NASA launches a moon satellite this week that will test ultrafast optical data transmission.

A new communications technology slated for launch by NASA this Friday will provide a record-smashing 600 megabits-per-second downloads. The resulting probe will orbit the moon and send communications back to Earth via lasers.

The plan hints at how lasers could give a boost to terrestrial Internet coverage, too. Within a few years, commercial Internet satellite services are expected to use optical connections—instead of today’s radio links—providing far greater bandwidth. A Virginia startup, Laser Light Communications, is in the early stages of designing such a system and hopes to launch a fleet of 12 satellites in four years.

Already, some companies provide short-range through-the-air optical connections for tasks such as connecting campus or office buildings when an obstruction such as a river or road makes laying fiber infeasible. “There are a bunch of technologies that all come together for new applications and improved service, not just one,” says Heinz Willebrand, president and CEO of Lightpointe, a San Diego-based company whose technology provides up to 2.5 gigabits per second for a few hundred meters.

One new technology figuring in NASA’s moon probe: a superconducting nanowire detector, cooled to three kelvins. That gadget, developed at MIT and its Lincoln Laboratory, is designed to detect single photons sent nearly a quarter of a million miles from infrared lasers on an orbiting lunar probe, which is being launched Friday to measure dust in the lunar atmosphere.

The new communications system, dubbed Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration, will deliver six times greater download speeds compared to the fastest radio system used for moon communications. It will use telescopes that are just under one meter in diameter to pick up the signal. But it could be reëngineered to provide 2.5 gigabits per second, if the ground telescope designed to detect the signals were enlarged to three meters in diameter, says Don Boroson, the Lincoln Lab researcher who led the project. “This is demonstrating the first optical data transmission for a deep-ish space mission. If you resize it and partly reëngineer it, you could potentially do it to Mars,” he says.

Because clouds block photons, detectors are being installed at three spots: one each in California and New Mexico, and a third on the Canary Islands. On this mission, though, the system will merely be tested. Most operations will be handled by radio technologies—upgraded versions of the system that delivered Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for man” transmission in 1969. But if all goes well, optical systems will likely dominate space transmissions in the future, with radio systems serving as a backup.

In addition to the nanowire detector, the system depends on high-speed encoding and decoding of data, and a separate set of calculations and adjustments to keep the telescopes pointed at each other. “There are a bunch of technologies that are new and exciting,” Boroson says.

But what may be even more exciting for bandwidth-hungry Earthlings is the prospect of a satellite-based all-optical network to augment the ground-based one.

Laser Light Communications is putting together components for a commercial system that would provide all-optical satellite-to-ground and satellite-to-satellite communications. The company aims to supercharge Internet bandwidth around the world with a space-based optical network to complement the global fiber one (see “New Oceans of Data”).

The idea is that the system will often create shorter continent-spanning links than are available on the ground while bypassing any bottlenecks. What’s more, in the case of failures—such as the severed undersea fiber cable that blacked out much of the Middle East and parts of India in 2008 (see “Analyzing the Internet Collapse”)—it would offer alternative routes and greater resiliency.

The company is planning an initial 48 ground stations for its system. If clouds block downlinks or uplinks at one site, it can dump the data at a different receiver—perhaps just a few hundred miles away—achieving very high reliability, says Robert Brumley, CEO of Pegasus Global Holdings, which is launching the company based on federally funded defense research in the area of optical communications.

Many more could be installed: the detector units would be small enough to be fitted atop an office building or even a truck, such as to handle feeds for live television, Brumley adds.

Under the system, eight satellites whizzing around the planet at an altitude of about 12,000 kilometers would create a total system capacity of six terabits per second—and download speeds of 200 gigabits per second, about 100 times faster than today’s radio links. “We’re aiming for worldwide coverage at service levels and connectivity options previously unattainable by other satellite platforms,” says Brumley.  But the company’s main aim is to become a wholesale supplier of bandwidth to other carriers–possibly even including other satellite services–and not to become a competitor, he added.

The recently launched satellite company O3B—which stands for “the other three billion”—provides between 150 megabits per second and two gigabits per second using radio frequencies. Other companies, Intelsat and Inmarsat, also deliver speeds in that ballpark.

Another Internet-boosting idea, Google’s “Project Loon,” envisions balloons circling the Earth in the stratosphere to provide coverage to underserved areas. But that would also use radio signals (see “African Entrepreneurs Deflate Google’s Internet Balloon Idea”), Google says.

(Reuters) – Two consortiums, including IBM and STMicroelectronics, have proposed building semiconductor wafer plants in India costing a total of $8 billion, a minister said after the government approved concessions to lure chipmakers.

India, which wants local production of chips to cut long-term import bills, has renewed a drive to attract investments after a previous attempt failed.

