Business Tech

Intel Labs Europe is joining a handful of French institutions to investigate large-scale computing challenges that face today's information technology industry.

The Exascale Computing Research Center will investigate machines that can perform 1,000 times more calculations than today's top supercomputers, Intel said, and the chipmaker is spending millions of dollars on the three-year partnership.

The effort also includes Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique, Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif, and the Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Those organizations will jointly match Intel's investment, Intel said.

"France has taken a leading role in driving high-performance computing research in Europe. We chose to work with these three organizations because of their world-class software competency in exascale and high- performance computing," said Steve Pawlowski, general manager of the Intel Architecture Group's central architecture and planning, in a statement.

The move also raises the company's profile in a jurisdiction that's been tough on Intel. The chipmaker ended up on the losing end of a European Commission antitrust judgment, and is now appealing the resulting fine of 1.06 billion euros ($1.58 billion). Intel just settled a separate antitrust case brought by rival AMD.

Intel Labs Europe employs 900 researchers in Europe, the chipmaker said.

And you thought computer chips were pervasive now.

In conjunction with a conference in Europe this week, Xerox has announced a new ink technology for printing electronic circuitry on everything from clothes to roll-up computer displays.

Xerox's process uses ink containing silver metal that can be used to wire up processing circuitry. It works on surfaces such as plastic that earlier have shown an inconvenient tendency to melt under the high temperature of liquid silver; Xerox's process works with an ink compound with a much lower temperature, the company said.

Xerox's process can print fine details of electronic circuitry on flexible plastic.

(Credit: Xerox)

"We've found the silver bullet that could make things like electronic clothing and inexpensive games a reality today. This breakthrough means the industry now has the capability to print electronics on a wider range of materials and at a lower cost," said Paul Smith, laboratory manager, Xerox Research Centre of Canada, in a statement. Smith is discussing the technology at the Printed Electronics Europe conference in Dresden, Germany.

So what might use it? Inexpensive e-book readers with flexible plastic displays, for one. Radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags, for another. Or smart pill dispensers that can help keep you taking your medicine at the appropriate pace.

The technology uses conventional inkjet printing methods, and though Xerox has used it with conventional desktop printers, the company expects that it would use continuous-feed printers that print on rolls rather than sheets of material. It doesn't require the super-clean environments needed for conventional silicon chip manufacturing.

The Xerox process actually requires printing three layers on a substrate: a semiconductor, a conductor and a dielectric. The silver ink is the layer that conducts electricity.

The silver ink technology now is available for testing by outside parties, and manufacturing the materials at production volumes isn't far off.

The content fill tool can replace a complicated background when objects are erased. This example shows the removal of a U-shaped white hair.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

The content fill tool can be applied with a paintbrush-like tool, in this case for removing line across a building.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

It looks as if Photoshop, already famous for its ability to make people look thinner and skies look bluer, could take digital erasure of unsightly objects to an entirely new level.

A feature called "content-aware fill" described in an Adobe video published Tuesday shows the technology used to remove buffalo, telephone wires, and a tree from various images and to clean up stray hairs from an imperfect scan of a print. Photoshop's existing cloning and spot-healing tools can take care of this to some extent, but the new version adds a lot of smarts to the process.

Specifically, instead of using one nearby patch of the image to fill the area that's being erased, it draws on multiple areas--and it uses image analysis to make informed guesses about how to reproduce complicated background. For example, the technology can reproduce the window frames, architectural patterns, a river shoreline, and clouds.

"What this algorithm is doing is copying multiple patches from the surrounding background to try to fit them inside the hole, unlike the old spot healing proximity match that was trying to find one match for each of these holes," said Dan Goldman, researcher in Adobe's Creative Technologies Lab, in the video. "This generally results in a very convincing fill for these holes."

Adobe developed the technology in collaboration with Princeton University and the University of Washington.

