in the British town of Bradford on November 1. 

Here’s his logic: Around 70 million people die each year and around a tenth of those deaths are legal cases that require an autopsy. Right now these are done the old-fashioned way, expensively. Grab a slice of that, so to speak, and you’re in business. 

There are obstacles. First off, post mortems are dying out. While humans have been cutting each other open for at least 3,000 years to learn more about death,  the autopsy these days is rarely embraced outside TV crime dramas.

Chandran sees his offering as way to make the autopsy palatable again. Plug his software into any standard medical CT or MRI scanner, train an expert into how to use it and you remove layers of cloth, skin and bone with a mouse or by gestures on a tabletop touchscreen.

Much easier, he says, and less destructive of evidence. And not new — the idea has been around for a couple of decades. Chandran is the first to believe he can see money in it. He pays for and builds the scanning facilities and then makes money from those families who prefer to have their loved ones scanned rather than autopsied if a post mortem is deemed necessary.

Families, officials, hospitals would pay, he reckons, because it would make everything simpler, faster, cleaner — and offer a permanent record. 

For Chandran, this is just the beginning: eventually he hopes, these facilities would not only help us better understand the dead but also scan the living, providing a global library of scans for doctors to better diagnose patients. Instead of using a blood samples and urine tests to figure out what’s wrong with us a GP would take a scan and peer inside us via his computer as we sit patiently by. 

Not everyone is happy of course, from pathologists who say their skills aren’t just in looking, but feeling, smelling and sensing a cadaver, to pioneers in the imaging field who say the technology isn’t ready for primetime.

And then there are those who wonder about Chandran’s business model. For it to work he not only has to convince a few local councils to let him in: he needs to change our whole way of thinking about the role autopsies play. 

Right now we treat autopsies much as we treat death — the less discussed the better. That deprives us, Chandran believes, of insights into the body, disease and death that we could benefit from.  

Google’s Design Gridlock

By | September 13, 2013
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Screen Shot 2013 09 13 at 9 25 14 AM

Another hamfisted design effort from Google, I’m afraid: this time, they’ve compressed the links at the bottom of the Gmail page to Google-related services to a grid, which you have to click on to find the service you want to access. 

This is what it used to look like: 

Screen Shot 2013 09 13 at 9 34 18 AM

This is what it now looks like: 

Screen Shot 2013 09 13 at 9 29 02 AM

Not only does this add a step to the process, but it also requires a significant move of the mouse to the services at the bottom (and don’t get me started on why you’d want to go to Gmail when you’re already in Gmail.) 

And there’s no way I can see of being able to go back to the old set of links at the top. 

This was a design experiment dating back to March, according to TNW. Back then Emil Protalinski commented that this seemed to borrow from Chrome OS and be an attempt to align with its mobile interface: 

We can understand Google replacing the navigation bar with a menu button: it saves horizontal space and works well with the goal of keeping things minimal. That being said, it adds a click to every action.

In the scheme of things this is probably no biggie, but it does seem to suggest that the wrong people are running design at Google, or they’ve run out of ideas, or they’re so intent on getting Google+ buttons everywhere that everything becomes secondary. Whatever, every incremental step that reduces the experience of Gmail adds to the likelihood it will start losing users.

Asha to Ashes: Microsoft’s Emerging Markets Conundrum

By | September 7, 2013
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A piece I wrote with Devi in Delhi, and the help of a couple of other colleagues. 

Asha to Ashes: Microsoft’s emerging market conundrum

By Jeremy Wagstaff and Devidutta Tripathy

SINGAPORE/NEW DELHI | Thu Sep 5, 2013 9:22pm EDT

(Reuters) – Microsoft Corp’s acquisition of Nokia’s handset business gives the software behemoth control of its main Windows smartphone partner, but leaves a question mark over the bigger business it has bought: Nokia’s cheap and basic phones that still dominate emerging markets like India.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has said he sees such phones – of which Nokia shipped more than 50 million last quarter – as an entree to more expensive fare.

“We look at that as an excellent feeder system into the smartphone world and a way to touch people with our services even on much lower-end devices in many parts of the world,” he said in a conference call to analysts on Tuesday.

But analysts warn that’s easier said than done.

