A startup called Iotera wants to let you track your pets, your kids, or your belongings without relying on commercial wireless networks.

By Rachel Metz

The iPhone wouldn’t stop chirping. On a recent morning I was riding in a car through Silicon Valley with three people from a startup called Iotera. A small tracking tag was attached to the passenger-side sun visor. Our mission was to see how far we could drive from Iotera’s office building before the tag would stop transmitting its location to a small base station on the building’s roof—which meant the location-logging app on the phone would go silent.

It took several miles. That’s good news for Iotera, which is developing tracking technology that can work throughout cities without requiring access to a commercial wireless network or even a short-range wireless protocol like Bluetooth. The system uses GPS-embedded tags that can last for months on a single charge, occasionally sending their coordinates over unlicensed wireless spectrum to small base stations with a range of several miles.

Iotera expects businesses to use its technology to track everything from tools on construction sites to workers in dangerous places like oil rigs. Or people might use it to keep an eye on their pets. Iotera’s founders say two companies (which it won’t name) are trying it out. One is using it to help parents monitor their children’s whereabouts, and the other is tracking company-owned devices.

Iotera is taking a risk by trying to sell its own wireless base stations. But the market for the Internet of Things—wherein normally unconnected devices are connected to the Internet so they can be tracked or made more functional—is growing fast. Networking equipment maker Cisco Systems estimates that there are 10.9 billion “people, processes, data, and things” connected to the Internet, and the company expects this to rise to as high as 50 billion by 2020.

Iotera grew out of an idea cofounder Ben Wild had for a long-range wireless tracking network. He thought such a network would be perfect for keeping tabs on animals, even though he doesn’t have any himself. “I just thought it would be cool to track pets,” he says. “And I thought this cool new wireless technology that I had an idea of how to build could really enable this market.”

Wild has been working on wireless tech for years. Before Iotera he founded Wirama, a maker of RFID product-locating technology that Checkpoint Systems bought in 2009. When I visited Iotera’s Redwood City office—a small suite in a startup-filled building with desks covered in prototypes of sensing tags and base stations—Wild, along with cofounder Robert Barton and software engineer Esther Rasche, demonstrated how their new technology works.

Wild handed me a sensor tag in a 3-D-printed case about the size of a small matchbox. If you clipped one to your dog’s collar, it would occasionally log Fido’s location and report it back to a small access point connected to the Internet. From there, it would be punted to Iotera’s servers, and then to a website or mobile app. Under what Wild calls “typical operating conditions,” the tag’s battery would last up to five months.

Fido’s location data could be transferred over as many as four miles in a suburban area, or two miles in a dense urban one, where more things can interfere with the signals.

To get a sense of the tracking in action, we jumped into Barton’s car, which was set up with a tag. We wound around hills, listening to a steady stream of chirps emanating from an iPhone app, which gathered location data from the access point and showed us the car’s movement on a map. The noise petered out as we hit Interstate 280 near a community college about four miles from Iotera’s office.

A cellular chip would eliminate the need for a base station and still let the tags work over a broader area, but Wild says it would require too big of a trade-off in battery life and sensor size. Not to mention, it would cost a lot more, given the monthly fee to use a wireless carrier’s network. Given that each of its base stations is a few hundred dollars, under a foot tall, and has a range of several miles, Iotera’s founders believe they can cover a whole city with just a handful of them.

However, each station can support only a certain number of tags, depending on the application it’s being used for. For an application that requires infrequent data transfers, like monitoring water meters each hour, an access point could handle 10,000 or more tags. But if you want to track a lost pet and transmit its GPS location every 30 seconds, Barton says, a station could support just hundreds.

Software digests thousands of research papers to accurately identify proteins that could prove valuable cancer drug targets.

(Reuters) – Apple Inc has bought Israel-based PrimeSense Ltd, a developer of chips that enable three-dimensional machine vision, the companies said on Monday, a move that signals gesture-controlled technologies in new devices from the maker of iPhones and iPads.

