Amazon has by far the best voice-based consumer operating system platform on the market. Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana both pale in comparison. The Echo is, however, not without limitations. Many questions can’t be answered by the Echo at this point. We have learned how to ask questions in different ways, though. For example, if Alexa can’t help us with a question, just rephrase it as “Alexa Wikipedia Jay Z” and the Echo will read you a few lines from Wikipedia.com on the aforementioned topic.  Many Echo users are starting to control their Hue light bulbs and other IoT devices in their homes by speaking commands to Alexa. What Photoshop is to Windows or the Mac O/S, these current and future household IoT devices are to Echo, which is emerging as the de facto audible operating system / server of choice to these client IoT devices. CTOs and CIOs will likely soon look into audible-based API calls to Echo or competing Echo products as another way to reach their customers.

The Next Operating System Platform that Matters | Sandhill

ANY sufficiently advanced technology, noted Arthur C. Clarke, a British science-fiction writer, is indistinguishable from magic. The fast-emerging technology of voice computing proves his point. Using it is just like casting a spell: say a few words into the air, and a nearby device can grant your wish. The Amazon Echo, a voice-driven cylindrical computer that sits on a table top and answers to the name Alexa, can call up music tracks and radio stations, tell jokes, answer trivia questions and control smart appliances; even before Christmas it was already resident in about 4% of American households. Voice assistants are proliferating in smartphones, too: Apple’s Siri handles over 2bn commands a week, and 20% of Google searches on Android-powered handsets in America are input by voice. Dictating e-mails and text messages now works reliably enough to be useful. Why type when you can talk?

How voice technology is transforming computing | The Economist

To further complicate matters, many voice-driven devices are always listening, waiting to be activated. Some people are already concerned about the implications of internet-connected microphones listening in every room and from every smartphone. Not all audio is sent to the cloud—devices wait for a trigger phrase (“Alexa”, “OK, Google”, “Hey, Cortana”, or “Hey, Siri&rdquo before they start relaying the user’s voice to the servers that actually handle the requests—but when it comes to storing audio, it is unclear who keeps what and when.

How voice technology is transforming computing | The Economist

Voice will not wholly replace other forms of input and output. Sometimes it will remain more convenient to converse with a machine by typing rather than talking (Amazon is said to be working on an Echo device with a built-in screen). But voice is destined to account for a growing share of people’s interactions with the technology around them, from washing machines that tell you how much of the cycle they have left to virtual assistants in corporate call-centres. However, to reach its full potential, the technology requires further breakthroughs—and a resolution of the tricky questions it raises around the trade-off between convenience and privacy.

How voice technology is transforming computing | The Economist

How Intel lost the mobile chip business to Apple's Ax ARM Application Processors

Intel at the time actually owned XScale, an ARM chip producer, but it announced plans to sell off the group to Marvell in the summer of 2006 after any hope of a deal with Apple was lost. Intel's inability to foresee the potential of Apple's new iPhone may have been colored by its disappointing experiences with XScale, the rebranded StrongARM group it announced plans to acquire from Digital Equipment Corporation in 1997 as part of a patent infringement settlement.

How Intel lost the mobile chip business to Apple's Ax ARM Application Processors

Nobody expected Apple to develop a tablet powered by a wimpy ARM chip intended for cell phones, in part because of the nonstop x86 propaganda radiating from Intel through the media via press releases, and in part because of Apple's fairly fresh partnership with Intel in Macs, which was then barely four years old. Apple had even developed its Apple TV set top box using a similar, low power Intel Pentium M processor.

How Intel lost the mobile chip business to Apple's Ax ARM Application Processors

Nvidia's Deals with IBM, Microsoft and Google Strengthen Its Artificial Intelligence Lead - TheStreet

24 big driverless car breakthroughs in 2016 - Business Insider

But there was also a reward. The company has collected more than 1.3 billion miles of data from Autopilot-equipped vehicles operating under diverse road and weather conditions around the world. And in the frantic race to roll out the first fully functional autonomous vehicle, that kind of mass, real-world intelligence can be invaluable. In that way, for now, the electric-car maker has a leg up on competitors including Google, General Motors Co. and Uber Technologies Inc.

The Tesla Advantage: 1.3 Billion Miles of Data - Bloomberg

Top 10 Big Data Trends for 2017 | Tableau Software

How IoT in Education is Changing the Way We Learn - Business Insider

Oracle keeps saying it can beat Salesforce and AWS, but numbers say otherwise - MarketWatch

The firm reported $687 million in operating income on $2.4 billion in revenue for AWS, making it a comparatively more profitable venture than the part of the firm that includes its retail arm. That has come even as it aggressively slashed prices to generate new business. Chief financial officer Brian Olsavsky said that AWS revenue for the year was on track to be "just short" of $10 billion by the end of its fourth quarter.

