‘DIDO’ Tech From QuickTime Creator Could Revolutionise Wireless Broadband

By Danny Allen on August 1, 2011 at 10:45 am

That’s a big statement, but Steve Perlman has the chops: he lead dev of QuickTime at Apple in the ’80s, co-founded WebTV in the ’90s, and more recently launched the OnLive game streaming service. Now his company has published a white paper for a new wireless tech claiming to flip current Wi-Fi, 3G and LTE limitations by getting faster (not slower) with more users. It supposedly allows users to access the full spectrum bandwidth and has been tested at speeds up to 100Mbps. Is the NBN in trouble?

Malcolm Turnbull reckons so (surprise!), telling the Australian that it could challenge the government’s wisdom on fibre. But the reality is that the tech, which also claims sub-millisecond latency from kilometres away, is at least 10 years off before it even comes close to commercialisation and the current copper network would still pose a bottle neck. Oh, and DIDO (which stands for Distributed-Input-Distributed-Output) is still largely an unproven concept.

As Stan Beer at ITWire put it, the tech “claims to offer all the advantages of wireless Internet connectivity without the disadvantages of latency and bandwidth limitations caused by the pesky laws of physics that NBN devotees love to cite.”

Still, colour me interested — definitely one to watch. [DIDO white paper via ITWire]

Distributed-Input-Distributed-Output (DIDO) wireless technology is a breakthrough approach that allows each wireless user to use the full data rate1 of shared spectrum simultaneously with all other users, by eliminating interference between users sharing the same spectrum. With conventional wireless technologies the data rate available per user drops as more users share the same spectrum to avoid interference, but with DIDO, the data rate per user remains steady at the full data rate of the spectrum as more users are added.

As a result, DIDO profoundly increases the data capacity of wireless spectrum, while increasing reliability and reducing the cost and complexity of wireless devices. DIDO deployment is far less expensive than conventional commercial wireless deployment, despite having vastly higher capacity and performance, and is able to use consumer Internet infrastructure and indoor access points.

The potential of DIDO is to have unlimited number of simultaneous users, all streaming high-definition video, utilizing the same spectrum that a single user would use with conventional wireless technology, with no degradation in performance, no dead zones, no interference between users, and no reduction in data rate as more users are added.

DIDO works indoor/outdoor for urban/suburban applications at distances of several miles, and for rural applications, DIDO works at distances up to 250 miles. Urban/suburban latency is sub-millisecond.

This paper describes how DIDO is dramatically different than conventional wireless technology, how DIDO works, what we have running so far, and the mind-blowing applications DIDO makes possible.
We believe that DIDO wireless will completely transform the world of communications and far more.

Why Japan Is Drilling Offshore For "Burning Ice"

But Japan may want to take its time on the $127.5 million project, which aims to start commercial drilling early next decade. 'Methane hydrates are a geological hazard, and it's been well
established for decades that they are dangerous,' said Richard Charter, a member of the
Department of Energy's methane hydrates advisory panel, in an interview last year with Discovery News. 'Until 10 or 15
years ago, the industry would avoid them no matter what.'

The newest form of natural gas might be the most potent yet. But while Japan is using it to replace nuclear power, mining it could just cause more disasters.