An Apple spokesman confirmed the purchase but declined to say how much it spent or what the technology will be used for. Israeli media said Apple paid about $350 million for PrimeSense, whose technology powers the gesture control in Microsoft Corp’s Xbox Kinect gaming system.

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” an Apple spokesman said in an e-mail.

A spokeswoman for PrimeSense said: “We can confirm the deal with Apple. Further than that, we cannot comment at this stage.”

It was the second acquisition of an Israeli company by Apple in less than two years. Apple bought flash storage chip maker Anobit in January 2012.

PrimeSense’s sensing technology, which gives digital devices the ability to observe a scene in three dimensions, was used to help power Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect device.

The Israeli company has licensed the technology to Microsoft but it is unclear how that deal changes with Apple’s acquisition of PrimeSense, which provides the technology behind Kinect’s visual gesture system.

Apple and Microsoft have other licensing deals between them. Microsoft did not return a call seeking comment.

Analysts are expecting PrimeSense’s technology to show up in Apple devices in about 12-18 months from now, potentially in the often-speculated device for the living room such as a television, dubbed iTV by fans.

“While we have not had any more evidence of an iTV coming in the next 6 to 12 months, some sort of living room appliance is in Apple’s future and gesture technology could be critical,” Peter Misek, analyst with Jefferies said in a note to clients.

Apple’s interest in PrimeSense was first reported in July by Israeli financial newspaper Calcalist.

By Jennifer Booton

BY ALEXEI ORESKOVIC

SAN FRANCISCO Tue Nov 19, 2013 5:50pm EST

(Reuters) – Yahoo Inc said it has increased its share repurchase authorization by $5 billion and that it planned to offer $1 billion in convertible notes.

Shares of Yahoo increased 1.6 percent to $35.17 in after hours trading on Tuesday following the announcement.

Yahoo has aggressively repurchased its common stock in recent quarters using cash obtained from selling a portion of its stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. In the first nine months of 2013, Yahoo spent $3.1 billion on share buybacks.

The buybacks have helped boost Yahoo’s shares roughly 74 percent this year, even as the Web portal’s revenue growth has remained stagnant amid competition from Facebook Inc, Google Inc and Twitter Inc.

Yahoo said the convertible notes will be due in 2018, with interest payable semi-annually in arrears on June 1 and December 1 of each year, beginning on June 1, 2014.

The interest rate and other terms of the senior unsecured notes will be determined at the time of pricing Yahoo said. The company also intends to grant the initial purchasers of the notes the right to buy an additional $150 million in notes.

BY BILL RIGBY

BELLEVUE, Washington Tue Nov 19, 2013 6:28pm EST

(Reuters) – Chairman Bill Gates said on Tuesday he was pleased with Microsoft Corp’s progress in finding a new chief executive but outlined the difficulties in picking the next leader of the world’s largest software company as it seeks to reinvent itself as a mobile computing power.

Gates is part of the four-man committee that gave itself a year to find a successor to Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer after he announced his plan to retire in August. Sources close to the process have said the search is down to a handful of candidates, but the company itself has been largely silent.

“We’ve been doing a lot of meetings with both internal and external candidates and we’re pleased with the progress,” said Gates at Microsoft’s annual shareholder meeting in Bellevue, Washington. “We’re looking at a number of candidates and I’m not going to give a timeline today.”

Ballmer said in August he planned to retire within 12 months, and the CEO search committee – headed by lead independent director and former IBM executive John Thompson – tasked itself with finding a replacement by the end of that period. Sources close to the company expect an appointment no later than January.

Gates, who in previous years did not address the shareholders’ meeting with prepared remarks, went on to describe the challenges of finding the right person to lead Microsoft.

“It’s a complex role to fill – a lot of different skills, experience and capabilities that we need,” he said. “It’s a complex global business the new CEO will have to lead. The person has to have a lot of comfort in leading a highly technical organization and have an ability to work with our top technical talent to seize the opportunities.”

