Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Ingress And Location


Google Game Could Be Augmented Reality's First Killer App
Ingress ... will give the company even more information about your current location. ...... Ingress’s world is one in which the discovery of so-called “exotic matter” has split the population into two groups: the Enlightened, who want to learn how to harness the power of this energy, and the Resistance, who, well, resist this change. Players pick a side, and then walk around their city, collecting exotic matter to keep scanners charged and taking control of exotic-matter-exuding portals in order to capture more land for their team...... what it suggests about Google’s future plans, which seem to revolve around finding new ways to extend its reach from the browser on your laptop to the devices you carry with you at all times. The goal makes plenty of sense when you consider that traditional online advertising—Google’s bread and butter—could eventually be eclipsed by mobile, location-based advertising. ...... Portals are found in public places—in San Francisco, where I was playing, this includes city landmarks such as museums, statues, and murals. Resistance portals are blue, Enlightened ones are green, and there are also some gray ones out there that remain unclaimed.





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Windows 8: Another Case For The Chromebook

Image representing Windows as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase
A most amazing thing about the Chromebook - and there are many - is you don't need anti-virus software on it. The plan seems to be that you stop paying your annual rent to Norton and with that saving you buy a Chromebook instead. The anti-virus software is so expensive, and the Chromebook is so cheap and getting cheaper.

Same Crap, Different OS: Windows 8
Crapware has long been a thorn in the sides of Windows users. Consumers and enterprise users buy PCs under the faulty impression that they’ll be getting a completely clean computer when they break open the box. Instead, they find a PC that’s been loaded up with junk that they typically don’t need. What’s worse, all of that software slows down boot times and performance, since the programs are usually set to load automatically and typically run in the background.
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G For Giga, G For Google

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase
I have said before, if Google is to end up a trillion dollar company - and it has a higher chance than does Apple, Apple has peaked - then the ISP space is where it is at. Google has to go global with its ISP ambitions.

Google’s Internet Service Might Actually Bring the U.S. Up to Speed
a radical new business direction for the company .... Google’s gigabit Internet service is priced at $70 per month ..... Users subscribing for a TV service get a two-terabyte storage box for recorded shows and a Nexus 7 Android tablet to use as a remote control. (As a budget alternative, Internet at five megabits per second is available for a one-time fee of $300.) ...... it can cost between $850 and $1,250 per customer to get fiber installed ..... entry of superfast Internet may aid local entrepreneurship .... (In Verizon’s case, the company generally charges $99 per month with a two-year contract for service of up to 300 megabits per second for downloads and 65 megabits per second for uploads). .... Another route to juicing Internet speeds to gigabit-per-second levels is government investment. Chattanooga, Tennessee, received such a boost when the local power utility got a $111 million U.S. Department of Energy grant as part of federal stimulus efforts that built out the city’s smart grid
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Wireless Broadband's Big Appetites

spectrum
spectrum (Photo credit: Free Press Pics)
It is good news that the bad news is not all that bad. There will not be a spectrum crunch. But there is one now. The possibilities have not been realized.

The Spectrum Crunch that Never Really Was
Cisco estimates that mobile data traffic will grow by a factor of 18 by 2016, and Bell Labs predicts it will increase by a factor of 25..... when wireless networks are overloaded, the real culprit may be inefficient use of existing spectrum rather than a fundamental shortage. ..... "We don’t have a spectrum crunch so much as we have a spectrum policy crunch .... The so-called ‘spectrum crunch’ really reflects artificial spectrum scarcity" ..... “The challenge now is to extend those proven successes to enable wider-area broadband access using other underutilized portions of the spectrum.” ... such strategies could increase wireless capacity by thousands of times...... half the new demand through 2015 would be handled by small cells—Wi-Fi plus cells handling frequencies used by 3G and 4G networks ...... it might be possible to increase capacity tenfold even without spectrum sharing. ..... rigid regulations don’t allow the use of flexible new technologies like cognitive radio ...... “Right now, we have a 15- to 20-year backlog of new technologies and architectures, including sharing and small cells, which can take us a long way into the future.”
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Nexus 4 And Barack Obama