The cloud wars are seriously heating up - The Washington Post

Check out this long track record of picking winners in the fast-moving technology sector. Here's the next in line: Tech Data Corp. (TECD - Get Report) . The Clearwater, Fla.-based company is one of the world's largest wholesale distributors of technology products and services. Its advanced logistics capabilities and other services enable 120,000 resellers in more than 100 countries to support the various technology needs of their customers.

This Little-Known Tech Stock Could Be Your Best Opportunity Right Now in Cloud Computing - TheStreet

Microsoft (MSFT) shares are up $1.07, or 1.8%, at $60.72, after Goldman Sachs’s Heather Bellini upgraded the stock to a Buy from neutral, and raised her price target to $68 from $60, as part of a mammoth 72-page report on the future of “public” cloud computing.

Microsoft to Ride Cloud’s Disruption of Half a Trillion in IT Spend, Says Goldman - Tech Trader Daily - Barrons.com

Enthusiasts Go Back to the Future in a Virtual Reality Boom | MIT Technology Review

When you are in the middle of a torrent of change, innovation eclipsing innovation, it can be hard to know what is passing and what will last. But the BBC's Peter Day believes that, here, in 2013, we are in the middle of a revolution so great it could turn our old familiar world upside down.

By Peter Day Global business correspondent Continue reading the main story

I have come to think that our world is being turned upside down. We probably do not grasp the huge implications because, perhaps, we are still imprisoned by our past.

We are all of us, almost everywhere, swept up in a maelstrom of change which overturns many of the assumptions we have lived with for the past 100 years.

That 100 years is important, because it is the span of the era of mass production ushered in just after 1910 by Henry Ford in Detroit. It is an era which I fancy may now be coming to a close, or at least becoming severely limited. The first industrial era is being replaced by something else.

Henry Ford memorably said about his Model T car: "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black". But why particularly black? It is not a matter of style or taste, it is just that black paint dries fastest, so the cars came off the production line faster. A hugely practical man, Henry Ford.

But let's begin close to the beginning, to the first signs that the 21st Century may be very different from what we got used to in the 20th.

In the spring of 2004, I had a revelatory encounter with the impact of China on the world. I was standing on a long quayside in the harbour of Qingdao on the Yellow Sea.

Ahead of me on my left, were mountains of iron ore just shipped in from abroad, lying rusting in the sun. And then, swivelling my gaze across this extraordinary panorama of emergent industrial might, I saw thousands of containers on the wharf side, piled up to the height of city blocks, full of manufactured exports awaiting shipping to the world.

The new Chinese industrial revolution was out there in front of me. In one glance, I saw the grip of China on the global economy - a huge rise in the price of vital raw materials such as iron and food, and at the same time, a great fall in the price of manufactured goods the world was rushing to buy from China.

It was an emblem of our developed world challenged to its core by a mighty upstart, then a series of Asian upstarts. The world was beginning to be turned upside down.

Here was the thesis of British economist Jim O'Neill asserting itself - the ascent to the world's economic top table of the "Brics" nations, Brazil, India, Russia and China.

O'Neill was the chief economist of the investment bank Goldman Sachs 12 years ago when he got an international reputation for some eye-catching predictions.

He argued that if the developing nations went on growing as they were, then China would in just a few decades have the largest economy in the world.

Bigger even than that of the previous Big Boy, the US.

And to appreciate the speed and scale of China's transformation, we need only look at the UK - which was slightly bigger than China back in 2000.

And as China would still be much poorer per head than the UK or the US, the new number one would go on pulling away. New emerging economies coming out as global top dogs excited the investment world.

But the people in charge of most companies seemed to feel (with one or two notable exceptions) that it would not happen on their watch, and so it did not really matter. But it did and it will, just as I saw in Qingdao.

Then I had another encounter on the way home from China to Britain via California. In Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, I went to revisit Joe Kraus. He had been one of five Stanford graduates who had gone straight out from the university to found a search engine called Excite in the middle of the 1990s.

The company sold its shares to the public - at 26, Joe Kraus had just become a multi-millionaire when I first met him in 1996. Excite grew exponentially and merged to become Excite@Home. By 1999 it was a $6.7bn enterprise with hundreds of employees and what seemed to be an almost infinite future.

