Could heat-tracking be the key to interacting with wearable computers?
The ways we interact with smartphones and laptops are well-established, but it’s not yet known whether voice, touch, or gestures will emerge as the best way to use wearable devices like head-worn computers, which may not have touch screens and aren’t suited to mousing around.
The augmented-reality company Metaio is experimenting with a wholly different method calledThermal Touch: it detects the traces of heat left behind when you touch something, which could enable you to use all kinds of things—walls, books, and perhaps even toys—as interactive touch surfaces.
The technology combines two kinds of cameras. A thermal camera detects the residual heat from a touch (as opposed to what happens when a finger just approaches an object). Simultaneously, a camera that registers visible light determines the location of the object being touched, so that Metaio’s software can map that touch on the object in three dimensions. Both cameras are combined in a device called the Optris PI 200 that Daniel Kurz, head of Metaio’s advanced technologies group, straps to a computer or a tablet to test the technology.
You won’t find a thermal camera in, say, Google Glass today, but Kurz is optimistic that this kind of sensor will make its way into smartphones and wearable computers in the near future, much like sensors such as accelerometers and magnetometers have done. In January, Flir released a thermal imaging camera module that manufacturers can add to smartphones and tablets. (The company also plans to release a $349 iPhone case equipped with the thermal sensor in July.)
In a demonstration that Kurz gave me over a Skype video chat from Metaio’s Munich headquarters, the object serving as his touch surface was a piece of paper printed with a pattern that made it look like a little stone wall. When Kurz and I looked at the paper through a computer display, we could see a virtual keypad displayed on it that stuck to its spot even if the cameras moved a bit. He reached out a finger, touching the paper in front of him to punch in numbers; each time he hit one, a blue oval popped up atop the number on the display in recognition of the touch.
Kurz says Thermal Touch can work across a range of temperatures, as long as the surface you’re touching is either hotter or colder than your body. The bigger the difference between you and what you’re touching, though, the easier it is to track.
There are many technological issues to fix. Metaio is working on reducing Thermal Touch’s latency, for example; it currently notes a touch after it has occurred. And right now the prototype detects touches only on essentially flat surfaces or three-dimensional objects that the computer knows in advance.
Chipmaker Intel Corp (INTC.O) on Thursday raised its outlook for the second quarter and the full year, citing stronger-than-expected demand for personal computers used by businesses.
Shares of Intel jumped more than 4 percent in extended trade as the chipmaker’s improved forecast lifted hopes for a PC industry that been shrinking due to consumers’ preferences for tablets and smartphones.
Intel said it now expects second-quarter revenue of $13.7 billion, plus or minus $300 million. Intel had previously forecast revenue of $13 billion, plus or minus $500 million.
The chipmaker said it expects “some” revenue growth for the full year, compared with its previous forecast of flat revenue.
The Santa Clara, California company also raised the mid-point of its gross margin forecast range for the second quarter, which ends at the end of June, by 1 point to 64 percent.
With personal computer shipments falling for eight straight quarters through March, some analysts have suggested the industry’s decline is close to hitting bottom, potentially giving Intel breathing room as it struggles to develop better processors for mobile and wearable devices.
Demand from companies for PCs likely received a boost recently due to Microsoft’s (MSFT.O) winding down of support in April for its Windows XP operating system, analysts say.
“PCs have been getting less bad for a while,” said Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon. “But if it’s all business PCs then the question is going to be sustainability.”
Intel’s revised revenue and gross margin forecasts for the June quarter could translate toearnings per share of 52 cents, RBC analyst Doug Freedman said in a note to clients.
For the second quarter, analysts on average had expected EPS of 47 cents and revenue of $13.02 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Intel is expected to report its second-quarter results on July 15.
Shares of Intel jumped 4.97 percent in extended trade after closing up 0.11 percent at $27.96 on Nasdaq.
Google Inc is developing a service that will combine information from health apps and personal fitness devices, in another competitive move against Apple Inc and SamsungElectronics Co, Forbes reported.
The new service, to be called Google Fit, will make its debut at the Internet company’s developer conference later this month, Forbes said on Thursday, citing anonymous sources.
It is not clear if Google Fit will be integrated into Android, Google’s mobile operating system, or offered as a standalone app, the report said.
Google declined to comment on the report.
Health data could become the next big battleground among tech companies as a new generation of wearable electronic gadgets allow users to measure heart rates, sleep patterns and exercise activities.
Last week Apple announced “Healthkit,” which will pull together data such as blood pressure and weight now collected by a growing number of healthcare apps on the iPhone or iPad. In May, Samsung launched a health platform for third-party app developers.