Gates paused briefly and choked up with emotion after he thanked Ballmer for his work at the company, saying both he and Ballmer have a commitment “to make sure the next CEO is the right person, for the right time, for the company we both love.” Gates and Ballmer are the only two CEOs in Microsoft’s 38-year history.

Gates, who co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, then left the stage and sat in the front row of an audience of around 400 people, alongside other members of the board. That was a departure from previous years when he remained onstage and occasionally answered questions.

Microsoft has not shed much light on its CEO search, but sources close to the process have told Reuters the company has narrowed its shortlist of candidates to just a handful, including Ford Motor Co chief Alan Mulally and former Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, as well as former Skype CEO and internal candidate Tony Bates, now responsible for Microsoft’s business development.

Microsoft remains highly profitable and last month beat Wall Street’s quarterly profit and revenue forecasts.

But the company has come under criticism for missing some of the largest technology shifts in the past few years from Internet search to social networking, and Apple Inc and Google Inc are now at the vanguard of a mobile computing revolution that is eroding its core PC-based business.

Microsoft’s shares closed down 0.5 percent at $36.74 on Nasdaq.

A simple way to print circuits on a wide range of flexible substrates using an inkjet printer has eluded materials scientists. Until now.

One of the dreams of makers the world over is to be able to print electronic circuits on more or less any surface using a desktop printer. The great promise is the possibility of having RFID circuits printed on plastic or paper packaging, LED arrays on wallpaper and even transparent circuits on glass. Or simply to rapidly prototype circuits when designing new products.

There are no shortage of conducting inks that aim to do this but they all have drawbacks of various kinds. For example, many inks have low or difficult-to-control conductivity or need to be heated to temperatures of up to 400 degrees C after they have been printed thereby limiting the materials on which they can be printed. The result is that the ability to print circuits routinely on flexible materials such as paper or plastic has remained largely a dream.

Until now. Today, Jing Liu and pals at the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry in Beijing say they’ve worked out how to print electronic circuits on a wide range of materials using an inkjet printer filled with liquid metal.  And they’ve demonstrated the technique on paper, plastic, glass, rubber, cotton cloth and even an ordinary leaf.

The new technique is straightforward. The magic sauce is a liquid metal: an alloy of gallium and indium which is liquid at room temperature. They simply pump it through an inkjet printer to create a fine spray of liquid metal droplets that settle onto the substrate.

The droplets rapidly oxidise as the travel through the air and this oxide forms a surface layer on each drop that prevents further oxidisation. That’s handy because the liquid metal itself does not easily adhere to the substrates. But the metal oxides do and this is the reason, say Jing and co, that the circuits adhere so well to a wide range of surfaces.

They also say it’s relatively easy to create almsot any circuit pattern, either by moving the printer head over the substrate or by using a mask.  And they’ve demonstrated this by printing conducting circuits on cotton cloth, plastic, glass and paper as well as on a leaf.

That looks to be a useful development. The ability to print circuits in magazines or on t-shirts will surely attract much interest. And being able to test circuit designs by printing them out using a desktop printer will be invaluable to many makers.

Perhaps most exciting of all is that the technology behind all this is cheap and simple: there’s no reason why it couldn’t be pushed to market very rapidly. And that raises the prospect of being able to print prototype circuits in small businesses and even at home.

Could it be that liquid metal printers could bring about the same kind of revolution in home-built electronics that 3D printers triggered with material design? And might it be possible to combine them into a single machine that prints functional electronic devices?

A researcher envisions the ultimate cure for “range anxiety”: roadway-powered vehicles with modified on-board power receivers.

By Martin LaMonica on November 19, 2013

One way to extend the range of electric vehicles may be to provide power wirelessly through coils placed under the surface of a road. But charging moving vehicles with high-power wireless chargers below them is complex.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a method to deliver power to moving vehicles using simple electronic components, rather than the expensive power electronics or complex sensors previously employed. The system uses a specialized receiver that induces a burst of power only when a vehicle passes over a wireless transmitter. Initial models indicate that placing charging coils in 10 percent of a roadway would extend the driving range of an EV from about 60 miles to 300 miles, says Srdjan Lukic, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at NCSU.