And yet, a year later the dotcom bubble burst, and before the end of 2000, Excite@Home was effectively defunct. At the same time, a few miles away, another little Stanford University graduate start-up - a rival search engine called Google - was turning itself into the largest media company in the world.

Continue reading the main story

Reviewing this jolting experience a year or so later, Joe Kraus had by then acquired a significant insight into why Excite had failed and Google had triumphed. He talked about how Excite had been a 20th Century company seeking all its revenue from the top 10 companies in America, as media businesses had been doing for decades. But - and this is the upside-down revolution - Google structured its business around attracting the top million, or ten million, advertisers in the US.

And then Joe Kraus told me something that I regard as one of the keys to understanding how different life is now compared to the world in which I have spent most of my life. It's one of the most important statements we have ever broadcast on my Radio 4 programme In Business.

He said: "The 20th Century was about dozens of markets of millions of consumers. The 21st Century is about millions of markets of dozens of consumers."

And that single phrase, "millions of markets of dozens of consumers", really does turn the conventional, mass production, 20th Century business world, upside down. The really revolutionary thing is what is happening to the notion of the "consumer", a term which seems first to have appeared in print in the Sears Roebuck catalogue at the very end of the 1800s, but which rose to prominence in the second half of our 20th Century.

In many societies, consumers are now beginning to challenge their passive role as users of stuff provided by others. They are becoming much more like creators than they have ever been allowed to before.

I also had a seminal encounter with its rival Google in 2002. This was four years after the company was founded, two years before its spectacular launch on the stock market. I went to the old, homey, Googleplex, not the vast campus that the company now inhabits. The corridors were full of bicycles. There was a grand piano in reception for lunchtime recreation and lava lamps everywhere.

But above the reception desk was something I had not seen before. On a big screen they projected live (but with sex-based terms omitted) some of the global searches being done by users from all over the world, then and there. My guide David Krane and I read them out one by one in to my microphone, and then I stopped, in absolute awe. I realised that we were looking at the mind of the world.

Here was a semi-structured connectivity of millions of people now, and billions still to come. The new mind of the world. The new nervous system. This was indeed our old world turned upside down.

That world that we were all shaped profoundly by owed far too much to Henry Ford.

Just over 100 years ago in Detroit, Ford had borrowed some potent ideas from other people and created an even more potent one. He took the concept of interchangeable parts from the US weapons industry. He took the moving line from the Chicago slaughterhouses. From them he produced the factory-scale assembly line. An impossibly practical man, he did it in pursuit of efficiency, of reducing costs, of making things cheaply - all of them black (at least to start with).

But he reduced work on his new production lines to a sort of lowest common denominator activity. This was because nearly all the trained and experienced engineers in Detroit at the time were already employed making railway wagons. Ford took his new unskilled workers with little understanding of English straight off the immigrant boats. He broke down the work they were required to do to make a Model T Ford into the simplest repeatable activities, driven by the moving production line.

The relentless nature of the work meant he had to pay the workers exceptionally well. In 1914 he more than doubled autoworkers' previous pay to $5 a day - enough for them to be able to afford a Model T. And he knocked an hour off the working day, too. Both things had a huge big impact on the productivity of the Ford plant.

Continue reading the main story

Ford workers disliked the new assembly line methods so much that by late 1913, labour turnover was very high. In order to expand the workforce by 100 men, the company had to hire 953.

So the company increased pay to $5 for an eight-hour day from the previous rate of $2.34 for a nine-hour day. Workers flocked to sign up in January 1914.

The work was no easier, the pace no less relentless. But the pay was so good that workers were willing. The new wage went only to people deemed "qualified" after an investigation into their private lives.

The company set up a sociological department to monitor its employees' personal and work lives. Advisers conducted home visits, checked bank deposits and monitored children's school attendance.

As many employees were recent immigrants, the company also ran English language lessons. Advisors also provided hygiene instruction, along with financial and legal advice.

... but the lure of the money was so strong that most workers put up with such paternalistic policies, however reluctantly.

This bargain between Ford and his workers - submission to discipline in return for high wages - would turn out to be as important as the Model T itself.

Continue reading the main story

What is so extraordinary is how this Fordist model of mass production and this mechanised quest for ever greater efficiency so quickly came to dominate not just car manufacturing but production in general, in nearly every industry.

The production-line big corporation became the absolute model for business everywhere in the industrialised world and the concept of work for millions of people. It brought huge prosperity and material goods to people who had never been able to have them before. It created the suburbs where people who made the cars and bought them could live.

