Verizon LTE devices are going global, bringing US carrier interoperability with them

One of the particularly annoying pain points for travelers who want to use Verizon Wireless’ 4G LTE service is that none of the handsets offered by the carrier include global GSM and WCDMA (UMTS HSPA+) support. Even devices that manufacturers had tested with GSM and WCDMA support by the FCC (who must authorize radio equipment to be sold in the United States) wound up on the shelves without the ability to use the built-in support.

Needless to say, this made people who wanted LTE world phones rather upset. However, Verizon Wireless likely did it for a single reason: carrier lock-in. It all ties into the rules that the FCC placed on the 700MHz C block spectrum that Verizon Wireless bought to run its network on. According to the regulations, Verizon Wireless is prohibited from disabling features on devices it provides to its customers. This is explicitly extended to include enabling features and crippling them.

In the past, Verizon Wireless offered special “world phones” with GSM, WCDMA, and CDMA2000 support. However, the radio firmware always had a built-in block for the United States’ mobile country code. This ensured that the GSM and WCDMA radios would not permit the device to work on US carriers (other than Verizon). It did not have to worry about the CDMA2000 radio, since that is always custom programmed for the carrier network it is intended for, and is not likely to work well on other networks. This is absolutely not allowed for any device Verizon Wireless wishes to offer that supports its 4G LTE network.

The regulations also seem to forbid SIM subsidy locks (also known as network locks). With that in mind, Verizon Wireless would be extremely hesitant to offer global GSM and WCDMA support on its 4G LTE phones. The main reason no one takes his/her 4G LTE device to another carrier is because no other carrier has a 4G LTE network that is compatible with the device. That impediment doesn’t even require a SIM subsidy lock, but with an unlocked device that has GSM and WCDMA support, consumers would be free to purchase Verizon Wireless 4G LTE global devices and actually pick which carrier to use them on. That is a bit too much power in the hands of the consumer, which Verizon does not want. US carriers thrive on the ability to impede consumers from getting the device they want and using it on a carrier of their choosing.

Something must have happened at Verizon Wireless, because it has changed its tune about global GSM and WCDMA support on 4G LTE devices. In February, Verizon Wireless enabled full global roaming capabilities in the Motorola Xyboard 8.2 and 10.1 tablets. In a statementVerizon Wireless announced that the following devices will get full global roaming capabilities this summer:

• Motorola Droid Razr
• Motorola Droid Razr Maxx
• Motorola Droid 4
• HTC Rezound

Aside from the HTC Rezound (which only has quad band GSM and dual band WCDMA for European 3G networks), all of these devices support quad band GSM and WCDMA for global roaming all over the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

Additionally, these devices will not have the mobile country code block. That means that they will operate on AT&T’s HSPA network. And of course, T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network will support them too after it refarms its spectrum to launch PCS HSPA+ and AWS LTE. The phones will work on both carriers’ GSM networks, too.

There is one more device in Verizon’s current lineup that is also due for an update that brings full global roaming support. Back at CES, Verizon Wireless announced that the LG Spectrum would also get its GSM and WCDMA radios enabled in a future update. The timing for that update has not yet been announced. The LG Spectrum has a quad band GSM radio and a tri band WCDMA radio for full roaming in Europe and limited roaming in the Americas and Asia. This device will partially work on AT&T’s HSPA network in certain areas, but it will work with T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network after refarming. And it will work on both carriers’ GSM networks, too.

When any of these devices are used on T-Mobile’s network, they will be able to use the carrier’s new nationwide IPv6 network.

It is quite likely that someone may have investigated and reported to the FCC that Verizon Wireless violated the terms of the network spectrum license when these devices rolled out without full global roaming. This would have forced Verizon’s hand and made it enable those radios for everyone. Otherwise, we would probably have not seen 4G LTE world phones for quite some time (probably only after Europe rolls out LTE).

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Testing out Axis, Yahoo’s search-centric browser

Yahoo is taking a baby step into the browser wars with the release of its own search-centric browser. Known as Axis, it comes in the form of a plugin for HTML5compliant browsers on the desktop and a full-fledged browser for the iPhone and iPad.

Two concepts take center stage in Axis: instant responses and visual search. As you type in a search term, Axis returns results instantaneously based on what it thinks you may be searching for. The results appear as thumbnails across the top of your screen in iOS, and across the bottom on the desktop. You can scroll back and forth through these results to find the result you are looking for.

Visual search done right

On iOS, swiping across the page takes you from one result to the next. This is a nice shortcut for those of us who like to quickly search through multiple sources. There is a similar shortcut on the desktop: move your mouse to the sides of the browser windows and navigation arrows will appear. The visual search component of Axis is its most compelling feature, and is much nicer to look at (and usually tells you more) than looking through a list of links and text.

Given that Axis is multi-platform, Yahoo baked in a feature that allows you to continue browsing between devices. The last page you access on a device is sent up into the cloud, and then displayed on the Axis home page. Click on it on the other device, and you can continue where you left off.

This is a great feature for those of us that move from device to device frequently, although some may not like the fact that Yahoo is inherently tracking our every move.

The visual search and multi-device browsing are the two most compelling reasons to give Axis a shot, but also consider here is that Axis really isn’t a browser in the true sense of the word: it’s built upon pre-existing ones. This is important because pages will render as you expect them to, and only affect how your interact with your browser and not the way it works.

On iOS, Axis is more like a browser, but is really Safari within a skin due to Apple’s stringent controls on apps. That said, based of the time I spent testing I’d argue Axis is a better browser for iOS users than Safari due to its extra features.

Microsoft wins too

While Yahoo might have scored a win here with Axis, it was a big day for Microsoft as well. Remember that Bing powers Yahoo’s search results. If Axis takes off on mobile, it will be cutting into a fairly sizable chunk of Google’s search share.

