Intel-backed ZPower to present extended life battery

ZPower, an Intel-backed start-up company, will be introducing a laptop battery using Silver-Zinc technology which is a superior alternative to the ubiquitous Lithium-ion laptop battery.

The company which is planning the battery’s debut with a big laptop maker in 2009, is promising that the battery will run 40% longer than current lithium-ion batteries and is 95% recyclable.

ZPower’s announcement came ahead of the Batteries 2008 Conference being held at Nice in France from October 9. ZPower chief executive and president, Dr. Rose E Dueber is scheduled to present company’s take on Silver-Zinc technology.

Silver-Zinc batteries were specifically developed for aircrafts initially and later found their application into the US Alfa class submarines. These batteries also powered the Apollo spacecraft.

Silver-Zinc technology is well known for its long life. The batteries, at full discharge, perform well for more than 200 cycles, which compares well with lithium-ion batteries.

Silver-Zinc batteries did not find wide application among consumers due to the high cost of Silver. Its use remained confined mostly to the small ‘button’ cells used as watch batteries. ZPower would be offsetting high cost through trade-in policy which will reduce mining for new material. ZPower claimed that 95% of key battery materials were reusable and the recovered raw materials retained original properties in recycling process.

ZPower has made necessary modifications to enhance conductivity and has taken care of shape change problems.

London tops world list of Wi-Fi business usage

London continues to reign at the top in the global list of cities for business usage of Wi-Fi, as reported by mobility-management company iPass.

The iPass Mobile Broadband Index report mentioned that London captured the top spot in the second half of 2007 and has continued to occupy it thereafter.

iPass is the provider of connectivity to users of Wi-Fi hotspots and mobile-broadband services. Its report covered activities on its virtual network worldwide, based on data from 3,000 businesses located in 80 countries, using over 104,000 Wi-Fi sessions.

London’s iPass business users had 31,842 sessions in the first half of 2008, which was approximately 27% higher than the sessions in same period in 2007.

According to Pierot Depaoli, director of global product marketing at iPass, London was the top city by quite a wide margin, followed by Singapore at second spot with 20,333 sessions in the first half of 2008.

He informed that Wi-Fi business usage rankings were based on cities’ relative density of hotspots. London and Singapore had 1,300 and 1,100 hotspots respectively.

According to the report Chelsea and Canary Wharf had the highest density compared to rest of London. Hotspots in London were better established than those in Singapore.

De Paoli informed that iPass witnessed more Wi-Fi usage in Europe than in North America for the first time due to increase in usage of roaming broadband and number of hotspots.

UK third for IT competitiveness

The UK is reported to have jumped up one place to number three in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU’s) report entitled “How technology sectors grow: Benchmarking IT industry competitiveness 2008”. As per the rankings, US remained at the top for incubating high-tech starts-up and bringing in technology innovation. Three other countries which made the top five position for the first time, displacing previous heavy weights Japan and Korea, included Taiwan, Sweden and Denmark.

Iran was placed at the bottom of the ranking list while India, Russia and China surprisingly ranked low at numbers 48, 49 and 50 respectively. The Business Software Alliance sponsored report being published since last year, ranks the performance of 66 countries based on six categories, which include IT talent pool, R&D environment, overall business environment, technical infrastructure, legal regime and government support.

The authors of the report foresaw harder times for IT producers due to economic downturn, but contended that IT industry’s competitiveness could remain unaffected. They identified sourcing of talent as the biggest challenge which threatened developed IT industries including US and the UK. They observed reverse trend in the brain drain of IT skills from developing countries which made it extremely difficult for developed countries to attract best technology skills.

The report emphasised competitive broadband market was most vital for IT competitiveness and noted that all top-ranking countries possessed high-quality fat-pipe network.

HP likely to build alternative OS to Microsoft Windows

HP, in its plan to minimise dependence on Windows is reported to be building an alternative operating system (OS) based on Linux.

An article stated that the operating system would be tweaked for providing accessibility to mainstream users. HP is aiming to compete with Apple’s Mac, which has its own OS on computers and is being regarded as more user-friendly than Vista

HP did not confirm the article report, but had been talking about the formation of a group for development of touch-screen technology within its Labs. It also talked of developing special software for use in its TouchSmartPC. The software enabled users to make use of certain features of Vista in completing some of the multimedia tasks quite easily.

There was no denial of report from chief technology officer of HP’s Personal System Group, Phil McKinney. He only remarked that developing their own operating system made no sense.

HP is the biggest provider of Microsoft software, through 50 million PCs which it ships all over the world every year.

The article also highlights Dell’s decision to provide Linux as alternative to Windows on its PCs, and Intel’s support for mini-notebooks and netbooks which use its Atom processor to run Linux.

Microsoft already began its fight back to counter threats to Windows’s dominance, by rolling out a high-profile campaign, starring Bill Gates and comedian Jerry Seinfeld.

Sun launches open source virtualization platform

Sun Microsystems has launched an open source virtualisation platform for servers under the banner xVM Server. The product is free to download. However, the catch lies in the fact that the support for the new application - including access to patches and training – can cost $500 per physical server per year. This is a huge amount.

xVM is built to work on Windows, Linux and Unix operating systems, as well as Sun’s Solaris. It is also interoperable with VMWare and allows workloads to be moved between the two platforms. In keeping with the open source theme, Sun also launched the xVMServer.org, which is an online open source community to build up and upgrade the product.

Sun offers the desktop virtualisation system called xVM VirtualBox and the virtual desktop consolidation application, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. The company has opened its Executive Briefing Centre in Linlithgow near Edinburgh in Scotland. Here, CIOs and IT directors can find out about Sun technology first hand. The facility is the second of its time for Sun. The other one is at the Menlo Park campus in California.