Ever since the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan has been scrambling to find alternative energy sources to replace its reliance on nuclear power. Just last month, Prime Minister Naoto Kan called for a nuclear-free future for the country. So now the technologically savvy country is attempting to perform a first in the energy industry: extracting natural gas from deposits of methane hydrate (aka 'burning ice') located in the seabed southwest of Tokyo. And it could end in disaster if Japan isn't careful.
Methane hydrates--ice-like crystals seen in places with high pressure and low temperatures--are often found on the ocean floor, where gas crystallizes as it comes into contact with the icy sea water. No one has ever attempted to extract methane hydrates offshore; it has only been attempted on land in Canada (using technology developed in Japan, natch).
That's because the presence of methane hydrates makes the seafloor unstable. If accidentally released into the atmosphere, methane could speed up climate change (methane is 21 times more effective at trapping heat than CO2). And as Popular Mechanics explains, decomposing hydrates near the seafloor's surface could cause landslides on the continental slope that trigger tsunamis.
But with big risks come big potential rewards. Methane hydrates are chock-full of natural gas; one cubic meter of methane hydrate releases a whopping 164 cubic meters of natural gas, and hydrate deposits are often hundreds of meters thick. According to the DOE, the energy content of methane in hydrate form may surpass the energy content of every other fossil fuel.
In a world with dwindling fossil fuel resources, there's no way that energy-hungry countries can afford to ignore an opportunity like that, even as alternative energy sources gain ground. Let's just hope that Japan--and every other country that decides to tap into the methane hydrate goldmine--takes serious safety precautions.
[Images: Top: Wikipedia; Bottom: Wikipedia]

Reach Ariel Schwartz via Twitter or email.

"

Google+ is the social backbone

The launch of Google+ is the beginning of a fundamental change on the web. A change that will tear down silos, empower users and create opportunities to take software and collaboration to new levels.


Social features will become pervasive, and fundamental to our interaction with networked services. Collaboration from within applications will be as natural to us as searching for answers on the web is today.

It's not just about Google vs Facebook

Much attention has focused on Google+ as a Facebook competitor, but to view the system solely within that context is short-sighted. The consequences of the launch of Google+ are wider-reaching, more exciting and undoubtedly more controversial.


Google+ is the rapidly growing seed of a web-wide social backbone, and the catalyst for the ultimate uniting of the social graph. All it will take on Google's part is a step of openness to bring about such a commoditization of the social layer. This would not only be egalitarian, but would also be the most effective competitive measure against Facebook.


As web search connects people to documents across the web, the social backbone connects people to each other directly, across the full span of web-wide activity. (For the avoidance of doubt, I take 'web' to include networked phone and tablet applications, even if the web use is invisible to the user.)


Search removed the need to remember domain names and URLs. It's a superior way to locate content. The social backbone will relieve our need to manage email addresses and save us laborious "friending" and permission-granting activity — in addition to providing other common services such as notification and sharing.


Though Google+ is the work of one company, there are good reasons to herald it as the start of a commodity social layer for the Internet. Google decided to make Google+ be part of the web and not a walled garden. There is good reason to think that represents an inclination to openness and interoperation, as I explain below.


It's time for the social layer to become a commodity


We're now several years into the era of social networks. Companies have come and gone, trying to capture the social graph and exploit it. Well intentioned but doomed grass-roots initiatives have waxed and waned. Facebook has won the platform game, being the dominant owner of our social attention, albeit mostly limited to non-workplace application.


What does this activity in social software mean? Clearly, social features are important to us as users of computers. We like to identify our friends, share with them, and meet with them. And it's not just friends. We want to identify co-workers, family, sales prospects, interesting celebrities.


Currently, we have all these groups siloed. Because we have many different contexts and levels of intimacy with people in these groups, we're inclined to use different systems to interact with them. Facebook for gaming, friends and family. LinkedIn for customers, recruiters, sales prospects. Twitter for friends and celebrities. And so on into specialist communities: Instagram and Flickr, Yammer or Salesforce Chatter for co-workers.


The situation is reminiscent of electronic mail before it became standardized. Differing semi-interoperable systems, many as walled gardens. Business plans predicated on somehow 'owning' the social graph. The social software scene is filled with systems that assume a closed world, making them more easily managed as businesses, but ultimately providing for an uncomfortable interface with the reality of user need.


An interoperable email system created widespread benefit, and permitted many ecosystems to emerge on top of it, both formal and ad-hoc. Email reduced distance and time between people, enabling rapid iteration of ideas, collaboration and community formation. For example, it's hard to imagine the open source revolution without email.


When the social layer becomes a standard facility, available to any application, we'll release ourselves into a world of enhanced diversity, productivity and creative opportunity. Though we don't labor as much under the constraints of distance or time as we did before email, we are confined by boundaries of data silos. Our information is owned by others, we cannot readily share what is ours, and collaboration is still mostly boxed by the confines of an application's ability.


