When you’re out all day, it’s a huge pain to charge your mobile devices. Even if you remember to bring a charger and get lucky enough to find a free electrical outlet at a coffee shop, you still have to sit there for around an hour or so to get a full charge. 18-year-old high school student Eesha Khare invented a tiny device that could potentially charge a phone in around 20 to 30 seconds.
At this year’s Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, Arizona, Khare displayed her tiny device. Referred to as a supercapacitor, the item is small enough to fit inside a standard smartphone battery. To demonstrate the device, she had it power a small LED — certainly not a power-hungry smartphone battery that dies before your train gets to your stop. Along with lasting around 10,000 charge cycles (as opposed to a standard battery’s 1,000), the capacitor is also flexible, so it can be maneuvered into oddly shaped spaces.
Khare’s capacitor (which we hope she’ll call the Khare Kapacitor if it ever hits the market) incorporates nanostructures to help store more energy per volume than a standard battery, hold a charge longer, and deliver a charge more quickly. After charging it for just 20 seconds, she was able to power that small LED. She hasn’t applied the battery to mobile devices just yet, but the theory has been tested, and that is the supercapacitor’s eventual goal.
The capacitor is also a solid-state device, making it more environmentally friendly than a regular battery, which could spill its liquid innards should the casing experience a rupture. The flexible nature of the capacitor should also help prevent it from taking severe damage. The device is also more temperature-stable than standard batteries, as well as more affordable. Along with powering your tasteful front yard LEDs, and hopefully mobile devices one day, the capacitor can also potentially be used in car batteries. This could be a boon for electric vehicles, making their power usage much more time efficient.
Khare won the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award, which came with a $50,000 prize, which she plans on using to help pay for college and other scientific endeavors.
Like most revolutionary battery technology — such as increasing standard lithium-ion battery storage with the help of graphene-based nanosheets — there isn’t a definite timeframe for when (if ever) Khare’s capacitor will hit the market, or even if it can be successfully incorporated into consumer electronics. However, it certainly is promising that there’s a veritable deluge of battery advancements seemingly every month. The more frequently they occur, the more likely one will be applicable to devices we use.
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany have successfully transmitted 40 gigabits per second over a one-kilometer (0.62 miles) wireless link — a new world record. The technology, dubbed Millilink, is the same speed as the fastest commercial fiber optic links, and could represent a major breakthrough for carrier backbones, broadband internet access in rural areas, and ultra-fast last mile access for customers who haven’t had fiber rolled out in their area.
So you have some idea of the scale of this accomplishment, the most advanced WiFi technology, 802.11ad (WiGig) manages around 7Gbps, over a distance of a few meters. 802.11ac can theoretically be used over longer ranges, but even with 8-antennae MIMO it maxes out at around 7Gbps.
To achieve 40Gbps (a transfer speed of around 5GB/sec, or a Blu-ray disc in five seconds), the German researchers use a massive, 80GHz block of wireless spectrum between 200 and 280GHz. By comparison, your WiFi router at home probably uses just 20MHz in the 2.4GHz or 5GHz range. (See: The wireless spectrum crunch, illustrated.) As you can imagine, you can squeeze a lot more data into 80GHz of bandwidth than 20MHz. In fact, with such a vast amount of bandwidth, link speeds well beyond 40Gbps should be obtainable — but for now, it sounds like the researchers are using a fairly rudimentary transmission protocol. With some multiplexing, it shouldn’t be hard to reach 100Gbps or more.
At this point, you might be wondering why WiFi, 3G, and LTE use tiny blocks of low frequencies, when massive amounts of bandwidth are available in the 30-300GHz (EHF, millimeter wave) range. The short answer is: The higher the frequency, the shorter the wave, the more the signal is attenuated (blocked) by obstacles. Longer waves can pass through walls, or bounce around corners — shorter waves can’t. This means that the Fraunhofer system is really only useful for point-to-point links that are less than a few miles long. Fortunately, that’s more than enough for backhaul between cell towers and ultra-fast last mile internet access. If the German researchers can commercialize their system, there would be a bevy of telecom giants who would love to roll out 40Gbps+ wireless links, instead of the very expensive task of laying cables in an urban environment.
There’s also another interesting corollary benefit of using such a high frequency: Higher frequencies have a shorter wavelength — and the shorter the wavelength, the smaller the antenna needs to be. In the case of Millilink, the transceiver chip measures just 4×1.5mm (pictured above). To generate such high frequencies, Fraunhofer uses its own III-V CMOS process to create transistors that are capable of operating at 300GHz.
Finally, it’s worth noting that faster wireless transfer speeds have been achieved in the lab — “infinite capacity” wireless vortex beams have managed 2.5 terabits per second (64 times faster) over one meter — but this is the first time that such speeds have been obtained in a real-world setting.