Wireless charging through magnetic induction—the same type typically used for electric toothbrushes—is being pursued by a number of companies for consumer electronics and electric vehicles (see “Wireless Charging—Has the Time Finally Arrived?”). Such chargers work by sending current through a coil, which produces a magnetic field. When a car with its own coil is placed above the transmitter, the magnetic field induces a flow of power that charges the batteries.

Stationary inductive chargers for electric vehicles typically use sensors to ensure that the receiver coils on the vehicle are aligned above wireless charging pads correctly. The NCSU researchers’ system operates without position sensors in an attempt to simplify the design and make it more efficient. When there are no vehicles, the transmitter coil gives off a weak field. But when a vehicle with a receiver passes by, electronics in the receiver trigger a strong magnetic field and an accompanying flow of power, says Lukic.

Precisely controlling when the roadway coils produce a magnetic field is important for safety reasons; if the field misses the car’s receiving coils, it could attach to parts of the car or attract stray objects. “Somehow we have to channel or contain the magnetic field produced by the transmitter to always be right below the receiver. We cannot just beam out a strong field into the environment,” he says. Some designs have a series of coils that are always energized, but that approach is not energy-efficient, Lukic says.

In a stationary induction charger, the power receiver is made with a simple coil. The NCSU device is more sophisticated. It uses capacitors and inductors to manipulate the power transfer and magnetic field, says Lukic. The coupling between transmitter and receiver could be done with power electronics, but such a system would be more expensive than the NCSU device, he says.

The researchers have made a low-power prototype and intend to reach a rate of 50 kilowatts, which is equivalent to direct-current fast chargers, which work more efficiently than conventional alternating-current chargers.

Commercial interest in wireless charging systems for moving vehicles is growing. Qualcomm is working on a “dynamic” charging system that builds off its current stationary wireless EV charger. The University of Utah has tested a wireless charging infrastructure for city buses and has spun out a company calledWireless Advanced Vehicle Electrification to build commercial products. With the Utah system a bus could charge from coils placed under the road surface where passengers load or at traffic lights. Dynamic wireless power transfer could also be used for robots.

The techniques that the NCSU researchers used for dynamic EV charging have already been applied in some consumer electronics, says Katie Hall, the chief technology officer of WiTricity, a company that makes wireless charging equipment. But the electronic tooling used for small electronics, such as switches, isn’t readily available for high-power applications. “That kind of technology doesn’t seamlessly scale to kilowatts or hundreds of kilowatts,” she says.

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory is also working on ways to automatically match the wireless power transmitter and receiver, says Omer Onar, a researcher who works on wireless vehicle charging there. The new work addresses only one of the barriers of the dynamic charging, he says: “Most of the [commercial] barriers are associated with cost and infrastructure.”

A more efficient engine and composite wings that fold up will reduce fuel consumption on Boeing’s 777x.

In 2020, Boeing says it will start deliveries of a new airplane, which is called 777x for now, that will be 12 percent more fuel efficient than its competition. That would bring huge savings to airlines in reduced fuel costs.

The plane is based, as the name suggests, on Boeing’s large 777 airliner. To get the fuel savings, Boeing is using the new GE9X engine from GE Aviation. It will also have composite wings that are longer than the ones on the current 777. Longer wings are known to improve efficiency, but pose a problem for negotiating airports. One solution is to add vertical winglets, which has much the same effect. With the 777x, Boeing has opted for longer wings that fold up when the plane is on the ground, shortening the wingspan by just over 6 meters.

Boeing has received 259 orders for the airplane.

Airplane design will change slowly because of the high need for reliability. But aircraft designers are working on new technologies that could eventualy cut fuel consumption in half (see “A More Efficient Jet Engine Is Made from Lighter Parts, Some 3-D Printed” and “’Hybrid Wing’ Uses Half the Fuel of a Standard Airplane”). Even greater benefits could come from radical engine designs and the use of batteries to augment them (see “Exploding Engine Could Reduce Fuel Consumption” and “Once a Joke, Battery-Powered Airplanes Are Nearing Reality”).