Then, after 80 years of Fordist Western domination, the rich world manufacturing machine began to move away to other, far flung locations. But here too, in the mighty Chinese industrial revolution and when services were outsourced en masse to India, mass production prevailed.

During the last decade of the 20th Century and into the 21st, I felt that the only way for businesses to be sure of survival in the developed world, in the US and in Europe, was to abandon competing with the world's low-cost producers I had seen emerging so fast in China and many other new industrial nations. I became convinced that the explosion of digital connectivity was the answer.

At the time, the internet was helping to generate vast amounts of information about consumers and their desires and was creating vast fortunes for a new generation of entrepreneurs. Yet when in 1998 I went to visit one of the most celebrated management gurus of all time, he said something that struck me as weird.

The late Prof Peter Drucker, then 87, said: "The computer has yet to really influence American business." It sounded crazy when so much money had been invested in computing.

But he was right - as usual. He meant that the shape and structure and hierarchy of the corporation had not responded to the huge flows of information that companies now had at their fingertips about their customers, should they wish to use it. They had computerised their 20th Century shape, rather than responding to how the computer network was upending much of what they had been set up to do decades before. It was one of the many things they don't teach you at business school.

Companies remained stuck in the 20th Century when life was moving on. Organisations of all kinds still saw their users through the goggles of the mass market philosophy. They looked on their users as groups of people with similar desires, arrayed remotely "out there" in dozens of markets, each of millions of people. If they wanted to contact their consumers, they sent out teams of people with clipboards and questionnaires.

They seemed almost frightened of the people they were making things for. So they worked out what they could most easily make, and then they asked their marketing and advertising people to come up with the designs, campaigns and slogans that would enable them to sell the stuff they could most easily and profitably produce on their established production lines, or those of their suppliers.

Their customers were interesting to the corporations only to the extent they would buy what the businesses could supply. There was a huge disconnect between users and suppliers. But this is still the accepted driver of most of the modern economy, of the world we have created over the past 100 years.

It creates huge alienation and frustration in the workers, the managers, and the customers.

The transactional experience is one that almost everywhere raises the blood pressure of the participants on both sides, but particularly the buyers and users. And the relentless drive for cost efficiencies at the heart of it is driving the profitability out of this business model in the West.

Western companies simply cannot compete with the developing country producers who are using the mass production model faster and cheaper. This is Capitalism competing itself to death. To paraphrase Lenin, it is Capitalists selling the rope with which to hang them.

Continue reading the main story

To try to rescue the developed world from this dilemma, my proposition was a new thing I termed the Heartbeat Economy, effectively almost a concierge approach to customers. To compete on something other than price, companies based in the West would have to escape from their preoccupation with mass markets and fulfil the precisely-defined individual requirements of their individual customers with breathtaking speed and efficiency.

This would be a worryingly intimate relationship for many businesses and organisations, but one which might provide a new kind of profitable and rewarding market place if they dared to be far closer to their customers' individuality than they had ever been before.

Joe Pine, an American management writer who has become the prophet of what is known as mass customisation, put it like this: "Customers don't want a choice. They want exactly what they want."

Taking the increased heartbeat as the symbol of all they want to avoid, organisations in this new economy would learn how not to raise the blood pressure of people who - in response - would learn to trust them.

I have seen this theory enhanced by lots of technology changes and collaboration over the internet, and advanced by the recent extraordinary rise of social networking as a new platform for interactivity that changes the way society behaves. The most vivid example of this social upheaval is something we did not know we needed 20 years ago, when it was invented by IBM: the smartphone. A revolutionary device, and one whose display and tools can be - and often are - absolutely individualised, so that no two phones are alike.

Configured from millions of applications and choices, their screens reflect their users' absolute individuality. They have rapidly become a part of their users' identity. But the 20th Century mass market of people, society and organisations persists, so thoroughly was it imprinted in us by Henry Ford 100 years ago.

Eighteen months ago in San Francisco, I had another of those rather rare encounters that changes how I think about the world. In a lofty office in one of the old converted warehouses north of Market Street, I found myself looking at a plastic bolt in a plastic socket.

Strong, ready to use - nothing remarkable about it. Except that both the bolt and the socket it was tightly screwed in to were "printed". It was a revelatory moment. I began to understand how 3D printing might affect our conventional world and bring us closer to a Heartbeat Economy. This was the upside-down world in action.

I was in the offices of a company called Bespoke Innovations, with a designer called Scott Summit. He had gone into partnership with a surgeon to make individualised artificial limbs, using a 3D fabricator. Bespoke can match an existing arm or leg, or design a prosthetic limb to be eye-catching in its own right.