The “big reveal” at Google I/O is always the keynote. This year’s conference was unique for the low-key presentation. The three-and-one-half hour marathon presentation didn’t include any new hardware announcements (unless you count the $649 unlocked version of the Galaxy S4 running pure Android). Instead it was a tribute to Google’s rapidly growing portfolio of services. In another surprise, the last hour was Larry Page giving his perspective on just about everything, and answering an amazing number of audience question.
One of the most impressive announcements was the all-new Google Maps. Featuring a greatly simplified UI, the new Maps is designed to put more of the information you might want on your maps directly — without those annoying pushpins — while hiding information you don’t want. I/O attendees received early invites and were invited to try it out during the conference. We used it to find some local coffee shops and eateries, with mixed results. The UI itself was very cool, but either the new servers were overloaded or there were still some glitches in the preview service, as directions and other features seemed slow or in some cases didn’t seem to be connected.
While the new Maps interface might have been of most interest to consumers, the new Android Studio demo was serious eye candy for developers. Featuring real-time previews of icons, as well as layouts on various devices, the IntelliJ-based developer tool makes me want to think of an app to build just so I can use it. Google is also building in templates and other generated-code modules for connecting to its services, much like Microsoft has done over the years with Visual Studio. The result should be much more rapid adoption of new Google services by developers.
Lines are a way of life at Google I/O. You might think that paying nearly $1,000 and hammering your keyboard during the three minutes tickets are on sale would make you really special. While that’s certainly true, so are the 6,000 other attendees. This line for lunch was a little daunting as we came down the escalator to the lobby, but fortunately it faded quickly. Popular sessions were filled well before they started, so advance planning was definitely a must if you had a particular agenda in mind.
The Sandbox level was full of product and technology exhibits and demonstrations. The space above was dominated by the Google Plus indoor blimps. Some of the cooler tech on display included the Seaview SVII underwater Street View camera rig, and the Epson / Apx Labs “anti-Glass” headset. Almost all of the vendors there stayed busy throughout the conference — in contrast to last year where the Sandbox often seemed almost empty — so hopefully it was well worth their time to be part of the conference.
Google had environmental sensors all over the building — some five hundred of them. It seemed like they didn’t have any especially amazing use for the mass of data being gathered, but were more interested in the experiment as a prototype of using Google Cloud services as a backend for massive data collection efforts. The use of open-source Arduino hardware built with the help of O’Reilly’s Data Sensing Lab made all of us wonder what has happened to the Android@Home effort that was big news at I/O two years ago.
As you would expect, Glass wearers were at the conference in abundance. Unlike in 2012 when most of the Glass units were mock-ups, this time there were hundreds of real ones being worn everywhere — including in the restrooms. I quickly decided that propping my Glass up on my forehead when entering the restroom was in the best interest of all concerned. The odd thing about wearing Glass for a few days is that you quickly forget that you have them on, so after awhile it is surprising when people look at you funny or start mumbling under their breath. Fortunately San Francisco is probably one of the easiest places to wear Glass, as everyone we met on the street or in restaurants that commented on them thought they were really cool.
Glass does not currently have a volume setting, so I found it very difficult to hear phone calls when in any type of noisy environment. Ironically I found myself needing to put my Bluetooth earpiece in my left ear while wearing Glass on my right ear in order to have a conversation in many of the conference venues.
Arriving early on the first morning gave me the chance to be the first Glass wearer many of the convention center workers had ever seen. These servers in the Cafe were intrigued and asked quite a few great questions about them. All of them were quite upbeat and, like nearly everyone on the street who asked about Glass, wanted to know not just what they did, but when they might be available and what I thought they’d cost. So of course I took their picture with Glass. No one visibly freaked out about having them around, but of course I have no idea what they were thinking or muttering under their breath.
Party scenes like After Hours are ripe for Glass, although the tiny sensor makes images in low-light settings like this one I snapped with Glass a little blurry and noisy — certainly good candidates for Google Plus’s new auto-enhancement features for photos. Of course these settings are also some of the ones that raise privacy concerns about Glass. Not everyone at a bar or party wants everything they’re doing and who they are doing it with to appear on the web — with automatic facial recognition privacy concerns will only increase.
These robotic drink mixers were fun to watch, but I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to be impressed that they could make a drink, or dismayed that these marvels of technology were about 50 times slower than a human bartender. As always, robots were big at After Hours. This year Maker Faire San Francisco is the day after Google I/O so there were plenty in town to put on a display.
This large robotic hand was controlled by an operator fitted with a hand-like set of controls. It was presumably designed as a demonstration of how robotic power could greatly enhance human capabilities with a semi-natural control interface. However, after watching the operator for awhile, it didn’t seem like the robot hand exactly followed his motions, more like he was using his controls the way someone might a fancy joystick, and anticipating what the result of his actions would translate into. The hand could pick up fuel drums between its “thumb” and “forefinger” which was pretty cool, and crush them of course. As you can see in this photo, it could also make silly gestures.