One of the reasons that Google has been able to maintain dominance is its near stranglehold on mobile search. The two major mobile platforms — iOS and Android — both default to Google when it comes to search. If these folks now turn to Yahoo’s Axis, obviously that traffic’s going somewhere else.

It’s going to be interesting to watch — Axis is already 23rd on the top apps in the App Store in just its first day of release with not much in the way of promotion.

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Audi’s 50 mph e-bike pops wheelies, boasts WiFi

Audi, the company that brought you hybrid-diesel racecars, has an intriguing two-wheel concept vehicle: an ultra-light carbon fiber electric bicycle that has WiFi built in, can hit 50 mph, and even has a Segway-like mode that lets it run on just its back wheel (apparently clever computers and gyroscopes will keep you balanced).

Audi unveiled it at the 2012 Wörthersee Tour in Austria — and the e-bike itself is also called Wörthersee (which happens to be a beautiful lake in Austria). The carbon fiber frame weighs just 3.53 pounds (1.6kg) — but with a 2.3kW electric motor and lithium ion battery the bike’s total weight is 24lbs (11kg). It’s pegged as a high-performance bike for trick cycling, including the ability to ride on its back wheel alone in two of the five modes: Pure, Pedelec, eGrip, Power Wheelie, and Balanced Wheelie.

Audi says the e-bike travels up to 31 mph on the electric motor, and up to 51 mph when the rider pedals as well. The battery can be charged in 2.5 hours or quickly swapped. It’s also outfitted with WiFi and a smartphone that provides electronic controls for the bike as well as unlocking the bike — so someone else doesn’t use your bike to pop their wheelies. Price and availability? Be patient, says Audi, all in good time.

Many automakers also sell performance bikes as lifestyle accessories, but nothing like Audi’s e-bike. BMW i Ventures, the New York City-based venture fund for mobility related investments, is providing seed money for a more mainstream electric bicycle that would be light and foldable. Drive to the train station in the suburbs, carry the bike on board, get to your destination city, unfold the bike, and motor electrically to your office a mile or two away.

Read more at Audi — or watch the cool (but rather noisy) video below:

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Can cable companies keep the dream of municipal WiFi alive?

Municipal WiFi may be a dream yet realized thanks to a new deal between the nation’s five biggest cable operators. Comcast, Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Cox Communications, and Time Warner Cable have agreed to let customers roam on about 50,000 hotspots owned by the respective companies nationwide.

Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner have made a deal that shares hotspots in an area spanning from southwestern Connecticut through the New York City and Philadelphia metropolitan areas, including portions of the Jersey Shore. Today’s announcement expands that same concept nationwide, and should start appearing later this year.

Users will connect to the network “CableWiFi,” and be asked to enter their respective ISP usernames and passwords. There are plans to allow for automatic connections, which may use a platform like WiFi Alliance’s Passpoint.  That uses device identification features — like SIM cards — to automatically connect and authenticate compatible devices.

While the initial rollout includes the 50,000 hotspots currently in existence, it appears the cable companies plan to aggressively roll-out WiFi connectivity nationwide. They hit on a sore subject for the wireless carriers in the announcement — bandwidth and capacity — as a reason for the partnership. In other words if your cellular carrier isn’t cutting it, “come on over to our network, we can handle it!”

It does work quite well: using Comcast’s network here in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, I can say that service is generally quite good, and you can find a connection in just about every public place in the city. While its not a replacement for the cell phone, it’s good enough for most tasks. Don’t try to stream high quality movies over it, but you’re golden on just about everything else.

I do see privately owned municipal WiFi as the only way to make the vision of the urban-jungle-as-a-hotspot a reality. Many cities — Philadelphia included — hatched plans in the middle of the last decade to offer residents WiFi connectivity. As the US economy tanked, so did these plans. They hemorrhaged money, and since most were built on the concept of “free,” politicians balked. With the cable companies, offering WiFi is a value-add: all the money is made on the cable services, and it is not a primary business. Plus, they don’t have taxpayers to worry about, just shareholders (sometimes equally as bad).

It is a shame that municipal WiFi and its core concept of “internet access for all” was never realized, but it was an idea doomed from the start. Nothing’s worse to some American’s than government waste. At least the cable companies are trying to bring it back in some form, even if those most underserved (who don’t have a cable account) may be locked out.

[Photo credit]

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Google acquires Motorola Mobility, rolls the dice with Android

Some 9 months after Google’s announcement that it would rather like to make a subsidiary of Motorola Mobility, the $12.5-billion acquisition has finally been approved by the US, EU, and China. All eyes are now on Google to see what it will do with a bunch of software platforms under its belt — Android, Chrome OS, and Google TV — and its new-found top-notch hardware division.

Outwardly, we are promised, except for a new CEO — Dennis Woodside, former president of Google’s Americas operation, replaces long-time Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha — very little will change. The last 9 months have basically seen Google promising Android partners such as HTC and Samsung that Motorola Mobility will not get preferential treatment when it comes to future versions of Android or Nexus devices. The Chinese regulators even went as far as saying that they would only approve the acquisition if Google keeps Android free for other device makers for at least five years.

Beyond that, though, is for Google’s execs to know, and for us to find out. Officially, all we have to go on is a mysterious line in the acquisition press release that says Motorola will “enable Google to supercharge the Android ecosystem and will enhance competition in mobile computing.” In reality, there are two equally likely (but diametrically opposed) paths that Google could take. It is possible that Google simply wanted Motorola Mobility’s 24,500-strong mobile device patent portfolio to protect Android from further patent litigation. In this case, Motorola Mobility will continue to function exactly as before, but with new leadership. There are rumors floating around that Google will proceed to lay off a large number of Motorola employees, which would reinforce this speculation.