Google has shaken up the market for fast Internet service in parts of the United States by offering or planning fiber-to-the-home in Kansas City and 11 other cities. Its reported entry into the satellite Internet business could do the same globally—by providing increased competition and better service than existing satellite technologies.
This week the Wall Street Journalreported that Google will spend more than $1 billion to launch a fleet of 180 satellites. The project, the paper reports, is being led by two executives with satellite startup O3b Networks, which Google helped fund in 2010. Neither company would comment on the plan Tuesday.
While satellite launches can be expensive, the strategy could give Google a foothold in a growing business.The effect of competition could be powerful. Google’s entry into municipal fiber markets has tended to drive down prices and improve service offerings from existing ISPs, according to some analyses (see “Google Fiber’s Ripple Effect” and “When Will the Rest of Us Get Google Fiber?”).
Similarly, if Google could beam Internet connectivity to countries that have only a single ISP—often one controlled by a government—and very high prices for Internet connectivity, “that could be a game changer for a huge swath of the globe,” says Rob Faris, research director at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard.
O3b’s name refers to the “other three billion”—a reference to people worldwide who lack Internet access. The company has four satellites in orbit and plans to launch another four next month. Its existing business is providing Internet connectivity to mobile carriers’ base stations.
It isn’t clear what model Google and O3b might pursue. But O3b’s satellites already offer a superior and cheaper way to deliver high-speed Internet than conventional satellite services. Satellite Internet is traditionally provided by geostationary satellites that stay over a given point on Earth. These satellites orbit at 35,000 kilometers—often adding a 600 millisecond delay to the radio signals going back and forth. Such a delay is generally considered excessive for business use.
O3b satellites orbit at a relatively low altitude of about 8,000 kilometers, and the company says this means a more-tolerable 150-millisecond delay coverage to latitudes up to 45 degrees north or south of the equator, a swath of territory inhabited by 70 percent of the world’s population. They can work even though they’re in motion relative to the Earth’s surface because they use technology called “beam-forming” to direct their signals.
Google declined an interview request about its satellite project. But like its other infrastructure efforts, the satellite plan could boost its earnings simply by bringing its services to new users.
That incentive also helps explain Google’s “Project Loon,” a far-out effort aimed at dispatching high-altitude balloons to provide broadband service from the stratosphere. Both Google and Facebook have been acquiring companies and experts to explore using drones for that purpose.
Rethinking smartphone software and battery design could make it possible for your handset to last much longer between charges.
Charging your smartphone once a day—or more—is one of the rhythms of modern life. A new project at Microsoft aims to change that, by using software and hardware tricks to extend a device’s battery life to a week.
While mobile devices have become much more powerful since the first smartphones appeared, their battery life has barely improved, Microsoft researcher Ranveer Chandra said Monday at MIT Technology Review’s Digital Summit in San Francisco. That’s because battery chemistry has not followed the exponential pace of improvements in computing hardware. The density at which batteries can store energy has only doubled over the past 15 years, says Chandra, who leads the Microsoft project.
Microsoft’s effort is focused on tweaking the software or design of mobile devices so they use available battery life more efficiently. It’s an approach that has been largely overlooked in the past but can offer major improvements, said Chandra. “You can’t just wait for the best battery technology to come along,” he says. “We can make a lot of progress because systems today don’t use battery intelligently.”
The most radical idea Chandra’s team is testing is to give devices two smaller lithium-ion batteries instead of one large one. One would be optimized to efficiently provide a large supply of current, for example when a person is playing games on a phone. The other would be designed to trickle out smaller currents, such as when a phone is idle. Chandra and colleagues have built simple prototypes that could improve battery life 20 to 50 percent, he said.
Batteries don’t convert their stored energy into current with perfect efficiency. Some energy is always lost to heat and other processes when a battery supplies a current, and that waste increases dramatically when a battery is asked to supply a level of current it isn’t designed for. Today’s devices have batteries optimized for an average load, meaning that they waste significant energy in the peaks and troughs of a device’s usage.
Microsoft’s battery effort is still a research project, but ideas stemming from it have already filtered into products. Windows 8’s Wi-Fi software uses energy-saving techniques devised by the group, for example. Chandra’s work has also led to a tool for software developers that predicts how much energy a given app will use on a device and makes it easier to reduce the load.
Another idea for how software could stretch battery lives is taking shape in a research prototype. Known as E-Loupe, it allows a mobile operating system to identify and police apps that consume a lot of power even when a person is not actively using them. It can pause or slow the activity of a background process—for example, an app downloading a large file—to maximize battery life, says Chandra.