All good things must come to an end, so by late evening only a few stragglers were left taking advantage of seats at the by-now closed exhibits to relax and no doubt catch up on email. With so many of the sessions livestreamed, and so much of the technical information otherwise available online, the value of conferences like I/O is increasingly found in the person-to-person contact with other attendees — especially when there aren’t any new hardware products that need to be experienced in person.
Intel’s Paul Otellini has admitted, on his last day as Intel’s CEO, that the original iPhone could’ve been powered by an Intel CPU — but Intel decided against it.
This revelation comes from a lengthy profile of Otellini published by The Atlantic. The profile mostly rehashes Intel’s modern history under Otellini’s leadership, and how he vanquished AMD, segued Intel from desktop to laptop parts, and produced stupendous amounts of money, but a handful of interesting tidbits straight from Otellini’s mouth have also been woven into the narrative. Most notably, Otellini chronicles how Intel had the chance of powering Apple’s original iPhone — but decided it wasn’t worth it:
“We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it,” Otellini told me in a two-hour conversation during his last month at Intel. “The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do… At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”
Paul Otellini, outgoing Intel CEO, with his favorite wafer
The Atlantic writer, Alexis Madrigal, says it was the only moment in hours of conversation that “regret slipped into Otellini’s voice.” Otellini continues: ”The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut. My gut told me to say yes.”
As for why Otellini passed on the iPhone, Intel simply wasn’t in the mobile mindset prior to the iPhone’s release in 2007. The first part specifically designed for mobile applications, Atom, wasn’t released until 2008 — and at that point, it couldn’t begin to come close to the iPhone’s power requirements. Otellini says he wanted to shift Intel towards cheap mobile parts in 2005, but it took five years to actually “move the machine.” It won’t be until the release of Silvermont (Merrifield/Bay Trail) this fall, some eight years after Otellini originally tried to steer the ship towards mobile/cheap, that Intel really has a mobile chip that competes with ARM.
In much the same way that Apple ended its 15-year relationship with IBM’s PowerPC architecture after experiencing the superior performance of Intel’s laptop and desktop x86 CPUs in 2005, we wouldn’t be surprised if Apple switches from ARM to Atom in due course. ”At the end of the day, the best transistors win, no matter what you’re building, a server or a phone,” Otellini says. As The Atlantic story details, in just the last two years, Intel has invested almost $40 billion in R&D and new chip fabs. Superior technology and manufacturing has kept Intel at the top for 40 years, and I don’t think its dominance will end with the death of the PC.
As of yesterday, Intel is now helmed by Brian Krzanich — an engineer who has worked his way up from the fabrication trenches, to running an entire fab, to COO, and finally to CEO. For more information on Otellini’s time at Intel, including the destruction of AMD, be sure to read The Atlantic’s complete profile.
In three hours of keynote at Google I/O, hardly a mention was made of the nagging issue of platform fragmentation that has plagued Android developers and users alike. The stats on how slowly new versions of the OS roll out on existing phones — if they make it at all — are plentiful and well-documented. Existing attempts to reduce fragmentation have had limited success. In a not-so-subtle move, though, Google unveiled its new gaming platform and services not as part of Android itself, but as an addition to Google Play and its Google Play Framework.
By pushing out its game services as part of Google Play, it will automatically be available to all Android devices running Froyo or later — although with devices like Amazon’s Kindle Fire the user will need to install Play and the Play Framework first. This clever move completely sidesteps Google’s OEM and partner channel to bring new capabilities directly to Google’s users, and gives developers an instant audience for games and game-related services. This type of rollout is much closer to the immediacy Apple is able to generate by pushing out new versions of iOS overnight than the current Android slog of getting updates out to users.
Google Play game services
While Android has become a major gaming platform, Google has offered limited support for multiplayer gaming. That makes game services an ideal area for it to try to jump-start its effort by getting features out to the market as soon as possible. The newly announced Google Play game services offers a set of four features:
Achievements that increase engagement and promote different styles of play.
Social and public leaderboards that seamlessly use Google+ circles to track high scores across friends and across the world.
Cloud saves that provide a simple and streamlined storage API to store game saves and settings. Now players never have to replay Level 1 again.
Real-time multiplayer for easy addition of cooperative or competitive game play on Android devices. Using Google+ Circles, a game can have up to 4 simultaneous friends or auto-matched players in a game session together with support for additional players coming soon.
The new game services are already available, with Google announcing that several dozen games were launching with them as of this week.
Addressing app fragmentation with Android Studio
While not directly addressing platform fragmentation, Google’s newly announced, and very sweet looking, Android Studio development tool will help developers create applications that look and run well across a variety of devices and resolutions — and in different languages. Based on IntelliJ, it offers real-time previews of varied screen layouts and translations. Personally I also love that it shows constants using their defined values in the editor, so you never have to worry if you’re using the right one. An integrated translation service can even provide needed foreign language strings for developers who don’t have access to their own resources.