A social backbone would also be a boost for diversity. Communities of interest would be enabled by the ready availability of social networking, without having the heavy lifting in creating the community, or run the risk of disapproval or censorship from a controlling enterprise.


The effect of email interoperability didn't just stop at enabling communication: it was a catalyst for standards in document formats and richer collaboration. The social backbone won't just make it easier to handle permissions, identity and sharing, but will naturally exert pressure for further interoperation between applications. Once their identity is united across applications, users will expect their data to travel as well.


We see already a leaning toward this interoperability: the use of Twitter, Facebook and Google as sign-on mechanisms across websites and games, attempts to federate and intermingle social software, cloud-based identity and wallet services.

What a social backbone would do

As users, what can we expect a social backbone to do for us? The point is to help computers serve us better. We naturally work in contexts that involve not only documents and information, but groups of people. When working with others, the faster and higher bandwidth the communication, the better.


To give some examples, consider workplace collaboration. Today's groupware solutions are closed worlds. It's impractical for them to encompass either a particularly flexible social model, or a rich enough variety of applications and content, so they support a restricted set of processes. A social backbone could make groupware out of every application. For the future Photoshop, iMovie and Excel, it adds the equivalent power of calling someone over and saying 'Hey, what about this?'


Or think about people you interact with. When you're with someone, everything you're currently doing with them is important. Let's say you're working with your friend Jane on the school's PTA fundraiser, and her and your kids play together. Drag Jane into your PTA and Playdates circles. Drop a letter to parents into the PTA circle, and your calendar's free/busy info into Playdates.


Now you're sharing information both of you need. Next Thursday you see Jane at school. While you're chatting, naturally the topic of playdates and the PTA come up. You bring up Jane on your phone, and there are links right there to the letter you're writing, and some suggested dates for mutually free time.


Teaching computer systems about who we know lets them make better guesses as to what we need to know, and when. My examples are merely simple increases in convenience. The history of computing frequently shows that once a platform is opened up, the creative achievements of others far exceed those dreamed of by the platform's progenitors.


The social backbone democratizes social software: developers are freed from the limitations of walled gardens, and the power to control what you do with your friends and colleagues is returned to you, the user.

Social backbone services

Which services will the social backbone provide? We can extract these from those provided by today's web and social software applications:

• Identity — authenticating you as a user, and storing information about you


• Sharing — access rights over content


• Notification — informing users of changes to content or contacts' content


• Annotation — commenting on content


• Communication — direct interaction among members of the system

These facilities are not new requirements. Each of them have been met in differing ways by existing services. Google and Amazon serve as identity brokers with a reasonable degree of assurance, as do Twitter and Facebook, albeit with a lesser degree of trust.


A host of web services address sharing of content, though mostly focused on sharing the read permission, rather than the edit permission. Notification originated with email, graduated through RSS, and is now a major part of Twitter's significance, as well as a fundamental feature of Facebook. Annotation is as old as the web, embodied by the hyperlink, but has been most usefully realized through blogging, Disqus, Twitter and Facebook commenting. Communication between users has been around as long as multi-user operating systems, but is most usefully implemented today in Facebook chat and instant messaging, where ad-hoc groups can easily be formed.

Why not Facebook?

Unfortunately, each of today's answers to providing these social facilities are limited by their implementation. Facebook provides the most rounded complement of social features, so it's a reasonable question to ask why Facebook itself can't provide the social backbone for the Internet.


Facebook's chief flaw is that is a closed platform. Facebook does not want to be the web. It would like to draw web citizens into itself, so it plays on the web, but in terms that leave no room for doubt where the power lies. Content items in Facebook do not have a URI, so by definition can never be part of the broader web. If you want to use Facebook's social layer, you must be part of and subject to the Facebook platform.


Additionally, there are issues with the symmetry of Facebook's friending model: it just doesn't model real life situations. Even the term 'friend' doesn't allow for the nuance that a capable web-wide social backbone needs.