Adobe is showing new warping and bending options.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

Every time Photoshop gets something like this, some folks--not without some reason in my opinion--get concerned that we can't trust the veracity of the images we see. But let's be clear: although the ease and sophistication of editing is increasing, photo manipulation has been going on for more than a century. And the way I see it, the profusion of digital cameras and ease of posting photos online probably means reality is being documented in unretouched form more comprehensively than ever.

Adobe touted other Photoshop features from the labs, too, in an earlier video released after the recent Photoshop World conference.

One of those new features aims to bring some realism to painting processes. Paint can be spread out and blended, and 3D models of various brushes simulate the behavior of actual brushes with different bristle configurations.

The other was a more sophisticated warping technology in which anchor points determine what parts of the image is fixed and other movable points are used to bend and stretch other parts of the image.

In addition, hinge points can make it possible to anchor the point of a person's elbow, for example, while moving the forearm.

Want more lifelike painting? Adobe is simulating actual brushes and paint behavior.

(Credit: Adobe Systems)

As the next generation of Universal Serial Bus technology nears commercial reality, next week's Intel Developer Forum will play host to more USB 3.0-capable devices.

Point Grey Research will show a high-end video camera streaming video to a laptop with USB 3.0 technology

(Credit: Point Grey Research)

A Fujitsu laptop, a high-end video camera, and a solid-state drive using USB 3.0 technology, among other hardware, will be demonstrated at IDF, according an announcement from the USB Implementers Forum on Thursday.

USB technology is now used on virtually all computing devices globally as well as the lion's share of consumer electronics products. Also referred to as "SuperSpeed USB," next-generation USB 3.0 boosts the data transfer rate 10 times over current technology, while also improving power efficiency.

Consumer electronics devices enabled with USB 3.0 are expected in the market late this year or early next. The specification was developed by Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, NEC, ST-Ericsson, and Texas Instruments.

On display at IDF, among other things, will be a Fujitsu laptop, the first to use built-in USB 3.0. Inside the Fujitsu laptop will be an NEC Electronics "host controller" chip that will exchange data with an external SuperSpeed USB drive from Buffalo Technology.

And USB 3.0 will be a godsend to video cameras--which often need to transfer gigabytes of video data. A prototype high-performance digital video camera from Point Grey Research will be rolled out that integrates a 3-megapixel Sony "IMX036" CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) image sensor to output 1080p high-definition images at 60 frames per second. This camera will stream uncompressed HD video to a laptop PC through a SuperSpeed USB ExpressCard from Fresco Logic.

Asus will also be present to show off its PC motherboard with SuperSpeed USB. The Asus X58 motherboard uses the same NEC chip and will exchange data with a LucidPort SuperSpeed USB mass storage device running the new USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP), which delivers improved performance and reduced latency.

The demonstrations will take place during two USB 3.0 technical sessions at IDF at the Moscone Center, San Francisco, starting on Tuesday.

Hewlett-Packard and Research In Motion announced on Monday a partnership for enterprise clients that incorporates the newly released BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 software and a print service.

HP CloudPrint for BlackBerry Smartphones, a Web-based technology slated to be shown at this week's Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando, Fla., lets users print e-mails, photos, documents, and Web pages from their BlackBerrys to the nearest printer, regardless of the printer manufacturer, HP said in a statement: "The service is printer-agnostic and driverless, and requires simple Internet access."

HP Operations Manager for BlackBerry Enterprise Server, also released Monday, is designed to enable companies to monitor and manage their BlackBerry enterprise environment. Managed BlackBerry Services, meanwhile, enables IT managers to outsource support of the BlackBerry environment to EDS Mobile Workplace Services, HP said.

"RIM and HP are working together to deliver solutions to customers that weave mobility into their daily operations--from innovative new services in the cloud to managed mobile services for the enterprise," Jim Balsillie, co-chief executive officer of Research In Motion, said in a statement. "Through our collaboration with HP, businesses will have access to an expanded set of applications and services for their BlackBerry smartphone deployments."

Research In Motion on Monday announced the availability of BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0, the next generation of the company's push-based server software for BlackBerry business users.