The big question, in our eyes, is whether Google can also use Play to roll out additional services that it wants to get to market quickly. With this move, Google has shown that it’s willing to circumvent carriers when necessary — but why draw the line at just additional Play APIs? In theory, Google should be able to update almost every part of your Android phone from the Play Store, except for low-level kernel tweaks and drivers.
If you follow developments in the US smartphone and tablet market, you are at least passingly familiar with the big names in the industry. Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Nvidia are the major ARM developers, while Intel’s recent Medfield, Clover Trail, and just-unveiled Silvermont products offer an increasingly significant challenge to the ARM tetrarchy. AMD has its own plans as well, though these are largely confined to the W8 tablet space.
Samsung, Qualcomm, and Nvidia account for the lion’s share of the high-end mobile market, but they’re not the only players. Two other fabless design manufacturers, AllWinner and MediaTek, are increasingly hungry for a piece of the lucrative mobile pie.
MediaTek moves to challenge
MediaTek was founded in 1997 as a spinoff from Taiwan’s United Microelectronics Corporation, or UMC. It started off as a controller chip manufacturer for CD and DVD drives but has pushed into mobile devices and wireless products. Total sales for 2012 in US dollars were $3.3 billion — and while that’s not in Samsung or Qualcomm territory, it’s nothing to sneeze at. The company has recently begun shipping several higher-profile products, including its MT6572 SoC. The less-than-sexy name cloaks a dual-core Cortex-A7 SoC at 1.2GHz with an integrated WiFi radio, Bluetooth, GPS, and FM radio tuner all on board.
It’s a bit exuberant, but here’s the feature set.
This is MediaTek’s second Cortex-A7 product — it launched a quad-core Cortex-A7 SoC late in 2012. One reason the chip stands out is that MediaTek has eschewed ARM’s big.LITTLE strategy to explicitly focus on the little end of the equation. ARM has mostly positioned the Cortex-A7 as a low-power companion for the Cortex-A15 and a way to improve total device efficiency by using a svelte low-power core as much as possible. MediaTek believes the Cortex-A7 has enough horsepower to drive a lower-end smartphone on its own, and has designed chips on 28nm technology to help make that happen.
MediaTek’s idea for these chips is to create a market around lower-end smartphones whose users care about battery life but still want an acceptable level of performance. The Cortex-A7, meanwhile, should be up to the challenge. Benchmarks of the quad-core version point to an acceptably snappy chip that trades some synthetic performance for less power consumption — exactly what MediaTek is targeting. If the dual-core variant does so as well, it could be strong competition for lower-end Snapdragons and Intel’s Atom.
The high-end quad-core variant, the MT6589T, recently broke cover and is proving to be a potent competitor for slightly older smartphones. Recently published benchmarks show the chip edging out the HTC One X (the Nvidia Tegra 3 version) and surpassing the Google Nexus 10 and Nexus 7 in the AnTuTu benchmark. These are only two tests, to be sure, but the Taiwanese vendor is clearly capable of fielding hardware that can compete at more than the bottom end of the market.
Allwinner amps up
Allwinner is a much younger company. Founded in 2007, it employs some 500 people, almost all of which are engineers. Unlike MediaTek, it’s a mainland China company. It’s been making waves for several years, starting with its A1X processor series. Newegg has a hefty list of Allwinner-equipped products, and while plenty of them are substandard schlock in the $80-$100 range, there’s an increasing number of devices pushing into $150-$200.
Allwinner’s latest A31 processors are still based on 40nm technology, but the quad-core Cortex-A7 designs should help limit total power consumption. In late March, the company announced its A31s SoCs, which are designed for so-called “phablets” — phones that range from five to seven inches. Equally as interesting to consumers and investors alike is that the company reportedly sells its SoCs for as little as $8-$10 each. That’s half of what Nvidia has reportedly charged for Tegra 3, and substantially less than Intel.
Devices like the upcoming Onda tablet might look like iPads, but they aren’t. Anyone arguing that these products are going to make a near-term chomp into Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia, or Intel is indulging in flights of fancy. Less fanciful is the fact that the ultra-cheap Android tablet market is growing up fast. When I tested the Walgreen’s Maylong tablet in December 2010, I was anything but impressed. The system used a resistive touchscreen, a 533MHz ARM9 core, 256MB of RAM, and 2GB of NAND flash. Even then, “unimpressive” was an understatement.
The Onda, at $145, is a quad-core Cortex-A7 design with 16GB of NAND, 1GB of RAM, a 1200×800 display (up from 840×480), an 8-inch screen, and a 3G modem. Video is via the SGX544MP2, and while that’s not a cutting-edge solution these days, it’s a much stronger product than what we’d have expected in these devices before.