The other option is that Google will begin producing its own line of Android, Chrome OS, and Google TV devices. In this case, Google would effectively begin a transformation into a company that resembles Apple — but with Search under its belt, it might even have the edge on Apple. The main problem with this, though — putting aside Chrome OS and Google TV for the moment — is that Android devices are commodities. For Googola to compete with Samsung and other device makers, it would need to somehow differentiate itself. Selling “vanilla” devices won’t be enough, and I can’t see Google developing a custom skin, a la TouchWiz or Sense.

If Google does go the hardware route, I suspect it will fork Android — perhaps to create a commercial, non-free version that flawlessly integrates with Chrome OS, and other devices such as Android@Home and Google Glasses. Forking the codebase wouldn’t violate the Chinese stipulation that Android remains free for five years — but even so, is it really the best thing for the Android ecosystem as a whole?

For more, read David Cardinal’s take on why Google should sell Motorola as soon as possible.

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Google’s Knowledge Graph: Wikipedia on steroids, or the beginning of the end for the web?

Further establishing itself as the Borg of the web, Google is adding a Knowledge Graph capability to its search engine. Simply put, Google will now try and answer your question right on the search results page — no need to actually visit Wikipedia or your favorite travel information site when Google can simply absorb their data and present it to you nicely formatted along with a few choice ads. Google already has most of the video content on the web through YouTube, most of the geographic information through Maps and Earth, and an increasing share of the email, so why not? The user gets a quicker, and likely more useful, set of facts about their search.

At a glance, faster results are a no-brainer benefit for everyone. But like the spread of cheap, imported goods, there is a corrosive downside. Web publishers get cut out of the loop, risking their business models and ability to create the content that we all rely on. Google risks crushing the web in its embrace — unintentionally loving it to death. Looking more closely at Knowledge graph shows how the process works and why you may want to worry more than a little about it.

The Google Knowledge Graph — Baby steps to an information monopoly?

Google’s Knowledge Graph is brand new — “only” containing an estimated 3.5 billion facts about 500 million objects — but of course it will grow as rapidly as the Googleplex can organize additional information. Even now it is a powerful tool for those who want quick answers, and don’t like wasting their time surfing to get them — loosely described as semantic search. For comparison, Wikipedia currently has less than 30 million pages. When Google decides a search is about one of the 500 million objects it has categorized, it displays the facts it has about that object in a separate “knowledge panel” on the right of the page. Traditional search results and ads appear in the main body of the page on the left.

Google’s Knowledge Graph shows not just links for the Bronx Zoo, but a panel of facts on the right-hand side of the page

You can see here that Google has pulled out a map showing the location of the Zoo, along with some facts from Wikipedia — which to its credit are linked and attributed to Wikipedia. It also shows me other topics that those curious about the Bronx Zoo are interested in. Interestingly, the knowledge panel is less useful in this case than the first search result — which reports the top links from the Bronx Zoo site itself — but for many topics which don’t have a definitive website the knowledge panel is a handy place to get started with research.

Google vs. Bing: Do you trust the web or your friends?

While Google is using brute force to tame all the information on the planet in its effort to bootstrap the semantic web, Bing is taking a more surgical, and social, approach — by sifting through data about and from your friends to decide what might be important to you. Once you turn on Bing’s new Sidebar and sign into Facebook, Bing will happily crawl through any and all information it can find in your friends’ profiles or posts to cough up a variety of factoids. Some can be very useful — like a friend’s photo album from a place you’re interested in visiting, or the fact that someone has just reviewed a movie you’re curious about. Others are at best trivia — like the information that a long-lost business colleague used to live 100 miles from a place you’re considering for vacation, or that the musician “Taj Mahal” recently tweeted, shown in response to an attempt to find out which friends might know something about the Taj Mahal in India.

Comparing the two, so far I’d give the edge to Google and the Knowledge Graph. Useful snippets from friends (and I’ve got around 800 FB friends, so that should be a good sample) are few and far between in my efforts to use the new Bing sidebar. I can see that with time and improved linking technology the amount of useful information from friends will improve, but it’s hard to guess by how much. For my Bronx Zoo example, Bing’s sidebar coughed up a photo of a friend’s daughter, presumably taken at the zoo, as well as letting me know that two of my friends used to live in north New Jersey towns. None of it very useful in planning my event there.

Bing also offers an “ask friends” where I can ask my friends to help me with a search. Frankly, I’m not willing to even experiment with that. If I have a topic that I’m not sure how to approach, I’m old-fashioned enough to mail a couple friends who I think might be able to help out. So posting a search would only be useful if I could make it visible to just a few friends, instead of all 800 — but that doesn’t seem possible yet. Ironically, because of the way Google+ got started — with circles from the beginning — the same idea might actually work for me if Google implemented it so that I could ask a particular circle. Hopefully Bing will also allow the feature to be restricted to particular lists of friends.

One advantage of Bing’s Social Search over Google’s Search Plus Your World, at least for me, is that Bing clearly separates the social results from web search results. It is confusing and frankly a little weird to be doing a web search on Google and have various posts and articles written by me or my friends mixed willy-nilly into the results. Sometimes they’re useful, but other times they just get in the way since I’m really trying to look outward for new information, not navel-gazing by re-reading my old articles.

Knowledge Graph: The end of web publishing?

Like the snake that eats its own tail, there is a very serious problem with the way Google’s Knowledge Graph is likely to grow. Over time it will pull more and more information into its database — likely it has already swallowed the useful parts of Wikipedia — and give users less reason to actually traverse the web and visit any of the sites from which it has gotten its information. In turn, of course, that will starve those sites of needed revenue (or in the case of Wikipedia, attention and donations) and cause them to slow their acquisition and publication of knowledge. How long will it be before the “Report a Problem” feature of Google’s Knowledge Graph becomes more important to the web than submitting a correction through the arduous Wikipedia edit and review process? The resulting paradigm clearly isn’t stable.