The government hopes other chipmakers will show interest in building further plants after the federal cabinet on Thursday approved concessions including subsidies on capital spending, interest-free loans and tax breaks, Communications and Information Technology Minister Kapil Sibal said.

“India needs not less than 15 fabs (fabrication units),” Sibal told reporters on Friday.

He said that given the huge investments, long build-up period of plants and low freight costs to import chips from abroad there is “no great interest”, and the only way to attract investments was through offering such major concessions.

Ganesh Ramamoorthy, a research director at Gartner, said there was little incentive for chipmakers to come to India.

“Globally there are established fabs that are struggling to maintain their profitability,” Ramamoorthy said.

“Will they be exporting it, will they be competing with other global fabs, or will India be generating enough demand … these are difficult questions,” the analyst added.

DETAILED REPORTS IN TWO MONTHS

The minister said the two consortiums would be asked to submit within two months their detailed project reports, including the production mix and marketing plans. The detailed project reports would be evaluated by a third party, he said.

One of the consortiums is made up of India’s Jaiprakash Associates and Israel’s TowerJazz with IBM as technology partner. It has proposed a plant near New Delhi at a cost of 263 billion rupees ($4 billion), the government said.

The second comprises Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp and Malaysia’s Silterra with STMicroelectronics as the technology partner. The proposed investment at 252.5 billion rupees for a plant in the western state of Gujarat.

A Jaiprakash spokesman declined comment. The Indian units of IBM and STMicroelectronics said they would not give an immediate comment.

The technology providers must take at least a 10 percent stake in the projects, while the Indian government would get an 11 percent stake in each project. The government would part-fund the investments through interest-free loans for 10 years.

India’s demand for electronics products is forecast to rise nearly 10 times during this decade to reach $400 billion by 2020, causing policy makers to worry that electronics imports, with no major local manufacturing, could exceed those of oil.

As sales of smartphones, computers and television sets surge, annual imports of semiconductors are expected to touch $50 billion by 2020 from $7 billion in 2010, according to an Indian government presentation.

Typically, semiconductor foundries take about two years to be up and running, Gartner’s Ramamoorthy said. Meanwhile global companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co are already exploring wafer technologies that are much more advanced than those India is proposing to make, he said. ($1 = 63.3925 Indian rupees)

(The story inserts dropped word “not” five graphs from end)

(Reuters) – Dell Inc Chief Executive Michael Dell said in an interview with CNBC on Friday the focus of the company, which he is taking private, will include expanding sales capacity and growing in emerging markets and tablets.

Dell, who won a battle with activist Carl Icahn to win control of the computer company, also said he will shift from a quarterly focus to a “five-year, ten-year focus.”

He does not foresee a Dell entry into the cell phone market.

By Soyoung Kim and Greg Roumeliotis and Jessica Toonkel

NEW YORK | Fri Sep 6, 2013 6:20pm

(Reuters) – Johnson & Johnson has launched a sale process for its Ortho Clinical Diagnostics unit, which makes blood screening equipment and laboratory blood tests and could fetch around $5 billion, three people familiar with the matter said on Friday.

J&J has asked JPMorgan Chase & Co to run the sale and is preparing to send detailed financial information in coming weeks to potential buyers, including some of the world’s largest private equity firms and a number of healthcare companies, the people said.

Early estimates suggest the unit’s earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization are between $400 million and $500 million, suggesting a possible valuation of roughly $5 billion, the people said.

The unit, whose tests are considered older and less profitable than modern molecular diagnostics that examine gene mutations for signs of disease, has annual sales of about $2 billion.

The people asked not to be identified discussing details of the process. J&J declined to comment, while a JPMorgan spokeswoman had no immediate comment.

Healthcare conglomerate J&J said in January it would explore strategic alternatives for the unit and cautioned that the process could take anywhere from about 12 to 24 months.

Industrial and healthcare conglomerates General Electric and Danaher Corp. are likely to take a serious look at bidding for the J&J business, said one of the sources and another who had heard about the sales process.

GE declined to comment. A call to Danaher was not immediately returned.

J&J’s decision to divest the division comes as drugmakers are shedding businesses and cutting costs due to overseas price controls and pressure on payments from insurers and the government. Pfizer Inc, for instance, just spun off its animal health products business, and Abbott Laboratories split off its branded drugs unit early this year.

Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, whose revenue growth has been relatively flat, is No. 5 in the clinical diagnostics market, as measured in sales. Typically, J&J’s businesses rank first or second in their respective markets.

Clinical diagnostics are less attractive than molecular diagnostics, which could see strong revenue growth in coming years as examination of genes helps doctors steer patients to appropriate treatments.

But some analysts, including Les Funtleyder of Poliwogg, have said private equity buyers might be interested in the stable cash flow the J&J unit could provide.