Wearable devices and electric cars could also benefit from software that is able to understand and adapt battery use, says Chandra. For example, a car might use its battery differently if a person asked the GPS for directions that involved a steep climb or plowing through slow-moving traffic.
MasterCard Inc, the world’s second-largest debit and credit card company, sees business booming from selling data to retailers, banks and governments on spending patterns found in the payments it processes, a top executive told Reuters.
MasterCard, which handles payments for 2 billion cardholders and tens of millions of merchants, uses that information to generate real-time data on consumer trends, available more quickly that regular government statistics.
“It is an incredibly fast growing area for us,” Ann Cairns, who heads MasterCard’s business outside North America, said in an interview, stressing that the company respects cardholder privacy, using anonymous data rather than personal information.
MasterCard does not give figures for its information services products but “other revenues”, which include the sale of data, grew 22 percent in the first quarter of 2014 to $341 million, outpacing the growth of total revenue dominated by payments processing, which rose 14 percent to $2.177 billion.
Cairns said clients for the data include retailers, banks and governments, with MasterCard tailoring it to their needs.
“Retailers are fantastic at using the data they have available about how people shop in their store, how their inventory turns over, but what they don’t know is what happens outside their store,” she said. “The data we’ve got is ubiquitous across the whole market. We can help retailers see what they need to do to capture more sales.”
Cairns, 57, a statistician by training who joined MasterCard in 2011 after helping manage the disposal of Lehman Brothers assets in Europe, revels in the insights real-time card data can provide, such as London’s popularity as the world’s top travel destination and a rise in spending on experiences such as eating out or going on holiday rather than shopping in stores.
MasterCard has recorded a spike in spending in Brazil on groceries and a drop in spending on luxury goods as the price of food has risen ahead of the World Cup, she said, the kind of insight valued by companies such as Nike and Adidas that are hoping to sell $300 soccer boots during the competition.
While MasterCard expands in “big data”, Cairns sees no slowdown in its traditional business of processing payments, with plenty of potential for growth as 85 percent of consumer transactions are still made by cash or cheque.
“Moving money and doing it safely and securely is so deeply cared about by so many people around the world that it will be a business that has fantastic value now and for years to come,” said Cairns, who previously worked at Citigroup and ABN Amro.
London-based Cairns, whose division accounts for 60 percent of MasterCard’s business, said the expansion of e-commerce and emerging markets is driving growth, noting that 2.5 billion people are still without access to financial services.
She predicted that shoppers in many developing economies will leapfrog plastic cards and go direct to payment via smartphone – adding MasterCard is providing “digital wallet” technology to retailers and banks and does not see their own moves into the payments field as a competitive threat.
She also played down the challenge from other new rivals such as Kenya’s money transfer service M-Pesa, owned by Safaricom, and eBay’s online payments unit PayPal, which is trying to move into physical transactions.
“We run at such a sub-infrastructure level around the world. It is very difficult to replicate our network,” she said, adding that M-Pesa had built a branch network to receive and make payments in Kenya, but that would not work in countries where there is more established financial infrastructure.
“Most counties in the world have ATM networks and point of sale networks. Because they are so ubiquitous, that model won’t fly,” she said.
Meanwhile, MasterCard is entrenching its technology in other emerging markets, for example developing a biometrics-based card used for benefits payments in South Africa and working with the Nigeria government on a pilot to overlay payment technology on a new national identity card.
As electronics get more personal, some fixtures of earlier eras of computing may feel inappropriate.
The smartphone era has also been the age of apps. But those specialized, standalone pieces of software will soon be an anachronism, says the CEO of the popular information-management serviceEvernote. He predicts that as wearable computers supplant smartphones, they will displace apps, too.
In an on-stage interview Monday at the MIT Technology ReviewDigital Summit, Evernote’s Phil Libin said that the advantage of smart watches or other computers worn on the body is that they can instantly deliver information that is finely tuned to a particular context. For example, Google Glass might provide background on the person you’re speaking to.
But that kind of service won’t succeed if a person must remember to fire up a given app in situations in which it might be helpful, Libin said. He argued that people will instead prefer “ambient” services that constantly run in the background and then step forward as needed.
“Apps are becoming irrelevant or becoming much less important,” Libin said. “I think the killer app for this thing [wearable computing] is hyper awareness. I basically want to have a Spidey sense.”
Libin’s vision is undoubtedly shaped by the fact that Evernote sells services that could fit into the scenario he describes—they store notes and other personal information for you to call up later.
Libin also argued that the dominant business model on wearable devices will be user subscriptions—like Evernote’s—rather than ads. The reason, he said, is that as devices get more intimate—with small screens just inches from the eyes—people will cringe at advertising. How much tolerance might people have for ads on a device like Google Glass? “Really, really, none at all. Zero,” Libin said.