Are we going to see these products launching stateside any time soon? For now, the answer is “no.” They’re not ready. Reading reviews of some recent low-end devices, a number of readers complain of a variety of problems — one person’s USB ports don’t work, another can’t get WiFi functional, a third has no trouble with WiFi or USB, but sound is heavily distorted. These are quality control problems that dog low-end manufacturing and they have to be fixed before these devices are ready for Western markets.
What the growth of these companies shows, however, is that there are other ARM licenseesthat could emerge as major players in their own right. This is particularly true in India and China, where much of the long-term smartphone growth is expected to take place.
In the eyes of the thousands of developers who are attending Google I/O 2013, yesterday’s keynote will have been a riotous roller coaster ride of new and exciting news. From a consumer’s perspective, though — and there were one million of them watching the live stream from home — the keynote was a bit disappointing. This was a marked departure from other major developer conferences, such as Microsoft’s Build and Apple’s WWDC, where the keynote presentations are usually an orgy of consumer-oriented news. Why did Google decide to focus on developers on the one day of the year that the whole world is looking on? The short answer is that, for some reason, Google didn’t have many major products to show us. For the long answer, read on.
Despite Google I/O’s opening keynote being more than three hours long, there were just two major consumer-facing announcements: A new version of Hangouts, which attempts to unify Google’s messy gaggle of messaging services, and a new version of Maps. Google+ also received a significant visual overhaul (but average consumers still only seem to care about Facebook), and an automatic, in-the-cloud feature that make your photos “awesome.” (In my opinion, the auto-adjusted photos don’t look very good.) For a complete rundown of the announcements, check our news story covering yesterday’s keynote.
Google’s new Hangouts replaces the old Google+ Hangouts, Google Talk apps on iOS and Android, Gmail’s IM solution, and Google Voice. The new Hangouts is basically a threaded IM app, like Facebook Messenger, iMessage, or WhatsApp, but with integrated group video chat. You can call home/mobile phones and include them in Hangouts, too — and though there’s no SMS functionality just yet, it should arrive soon. At first glance, this sounds like a much-needed fix: Google’s mix of messaging platforms has been an embarrassment for the company for years. It’s hard to ignore the fact that Google is incredibly late to the game, though. Beyond free group video chat, there isn’t really a compelling reason to use Hangouts, especially when you remember that it suffers from the same critical flaw as Google+: All of your friends use Facebook.
Perhaps more excitingly, Google Maps has been completely rebuilt. The new version — which isn’t widely available yet — is flatter, sleeker, and (amazingly) even more functional than before. On browsers that support it, it seems the interface is now powered by WebGL, allowing for incredibly smooth zooming and transitions between modes. Google Earth has been integrated, allowing you to instantly go from map view to globe view. Actually using the maps is a lot easier, too: To interact with a point on the map, now you just click it, and a card appears in the top left with all of the available options. Directions are now displayed in a clearer fashion, and the public transportation view is very impressive indeed, comparing all of the possible combinations of walking, trains, and buses.
The big omissions, though, were Android and Chrome. The Chrome team spent 45 minutes reminding developers of existing technologies such as HTML5, WebP, and WebM (VP9). The Android team announced a Google-branded Galaxy S4, but everything else was developer-oriented. Search, Google’s most important product, did unveil a conversational search tool that’s a lot like Apple’s Siri, but as we all know, the jury is still out on the actual usefulness of voice control.
Rather than be disheartened by the lack of consumer-oriented releases at Google I/O, though, we should actually be encouraged. Instead of trying to build cool stuff specifically for an artificially imposed Google I/O deadline, Google is now focusing on producing good products. We knew that things would change when Larry Page became CEO and promisedmore wood behind fewer arrows. The last 18 months have seen the shutting down and consolidation of dozens of Google’s weaker, non-core services, and coupled with yesterday’s relatively sedate keynote, with the growing maturity of Search and Maps and unified messaging, Google is signaling that its Wild West days are over.
Is it good that Google is focusing more on maturing its core products, instead of creating new ones? Almost since its inception, Google’s existence has been defined by its rapid release of new and exciting products. Gmail, Reader, Google+, Buzz, Talk, Voice, Maps — really, when you get a chance, take a stroll through the Wikipedia page of Google’s products; it really is quite amazing how many products Google has released in its 15-year history. Since Page took over in 2011, Google has released very few products and slowed down its acquisitions dramatically. The plan, as far as we can tell, is to develop more core products that can earn money — advertising still generates somewhere in the region of 95% of Google’s revenue, and in a high-tech world where startups can replace incumbents in just a few years, a lack of diversification is very dangerous indeed (just ask Microsoft). At the same time, though, by consolidating rather than innovating, Google’s movements will be inherently slower and more measured. For developers and shareholders, this is a good move — for consumers who constantly crave new and exciting things, you may have to start looking elsewhere for your thrills.
For the past few years, Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox has billed itself as the largest, safest repository for Bitcoin buying and selling. The site has weathered a number of DDoS attacks and survived the launch (and failure) of multiple rival exchanges. Last night, for the first time, it ran afoul of the United States government.