The 3D printer works like a scanner, spraying one layer of metal or plastic powder on a surface, fusing it with a laser, and then repeating the process - just like a computer printer, but piling up a 3D shape layer by layer. When the fabricator has finished making the device, and the plastic or metal has been fused into solidity, you blow out the dust that remains from the assembly and there is the bolt snugly fitting into its hole. So, sophisticated joints and flexible devices are now printable.

In fact, printing is not quite the right word for the process. Enthusiasts call it "additive manufacturing" because of the contrast with the time-honoured way of making things - no more scraping away at metal to create shapes from it, or pouring plastic into expensive moulds. That has changed now. The compelling proposition is, if you can draw it, you can print it.

Continue reading the main story

Spend an afternoon with a designer like Scott Summit in San Francisco and you begin to get carried away. I certainly did.

For the past 100 years, we have been taught to think that most things we use are best made in quantity on a production line. One-off things, bespoke, hand-crafted - all these "old-fashioned" ways of making things have become curiosities: quaint, fiddly, hideously expensive.

Not any more. As Summit, who started his career designing "one-size-fits-all" products to be sold in their millions, says: "We are about to see a real reawakening of this idea of unique products of all kinds."

The 3D fabricator can make something slightly different every time it makes an object, individualising it every time. The individual customer can now get exactly what he or she wants at little or no extra charge compared with the cost of a one-size-fits-many model, and maybe even cheaper.

Bespoke Innovations claims that artificial limbs made like this may be one tenth of the price of ones made in the conventional way. One particular cost saver is time: the gap from finished design to finished product is concertinaed into hours, rather than months as the 3D fabricator makes many components in to one united piece.

Of course there are currently limitations. Much of the stuff currently being 3D printed is modest and trivial - iPhone cases, plastic jewellery, spectacle frames.

But at Britain's biggest manufacturer, British Aerospace, they are printing highly individualised components for aircraft and satellites - not prototypes, the real thing. Other companies are printing false teeth and there is no reason why they should not be done on the spot by dentists who fit them straight away.

It could be much bigger than teeth. At Loughborough University, I saw how they are learning to print houses in one go, using computer-aided design tools to direct a cement nozzle supported by a huge rig.

There is even talk of printing human organs as replacement for diseased worn out body parts and of printing personalised drugs at home. Huge regulatory problems present themselves, of course, especially when absolutely anyone can print a handgun, which is now possible.

But this 3D revolution could be bigger than a torrent of cheap new goods made to order. The mass production company gave new powers to the role of managers and foremen. But it debased the craft skills and turned human beings with very personal ideas and emotions into mere machine feeders. You hung your own personal ideas and ambitions on the hatstand when you clocked in for work.

Until now, that is. If individualised, personalised production catches on, it may radically reshape the corporation, with its divisions, baronies and management structures.

Designers and innovators will find themselves elevated in the business hierarchy, because they will be able to turn their inventions and ideas into feasible production without the interposition of the host of manufacturing experts hitherto required to turn designs into makeable objects.

Continue reading the main story

Doing it for themselves: 'We wanted to explore, so we built our own underwater robot."

But this 3D idea is even bigger than that in its implications. Who needs metal presses costing hundreds of millions of dollars to make parts of equipment? Who needs hugely expensive moulds for plastic components, the place where hideous bottlenecks occur before new designs are sent to the factory? Who needs factories? Who needs to transport all these manufactured goods all around the world when you may be able to make many of them just a stroll down the road from where you need them?

It is conceivable that a company may become merely a bright young designer or entrepreneur with a $1,000-laptop computer whose designs are produced at a 3D printing bureau on your local High Street.

This is edging towards something I think we may live to call Capitalism without Capital (trademark, all rights reserved). I am also sure that service industries will be swept up in all this, but I have not yet quite decided how.

Something is happening to us. And it is the new sense of the emergent individual that I think may be the profoundest change of all.

We may be able to get some grasp of how large an impact these new technologies may have on the way we perceive the world and how we then behave by going back more than 500 years to the arrival of another great disruptor of society, the printing press.

As a radio person, I'm very proud to be a member of one of the ancient City of London livery companies, the Stationers. A visit to their splendid hall in the shadow of St Paul's Cathedral sets you thinking about how the Stationers' traditional trade in pens and ink and manuscripts was utterly disrupted in 1476 by William Caxton's new printing press established just up the River Thames in Westminster.

The Stationers quickly embraced printers as members of the company and, eventually, the idea of copyright emerged from the Stationers' jealously guarded rights and privileges. And copyright created the concept of intellectual property, one of the main engines of the modern economy.