Responding to reports of mass surveillance, engineers say they’ll make encryption standard in all Web traffic.

By David Talbot on November 18, 2013

In response to the public outcry over mass Internet surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA), the engineers who develop the protocols that underpin the Internet are deep into an effort to encrypt all Web traffic, and expect to have a revamped system ready to roll out by the end of next year.

The effort, by the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF, an informal organization of engineers that changes Internet code and operates by rough consensus, involves HTTP, or hypertext transfer protocol, which governs information exchanges between the Web browser on your phone and computer and the servers that hold the data of the website you are visiting.

Leaked documents brought to light by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggest the NSA routinely harvests and stores huge amounts of information from major cloud computing platforms and wireless carriers. Today, much of the Web traffic between your device and Web server is not encrypted unless websites choose to use a variant of the HTTP protocol called HTTPS—which includes an encryption step, called transport layer security. This is commonly used by banks, e-commerce sites, and by some big sites, including Google and Facebook. (If a website’s address starts with “https://” it already uses encryption.)

The IETF change would introduce encryption by default for all Internet traffic. And the work to make this happen in the next generation of HTTP, called HTTP 2.0, is proceeding “very frantically,” says Stephen Farrell, a computer scientist at Trinity College in Dublin who is part of the project.

The hope is that a specification will be ready by the end of 2014. It would then be up to websites to actually adopt the technology, which is not mandatory.

Many experts have pointed out that mass Internet spying is done in part because it’s so easy to do. Some argue that making life a little harder for agencies like the NSA may make them focus on legitimate national security targets rather than scooping up everything and asking questions later (see “Bruce Schneier: NSA Spying Is Making Us Less Safe” and “NSA Leak Leaves Crypto Math Intact but Highlights Known Workarounds”).

“I think we can make a difference in the near team to have Web and e-mail encryption be ubiquitous,” Farrell says.

Indeed, an even nearer-term step the IETF is taking, he says, involves beefing up security in e-mail and instant message traffic—two key targets for dragnet surveillance. Right now, protocols exist to encrypt these communications as they make several hops: first from your device to your e-mail provider, then to the recipient’s e-mail provider, and finally to the recipient’s phone or computer.

The problem is that often the protocols needed for encryption are not set correctly and then don’t work between different e-mail servers, such as those of small organizations, or when they hop between big encrypted services like Gmail and that of a small company or institution.

When this happens, your e-mail winds up being sent “in the clear” because e-mail protocols elevate actual delivery over all other concerns, including whether or not the encryption actually was working. “I think we can do better on that,” Farrell says, to make the setup easier and verifiable.

In some ways this is an about-face, because a year and a half ago a group within the IETF had decided against adding encryption by default in HTTP. Part of what makes the task hard, Farrell says, involves the static portion of Web pages that are “cached,” or stored on local servers nearer to the user.

Caching is problematic because the cached content sits between the browser and the server, and it is typically kept “in the clear”—or unencrypted—so it can be identified. By its nature, encryption makes every piece of content appear unique. “The issue is, if you turn on the crypto, you make it harder to do that caching,” Farrell says. “And the technical challenge is, how do we get the security benefit and keep the caching benefit? That’s being worked on.”

A range of other potential technical avenues for tightening up Internet privacy was outlined in a recent blog by Tim Bray, who helped develop several key Web protocols and now works at Google. He attended an IETF meeting last week in Vancouver (see “Time for Internet Engineers to Fight Back Against the Surveillance Internet”).

Bray did not reply to an interview request but outlined the relevance of these efforts in his post. “At the end of the day this is a policy problem [and] not a technology problem; but to the extent that anything can be done at the technology level, a lot of the people who can do it are here,” he wrote, referring to the engineers and browser makers attending the IETF.

Indeed, Jari Arkko, the IETF chair and an expert on Internet architecture with Ericsson Research, says that nobody should harbor illusions about technical quick fixes. “I need to be honest and open—technology is only part of the issue here,” he says.