(Reporting by Soyoung Kim, Greg Roumeliotis, Jessica Toonkel and Ransdell Pierson in New York; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Bernard Orr)

A real-time MRI system can help surgeons perform faster and safer brain operations.

By Susan Young

A new system for visualizing the brain during surgery is helping neurosurgeons more accurately diagnose and treat patients and is even allowing them to perform some procedures that until now have been extremely difficult or even impossible.

Neurosurgeons can use the imaging technology during surgeries that require small objects—biopsy needles, implants, or tubes to deliver drugs—to be placed at precise locations in the brain. The system provides live magnetic resonance images (MRI) that allow surgeons to monitor their progress during the operation.

Typically, neurosurgeons use an MRI before a surgery to plan the trajectory of the operation, based on the brain’s position relative to a guidance frame that’s screwed onto the patient’s skull, says Robert Gross, a neurosurgeon at Emory University. But the brain can shift before the actual surgery takes place, he says, rendering that MRI inaccurate. To check on what’s happening inside a patient’s skull, doctors have to stop the surgery and perhaps even move the patient out of the operating room.

To address these issues, researchers have been developing new neurosurgical guidance systems that can work with the strong magnets and electronic signals used by MRI scanners. The medical-device company Medtronic, for example, offers a real-time MRI imaging system for neurosurgery. But Gross says the most useful system on the market is offered by MRI interventions, a medical device company based in Memphis, Tennessee.

If it can cleverly blend hardware and software in new ways, reach new markets, and take advantage of Nokia’s patent portfolio, Microsoft’s billions could be well spent.

By David Talbot

Nokia might have gotten the better of Microsoft this week in selling its once-dominant handset business to Microsoft and entering into a broad patent agreement in a deal worth $7.1 billion. Microsoft’s stock price took a big hit. And no wonder: given the declining state of Nokia’s business, the deal seemed like a desperate attempt to prop up the largest manufacturer of phones that run Windows before it went under or switched to Google’s Android system.

But there are at least four ways Microsoft might come up a winner in the long run. With than 4 percent of the global market for smartphone operating systems, Microsoft has little more to lose and a lot, potentially, to gain as it tries to claw market share from Android and Apple.

Here’s how Microsoft could benefit significantly.

1. Skype, the dominant voice-over-Internet service owned by Microsoft, could become more powerful. Microsoft can now push Skype across its Xbox gaming/TV console, Nokia devices, Surface tablets, all PCs, and Android and Apple phones. That’s more of the world than Apple or Google can address with their FaceTime or Hangouts chat services. Skype is being steadily integrated more deeply into Windows; it will be preinstalled in Windows 8.1 on the desktop. It could become a way for Microsoft to compete with conventional cellular carriers on voice and messaging, where there’s money to be made.

More generally, Microsoft might now be able to do something that Apple or Google haven’t or can’t: integrate mobile devices and desktops into a more seamless experience. Google is limited in this regard because it doesn’t control PCs, although it is doing things like putting Google Now, the company’s intelligent personal assistant, into its main website. Apple has required users to use iTunes, and more recently iCloud, to sync up their phones with their laptops, but perhaps Microsoft can use Skype and other apps as the basis of a simpler and more compelling multi-device experience.

2. Leaving aside the patents that Microsoft acquired, Nokia retains ownership of some of the most valuable and fundamental patents—known as “utility patents” in the wireless industry. While Microsoft didn’t buy those, it did license all of them for 10 years, giving it a free reign that rival phone makers won’t necessarily have.

Over the last two decades or so, Nokia spent more than $55 billion on R&D and made acquisitions that gave it a war chest of 30,000 patents. Many of these cover fundamental operations and ones for wireless standards like GSM. One of Nokia’s most valuable patents is one describing a “method for mapping, translating, and dynamically reconciling data.” This is now fundamental to syncing calendars on different devices. And now that it is free of its handset business, Nokia can focus more on monetizing this fundamental IP—in court, if necessary. Nokia will no longer have to worry about countersuits alleging infringements by technologies in its phones, since it will no longer be making or selling any. And if Nokia does decide to go for the jugular, Microsoft’s neck will be protected.

Nokia has shown aggressiveness before. In a 2009 suit against Apple, Nokia claimed that the iPhone maker had violated 46 Nokia patents, on everything from wireless standards to touch-screen controls. Apple agreed to settle two years ago. Nokia gets more than $600 million every year in patent-related revenue.

Nokia’s announcement included this clue: the company plans to “expand its industry-leading technology licensing program, spanning technologies that enable mobility today and tomorrow.”

3. Microsoft may gain a deeper store of research knowledge to draw from. Nokia spent lavishly on R&D—including more than $5 billion last year alone—and had 27,551 R&D employees at the end of 2012. It’s true that the value of their collective output is dubious: Nokia R&D failed to produce technologies that could dent the dominance of Apple and Samsung in the smartphone business.