This problem isn’t lost on Google, although its current answers aren’t particularly satisfying. Google’s executive in charge of search, Amit Singhal, says that as search engines improve, users perform more searches and also create more traffic to external websites. The trouble with that bromide is that in the past the improvements have been related to providing more accurate links to external sites — inviting increased browsing — and now they are being geared at providing answers directly on the Google site, which is an entirely different thing that might well decrease subsequent browsing.

Google’s head of Search, Amit Singhal, at SMX on the issue of how Google’s Knowledge Graph affects publishers.

Singhal also explains that to survive websites have to move further up the value chain, and not simply answer questions the search engine is able to. He uses the annoying and trivial example of a site providing the answer to “2+2.” Unfortunately, that answer shows the issue isn’t really deeply concerning to him, and apparently to Google. There is no “bright-line rule” beyond which Google won’t venture, only practical limits on its technology. This sounds very similar to the issue with PC utility software vendors providing services which are eventually bundled into the operating system. Realistically, it’s a warning shot across the bow of publishers that Google considers anything anyone wants to know as fair game, and if it can figure out how to provide that knowledge within its ecosystem and keep all the money — it will.

Once Google has effectively tied its Knowledge Graph into its digitized library of almost every book on the planet and scraped the contents of the semantic web into its Googleplex, it will have a practical monopoly on access to many kinds of information — even if you have a site with some other perspective, users will likely need to find it through Google. Public opinion, and in turn public policy, will get shaped by which factoids Google serves up in response to controversial searches like “climate change” or “intellectual property protection.”

Google Knowledge Graph results for global warming feature a well-known climate skeptic and an activist. Fair and balanced, maybe, but certainly a step towards editorial control coming from Google.

There is something more than a little insidious and even terrifying about this prospect. By declaring itself a repository of knowledge, rather than just an honest broker providing equal access to resources on the web, Google is making itself the sole arbiter of truth — or at least sole editor of the presented truth. Even Wikipedia provides an open, community-driven, process for editing, reviewing, and correcting facts as part of serving the community. If Google continues down its current path without articulating a clear set of transparent checks, balance, and access rules — or limiting itself to the role of a “common carrier” for the web’s information — it is likely we’ll soon hear a clamor for extending anti-trust regulations to limit monopolies on the access to knowledge.

Read more about Knowledge Graph, or the semantic web

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Why Diablo 3′s always-online DRM is a good thing

Diablo 3 has now been available worldwide for a week. In true, zealous, Blizzard-super-fan style, the end boss on the hardest difficulty setting has already been defeated. We don’t know the exact number of Diablo 3 sales, but with some 2 million pre-orders, we’re talking about one of the fastest-selling games of all time — and probably the fastest-selling PC game of all time (beating out the World of Warcraft expansions and Starcraft 2, which are also Blizzard titles).

By almost all accounts, Diablo 3 is a fantastic game. It has received almost perfect scores from the top game critics, hardcore gamers, and casual players alike — except for one niggling issue: Diablo 3 requires an internet connection to Battle.net to play.

It’s not like this is news — Blizzard announced that the game would require an internet connection last year — but unfortunately it was brought into sharp relief by a flurry of server issues and extended maintenance downtime over the past week. If there hadn’t been any login difficulties, the always-online thing probably would’ve faded into the background, obscured by legendary-tinted glasses — but because some 2+ million people have spent the past week battling with heinous lag, Error 33, Error 37, and Error 3003, critics and gamers have focused their ire on what they perceive to be the issue: Diablo 3′s always-online DRM.

Now, while it’s true that D3′s reliance on Battle.net does act as a form of DRM, this is just a value-added extra as far as Activision-Blizzard are concerned. Really, given the faith that Blizzard has garnered from its users over the last 20 years, I’m surprised that fans have been so quick to label this feature as crippling DRM, or worse, the hellspawn of Blactivision’s CEO, Bobby Kotick. In reality, Diablo 3′s connectivity requirement exists for a handful of compelling reasons that actually make the game better.

Gameplay

Users and critics are quick to draw comparisons to Ubisoft’s aborted use of must-remain-connected-to-the-internet DRM, but Diablo 3 is really very different. To begin with, it helps if you think of Diablo 3 as an online game. In fact, think of Diablo 3 as an MMO, like World of Warcraft or Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Unlike Diablo 2 or other offline games, all of your D3 characters reside in the cloud — in one of Blizzard’s huge database servers, just like your WoW character. Every time you loot or equip an item, that change is automatically saved to Blizzard’s database. Because of this, your characters will survive a hard disk crash, and they’re accessible from any internet-connected computer — you can log into D3 from a friend’s computer (or your office computer) and continue from where you left off.

Once you actually log in, Diablo’s gameplay is a piece of seamless mastery. Joining a friend’s game takes one click — and then porting directly to them takes one more. All your characters share a single item stash. With the BattleTag and Real ID systems, you can set up a new game with two or three clicks — and of course, like SC2 and WoW, you can chat to any of your friends, no matter which game they’re currently playing, from the chat window.

None of this would be possible without permanent Battle.net connectivity.

Security

One of the biggest problems with offline games is that all of the game logic and game saves must be stored locally. Game saves are historically very, very easy to crack — outfitting your character with a full set of end-game legendary items can be as simple as loading up a hex editor and changing a few values. With decompilation and memory interrogation hacking, a game’s inner workings — boss mechanics, loot generation, and so on — can be laid bare.

