TechEye |  |
- Let’s face it, you’re in it
- Quanta bullish about Apple Watch sales
- Humans will become robot pets
- Integrated infrastructure revenues up
- E-commerce bans Confederate flag symbols
- MIT slashes battery cost by half
- Xiaomi and Qihoo have boo-who over pregnant women
- An Apple a day keeps Hon Hai quite gay
- Hancock has his half hour of fame
- LTE antennae worth $4 billion
| Posted: 26 Jun 2015 04:40 AM PDT
Tactica said that the biggest use for facial recognition is mobile phones recognising you. But while that application promises big volumes, the unit price is small. The other big sector is governmental – whether it's defence, law enforcement or border controls. There's also a move to profiling people with specific digital signage. But even though the numbers are there, Tactica said that it faces stiff competition from other methods of authentication, including fingerprints, voice, speech, and eye. Revenues for facial recognition are likely to be worth $882 million by 2024. Tactica said that the more expensive infrared facial thermography is more reliable and could well be used by border controls and by banks. |
| Quanta bullish about Apple Watch sales Posted: 26 Jun 2015 03:58 AM PDT
But recently it has diversified, and as well as making servers that it ships direct to selected customers, it's also making the Apple Watch. It's the sole manufacturer so far, and told the Digitimes wire that it expected a large growth in shipments of the watches in the second half of this year. It also discounted rumours that other manufacturers were being lined up to second source Apple Watch production, but that could well happen if the device becomes as popular as the company hopes. Digitimes thinks that as many as 40 million watches could ship this year, but other sources are far less buoyant about its future. Quanta turned in $2.49 billion in revenues during the month of May, much of that not based on notebook PCs but on its diversified ranges. |
| Posted: 26 Jun 2015 02:28 AM PDT
Woz has warned that artificial intelligence will be “scary and very bad for people,” saying robots will “get rid of the slow humans” which would mean most of Apple's customers. However Woz has since mellowed a bit saying that being a robot's pet is no bad thing. Speaking at the Freescale technology forum in Austria, Wozniak said: “They’re going to be smarter than us and if they’re smarter than us then they’ll realise they need us. We want to be the family pet and be taken care of all the time.” He realised this when he was feeding his dog the same meals as he prepared for himself. “I got this idea a few years ago and so I started feeding my dog fillet steak and chicken every night because ‘do unto others.'” Wozniak added: “It’s actually going to turn out really good for humans. And it will be hundreds of years down the stream before they’d even have the ability to look after humans. They’ll be so smart by then that they’ll know they have to keep nature, and humans are a part of nature. So I got over my fear that we’d be replaced by computers. They’re going to help us. We’re at least the gods originally.” |
| Integrated infrastructure revenues up Posted: 26 Jun 2015 02:24 AM PDT
IDC divides this market into two sectors. Integrated platforms, according to its definition, are sysems sold with pre-integrated packaged software and system engineering optimised for a limited set of tasks. Integrated infrastructure are for general purpose workloads. So, for the platform market, the number three players are Oracle, IBM and a tie between Hitachi and HP. However, Oracle is by far the biggest player, with a 51.9 percent market share in the quarter. For integrated infrastructure, VCE was number one with 24.1 percent market share, followed by Cisco/Netapp (22.6%) and HP (17.8%). Kevin Permenter, a senior analyst at IDC, described the integrated systems market as "highly competitive landscape". The major players, he added, have reorganised themselves to win business in the datacentre infrastructure marker. |
| E-commerce bans Confederate flag symbols Posted: 26 Jun 2015 02:02 AM PDT
The US had a wakeup call in the wake of the racist massacre in a South Carolina church. Amazon reportedly joined other e-commerce companies, such as eBay and Etsy, Apple and national retailers in pulling goods with symbols from their digital shelves. Google followed saying it will pull paraphernalia with images of the flag from Google Shopping, its online marketplace, as well as its product listing ads. A spokesGoogle said that it will "remove content containing the Confederate flag from Google Shopping and Ads… We have determined that the Confederate flag violates our Ads policies, which don't allow content that's generally perceived as expressing hate toward a particular group." It is a bit odd that no-one appears to have noticed this, given that originally the flag was placed on a white background and its inventor William T. Thompson said that: "As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or coloured race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause." Later the confederates added a red strip to the flag but kept the white background. What most people see as the Confederate flag is just the left hand bit of the true flag also called the Battle Flag. The Battle Flag was designed by William Porcher Miles. It was made famous because it was carried by Confederate War Veterans including one famous secret vigilante group formed in 1865 which targeted freed slaves and sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans. It was called the KKK. |
| MIT slashes battery cost by half Posted: 26 Jun 2015 02:00 AM PDT