You get another overwhelming sense of print as a powerhouse of change in the elegant and slightly unlikely circumstances of a Renaissance courtyard house in the Friday market place in the Flemish port of Antwerp. I was there the other day and was again dazzled by it.

In the 16th Century, Antwerp was the trading centre of the world. In 1555 the Frenchman Christopher Plantin started a print and publishing business in the city which he and his in-laws ran for 400 years.

Remarkably, the building complex he created is still there, pretty much unchanged. There are 33 successive rooms of type, ancient wooden presses, and a library of the books they printed for the whole of Europe, sometimes at the breathtaking rate of one new title every week. Typeset and printed by hand, of course.

Plantin was the world's first industrial printer. The Plantin-Moretus Museum is an astonishing meeting point of commerce, civilisation - and power.

But the social impact of printing was far more profound than even the principle of intellectual property, and that social impact provides a possible parallel with the internet and 3D printing today. The printed book assembled a torrent of words on paper in a fraction of the time that a copyist could. This began to change the way the whole world behaved.

No longer were they handwritten volumes of knowledge chained up in libraries, dangerous knowledge firmly in the control of the church and those close to power.

Reading, which had until then mostly been done out loud in the courts of kings and the halls of monasteries, became a private pursuit. Scientific thought threw off the yoke of church and state censorship as books provoked dialogue and discovery. So did the ideas which writers, philosophers and poets put forward - human sensibility itself began to change.

Effectively, printing changed the relationship between men and women and their universe, their surroundings. Nobody knows who first said it, but there is no exaggeration in the resonant phrase about the alphabet moulded into sticks of metal type: "With 25 lead soldiers I will conquer the world".

This sort of thing does not happen very often. I think it is happening again now, but it is very early in its development. The word for the printing done in the 15th Century is "incunabula". It means the "swaddling clothes" of a baby industry.

I would like to propose that our new internet age may eventually be seen to be living through a disruption of the human sensibility on a par with the invention of printing.

There are other candidates for this disruptive role, including the automobile, the aeroplane or broadcasting. But the internet is more profound because of the power it endows the individual user - the power of imagination, invention, collaboration and market-making.

But it is difficult to see when we are in the middle of this great disruption. We are still at the incunabula, the infant stage of the great internet upheaval.

And as the prophet of communications Marshall McLuhan said, we tend to look at the future through the rear-view mirror of the past. The first car was a horseless carriage. Early radio was the wireless.

But for richer, for poorer, for better or for worse, the world is being turned upside down. And we are just beginning to see what these possibilities are.

Illustrations by Robin Chevalier | eastwing.co.uk

Listen to the World Turned Upside Down by Peter Day on BBC Radio 4's Archive on 4 programme, Saturday 12 October at 20:00 BST. Or listen to it on the Archive on 4 website. Download Peter Day's World of Business podcasts here.

Is Peter right? What do you think the world will be like in the 21st Century?

Get in touch using the form below. You can also message us on Facebook or tweet us @BBCNewsMagazine

Can Oculus Rift Turn Virtual Wonder into Commercial Reality?

Oculus Rift has heavyweight developer support, and millions of dollars of crowdsourced investment. But many of the old challenges to this new technology remain.

• By Simon Parkin on October 7, 2013

Forget Xbox One and PS4, all I want for Christmas is an Oculus Rift

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by Chris Smith 25 June 2013 | Go to comments

A computer that can be screwed into a light socket can project interactive images onto any nearby surface.

• By Tom Simonite on November 29, 2012 .

Desk toy: A computer with a camera and projector fits into a light bulb socket, and can make any surface interactive.

Powerful computers are becoming small and cheap enough to cram into all sorts of everyday objects. Natan Linder, a student at MIT’s Media Lab, thinks that fitting one inside a light bulb socket, together with a camera and projector, could provide a revolutionary new kind of interface—by turning any table or desk into a simple touch screen.

The LuminAR device, created by Linder and colleagues at the Media Lab, can project interactive images onto a surface, sensing when a person’s finger or hand points to an element within those images. Linder describes LuminAR as an augmented-reality system because the images and interfaces it projects can alter the function of a surface or object. While LuminAR might seem like a far-fetched concept, many large technology companies are experimenting with new kinds of computer interfaces in hopes of discovering new markets for their products (see “Google Game Could Be Augmented Reality’s First Killer App” and ”A New Chip to Bring 3-D Gesture Control to Smartphones&rdquo.