Enterprise Server 5.0 beefs up integration between BlackBerry smartphones and corporate enterprise systems, enabling mobile workers to be more productive, RIM said in a statement.

Additionally, RIM announced a new interface that will let developers push real-time data to consumer BlackBerry users. Until now, push technology was available only in corporate environments. BlackBerry owners will be able to receive news, weather reports, music purchases, games, and other updates.

Enterprise Server lets users tap into corporate e-mail, instant messaging, voice mail, wireless networks, and enterprise applications. Corporate BlackBerry users can access their network files and documents, view and send e-mail attachments, and manage their calendars. Version 5.0 helps IT administrators more easily manage the BlackBerry within a corporate environment, RIM said. Using push technology, the IT staff can send software updates and other content to their BlackBerry users.

BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 has already been tested in real-world environments over the past year and is currently in use by companies such as IBM, RIM said.

"We are proud to unveil the next generation of BlackBerry Enterprise Server software," Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO at RIM, said in a statement. "BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 significantly raises the bar for advanced IT manageability, high availability, system monitoring, and reporting. It has undergone testing in real-world environments for over a year and is available now for customers."

BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0 is the first mobile platform to win the Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+) certification, RIM said.

A new version of BlackBerry Mobile Voice Server (MVS) has also hit the market. Optimized for use with Cisco Unified Communications Manager version 6.1 or later, MVS offers corporate BlackBerry users such benefits as a single, "read me anywhere" corporate phone number, and simultaneous or sequential ringing of up to four devices.

Chip giant Qualcomm said that it is seeing a pickup in chip demand. Separately, two chip industry research firms said graphics chips shipments rose in the first quarter.

Qualcomm indicated on Monday that it is encouraged by demand. "We're feeling more comfortable looking forward...We're happy to see chip demand up," CEO Paul Jacobs said during the company's second-quarter earnings conference call. "We're happy to see inventories stabilizing, reaffirming the device demand, we have very strong operating cash flows," he added.

The world's largest maker of cell phone chips had revenue of $2.46 billion, down from the $2.61 billion posted in the same quarter last year, and posted an operating loss of $10 million, reflecting a $748 million charge for litigation settlement related to the settlement and patent agreement with Broadcom.

The sentiment expressed by Qualcomm's CEO adds weight to comments made by Intel earlier this month in its first-quarter earnings conference call. "I believe the worst is now behind us from an inventory correction and demand-level adjustment perspective," Intel CEO Paul Otellini said on April 14.

Reports from market research firms were also positive. On Tuesday, Jon Peddie Research, which tracks the graphics chip market, said shipments were up 3.3 percent from the fourth quarter, "breaking an eight-year seasonal trend that dictated negative sales from Q4 to Q1."

Peddie attributed this, however, to going from nothing to something. "In Q3 and Q4 of 2008 the channel stopped ordering GPUs (graphics processing units) and depleted inventory in anticipation of a long drawn out worldwide recession. But, no recession, no matter how severe, results in zero sales. The world continued to turn and the consumers continued to buy, albeit they bought less," Peddie said in a prepared statement.

Also on Tuesday, Nvidia released information from Mercury Research, another firm that follows chip markets, which said overall graphics chip shipments were up 3.8 percent from the fourth quarter of 2008. The uptick was attributed to improved desktop sales.

Peddie added this cautionary statement. "Things probably aren't going to get back to the normal seasonality till Q3 this year, and we won't hit the levels of 2008 until 2010."

Yahoo has signed up three new universities to participate in Internet-scale computing research, the Internet pioneer said Thursday.

The University of California-Berkeley, Cornell University, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst have joined an effort that already included Carnegie Mellon University, Yahoo said Thursday. The universities get access to a cluster of Yahoo computers called M45 that runs open-source software called Hadoop that can be used to process data rapidly.