The method will be marketed by a spinoff company called 24M which claims to have re-invented the process of making lithium-ion batteries. Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics at MIT, and a co-founder of 24M said that the existing process has hardly changed in the two decades since the technology was invented, and is inefficient, with more steps and components than are really needed. The new process is based on a concept developed five years ago by Chiang and colleagues including W. Craig Carter, the POSCO Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. In this so-called "flow battery," the electrodes are suspensions of tiny particles carried by a liquid and pumped through various compartments of the battery. The new battery design is a hybrid between flow batteries and conventional solid ones: In this version, while the electrode material does not flow, it is composed of a similar semisolid, colloidal suspension of particles. Chiang and Carter refer to this as a "semisolid battery." Chiang said that this approach greatly simplifies manufacturing, and also makes batteries that are flexible and resistant to damage. We realized that a better way to make use of this flowable electrode technology was to reinvent the manufacturing process." Instead of the standard method of applying liquid coatings to a roll of backing material, and then having to wait for that material to dry before it can move to the next manufacturing step, the new process keeps the electrode material in a liquid state and requires no drying stage at all. Using fewer, thicker electrodes, the system reduces the conventional battery architecture's number of distinct layers, as well as the amount of nonfunctional material in the structure, by 80 percent. Having the electrode in the form of tiny suspended particles instead of consolidated slabs greatly reduces the path length for charged particles as they move through the material — a property known as "tortuosity." A less tortuous path makes it possible to use thicker electrodes, which, in turn, simplifies production and lowers cost. Basically this will cut battery costs by half, and create a battery that is more flexible and resilient. While conventional lithium-ion batteries are composed of brittle electrodes that can crack under stress, the new formulation produces battery cells that can be bent, folded or even penetrated by bullets without failing. This should improve both safety and durability, he says. |
| Xiaomi and Qihoo have boo-who over pregnant women Posted: 26 Jun 2015 01:59 AM PDT
It is not clear what the switch actually does, as wi-fi is normally safe for pregnant women and Qihoo might as well have released a switch that rendered the signal "fat person friendly" or "suitable for vegans". But the move angered its rival Xianomi because it implied that it was marketing routers that might harm women expecting a child. Qihoo's P1 router features three settings: "wall penetration", "balance" and “bun in the oven” . Xiaomi took to social media site Weibo to denounce Qihoo's product as scaremongering. Xiami's post read: "The so-called pregnancy mode is just a marketing tactic. Wi-Fi usage is safe, so please rest assured when using Xiaomi's router. "We firmly oppose, and feel ashamed of, those who create rumours and arouse instability for business purposes." Zhou Hongyi, chief executive and president of Qihoo, hit back with the rather brilliant but ominous statement: "We will wait and see who has a more profound understanding of Wi-Fi routers, me or our competitors." Hongyi claims that the upgraded P1 router protects pregnant women from any harm from signals, as it reduces radiation by around 70 percent. "We are targeting people who are afraid of radiation", he said. However, in a statement to South China Morning Post he acknowledged that no definitive link has been made between Wi-Fi signals and poor health and his company has not invested in scientists to prove how much damage the radiation from Wi-Fi can cause. The World Health Organisation says there is no empirical evidence to suggest health implications and in any event if there were turning down the wi-fi radiation would not change much. |
| An Apple a day keeps Hon Hai quite gay Posted: 25 Jun 2015 10:25 AM PDT
Its chief executive, Terry Gou, reckons its revenues will soar by 10 percent this year, to a rather respectable $132.68 billion. The Taipei Times said Gou said is getting closer and closer to Apple and that's what will boost its sales. Hon Hai makes Apple kit in mainland China, although it is a Taiwanese firm. It has come under scrutiny in the past for its labour record and a spate of well publicised suicides. Gou said that Hon Hai is the chief assembler for Apple kit and in fact makes all of Apple's bigger iPhones. He told the Taipei Times that Pegatron – another Taiwanese company – only gets a few crumbs compared to Hon Hai. Gou has his eyes on the Indian market and will invest in the country. |
| Hancock has his half hour of fame Posted: 25 Jun 2015 07:57 AM PDT
Matthew Hancock, who lives in the Cabinet Office, described the smartphone as "one of the most profound symbols of digital transformation the world has ever seen". He said the smartphone is a miniature office, a digital camera and a fitness monitor. He said that some of his younger officials use the smartphone as a dating agency. He claimed that if you tried to get the same functionality in 1990, the memory and components alone "would cost around $3.6 million". He said that the last coalition government aimed to make important transactions digital by default – citing for example apps to view your driving licence and visiting prisons. He said there are about 700 interactions between government and UK citizens and many could be digitised but it's time consuming and expensive to build the infrastructure. He claimed that the introduction of "government as a platform" includes building "core digital plumbing" which can be used by different government departments. The UK government is prototyping a status tracking platform that can be used by any service. He claimed that Intel's Moore's Law means "you really can do more of less, if you use technology". He said that the symbol of transformation "is no longer the iPhone in your hand, but here, miniaturised in the iWatch on your wrist". |
| Posted: 25 Jun 2015 07:39 AM PDT
So much so, that market intelligence company ABI Research, forecasts that the global market for LTE capable antennae will be worth close to $4 billion this year. ABI thinks that multi-band antennae are the hot potatoes in the LTE bortsch. "Lance Wilson, a research director there, said: "LTE does not have the formal spectrum standardisation of previous air interfaces such as 3G, so multi-band antennae that can operate over a number of different frequency slots offer a solution to the problem of rapidly growing LTE wireless data traffic." The cost of active antennae has caused it to have lack of appeal, but the entire supply chain for antennae is "unusual" because of multiple tiers and multiple players. Wilson said that most vendors are small companies and there's very likely to be consolidation in that sector. He believes that LTE capable antennae are responsible for growth the market and that's going to continue to happen at least for the next few years. |
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