Linder’s system uses a camera, a projector, and software to recognize objects and project imagery onto or around them, and also to function as a scanner. It connects to the Internet using Wi-Fi. Some capabilities of the prototype, such as object recognition, rely partly on software running on a remote cloud server.

LuminAR could be used to create an additional display on a surface, perhaps to show information related to a task in hand. It can also be used to snap a photo of an object, or of printed documents such as a magazine. A user can then e-mail that photo to a contact by interacting with LuminAR’s projected interface.

“I’m really excited by the way this would be used by engineers and designers,” says Linder, who believes it could be useful for any creative occupation that often involves working with paper and other tangible objects as well as computers.

LuminAR could have uses beyond the desk or office environment. One demo to illustrate the use of one of the devices features a mock-up of an electronics store, where the device projected price tags next to cameras on a table, as well as buttons that could be used to call up more product information. Linder has also tried using it for Skype-style video calls, projecting the caller’s video onto the wall next to the desk the lamp stood on.

The current prototype is built around a processor from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon series, commonly used in smartphones and tablets. Linder and colleagues are experimenting with both a custom Linux-based operating system and a modified version of Google’s Android mobile operating system.

Earlier LuminAR prototypes included a motorized arm for the lamp, too. But the researchers are currently focused on finessing the bulb-only version. That design cuts costs and complexity, and also makes the technology easier to adopt, says Linder. “It has zero cost of adoption. You just change the bulb in your lamp,” he says.

Browse better: How to make your internet connection faster and more reliable

• By Grant Brunner on November 1, 2012 at 1:20 pm
• Comment

The internet is a vital part of our lives. Just like your car, body, and robot underlings, your internet connection can be fine-tuned and made to work more efficiently. With just a little bit of effort, your surfing experience can be noticeably improved.

DNS

The quickest and easiest way to improve your internet surfing is to change your Domain Name System (DNS) service to OpenDNS. Not only are you very likely to see faster DNS resolution than your ISP’s DNS service, but it comes with a whole host of features. Anti-phishing, usage reports, and parental controls are built right in, and it’s as simple as changing a few numbers in your router or computer’s settings.

If there is a specific server or two that is always slowing down your page loads, you can simply keep your computer from reaching them by editing your hosts file. Hosts is a simple text file that can override your DNS service’s resolution to specific IP addresses. If you’re tired of an ad server or third-party service like Twitter wasting your resources, just set their domains to hit your localhost (127.0.0.1). Now when your favorite website tries to load that Twitter iframe, it will appear as if that server is offline.

If you’re running OS X, there is a very neat preference pane called Hosts that allows you to change your hosts file within System Preferences. Everyone else just needs to find the file, and customize it in your text editor of choice.

Traffic shaping

On heavy-traffic networks, sometimes the best you can do is triage. Many routers, especially those designed for businesses, have Quality of Service (QoS) settings. This allows specific types of traffic to have priority over others. For example, if your peers are flooding the router with BitTorrent traffic, you can configure the router to prioritize web traffic so you’ll be less inconvenienced. This is also extremely important if you’re planning on using VoIP. You don’t want that HD video downloading on iTunes to take priority over your important business call, so QoS will certainly come in handy.

Speeding up DSL

If you’re a DSL user, you might have heard about interleaving and FastPath. Interleaving is an error correction mechanism that makes sure you get all of your packets in an uncorrupted form. If your connection is bad, it can make a big difference when left on. However, people with good DSL connections might want to consider asking their ISP to turn this setting off, thus enabling FastPath. For example, you might want it off if you’re a big gamer because it can lower your ping time, and it’s not vitally important that every packet is received properly. The pros and cons vary heavily depending on your situation, so don’t assume turning it off will make your connection better.

DSL users may also have the option of changing their profile to more aggressive settings. If you are close to the local telephone exchange, there is less line noise, and thus higher connection speeds are possible if your ISP and router are correctly configured. To change your line profile you will generally need to contact your ISP (and you may need to speak to an engineer, rather than a customer service rep).

Compression

Not all of us can have FiOS or Xfinity. Some people are stuck with slow DSL, satellite, or even dial-up internet connections. For these poor souls, there is a way to dramatically decrease your load times: compression. While there are a few services that offer this, the simplest way to get dynamic image compression is with Opera Turbo. Install Opera, turn on the Turbo feature, and it will automatically detect when you’re on a slow internet connection. It will then start passing every website you visit through their servers, and squashing the elements on the page. The quality of the images will suffer, but at least your bad connection will be usable.