This is not to set up a Facebook vs Google+ discussion, but to highlight that Facebook doesn't meet the needs of a global social backbone.

Why Google+?

Why is Google+ is the genesis of a social backbone? The simple answer is that it's the first system to combine a flexible enough social model with a widespread user base, and a company for whom exclusive ownership of the social graph isn't essential to their business.


Google also has the power to bootstrap Google+ as a social backbone: the integration of Google+ into Google's own web applications would be a powerful proving ground and advertisement for the concept.


Yet one company alone should not have the power to manage identity for everyone. A workable and safe social backbone must support competition and choice, while still retaining the benefits of the network. Email interoperability was created not by the domination of one system, but by standards for communication.


To achieve a web-wide effect, Google+ needs more openness and interoperability, which it does not yet have. The features offered by the upcoming Google+ API will give us a strong indication of Google's attitude towards control and interoperability.


There is some substantial evidence that Google would support an open and interoperable social backbone:

• Google's prominence as a supporter of the open web, which is crucial to its business.


• The early inclination to interoperation of Google+: public content items have a URI, fallback to email is supported for contacts who are not Google+ members.


• Google is loudly trumpeting their Data Liberation Front, committed to giving users full access to their own data.


• Google has been involved in the creation of, or has supported, early stage technologies that address portions of the social backbone, including OAuth, OpenID, OpenSocial, PubSubHubbub.


• Google displays an openness to federation with interoperating systems, evinced most keenly by Joseph Smarr, the engineer behind the Google+ Circles model. The ill-fated Google Wave incorporated federation.


• The most open system possible would best benefit Google's mission in organizing the world's information, and their business in targeting relevant advertising.

Toward the social backbone

Computers ought to serve us and provide us with means of expression.


A common, expressive and interoperable social backbone will help users and software developers alike. Liberated from information silos and repeat labor of curating friends and acquaintances, we will be free to collaborate more freely. Applications will be better able to serve us as individuals, not as an abstract class of 'users'.


The road to the social backbone must be carefully trodden, with privacy a major issue. There is a tough trade-off between providing usable systems and those with enough nuance to sufficiently meet our models of collaboration and sharing.


Obstacles notwithstanding, Google+ represents the promise of a next generation of social software. Incorporating learnings from previous failures, a smattering of innovation, and a close attention to user need, it is already a success.


It requires only one further step of openness to take the Google+ product into the beginnings of a social backbone. By taking that step, Google will contribute as much to humanity as it has with search.


Edd Dumbill is the chair of O'Reilly's Strata and OSCON conferences. Find him here on Google+.

---

(Google's Joseph Smarr, a member of the Google+ team, will discuss the future of the social web at OSCON. Save 20% on registration with the code OS11RAD.)

Related:

• The good, the bad, and the ugly of Google Plus



• Brief thoughts on Google Plus



• Your data and Google Plus

"

Cisco: 50 Billion Things on the Internet by 2020 [Infographic]

The Internet of Things, when real world objects are connected to the Internet, is a trend that we've been actively tracking since early 2009. So far a lot of big technology infrastructure and solutions companies have gotten behind the trend, for the simple reason that they see a huge market opportunity. As more and more 'things' go on the Net, it creates more demand for network infrastructure like sensors and routers. Enter the likes of Cisco and Verizon Wireless. Likewise, more technology solutions will be developed to upload and manage data from real world objects. Enter the likes of IBM and HP.

Cisco: 50 Billion Things on the Internet by 2020 [Infographic]: "

Cisco has designed an infographic that offers a simple example of how Internet of Things will affect you in your everyday life. It also states that by 2020, there will be 50 billion 'things' connected to the Internet - everything from your body, car, alarm clock and even cows.

Sponsor

There has been some contention about the number of connected things and by when. Cisco's prediction of 50 billion devices by 2020 matches Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg's prediction earlier this year within a similar time period. However IBM recently put it at 1 trillion connected devices by 2015. Indeed in April 2010, Cisco's own CTO Padmasree Warrior said that by 2013 the number of devices connected to the Internet will reach 1 trillion. So even Cisco doesn't seem to have a consistent prediction.