In offline-only games, these factors aren’t a big issue — but in Diablo 2, which featured offline and online play, so much data was available in the game client that hacked characters and map hacks were rife.

Diablo on the left, WoW on the right — the look similar because they are

To put it another way: Can you ever imagine an MMO like WoW storing character data locally on your hard drive? No. Just apply the same logic to Diablo 3. Blizzard wants to keep hacking and exploitation to a minimum — and hacked games and characters were one of the biggest complaints in Diablo 2 — and so it isn’t all that surprising that the company is keeping as much data and logic server-side as possible.

The real-money auction house

The jewel in Diablo’s crown — and one of the most exciting experiments in online/MMO history — is the real-money auction house (RMAH). When it launches at the end of May, players will be able to sell items for actual dollars and pounds, with Blizzard taking a flat $1 cut on unique items, and 15% on stackable commodities (health pots, gems).

The real-money auction house is Blizzard’s attempt to monetize (and legalize) the rampant, gray/black market buying of gold and items from “Chinese gold farmers” using real money. Similar approaches at stemming gray/black market trading have been tried before — most notably, Eve allows you to buy your monthly subscription with in-game currency — but Diablo 3′s RMAH is by far the highest-profile attempt yet. The intricacies of virtual world economies are beyond the scope of this story, but put it this way: It is actually more efficient for someone in China (or another developing country) to farm gold in WoW and sell it to rich Westerners, than to work in manufacture or agriculture.

Diablo 3 real-money auction house

It is likely, if Diablo 3 attracts enough players, that a huge real-money economy will develop around the game, making Blizzard (and players!) millions of dollars in the process. For a game without a monthly subscription, this is obviously a rather attractive proposition for Blactivision.

For the RMAH to work, though, Blizzard needs absolute security. Dupe bugs and hacks — where players can magically conjure up duplicates of the same item — could ruin the legitimacy of the RMAH overnight. This isn’t to say that MMOs are perfectly secure (almost every big MMO has fallen victim to a dupe bug), but they’re a lot more secure than offline games. As we mentioned previously, every action that you perform in Diablo 3 is recorded and saved in one of Blizzard’s databases. It might be possible to dupe some gold or items, but Blizzard will have built in plenty of protections that allow it to track the duped objects and remove them from the game. There is almost certainly a team at Blizzard that is tasked with hunting for exploits and exploiters 24/7.

Epilogue

In my opinion, these three factors are a large part of what make Diablo 3 so damn enjoyable. With that said, though, there is simply no avoiding the fact that requiring an internet connection to play is ultimately very lame. DSL connections are finicky beasts, after all — and what happens if Blizzard gets DDoSed, or it goes bankrupt? As internet connections improve, though, these concerns will slowly vanish.

In many ways, Diablo 3 is almost the first step towards cloud gaming. While I can’t confirm this, I suspect that the D3 artwork is the only real asset that is stored on your computer — everything else is either downloaded, or streamed while you play. You will notice that, despite the tumultuous first week, Blizzard hasn’t issued a single patch for D3. It’s entirely possible that, when you log in, item stats, monster attributes, spell effects, and even game mechanics are downloaded from the Battle.net servers. It also seems that Blizzard has the capability to change items, monsters, and spells while you play the game. In effect, you are streaming everything from the cloud — except the art.

I think this is the real reason that Diablo 3 completely forbids offline play. Blizzard could make it so that you could download a complete version of Diablo 3 for offline play, but a) that would give hackers easier access to data that Blizz would rather keep locked up; b) the ability to continually fine-tune the game after launch is very desirable; and, finally, who are we kidding: As far as the accounting bods are concerned, online-only play is the single best way of cutting down on piracy and generating more income — at least until someone reverse engineers the Diablo 3 server, of course.

Read more about Diablo 3, or the awful DRM in Batman: Arkham City

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Windows 8 kills off “dated and cheesy” Aero

In what must surely be the longest Windows 8 treatise yet, Microsoft has spent 11,048 words describing the birth, evolution, and future of the Windows user interface. Hidden within the morass of design notes and historical navel gazing there is one notable change: The final build of Windows 8, due this fall, will feature a rejigged, Aero-free Desktop (pictured above).

Unlike most Building Windows 8 blog posts, the essay — titled “Creating the Windows 8 user experience” — is surprisingly triumphant. It begins by detailing Windows 1.0, a GUI for DOS. Released in 1985, just a few years after the first IBM PC, the computer mouse was still completely unproven and considered (by critics) to be gimmicky and a production killer. Then, of course, Windows 3 came along in 1990 and changed everything — almost every computer from that point on would be sold with a mouse. Windows 95 followed, introducing the Desktop paradigm, and the Start button and menu.

Windows 1.0

Eventually the saga reaches Windows Vista and the introduction of Aero, a user interface that espoused shiny, glossy, translucent, specular surfaces above all else. Everything was see-through, drop shadows ruled supreme — and according to Microsoft, Aero “represented the design sensibilities of the time.” Later on, though, MS goes on to say that it looks “dated and cheesy now.” This is why the final release of Windows 8 will do away with Aero. As you can see above, the Windows 8 desktop is flat, square, white, and really rather beautiful. Gradients are gone, glows are gone, rounded corners have been squared, and transparency is severely curtailed (only the taskbar is slightly transparent now). Even drop shadows — an operating system stalwart that has haunted us since Windows XP — have been almost completely gutted. It now looks like there’s a tiny drop shadow beneath the active window, but that’s it.

Now, if you’re a big fan of Aero, don’t worry too much: For those who don’t like change, Microsoft is historically very good at providing optional “classic” interfaces (thank God, in Windows XP’s case). This isn’t confirmed, but we’d be surprised if Windows 8 doesn’t ship with Aero as an optional theme.