Extend your wireless network

If your internet connection is fine, but you lose WiFi connection in certain parts of your house, this can be fixed too. What you need is a wireless bridge. Using the Wireless Distribution System (WDS), you can use a second wireless router to extend your WiFi range. When you’re shopping for a bridge device, look for terms like “Wireless Bridge” or “WDS” in the product description. If you have a router laying around, and the official firmware doesn’t support what you want, you can consider a third party firmware to make your life easier. Something like the Tomato firmware can make locked-down consumer routers easier to configure and use for just such purposes.

Bear in mind that simply plugging your computer into a physical, wired connection can also significantly reduce latency and increase throughput.

If your surfing is slow, these tweaks and services can make a big difference. However, these won’t solve every problem under the sun. Try these out, and hopefully it will cure what ails you. If not, your best bet will be calling your ISP, and asking for help. Even the nerdiest among us can’t get around that sometimes, so don’t feel bad.

The Tech Behind Apple’s Impossibly Thin New iMacs

The 27-inch iMac is only 5mm thick at its edges. Photo: John Bradley/Wired 

We know Apple has a love affair with thin. The iPhone 5 is the thinnest iPhone ever. The MacBook Air could very well be used to slice bread. And the svelte MacBook Pro with Retina Display shows even premium notebook offerings can stand to shed a few pounds.

Still, when Apple unveiled the new 21.5- and 27-inch iMacs at its media event last week, it was shocking just how much thinner Apple had managed to make them. They seemed almost surgically precise, the result not just of remarkably slim displays but also an advanced welding technology borrowed from the aerospace industry.

Apple cut the volume of the new iMac by 40 percent. The LCD display is 45 percent thinner than that of the previous generation’s, which equates to 5 mm shaved off the total thickness. “The iMac display is really not getting the attention it deserves,” IHS analyst Vinita Jakhanwal told Wired. OLED displays are known for being lighter and thinner than their LCD counterparts, but Apple seems to have bucked that trend. “If it’s anywhere close to OLED display thickness, that’s something really cool.”

LG, for example, introduced a 55-inch OLED TV at CES last year that was 4 mm thick, and a few years before that, Sony demoed an 11-inch OLED TV that was only 3 mm thick. Since the edge of the iMac is only 5 mm thick, it’s safe to assume that the LCD display is down in OLED territory.

NPD DisplaySearch analyst Paul Semenza explained via e-mail how Apple managed to make the iMac display so thin, and the benefits of that process: “Apple is using optical bonding (lamination) of the [LCD] panel to a sheet of strengthened cover glass. This eliminates the air gap between the panel and the glass, which reduces overall thickness, and the optical bonding eliminates the reflections between the inside of the cover glass and the outside of the panel, which improves image quality.”

This may sound similar to the process used to make the display in the iPhone 5, but it’s actually less complicated. The iPhone’s display is higher resolution and has integrated touch sensing, which makes it more challenging to produce. Jakhanwal says that Corning and other glass companies have been working to reduce the thickness of that cover glass, too. In recent years, it’s come down from over 0.7 mm to 0.3 mm.

Apple took full advantage of the thinner displays by creating an ultra-thin body to go along with them. The new iMacs are just 5 mm thick for the entirety of the desktop’s perimeter. To maintain that along seams where the front and back pieces meet, Apple used a process called friction stir welding (FSW) — a method normally reserved for things like airplane wings and rocket booster tanks, areas that need a seamless, fail-safe connection. It was even used on parts in the Space Shuttle.

FSW is a solid-state process, meaning the metal isn’t melted. In simple terms, it works by using a rotating tool pressed against the surface of two overlapping plates. The tool has a small protrusion that fits into the crack between the plates and is pressed down along the length of the joint. This creates frictional heat that softens the two surfaces, which are then pressed together under high pressure to create a bond.

FSW was invented by Wayne Thomas at TWI Ltd, a U.K.-based independent research and technology company. Because this is a patented process, Apple is licensing the technology for its iMacs. A TWI representative said that the specific details of that license are confidential, but it looks like Apple is the first consumer electronics company to employ the technology. Of course, if the rest of the industry follows Apple’s lead — as it is wont to do – TWI could be getting a lot more customers.

The star of the show, however, will be Google's new 10" tablet that was developed in conjunction with Samsung. This tablet will come bearing Android 4.2 (still operating under the Jelly Bean codename) and a Retina-surpassing resolution of 2560x1600 (300 ppi). Apple's "New iPad" features a screen resolution of 2048x1536 (264 ppi).
The device will likely be called the Nexus 10. We don't have any specs to report on at this time other than the screen, but we can only assume that it'll be packing a quad-core processor and at least 64GB of storage space at the high-end.

Source: The Next Web