Regardless, as the infographic below shows, the number of things connected to the Internet has already exceeded the number of people on earth. So this is a big trend - and big business for Cisco and other technology companies.



Infographic via All Things D


Discuss

"

Ten Principles To Live By In Fiercely Complex Times

If you're like most people I work with in companies, the demands come at you from every angle, all day long, and you have to make difficult decisions without much time to think about them. What enduring principles can you rely on to make choices that reflect openness, integrity and authenticity?


Here are ten that work for me:


1. Always challenge certainty, especially your own. When you think you're undeniably right, ask yourself 'What might I be missing here?' If we could truly figure it all out, what else would there be left to do?


2. Excellence is an unrelenting struggle, but it's also the surest route to enduring satisfaction. Amy Chua, the over-the-top 'Tiger Mother,' was right that there's no shortcut to excellence. Getting there requires practicing deliberately, delaying gratification, and forever challenging your current comfort zone.


3. Emotions are contagious, so it pays to know what you're feeling. Think of the best boss you ever had. How did he or she make you feel? That's the way you want to make others feel.


4. When in doubt, ask yourself, 'How would I behave here at my best?' We know instinctively what it means to do the right thing, even when we're inclined to do the opposite. If you find it impossible, in a challenging moment, to envision how you'd behave at your best, try imagining how someone you admire would respond.


5. If you do what you love, the money may or may not follow, but you'll love what you do. It's magical thinking to assume you'll be rewarded with riches for following your heart. What it will give you is a richer life. If material riches don't follow, and you decide they're important, there's always time for Plan B.


6. You need less than you think you do. All your life, you've been led to believe that more is better, and that whatever you have isn't enough. It's a prescription for disappointment. Instead ask yourself this: How much of what you already have truly adds value in your life? What could you do without?


7. Accept yourself exactly as you are but never stop trying to learn and grow. One without the other just doesn't cut it. The first, by itself, leads to complacency, the second to self-flagellation. The paradoxical trick is to embrace these opposites, using self-acceptance as an antidote to fear and as a cushion in the face of setbacks.

8. Meaning isn't something you discover, it's something you create, one step at a time. Meaning is derived from finding a way to express your unique skills and passion in the service of something larger than yourself. Figuring out how best to contribute is a lifelong challenge, reborn every day.


9. You can't change what you don't notice and not noticing won't make it go away. Each of us has an infinite capacity for self-deception. To avoid pain, we rationalize, minimize, deny, and go numb. The antidote is the willingness to look at yourself with unsparing honesty, and to hold yourself accountable to the person you want to be.


10. When in doubt, take responsibility. It's called being a true adult.




Follow @FastCoLeaders for all of our leadership news, expert bloggers, and book excerpts.

Reprinted from Harvard Business Review

Tony Schwartz is President and CEO of The Energy Project, a company that helps individuals and organizations fuel energy, engagement, focus, and productivity by harnessing the science of high performance. Tony's most recent book, The Way We're Working Isn't Working: The Four Forgotten Needs that Energize Great Performance, was published in May 2010 and became an immediate The New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. Follow him on Twitter @TonySchwartz.

"

Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers On The Future Of Coal, Nuclear, And The Energy Industry

by Ariel Schwartz

Recently named one of the 50 most powerful people in the world by Newsweek, Rogers talks about how we'll be getting power in the next 50 years.