Yahoo is a major contributor to Hadoop, a project within the Apache Software Foundation's collection, but Google created the underlying technology through its MapReduce algorithm. MapReduce and Hadoop can be used for tasks such as finding, relatively rapidly, all the Web sites that link to a particular Web site, a task that's essential to the companies' search engines.

Berkeley plans to investigate "societal-scale information" including voting records, polling data, and online news. Amherst plans projects involving the million scanned books in the Internet Archive. Cornell has its eye on biodiversity, socio-economic research, and renewable energy.

The universities also will get access to a research computing research project called Open Cirrus spanning several data centers internationally, Yahoo said. The M45 cluster is part of Open Cirrus, which is run by Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Infocomm Development Authority in Singapore, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, and the National Science Foundation.

Sometimes even a well-designed and innovative product can still be a total dud. See the Apple Newton.

The industry analysts at Forrester Research now say they know why this happens.

Forrester's new research method says TiVo's superior design is trumped by cable DVRs' convenience.

(Credit: TiVo)

In a new report released Friday, Forrester analyst James McQuivey zeroes in on what makes seemingly good products fall flat once they reach store shelves: lack of convenience. And he doesn't just mean "convenient" in that you can, for example, transfer a music device easily from your pocket to your car dashboard, but rather the entire experience using that music device--from buying the songs to putting them on that device, to having a battery that lasts long enough and can be easily recharged.

It's not enough to have simply the best design or be first to market, or have the best market researchers on your side to experience success in the electronics world. In the study, McQuivey uses TiVo as an example. Logically, TiVo should be the leader in the category it essentially invented. It was one of the first DVRs on the market, became the verb for recording a live TV show on a DVR, and has what is generally regarded as the best interface in its category. Yet the company has struggled from the beginning and has less than 2 million subscribers. Cable and satellite companies offer DVRs with far less functionality yet have 30 million DVR subscribers between them.

Lowest price doesn't necessarily mean guaranteed success either. Though the Eee PC from Asus and Acer's Aspire One Netbook are incredibly similar devices and the Eee PC is in some cases cheaper and was first to market, Acer is dominating the Netbook game.

The first Kindle was ugly and awkward, yet consumer still embraced it.

(Credit: Amazon.com)

Forrester says convenience is key. It defines the concept in this way: A "comprehensive measure that considers the total product experience." That includes researching the product, obtaining the device, using it, and eventually getting rid of it. The study also says that in successful products, convenience is not a benefit, but "a measure of how easy your product makes it for people to get the benefits your product promises."

The fewer things that stand in the way of using the product as it's intended (installation process, user interface, price, and availability at retail) the more convenient it is overall.

Think this all sounds rather obvious? Far more companies would release successful products if it were. (And then Forrester wouldn't be able to charge $750 for this report.)

A prime example of the convenience quotient in action is the Amazon Kindle, according to the study. The original version was downright ugly and awkward to use, but it's now judged to be an improbable success (moving what some analysts count as 500,000 units last year) considering how it was originally received, and the relatively high price of $399 and eventually $359.

But Forrester's new methodology would say it wasn't improbable at all, and in fact it was quite predictable. That's because of the convenience of accessing cheap, digital copies of books at the Kindle Store, and the ability to do it on the fly and wirelessly--without any need to sync up with a computer.

The same factor was likely at work with Apple's iPod success. The iPod is not as widely available at retail locations, or priced nearly as well as some of its competitors. Yet it's dominated the MP3 player market because of its convenient eco-system of iTunes software for organizing music files, iTunes Store, and the accompanying iPod.

It can also explain Acer's success in Netbooks. It wasn't first or lowest priced, but consumers have responded well to its decision to bundle its Aspire One Netbook with mobile broadband subscription services. A 3G contract subsidizes the price of the Netbook and enables customers to use Netbooks they way they're intended: accessing the Web quickly while on the go.

Forrester has just introduced this methodology and hasn't officially released its rating of products yet, but promises to do eight to 10 studies this year weighing gadgets by their convenience quotient.

Feel free to leave examples in the comments of gadgets you think this theory does or does not apply to.