Yesterday, Mt. Gox’s major payment processor, Dwolla, notified customers that it could no longer transfer funds between Mt. Gox’s account (Mutum Sigilum) and Dwolla users’ accounts. Dwolla functions much like Paypal — you transfer funds from a BTC transaction to a Dwolla account and, if you’ve verified a bank account with Dwolla, you can then transfer the funds to and from your bank.
The warrant that DHS used to seize the funds in Mt. Gox’s Dwolla account has just been published, and it points to a significant problem with the service. As Ars Technica details, when Mt. Gox owner Mark Karpeles opened the Mutum Sigilum account with Wells Fargo, he was asked if Mutum Sigilum LLC was a business engaged in monetary services. From the warrant:
The application asks several questions; to include, “Do you deal in or exchange currency for your customer?” and “Does your business accept funds from customers and send the funds based on customers’ instructions (Money Transmitter)?” Karpeles answered these questions “no,” indicating that Mutum Sigilum LLC does not deal in or exchange money, and that it does not send funds based on customer instructions. Money transmitting businesses are required by 31 USC section 5330 to register as such with FinCEN. According to FinCEN records on May 6, 2013, neither Mt. Gox nor the subsidiary, Mutum Sigilum LLC, is registered as a Money Service Business.
Whoops.
The warrant goes on to detail how virtually all of the transactions passing through the Dwolla Mutum Sigilum account were Bitcoin-related transactions, and verifies that Mt. Gox has no other US-based account through which these transactions might be flowing. Karpeles, in other words, is in violation of some fairly serious banking laws. Worse, FinCEN issued new guidance nearly two months ago confirming that a virtual currency exchange like BTC is explicitly required to register as an MSB (Money Service Business).
The Wells Fargo account in question was opened in May 2011, transfers to and from Dwolla began in December of that year. Theoretically, Karpeles may have simply made a mistake — but the FinCEN guidance issued in early March made it very clear that virtual currencies and de-centralized convertible virtual currencies needed to comply with the regulations of the Bank Secrecy Act.
What’s this mean?
This isn’t a ruling on the legality of Bitcoins. The FinCEN document makes it clear that the users of virtual currencies are in no way required to comply with the regulations that govern MSBs. The problem here is that Mt. Gox has been in violation of US banking regulations for around 18 months. What happens next is honestly unclear. Mt. Gox offers wire transfers to and from bank accounts, provided you pay the associated wire fees, and since the company is headquartered in Japan, US banking law doesn’t apply.
Will this shake up the price of Bitcoins? So far, it hasn’t. Both Dwolla and Mt. Gox have stated that only a fraction of their respective businesses rely on each other. Dwolla doesn’t want to be tagged as the Bitcoin payment service, Mt. Gox doesn’t want its users thinking that it depends on Dwolla as a critical source of liquidity. The total amount of money seized from the Dwolla account hasn’t been revealed.
I suspect the market is taking a wait-and-see approach. For now, however, one of the simplest methods of transferring cash between an individual’s bank account and Mt. Gox is closed. Presumably, the DHS wouldn’t have elevated this to a federal warrant if they weren’t serious about pushing a criminal case, but it could also be a high-profile way to kick Karpeles in the direction of immediate compliance.
At 9am PST (12pm EST, 5pm BST) today, Google I/O 2013 will begin — and you can watch the live keynote video, and follow ExtremeTech’s live blog, right here (embedded below). Google I/O is Google’s annual developer-oriented conference, but we can still expect a deluge of consumer-related news from Google’s Android, Chrome, Maps, and Glass teams.
On the hardware front, the rumor mill suggests that I/O 2013 will be one of Google’s quietest years. Instead of a new tablet, smartphone, or laptop, it seems like a Samsung Galaxy S4 “Google Edition” will be the only major piece of hardware on display. It’s also rumored that Android@Home, Google’s seemingly stillborn smart home initiative, will get another whack.
On the software front, leaked screenshots suggest that the main release at Google I/O will be a completely revamped version of Google Maps. While we don’t expect a major release of Android (is Google’s manic release schedule finally slowing down?), there will probably be some Android news from today’s keynote. If Google follows the same pattern as last year, tomorrow’s keynote will probably feature some Chrome and Chrome OS news.
All in all, it sounds like Google I/O 2013 will actually be a developer-oriented developers conference, rather than the freebie hardware orgy that it usually is. Now, sit back, relax, and watch the live stream and follow our live blog below, because the keynote is about to begin.
Since their launch at Google I/O nearly a year ago, few tech gadgets have been more talked about than Google Glass. Billed as the next best thing to being a cyborg, Glass promised all-the-time, always-on sharing and connectedness that has traditionally been the province of science fiction stories. While still at least a year away from a true consumer product, early adopters have been able to get their hands on “Explorer” units and peer into the future a bit. This week marked my initiation into the Explorer community with a full-scale immersion into the unique world of Google Glass.