As for why Aero is being removed, the reasoning is probably twofold. First, while the Desktop paradigm can never be shoehorned into a Metro-style touch-friendly interface, these changes definitely go some way towards unifying the Desktop design with the Metro Start Screen and apps, Windows Phone 7, and the Xbox. The second answer is much more direct: Microsoft is simply trying to save on CPU and GPU cycles, thus making Windows 8 devices faster and more power efficient. All of those drop shadows and transparencies add a significant resource overhead to Windows Vista and 7, which is OK for a high-power desktop computer, but crippling on a laptop, netbook, or tablet.

Which brings us neatly back to the other thread in Microsoft’s 11,000-word opus: The desktop is dying. After the launch of Windows 95, the mouse slowly began losing out to other pointing devices — first the laptop touchpad (though this is of course inferior to the laptop nipple), and now touchscreens. In 2012, according to Microsoft, 61% of PCs (Windows and Mac) sold worldwide are laptops — in the US, where Apple is disproportionately popular, laptop sales will account for 76% of all PCs sold. In absolute numbers, tablets will outsell desktop PCs. And then there’s smartphones, which outsell everything.

It’s very clear that computing is going mobile — and, after reading through what amounts to a novella, it definitely sounds like this is the primary drive behind everything in Windows 8, from the new Metro Start Screen to the live tiles to the split-screen Metro apps. It explains almost everything — except for the abolition of the Start button. I still can’t work that one out.

Read a lot more at Building Windows 8

Updated @ 8:40: It isn’t explicitly declared, but I assume (hope) that “Aero Peek” (thumbnail previews from the taskbar) will survive the cull.

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Network Vision: Sprint’s path to domination

Over the last year, Sprint has constantly touted its Network Vision upgrade as the way forward for the company to compete effectively against the likes of AT&T and Verizon Wireless, as well as T-Mobile USA and other smaller carriers. But what is Network Vision? How does it affect Sprint subscribers? Is it the silver bullet that Sprint portrays it to be?

History

Before we dive into answering those questions, a little history on Network Vision is in order. The history will help put into perspective why Sprint is even doing this, and why it believes it will save them. The concept of Network Vision begins with Sprint-Nextel Corporation, at the beginning of 2010. It had just had yet another successful year selling its 4G WiMAX phones, but it had trouble keeping up with all the networks it runs.

Over the last two years, Sprint has suffered considerably over the maintenance of its iDEN, CDMA2000, and WiMAX networks. Network performance on the CDMA side has been consistently falling over the last two years. Analysts and various stakeholders in Sprint-Nextel have been pressuring the company to eliminate the Nextel iDEN platform and migrate subscribers to the Sprint CDMA platform after badly managing the integration of the Nextel platform following the merger in 2005. Finally, nearly everyone has ragged on Sprint for its choice in using Clearwire’s WiMAX for its 4G platform after Verizon Wireless and AT&T announced that they would use LTE back in 2008. Never mind that if Clearwire and Sprint had not deployed WiMAX, then Clearwire would have lost the licenses to the TDD 2.5GHz spectrum that WiMAX resides on due to the build-out requirements described in the licenses.

Since 2008, Sprint has consistently made known its desire to simplify its network architecture and offer a unified platform that is cheaper to maintain and offers the same quality of service that Sprint has always offered. In December 2010, Sprint announced that it had begun a radical new project to rebuild its entire network, called Network Vision. The announcement of Network Vision came shortly after Verizon Wireless launched its 4G LTE network in October 2010.

Initially, Sprint announced that Network Vision would just be a replacement of the separate infrastructures for the 2G (iDEN), 3G (CDMA2000), and 4G (WiMAX) networks. The idea was to use new multi-mode network infrastructure that could handle all three different network technologies. While iDEN would remain separate, CDMA2000 and WiMAX would live on the same infrastructure. iDEN would then be phased out after Network Vision build-out completed in favor of a push-to-talk solution over CDMA2000.

When queried about the lack of LTE in the original Network Vision infrastructure design, Sprint noted that it could easily run any network technology it wanted with the new Network Vision equipment. Sprint also mentioned that it can easily migrate to LTE from WiMAX because they are both very similar at the tower level, so it can reuse most of the equipment at the tower for LTE.

In October 2011, Sprint made a new announcement about Network Vision. It had revised its plans after securing a deal to offer the iPhone to its subscribers. The new Network Vision project is far more ambitious than the original one. WiMAX was dropped from the architecture of Network Vision. Instead, Sprint would deploy LTE on its exclusive nationwide PCS G-block spectrum. It would also shut down iDEN while deploying Network Vision, with iDEN spectrum eventually being used for a second LTE channel to bond with the G-block PCS LTE network.

Enough about history, what exactly is Network Vision?

Network Vision, as a whole, is Sprint’s last ditch effort to bring its network up to handle the demands of its subscribers in terms of data usage. CDMA2000 and LTE would be hosted in the same cell using new multi-banded multi-mode radios. Using these radios, CDMA2000 would be re-deployed on PCS and deployed on former iDEN spectrum as CDMA2000 1X Advanced with EV-DO Rev. A. With CDMA2000 1X Advanced, Sprint will be enabling HD Voice so that capable devices on the network can offer higher quality voice calls. VoLTE will also be supported with the LTE Release 10 upgrade to the network in 2013. Additionally, equipment for activating LTE at a cell would be installed with the rest of the Network Vision equipment. Each cell would be capable of offering CDMA2000 and LTE initially. Since the same radio will be handling both CDMA2000 and LTE, coverage breadth in areas upgraded to Network Vision will be exactly equal for both CDMA2000 and LTE.