Linux Foundation releases guide for developers

The Linux foundation is seeking on increasing the participation of programmers in the kernel development process by releasing a guide on the subject.

Jonathan Corbet, a Linux developer and author of the guide who is also executive director of 1wn.net, states that some businesses and developers who were suggesting changes to the Linux kernel were getting confused about the processes used.

He points out that the development lifecycle was not being taken into account by the coders. As per the guide, the stable patches are merged in to the mainline kernel at the interval of 2 to 3 months at the beginning of the lifecycle.

The merger window is closed after two weeks and the project leader Linus Torvalds delivers a ‘release candidate kernel’ for establishment. If new features are pushed for merger outside the merge window, then developers get an unfriendly reception, since only ‘release candidate’ fixes are accepted in the process.

The guide further explains that developers get more frustrated on account of inadequate understanding of the process or if they attempt to circumvent it. Corbet adds that patches are subjected to reviews before acceptance in to the kernel.

According to the not-for-profit Linux Foundation, the 30-page guide would help in further expanding the existing community of 1,000 developers in more than 100 companies.

EC is harmonising European satellite wireless spectrum

The European Commission (EC) is harmonising radio spectrum to enable satellite-based service providers of mobile TV, mobile data, remote medical services and disaster relief, extending their services across the whole of Europe.

EU is organising a competition for the providers who are interested in servicing the entire European market. The commission wants to make it economically viable since service providers will not be required to deal with different spectrums in various EU countries.

According to the telecoms commissioner, Viviane Reding, mobile satellite services could cover large EU territory and reach millions of citizens across borders. They would present a great opportunity to avail new communication channels in cities and even in rural and thinly populated areas.

But Viviane Reding emphasised that the services are largely dependent on huge investments and need faster procedures and legal certainty. He expected intense competition among service providers, which could pave way for the first satellite launch in 2009. He remarked that the ball was in industry’s court.

The allocated spectrum is in 2GHz band. The envisaged services include access to portable satellite telephones and high-speed internet. The last date for applying for participation in the competition is October 7, 2008.

Met Office to acquire IBM’s petaflop supercomputer for weather forecast

Met Office has entered into a deal worth £33m with IBM to acquire a supercomputer which will operate at a speed of one petaflop. The supercomputer which is yet to be named will be used for climate-change predictions and weather forecasting. Scheduled to come online, its initial operating speed will be 125 trillion floating point operations per second.

IBM claims that this supercomputer will be the UK’s most powerful computer, next only to one installed at European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. The Met Office supercomputer is likely to run at the speed of one petaflop by 2011.

IBM overcame its petaflop barrier when it built ‘Roadrunner’ supercomputer for modelling nuclear explosion effects at the National Nuclear Security Administration, US Department of Energy.  According to Ian Green, worldwide sales leader for IBM’s high-performance computing system, the Met Office supercomputer will be performing high-speed communications between various regions with high memory bandwidth. The system will need vast memory for processing data with constantly changing variables. Ian Green described this as a ‘flutter of butterfly wings’ creating a storm at the other end of the world. He elaborated by saying that increasing number of data points affects process of forecasting.

The supercomputer will introduce a one-kilometre grid instead of existing 4- kilometre. It will pick up development of thunderstorms which were difficult to forecast accurately. However, according to Met Office spokesperson, the supercomputer will not guarantee 100 per cent accuracy of the forecast.

Gesture-based computer mechanisms will make the mouse extinct

A Gartner analyst has predicted the extinction of the computer mouse in the coming three to five years. Taking over it will be so-called gestural computer mechanisms, such as touch screens and advanced facial recognition devices.

Analyst Steve Prentice declared:  “The mouse works fine in the desktop environment, but for working on a notebook or home entertainment, it’s over.” He was quoted as saying that his prediction is largely driven by the sustained efforts of consumer electronics firms that are coming up with products including new interactive interfaces driven by the world of gaming.

“You have got Panasonic showing ‘forward facing’ video in the home entertainment environs. Instead of making use of a conventional remote control you simply hold up your hand for it to recognise you have done that,” he added. “It also recognises your face and then it will display on the screen your menu. You can just move your hand select what you want.”

According to him, users will soon even have emotive systems wherein you can wear a headset and easily control a computer by just thinking. This is all about employing computer power to perform things in a smarter way, he concludes.

WiMax emerging as cheaper wire less alternative in UK

The WiMax networks are getting wide acceptability across UK since it is proving to be a good alternative, cheaper than symmetrical DSL. On-Communications has decided to adopt WiMax as the technology to provide wireless connectivity to the businesses in UK. It is claiming to become the biggest WiMax provider in UK by rolling out the technology to customers in London, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and Oxford.

Taking cue from Freedom4, On-communications is offering WiMax as an alternative to symmetrical DSL which is costlier than WiMax. All the new base stations of On-Communications will be made WiMax compatible, using Airspan’s MicroMax technology.

However, some industry observers and Wi-Fi chip developers are doubtful about WiMax technology’s adequacy in supporting emerging applications since the equipment is based exclusively on 802.11n.
On-Communications’ chief executive Ian Roberts, claims that WiMax is ready for prime-time deployment after satisfactory detailed laboratory and field evaluations. He adds that WiMax is a real intelligent pipe, and will prove to be a boon for high speed symmetrical internet connectivity.

OrbitalNet, another provider of WiMax, will be covering businesses in Folkestone, Kent, from 23 July. The service will provide symmetrical speeds of up to 45Mbps.

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