The problem, said Jayanth Kolla, partner at Convergence Catalyst, an India-based telecom research and advisory firm, is that Microsoft simply lacks Nokia’s retail and supply chain experience in the Finnish company’s most important markets.

“The devices business, especially the non-smartphones business in emerging markets, is a completely different dynamic,” he said.

Kolla pointed to the need to manage tight supply chains, distribution, and building brands through word-of-mouth. “Microsoft doesn’t have it in its DNA to run operations at this level,” he said.

India is a case in point. Nokia has been there since the mid 1990s and the country accounted for 7 percent of its 2012 revenue while the United States generated just 6 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data. Its India roots run deep: it has a presence in 200,000 outlets, 70,000 of which sell only its devices. One of its biggest plants in the world is in the southern city of Chennai.

For sure, Nokia has slipped in India as elsewhere: After nearly two decades as the market leader it was unseated by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd in overall sales last quarter.

But it still sold more of its more basic feature phones.

As recently as last October, market research company Nielsen ranked it the top handset brand. The Economic Times ranked it the country’s third most trusted brand.

LOYALTY RUNS DEEP

In a land of frequent power cuts and rugged roads, the sturdiness and longer battery life of Nokia’s phones have won it a loyal fan base – some of whom have stayed loyal when trading up.

Take Sunil Sachdeva, a Delhi-based executive, who has stuck with Nokia since his first phone. He has just bought his fifth: an upgrade to the Nokia Lumia smartphone running Microsoft’s mobile operating system.

“Technology-wise they are still the best,” he said of Nokia.

But Microsoft can’t take such loyalty for granted. Challenging it and Samsung are local players such as Karbonn and Micromax, which are churning out smartphones running Google Inc’s Android operating system for as little as $50.

Such players are also denting Nokia’s efforts to build its Asha brand, touchscreen devices perched somewhere between a feature phone and a smartphone.

Nokia shipped 4.3 million Asha phones globally in the second quarter of this year, down from 5.0 million the previous quarter.

“The sales performance of the Asha line has been quite poor,” said Sameer Singh, Hyderabad-based analyst at BitChemy Ventures, an investor in local startups. “With increasing competition from the low-end smartphone vendors, I’m unsure how long that business will last.”

That leaves the cheap seats. Singh estimates that the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa accounted for two-thirds of Nokia’s feature phone volumes in the last quarter, at an average selling price of between 25 to 30 euros ($32.99 to $39.59).

“I don’t see how Microsoft can really leverage this volume,” he said. “The market is extremely price sensitive and margins are racing into negative territory.”

TOO BIG TO IGNORE

The quandary for Microsoft is that while the basic phone market may be declining, it may simply be too big to ignore.

“If you look at markets like India and Indonesia, more than 70 percent of the volume comes from the feature phone business,” Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner said. “It’s still a significant part of the overall market.”

That means that if Microsoft wants to herd this market up the value chain to its Windows phones, it needs to keep the Nokia and Asha brands afloat – while also narrowing the price gap between its smartphones and the feature phones and cheap smartphones.

Microsoft has hinted that lowering prices of smartphones would be a priority. The Windows Phone series includes the top-end Lumia 1020, which comes with a 41-megapixel camera, while it also sells simpler models such as the Lumia 610 and 620 aimed at first-time smartphone buyers.

“The lower price phone is a strategic initiative for the next Windows Phone release,” Terry Myerson, vice president of operating systems said on the same conference call, while declining to provide details.

An option for Microsoft, analysts said, would be to shoe-horn services like Bing search, Outlook webmail and Skype, the Internet telephony and messaging application, into the lower-end phones as a way to drive traffic to those services and make the devices more appealing.

“So you can bundle services with these low-end products and that way you can reach a wider audience,” said Finland-based Nordea Markets analyst Sami Sarkamies.

But in the meantime Microsoft needs to brace for assault on all fronts as emerging market rivals see an opportunity to eat further into Nokia’s market share. In India, said Convergent Catalyst’s Kolla, cheap local Android brands have been held back by Nokia’s strong promotion of its mid-tier Asha brand.

“Now, I expect them to pounce,” he said. ($1 = 0.7577 euros)

(Reporting By Jeremy Wagstaff in Singapore, Devidutta Tripathy in New Delhi, Bill Rigby in Seattle, Ritsuko Ando in Helsinki; Editing by Emily Kaiser)