Oskar Sodergren, a Nokia spokesman, says that while the Nokia Research Center stays with Nokia, all R&D staff related to mobile products and smartphones will all transfer to Microsoft. Presumably, these are the people who gave us things like “Morph Concept” technologies—in which a phone or watch can be made flexible and transparent, with built-in solar-power recharging and integrated sensors.

A Microsoft research spokeswoman, Chrissy Vaughn, says the company was not elaborating on how the research units might merge. But Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s outgoing CEO, said in a press call yesterday that “Finland will become the hub and the center for our phone R&D.” The two companies have said that all of Nokia’s 4,700 Finnish employees who now work in devices and services will become Microsoft employees.

4. The smartphone business is still ramping up quickly, which means there remains a lot of opportunity, especially in international markets that are far from saturated. Nokia sells more than 200 million phones annually—and most of them are not in Europe or North America. Although Microsoft will have to compete with legions of low-cost manufacturers, it might be able to use Nokia’s international manufacturing and distribution to its advantage—assuming, of course, that it can do something truly novel on the phones themselves.

By Lee Chyen Yee

(Reuters) – Chinese telecom carriers China Unicom Hong Kong Ltd (0762.HK) and China Telecom Corp Ltd (0728.HK) will carry AppleInc’s (AAPL.O) newest iPhone models within days of their launch in Beijing next week as the U.S. technology giant tries to regain lost ground in its second-biggest market by releasing the phones faster.

Apple said earlier this week it was holding a satellite event in Beijing on September 11, the day after it is expected to unveil its latest iPhones in the United States. The September 11 event is the first time Apple will launch in China at almost the same time as in the United States, underscoring the importance of the Chinese smartphone market, the biggest in the world.

“There used to be a wait of a few months before Apple launches their latest products in China, but nowadays, China is too important a market for Apple and so it will be the first batch of markets to start selling the low and high-end iPhones next week,” said a source at one of the telecom carriers, who declined to be identified as he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The high-end version is being called the iPhone 5S and the low-end version is the 5C.

China Unicom and China Telecom, the mainland’s second and third-biggest mobile carriers respectively with a combined 266 million subscribers, are Apple’s carrier partners in China, the world’s biggest mobile phone market with more than 1 billion users.

China Mobile Ltd (0941.HK) is the only carrier without an iPhone contract, although it has been rumored in the market Apple and China Mobile may soon come to an agreement.

Apple’s high-end 5S model may support a 4G technology called TD-LTE, which could pave the way for an agreement with China Mobile, which has more than double the subscribers of China Unicom and Telecom combined.

Officials with all three carriers declined to comment.

Days after the launch in Beijing, both of Apple’s current Chinese carriers will accept pre-orders. It will take about a week for them to deliver the new iPhones to their customers, the source said.

News of the iPhone debuts leaked on Sina Corp’s (SINA.O) Weibo microblog, which briefly carried a pre-order advertisement for the latest models on China Telecom’s verified page in Beijing. The post was quickly taken down, although word had already spread among bloggers, many of whom posted screenshots of the announcement.

“Have you prepared your cash to welcome the iPhone 5S and 5C? I’m looking forward to it,” said a Sina microblogger.

Over the past few quarters, Apple’s China market share has dwindled due to stiff competition from global rivals like Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) and domestic players selling phones that cost a fraction of the iPhone.

Its second-quarter market share slipped to 5 percent and was ranked No.7, trailing Samsung, Lenovo Group Ltd (0992.HK), Yulong Computer, ZTE Corp (0763.HK) (000063.SZ), Huawei Technologies Co Ltd HWT.UL and Xiaomi, according to research firm Canalys. Apple’s iPhones had a market share of 8 percent, making it the No.5 vendor, in the first quarter, Canalys said.

“It’s a very good direction that Apple is launching its latest model so soon in China when its brand attraction is on the decline,” said Nicole Peng, an analyst at Canalys. “It is a sign that they value the Chinese consumers.”

In another sign that its Chinese sales were faltering, Apple’s greater China revenue for its fiscal quarter ending June plunged 43 percent from the previous period and 14 percent from the same quarter last year to around $5 billion.

(Reporting by Lee Chyen Yee in SINGAPORE; Additional reporting by Paul Carsten in BEIJING; Editing by Matt Driskill)

By Eric Pfanner

TAIPEI — Fresh from poaching a top Google executive to lead its global expansion plans, the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi on Thursday announced another jaw-dropper: a 3-D television with a 47-inch screen, capable of hooking up to Internet, all for less than $500.

Published August 30, 2013

By Benjamin Pimentel

Published August 30, 2013