However, the Network Vision architecture has some additional flexibility. By design, Network Vision cells are technology independent. That means that Sprint can simply plug in new radio network technologies through certain specified interfaces and essentially be able to add another network to Network Vision. For example, if a network operator decides to contract Sprint to host an HSPA+ network over Sprint’s PCS band, then Sprint can easily configure the network to offer HSPA+ alongside CDMA2000. That is what Sprint calls network hosting.

Additionally, Network Vision supports all major FDD and TDD frequency bands certified for use in the United States. If a potential network operator wishes to lease its frequencies to Sprint in order to use Sprint’s infrastructure to host its own network, Sprint and the operator can work out an agreement to lease the spectrum to Sprint and have it operate as a component of the network managed by the operator. This is what Sprint calls spectrum hosting.

While network and spectrum hosting are separate concepts, they are not mutually exclusive. It would make far more sense for spectrum hosting to be a component of network hosting. Sprint hopes to use the inherent flexibility of the Network Vision infrastructure to create new business models that would help Sprint generate much more revenue than the traditional mobile network operator and internet backbone provider businesses provide it. While it can offer network hosting with technologies other than CDMA2000 and LTE, it is quite likely that Sprint will not offer such services since it is far more expensive to deploy. Though if it did decide to offer network hosting of HSPA+ and other wireless communication technologies, Sprint could feasibly request that the costs of deployment be shared by the company requesting the deployment of the technology.

The Network Vision architecture is much more compact than the traditional network equipment that is used by Sprint. As a result, Network Vision cells take up a small fraction of the space of the older equipment and are extremely energy efficient. This will allow Sprint to eliminate large external air conditioning facilities required for the old equipment and cut back on the costs to power the equipment. This alone eliminates massive costs to Sprint’s current operating expenditures, and Sprint is expected to benefit from this almost immediately after deployment is complete.

The new multi-band multi-mode antenna equipment attached to the base stations for Network Vision cells will be able to push out stronger signals with less energy due to newer, more efficient radio designs. This means that Network Vision cells will have much higher ranges, which means more complete coverage in a given area. At the base station level, the cell will be able to support far more backhaul (connections to the internet) than it was previously capable of supporting. With more backhaul, Sprint subscribers will be able to get higher throughout and lower latencies over CDMA2000. It also means that subscribers will likely be able to experience the same kind of high speed LTE service that AT&T and Verizon Wireless offers to its subscribers.

Network Vision sounds amazing, but will it save Sprint?

The Network Vision platform that Sprint has developed is truly amazing. By developing a modular, yet minimal architecture for its network infrastructure, Sprint has pushed the boundaries of efficiency with cellular radio technology. Being able to integrate disparate network technologies onto a single system allows Sprint to manage all of it much more effectively than if it was several independent networks.

By rebuilding its network from the bottom up with Network Vision, Sprint will drastically reduce its costs over time. This will hopefully allow it to continue to afford the massive payouts required to keep offering the iPhone on its network and keep Clearwire afloat so that it candeploy TDD LTE to augment Sprint’s own FDD LTE network.

However, Network Vision alone is not going to be the silver bullet that Sprint often portrays it as. Having a totally new infrastructure for its network will require a lot of training and management changes. Sprint will also have to continue to pay Ericsson to manage the network (built out by Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and Samsung), since Sprint does not manage the network itself. Sprint subscribers will need new devices to take full advantage of Network Vision, but some of the benefits can be felt with Sprint’s tri-band CDMA2000 devices. Dual-band CDMA2000 devices (which can only use Sprint’s PCS CDMA2000 network and Verizon’s 850MHz CDMA2000 network) will not get much of a boost in terms of coverage.

The quality of service will also depend heavily on the quality of backhaul that Sprint uses. Historically, Sprint does not have a lot of backhaul attached to its base stations. Going forward, Sprint will hopefully improve the situation. But if nothing changes in terms of backhaul, Sprint subscribers will only get a marginal performance increase over the CDMA2000 network, and the LTE network will only be somewhat faster than AT&T’s HSPA service.

Sprint will also need encourage device makers to start seeding the market with LTE devices that support its unique frequencies. Since its low band frequencies for LTE are a superset of the traditional Cellular 850MHz band and its high band frequencies for LTE are a superset of the traditional PCS 1.9GHz band, Sprint should not have too much trouble getting device makers to offer devices that support its bands along with the international Cellular 850 and PCS bands. Without a breadth of devices to offer, all the effort put into Network Vision would become a total waste.

If Sprint works to improve all aspects of its service, then it will be rewarded with a much higher quality of service to offer subscribers. Subscribers will be very pleased with the improvements and will likely continue to stay with Sprint. But it does not stop there. Sprint must be vigilant and continue to aggressively improve its service in accordance to what its subscribers and potential subscribers want. As a first step, though, Sprint is definitely on the right track.

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The semantic web: Can it make Google as smart as IBM Watson?

Once upon a time, search was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Most of us still couldn’t live without it, but hardly an hour goes by that we aren’t cursing the lousy results from our otherwise favorite search engine. Queries which seem straightforward to us stump even the mighty Google, despite the billions of dollars invested in it. So the amazing show put on by IBM’s Jeopardy-winning Watson was inspiring as a possible model for how we’d like to see our own questions answered. Unfortunately, we can’t all have our own Watson — at least not anytime soon — but the internet industry is trying to help us get similar results using semantic search, building on a much broader set of technologies loosely called the semantic web.

When the web started, the mere existence of a link between two pages or sites was a good indicator that they were related, and if you were interested in one, you might be interested in the other. After all, there weren’t all that many sites around. As the web grew into a global monster with hundreds of millions of sites and over a trillion pages — meaning trillions of links — it has gotten a lot harder to sift through or organize. So instead of only having simple links from one page to another, the notion of relationships was added to the web.