Libin noted, to laughter from the audience, that this idea might seem somewhat counterintuitive. The intense data-collection made possible by wearables might seem like an advertiser’s dream. But he was adamant that finely tuned, ultra-targeted ads are not really a killer application for most consumers. “I just call bullshit on that,” he said.
A $70 million program will try to develop brain implants able to regulate emotions in the mentally ill.
Researcher Jose Carmena has worked for years training macaque monkeys to move computer cursors and robotic limbs with their minds. He does so by implanting electrodes into their brains to monitor neural activity. Now, as part of a sweeping $70 million program funded by the U.S. military, Carmena has a new goal: to use brain implants to read, and then control, the emotions of mentally ill people.
This week the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, awarded two large contracts to Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of California, San Francisco, to create electrical brain implants capable of treating seven psychiatric conditions, including addiction, depression, and borderline personality disorder.
The project builds on expanding knowledge about how the brain works; the development of microlectronic systems that can fit in the body; and substantial evidence that thoughts and actions can be altered with well-placed electrical impulses to the brain.
“Imagine if I have an addiction to alcohol and I have a craving,” says Carmena, who is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and involved in the UCSF-led project. “We could detect that feeling and then stimulate inside the brain to stop it from happening.”
The U.S. faces an epidemic of mental illness among veterans, including suicide rates three or four times that of the general public. But drugs and talk therapy are of limited use, which is why the military is turning to neurological devices, says Justin Sanchez, manager of the DARPA program, known as Subnets, for Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies.
“We want to understand the brain networks [in] neuropsychiatric illness, develop technology to measure them, and then do precision signaling to the brain,” says Sanchez. “It’s something completely different and new. These devices don’t yet exist.”
Under the contracts, which are the largest awards so far supporting President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, the brain-mapping program launched by the White House last year, UCSF will receive as much as $26 million and Mass General up to $30 million. Companies including the medical device giant Medtronic and startup Cortera Neurotechnologies, a spin-out from UC Berkeley’s wireless laboratory, will supply technology for the effort. Initial research will be in animals, but DARPA hopes to reach human tests within two or three years.
The research builds on a small but quickly growing market for devices that work by stimulating nerves, both inside the brain and outside it. More than 110,000 Parkinson’s patients have received deep-brain stimulators built by Medtronic that control body tremors by sending electric pulses into the brain. More recently, doctors have used such stimulators to treat severe cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder (see “Brain Implants Can Reset Misfiring Circuits”). Last November, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration approved NeuroPace, the first implant that both records from the brain and stimulates it (see “Zapping Seizures Away”). It is used to watch for epileptic seizures and then stop them with electrical pulses. Altogether, U.S. doctors bill for about $2.6 billion worth of neural stimulation devices a year, according to industry estimates.
Researchers say they are making rapid improvements in electronics, including small, implantable computers. Under its program, Mass General will work with Draper Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to develop new types of stimulators. The UCSF team is being supported by microelectronics and wireless researchers at UC Berkeley, who have created several prototypes of miniaturized brain implants. Michel Maharbiz, a professor in Berkeley’s electrical engineering department, says the Obama brain initiative, and now the DARPA money, has created a “feeding frenzy” around new technology. “It’s a great time to do tech for the brain,” he says.
The new line of research has been dubbed “affective brain-computer interfaces” by some, meaning electronic devices that alter feelings, perhaps under direct control of a patient’s thoughts and wishes. “Basically, we’re trying to build the next generation of psychiatric brain stimulators,” says Alik Widge, a researcher on the Mass General team.
Darin Dougherty, a psychiatrist who directs Mass General’s division of neurotherapeutics, says one aim could be to extinguish fear in veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Fear is generated in the amygdala—a part of the brain involved in emotional memories. But it can be repressed by signals in another region, the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex. “The idea would be to decode a signal in the amygdala showing overactivity, then stimulate elsewhere to [suppress] that fear,” says Dougherty.
Such research isn’t without ominous overtones. In the 1970s, Yale University neuroscientist Jose Delgado showed he could cause people to feel emotions, like relaxation or anxiety, using implants he called “stimoceivers.” But Delgado, also funded by the military, left the U.S. after Congressional hearings in which he was accused of developing “totalitarian” mind-control devices. According to scientists funded by DARPA, the agency has been anxious about how the Subnets program could be perceived, and it has appointed an ethics panel to oversee the research.
Amazon.com Inc later this year plans to launch a marketplace for local services, a broad term that encompasses anything from babysitters to handymen to birthday clowns, beginning with a single market, several people familiar with the matter said.