The basics of Glass
Google Glass hardware specs have been out for awhile, and most of you know that the device itself is an ironically named glasses frame with, well, no glass. Instead it — Glass seems to be singular rather than plural like glasses — features a small video screen “up and to the right” of your field of view. Google is considering other options for the display, including for those who need prescription lenses, reading glasses, or want to use their left eye, but for now Glass is best used by those with good distance vision or contact lenses, and who can use their right eye to read.
Along with the display is a 5MP (720p video) camera, a bone-conducting speaker near your ear, a microphone built into the temple, and a touchable control area. A battery, an on/off switch, and of course a CPU running Android round out the device. The speaker is really impressive, offering more clarity than many earpieces, while the microphone’s location above your eye gives it trouble in noisy rooms. The Saturday Night Live skit where Glass picks up someone else’s voice isn’t made up — that happened to me while I was first being fitted for my glasses.
Getting Glassed
While Google offers to mail Glass to its Explorer program participants — who plunked down $1500 for the early prototypes — picking one up at the Googleplex provides a much richer experience. Google’s Glass Guides swarmed about the lucky (dare I say) future glassholes offering advice about color choices to kick off the fitting process, and a choice of beverages. I chose Shale as my color — it looked good and less conspicuous than red or blue — and declined the offered mimosa, opting for a Diet Coke instead. Physically adjusting Glass is a quick process, as the frames are made from titanium and are easy to shape.
Setting up Glass requires using a computer — in this case Google was showcasing Chrome OS-based Pixels with their gorgeous displays — where you connect your Google account to your Glass. You can also select what types of information you want streamed to your Glass. Current options include Google Plus and Gmail notifications, as well as Google Now and updates from the New York Times. The process is simple enough that I was able to duplicate it later at home when I wanted to change Google accounts.
Pairing with your phone is also not difficult, using the free Myglass Android application (I didn’t dare even ask whether there would be an iOS version, as merely mentioning the idea inside the Googleplex might have triggered alarms). My Glass Guide, Patrick, helpfully explained how to navigate the Glass interface (there are really only a few gestures it understands when tapped or swiped on its touch-sensitive area, and one button which can be used to snap a photo or start a video). After learning tap, swipe backwards, forwards, and down, as well as “fling,” I was good to go.
My Guide offered a tour of the Googleplex, but since I was there with a Google friend, we opted for a quick bike trip around the place instead. Unfortunately my video of the trip got accidentally deleted in a later Glass software upgrade, so I can ‘t share footage of how strange I look on a too-small yellow bicycle.
Navigate like a cyborg
Glass is at its strongest when you are interacting with it without having to twitch, wink or tap. Hangouts are one example of that, and navigation is another. Glass knows which way you are facing, so directions shift to match your view. It is easy to switch between driving, bicycling and walking directions as well. Voice guidance, turn-by-turn directions, and route overviews complete the picture. Using the Navigate app definitely made me think of Schwarzenegger’s character in Terminator. For the sake of science, I tried using Glass to navigate while driving, but it is clearly more of a safety hazard than a dash-mounted smartphone or in-dash GPS — although certainly less so than texting. For walking or bicycling, however, it has a lot of advantages — like not needing a hard-to-mount screen — and could be helpful for driving in a pinch.
As Glass becomes more powerful and more integrated with Google’s vast store of information about you and your surroundings, this interactivity will expand and become more useful, more often. (See: Google Glass & Now: Utopia or Dystopia?) Because the Glass display is not an overlay on your field of view — it is up and off to the side — it won’t be the sort of heads-up augmented reality many people envision, but it will begin to provide information of interest to you as you move around. (See: Oculus Rift: Is the world finally ready for virtual reality games?)
Do you want to see what I see?
Just like the millions of pictures of meals posted to Facebook once people discovered how easy it was, Glass will no doubt create an avalanche of “look ma, no hands” video uploads. Whether your friends or family actually care what you saw coming down that awesome ski run is another matter. After the bike ride, my next video was a first-person-instructional attempt at a cooking video. The 720p video quality was great, but I learned that you really need to look down at your hands if you want them to appear in the frame. For the curious, here is what a straightforward attempt at an instructional video — in this case how to bake bacon — looks like with Google Glass:
How good can such a tiny camera be?
The Glass’s camera is remarkably good for such a tiny unit. It has a fixed focal length of 3mm, but is about f/2.5 so it can get reasonable images even indoors. Glass will tune the ISO from as low as 60 (or at least that’s as low as I saw it go) to a high of at least 960. Obviously shutter speed suffers in low light even with that ISO, resulting in the expected blurry images when flash or a larger sensor would normally be needed. A piece of good news is Glass’s awesome depth of field. The camera’s very short focal length means that it has reasonably good focus from only inches away from the lens all the way out to infinity.