Through the rel attribute on links (actually on the a tag used for links), page authors can specify more precisely the relationship of one page to another. One of the most prevalent uses of rel is the author attribute. By linking an article to an author’s Google profile, for example, Google knows to display the author’s headshot when the piece turns up in search results. As an example, the author link for one of my articles on ET looks like:

<a href="http://www.extremetech.com/author/dcardinal" 
  title="Posts by David Cardinal" rel="author">David Cardinal</a>

This immediately allows a search engine to “know” that I am the author of the article, and link it to my author page and list it when a users wants to know about articles I’ve written. By also linking from my author page to my Google profile, a search result is able to show this rich snippet, including my photo, instead of a simple text result:

David Cardinal ExtremeTech Author Rich Snippet

Author is far from the only attribute that can be used with rel to indicate something about the nature of the link between two pages. Perhaps the most common use of rel is for style sheet links, which indicate the CSS that should be loaded by the browser to display the page. Other uses include listing a short form of the URL, previous and next articles, shortcut icons, and metadata for editors. Overall there are around 20 different links in an ET article that make use of rel.

Declaring the author of an article is an example of adding semantic information to the web. It allows software, whether a search engine or a tool looking for authors, to “know” a fact both about me and about the article. The semantic web relies on that simple concept to begin to add “knowledge” to web pages and links. Tim Berners-Lee, one of the fathers of the original web, envisioned the semantic web as a next generation version that could be processed by machines as well as people.

Towards a common taxonomy

In the decade since Berners-Lee predicted the transition to a semantic web, progress has been fairly slow. Trivial, but powerful, examples like the author relationship abound, including data structures for products, movies, music and reviews, but little knowledge has been encapsulated beyond the sort of simple fact-based linking you’d expect from a product catalog or well-organized newspaper.

One reason for that is the difficulty in agreeing on terms and collections of terms — called taxonomies. As a simple example, being 6′ tall I might want to include an attribute height = tall on my author profile. But someone else might decide that tall was really Sebastian’s 6’5″. So for any attribute to have global meaning, it has to refer to a common definition and be part of a common taxonomy.

Many efforts have been made over the years to create standard taxonomies, including ones based on RDF (Resource Description Format), microformats, and Facebook’s Open Graph, but one of the newest and most promising for the semantic web is schema.org — a joint effort by Google, Bing, Yandex and Yahoo! — which aims to provide a common set of terms which search engines can use to help categorize information.

Ironically, schema.org eschews the most powerful and widely-adopted structure for taxonomies — RDF — in favor of a much simpler and less powerful system called microdata. It’s easy to see from this simple example of the microdata for this article that it is neither easy to read or to write, so acceptance will be largely determined by how quickly standard web content creation tools begin to support it:

<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Article">
  <h1 itemprop="name">The semantic web</h1>
  <div itemprop="author" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
    Author: <span itemprop="name">David Cardinal</span>
  </div>
  <span itemprop="genre">Technology</span>
</div>

While the origins of the term semantic web are often traced back to a Berners-Lee Scientific American article published in 2001, typed links are far from new. Ted Nelson and his Xanadu project have been trying to make them a reality for over 30 years. However, semantics got left behind in the original web architecture for the sake of simplicity, so we’ve been left retrofitting it with “hacks” like the relattribute or microdata stuck onto the side of existing HTML syntax.

It’s a question of trust

The web had an early run-in with semantic, and it didn’t end well. Keywords were ubiquitous in the early web as a way to signal what a page was about. Search engines relied heavily on them to decide which pages to show users. Quickly, however, publishers realized that by “stuffing” advantageous keywords into their metadata they could rise to the top of search results for all sorts of things — whether the user found the actual page helpful or not.

As a result, most search engines ignore the formerly useful and powerful keyword field when they find search results. The same is true for most kinds of hidden data. It is too easy for hidden fields to be used to try to trick the search engine into misleading people towards a page that otherwise they wouldn’t be interested in.

Clearly semantic web data like microformats have the same potential for trouble. Some basic safeguards are already in place. To be listed as the author of an article, for example, a link is needed both from the article to the author’s profile, and back from the author’s profile to the web site hosting the article. So we couldn’t send ET skyrocketing to the top of the SEO charts by claiming that Stephen King had just published his next novel on our site.

You can see how complex this “web of trust” would need to be by looking at the sophisticated tools that Wikipedia uses to help provide reliable articles from known authors — and it is only addressing the problem for a single site with authenticated contributors. For the semantic web to become reliable, it’ll require the same type of authority and delegation system that security certificates have now. Given how slow and complex the adoption of security certificates has been, don’t expect the semantic web to bloom overnight.

Going beyond pages — Exposing data

Links between pages and trivial attributes of common products only scratch the surface of what is possible with the semantic web. Technically every piece of data on a web page is capable of being described semantically — so that other applications and tools can process it automatically. This is where more complex solutions such as RDF and its related query language, SPARQL, will eventually begin to shine.

While the vast bulk of the web has been left largely untouched by semantic markup, there are many pilot projects which are creating useable subsets of web information complete with semantic content. Startup Silk provides a simple web authoring tool that lets you create sites with semantic content, and showcases what is possible with a number of demo sites including one about the tech community itself, and another about The Simpsons TV show.

It is only a matter of time before the web as we know it today gradually turns into a smarter web, capable of answering questions (or creating questions for answers) like IBM’s Watson. The result won’t be anywhere near true intelligence, but it will make powerful and rapid data analysis applications that run across the web as easy to build as database applications are today.

Resources

• Official W3C Semantic Web project and activities
• Semantic web wiki with community-contributed resource listings
• Scientific American article on The Semantic Web in Action
• W3C collection of public semantic datasets – SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System)

[Image credit: Paul Clarke]

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