Amazon aims to gauge demand and test logistics before rolling out nationwide, mirroring its approach to its grocery delivery service, Amazon Fresh. Fresh was tested in Seattle for years before expanding to San Francisco and Los Angeles last year.
The move takes direct aim at consumer review sites Yelp Inc and Angie’s List Inc as well as U.S. home improvement chains Home Depot Inc and Lowe’s Companies Inc, which have both invested in ways to link customers with local plumbers, painters and other service providers.
Amazon declined to comment.
Services marks a new frontier for Amazon, which has focused on selling products as it expanded from books into consumer goods, groceries and media. Local services are massive and growing, but it has been tough for marketplace companies to turn a profit, since offerings must be tailored to each city or region.
In recent months, Amazon has reached out directly to service companies as well as to several startups in Seattle and San Francisco that already connect service providers, from home repair to massages, to customers through their own web sites and mobile applications, according to the people.
Amazon has also been experimenting with ways to tie services to the products it sells. In one example, Amazon recently ran a test on its website offering installation services to users who bought Nest thermostats.
The moves reflects Amazon’s long-running efforts to have services tied to every product sold by Amazon on its website, according to one person close to the company, who like others declined to be named discussing confidential plans.
BACKED BY AMAZON
A local services marketplace would extend Amazon’s role as a middleman for third-party vendors, which account for about 40 percent of Amazon’s sales.
The quality of the local services would be backed by Amazon’s “A-to-z Guarantee” which the company uses to vouch for items sold by third-party sellers on its website, the sources said.
One of the companies Amazon contacted in January was San Francisco-based Thumbtack, a startup that serves as a matchmaker between consumers and 63,000 service providers including photographers, tutors and others.
In its conversations with Thumbtack, Amazon asked several questions about the company’s growth strategy and the market for local services, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
Thumbtack, which has raised $49 million from investors including Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global Management, said the average project on its site is $600. It drives an estimated $1.8 billion worth of business annually to professionals on the site.
Other industry observers estimate that the home repair and improvement market alone represents an at least $250 billion opportunity.
Angie’s List in 2011 estimated that the market for local services was around $400 billion, including remodeling services and pest control. But since going public that year, the company has had just two profitable quarters.
Amazon itself has had limited success with Amazon Local, a daily deals service. Amazon Local has no involvement in the services marketplace currently in development.
But the business opportunity may be improving, in part by the proliferation of smart phones, which let service providers schedule appointments on the fly.
Offering local services on Amazon’s website has been a goal of Chief Executive Jeff Bezos for years. He personally invested in Pro.com, a Seattle-based startup, founded by former Amazon executive Matt Williams, which helps customers find contractors and estimate the costs of home repair and improvement projects.
Japan’s SoftBank Corp said on Thursday it will start selling human-like robots for personal use by February, expanding into a sector seen key to addressing labour shortages in one of the world’s fastest ageing societies.
The robots, which the mobile phone and Internet conglomerate envisions serving as baby-sitters, nurses, emergency medical workers or even party companions, will sell for 198,000 yen ($1,900) and are capable of learning and expressing emotions, Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son told a news conference.
A prototype will be deployed this week, serving customers at SoftBank mobile phone stores in Japan, he added. The sleek, waist-high robot, named Pepper, accompanied Son to the briefing, speaking to reporters in a high-pitched, boyish voice.
“People describe others as being robots because they have no emotions, no heart. For the first time in human history, we’re giving a robot a heart, emotions,” Son said.
The robots were developed by French robotics company Aldebaran, in which SoftBank took a stake in 2012, and will be manufactured by Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co Ltd.
They will use cloud computing to share data that can develop their own emotional capabilities. Son said they would not share an owner’s personal information.
Japan’s population is one of the most rapidly ageing in the world and the government hopes companies can offset a decline in the labour force by utilising robotics.
Several Japanese technology manufacturers are targeting robotics for growth. Panasonic Corp and robotics research subsidiary ActiveLink Co Ltd this week showcased robotic suits and vests to assist in arduous manual tasks such as carrying heavy loads or picking fruit from trees. Personal or household robots, such as the Asimo robot that Honda Motor Co has been developing for more than a decade, are seen as potential elderly care providers.
Japan’s overall robotics market was worth about 860 billion yen ($8.38 billion) in 2012 and is forecast to more than triple in value to 2.85 trillion yen by 2020, according to a trade ministry report last year.
A draft government growth strategy obtained by Reuters calls for a “robotic revolution” that would increase the use of robots in agriculture 20-fold and double manufacturing use.