Duke Energy is one of the largest utilities in the U.S.; after the company completes a $13.7 billion takeover of Progress Energy later this year, it will be the largest utility in the country, not to mention one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters in the nation. We had the chance to chat with Duke CEO Jim Rogers--named one of the 50 most powerful people in the world by Newsweek--about the future of the company and the energy industry.
What have been some of the biggest challenges of running a massive utility?
In the five years since I've been at Duke, our biggest challenges have been several things. One is the recognition that after 50 years, the real price of electricity is going to rise because of tighter regulations on coal plants and the recognition that we have to restrict carbon. [After the merger] we will be [one of the] largest emitters of CO2 in the U.S. We have a special responsibility to lead on that issue.
We will have to retire and replace virtually every plant by 2050. In a sense, that gives us a blank sheet of paper. What will we build in the future? One of our challenges is going to be to try to position the company to totally remake its system of generation and at the same time modernize our grid, which effectively means going from an analogue grid to a digital grid.
What do you believe the energy mix will look like in the coming decades?
Over the last 20 years we have started using coal in a cleaner way. But there needs to be more technological development to use it in a low carbon world. Is this carbon capture and storage (CCS)? Is it a system to usealgae to capture carbon and accelerate the growth of algae and then use it as a biofuel? I think CCS will play a role particularly if utilities are in a region where the geography works, but that's predominantly in the Midwest. The ultimate solution to [make coal more sustainable] is to recycle the carbon. We have relationships with a number of Chinese companies, and they're actually more focused on how you recycle the carbon rather than storing it. On some level, it seems like a more sustainable practice to take it and reuse it rather than store it in the ground.
So you do still believe coal will play an important part of the energy mix in the future?
By 2030 coal will still be here and be used, but in the longer term, with the realization that we will have carbon constraints, the question is whether the technology will evolve to allow coal to remain a [clean] alternative. Whether or not these technologies will be here in 2050 is a function of how well we can develop technology to reduce their emissions footprint. With respect to renewables, how fast can we bring down the cost of solar and wind in a way that we don't need subsidies?
Do you think solar and wind will become cheap enough to compete with traditional energy sources?
I do. [The price of] wind has come down rather dramatically. What's going to drive down the cost of solar--although I don't believe Moore's Law applies to solar--if you look at the Chinese who are leading the world in solar panel production, wind turbine production, and probably lead the world in the development of batteries ...the Chinese are developing the intellectual property of scaling, and that in itself is what creates value. The Chinese are going to find a way to scale this, and as they scale this, they will drive the costs down. I am confident that over the next two to three decades you're going to see prices come down pretty dramatically.
What about the future of nuclear plants?
We will have to retire and replace every [Duke Energy] nuclear plant by 2050. Lets start with the simple assumption that 70% of [low-carbon] electricity today comes from nuclear. If we had to replace that with gas...it would have a fairly detrimental impact with respect to climate. Two things give me hope. One is evolving technologies, the second is development of modular nuclear technology.
When I look at nuclear, I look at it both as modular as well as large plants in the future. I believe we have to solve the spent fuel issue. The question is whether we store it or recycle it. My judgment is that we'll find a way to recycle it. So [nuclear] will play a role, and it's kind of hard now to really predict the role. I mean, that's what makes this puzzle so interesting, because we know what the pieces are, we kind of have inklings of what some of the shapes of the pieces will be tomorrow, but to put the map together of what the mix will be--it's a pretty intriguing exercise. We've got to do it. We don't have a choice.
What are some of the new energy technologies that will be prevalent in the future that aren't so well known today?
If I knew that I'd be taking money and making bets. I think modular nuclear as a group will be breakout. I think there are going to be breakthroughs in solar technology. I think in the long run solar will trump wind because solar can be distributed [on rooftops] and also I think will be more efficient than wind turbines over time for a variety of different reasons.
I think battery technology will be transformative, not just with respect to intermittent sources of power, but also it has a fundamental impact on how the grid actually operates. I'm following very closely what BYD is doing. I thinkzinc air [battery technology] is kind of interesting because [the cells] become grid storage, which I think is important.
These are some of the areas that I think will evolve. The only question is which ones will be lowest cost and most efficient. We're at a very important point, I believe. I wish I could be a CEO for another 23 years. The technologies are coming together and are evolving. Some are clearer than others. I've always told people particularly recently that we're a technology company disguised as a utility.
Reach Ariel Schwartz via Twitter or email.