This shot of my business card in the foreground with trees out the window in the background helps illustrate this depth of field — important since Glass’s camera is fixed focus. The image also shows that the optics and sensor do a pretty good job of handling high dynamic range scenes.
Glass Hangouts are like backwards Skype
In many ways Hangouts are Google’s answer to Skype — except if you use them on Glass. Since the only camera on Glass faces outward, the person you are hanging with doesn’t see you, they see what you see. That can be pretty cool for sharing an experience, but it takes a little getting used to. You do get to see your Hangout buddies, although paying too much attention to the frightened expression on their face while you perform that cool X Games-style bike trick might be a bit of a safety issue.
Can Glass make you look less like a dork?
Until, and unless, Glass becomes commonplace, wearing it will make you at least a curiosity, if not an obvious geek. Fortunately, Google provides “sunglass” inserts which actually make the Glass itself a lot less visible — especially if you have the Shale color like I got. In addition, for walking navigation, Glass has a real style advantage. Instead of having to pull out and stare down at your smartphone screen in the bright sun every few blocks, you can simply glance up at your route — or listen to voice guidance through the bone-conducting speaker.
Glassware will be a key factor in adoption
Walking around San Francisco generated a lot of — friendly — interest in Glass like from this barista at the local coffee shop
Glass is a new platform. It may run a version of Android, but you wouldn’t know that from using it. Specially designed applications, called Glassware, need to be written to take advantage of Glass. They use Google’s Mirror API to show cards and “bundles” (an awkward term meaning sets of more than one thing) as well as get limited user input. It’ll clearly take time for developers to learn how to do this effectively. For example, the current flagship application, a New York Times reader, puts the unhelpful phrase “X new updates are available” as the top card of a bundle. This requires a tap to find the first headline — even if there is only one. Its read aloud feature only reads the first sentence or so of the article, often leaving you wanting to know more with no way to get at it.
This is not a review
It would be silly to do a product review with Glass in its current state. The software is evolving quickly, and there are plenty of rough edges and odd behaviors — including crashes — to go around. No doubt those will be a thing of the past by the time Glass appears in the market as a real product, so I’ve focused on the capabilities Glass provides — or is on the verge of providing — not the glitches along the way.
One of the toughest issues for Google to address may be battery life. Battery technology evolves notoriously slowly, and Glass is currently pretty short on it. In my case, recording video rapidly drained the unit (it is hard to measure precisely, but I don’t think I could get an hour of video on one charge for example). Hopefully other power conservation measures will enable Glass to truly be an “all day” device — even if not an all-day video camera — by the time it ships.
If you haven’t seen it, the SNL parody of Google Glass is not only funny, but frighteningly on-point. To one degree or another, many of the mishaps that occur during the skit are based on some of the real-life issues with bringing eyewear to life.
What does Google want out of Glass?
Like Nexus phones, it is unlikely that Glass hardware is destined to be a huge moneymaker for Google. Google, though, wants to be your lens to the world — 24 hours a day if possible. All those hours you’re not at your computer, or behind the wheel of your future Android-powered, self-driving car, perhaps you’ll be wearing Glass or one of its successors. The Glass project represents more screens, and more eyeballs, to drive the advertising engine that makes Google work.
While not directly addressing platform fragmentation, Google’s newly announced, and very sweet looking, Android Studio development tool will help developers create applications that look and run well across a variety of devices and resolutions — and in different languages. Based on IntelliJ, it offers real-time previews of varied screen layouts and translations. Personally I also love that it shows constants using their defined values in the editor, so you never have to worry if you’re using the right one. An integrated translation service can even provide needed foreign language strings for developers who don’t have access to their own resources.
Devices like the upcoming Onda tablet might look like iPads, but they aren’t. Anyone arguing that these products are going to make a near-term chomp into Samsung, Qualcomm, Nvidia, or Intel is indulging in flights of fancy. Less fanciful is the fact that the ultra-cheap Android tablet market is growing up fast. When I tested the Walgreen’s Maylong tablet in December 2010, I was anything but impressed. The system used a resistive touchscreen, a 533MHz ARM9 core, 256MB of RAM, and 2GB of NAND flash. Even then, “unimpressive” was an understatement.
Rather than be disheartened by the lack of consumer-oriented releases at Google I/O, though, we should actually be encouraged. Instead of trying to build cool stuff specifically for an artificially imposed Google I/O deadline, Google is now focusing on producing good products. We knew that things would change when Larry Page became CEO and promised
While Google offers to mail Glass to its Explorer program participants — who plunked down $1500 for the early prototypes — picking one up at the Googleplex provides a much richer experience. Google’s Glass Guides swarmed about the lucky (dare I say) future glassholes offering advice about color choices to kick off the fitting process, and a choice of beverages. I chose Shale as my color — it looked good and less conspicuous than red or blue — and declined the offered mimosa, opting for a Diet Coke instead. Physically adjusting Glass is a quick process, as the frames are made from titanium and are easy to shape.
