It is going to be 90 out this weekend and I have to get the lawn cut. It is time to seriously consider putting tech to work for me. The LB1200 Spyder by Kuyodo America just may be what the doctor ordered. The Spyder is the world’s first robot mower that doesn’t use a perimeter
IBM scientists will report on a prototype optical chipset, dubbed “Holey Optochip”, that is the first parallel optical transceiver to transfer one trillion bits – one terabit – of information per second. IBM will present the new chip at the 2012 Optical Fiber Communication Conference. The Holey Optochip is a standard silicon CMOS chip with holes
Earlier this month Eastern Michigan University sent a mass email dismissing to the entire student body and an unknown number of recent EMU graduates. Julie Baker at AnnArbor.com reports that the message dismissed the students from the university and canceled all further enrollment. The article says the mass email was sent from the email of
Council imagines the Internet of Things as a world where everything can be both analog and digitally approached. It reformulate our relationship with objects – things- as well as the objects themselves. Any object that carries an RFID tag relates not only to you, but also through being read by a RFID reader nearby, to
It is going to be 90 out this weekend and I have to get the lawn cut. It is time to seriously consider putting tech to work for me. The LB1200 Spyder by Kuyodo America just may be what the doctor ordered.
The Spyder is the world’s first robot mower that doesn’t use a 
perimeter wire to operate. Patented sensors actually ‘sense’ when the LawnBott Spyder is over grass to cut, reversing direction when over walkways, curbs, patios and mulched areas.
According to the its web-site, all you do is set it down, turn it on, and walk away. It has 4 cutting disc blades to cut your lawn for up to 3.5 hours on a single charge using a Li-ion battery. This model is designed for yards up to up to 5,500 sq. ft. The LawnBott Spyder has 4WD to tackle slopes up to 27°. The manufacturer says the LawnBot uses up to $10 of electricity a season.
This unit can be charged from your house electrical, no special re-charger required and its code can be updated via the web.
IBM scientists will report on a prototype optical chipset, dubbed “Holey Optochip”, that is the first parallel optical transceiver to transfer one trillion bits – one terabit – of information per second. IBM will present the new chip at the 2012 Optical Fiber Communication Conference.
The Holey Optochip is a standard silicon CMOS chip with holes punched in it. According to ITnewsLink, until now, it was not possible to transport terabits of data for existing parallel optical communications technology. Reportedly the new IBM (IBM) chip prototype compactly and efficiently delivers ultra-high interconnect bandwidth to facilitate the growth of big data and cloud computing and the drive for next-generation data center applications.
Big Blue speculates that the ability to move information eight times faster than today’s systems, could transform how data is accessed, shared and used for a new era of communications, computing and entertainment. “Reaching the one trillion bit per second mark with the Holey Optochip marks IBM’s latest milestone to develop chip-scale transceivers that can handle the volume of traffic in the era of big data,” said IBM Researcher Clint Schow, part of the team that built the prototype.
The holes in Holey Optochip allow light through the chip to produce an
ultracompact, high-performing and power-efficient optical module capable of record-setting data transfer rates. ITnewsLink says optical networking can significantly improve data transfer rates by speeding the flow of data using light pulses, instead of sending electrons over wires. Researchers have looked for ways to make use of optical signals within standard low-cost, high-volume chip manufacturing techniques for widespread use. The Holey Optochip module is constructed with commercially available components, providing the possibility to manufacture at economies of scale.
“We have been actively pursuing higher levels of integration, power efficiency and performance for all the optical components through packaging and circuit innovations. We aim to improve on the technology for commercialization in the next decade with the collaboration of manufacturing partners,” Mr. Schow said in a press release.
The Holey Optochip is green. It achieves its speed while consuming less than five watts; the power consumed by a 100W light bulb could power 20 transceivers. This progress in power efficient interconnects is necessary to allow companies who adopt high-performance computing to manage their energy load while performing powerful applications such as analytics, data modeling and forecasting.
Technical Aspects of the Holey Optochip
The article explains that parallel optics is a fiber optic technology primarily targeted for high-data, short-reach multimode fiber systems that are typically less than 150 meters. Parallel optics differ from traditional duplex fiber optic serial communication in that data is simultaneously transmitted and received over multiple optical fibers.
Photomicrograph of the Holey Optochip with lasers and photodetectors visible
A single 90-nanometer IBM CMOS transceiver IC becomes a Holey Optochip with the fabrication of forty-eight through-silicon holes, or “optical vias” – one for each transmitter and receiver channel. Simple post-processing on completed CMOS wafers with all devices and standard wiring levels results in an entire wafer populated with Holey Optochips. The transceiver chip measures only 5.2 mm x 5.8 mm. Twenty-four channel, industry-standard 850-nm VCSEL (vertical cavity surface emitting laser) and photodiode arrays are directly flip-chip soldered to the Optochip. This direct packaging produces high-performance, chip-scale optical engines. The Holey Optochips are designed for direct coupling to a standard 48-channel multimode fiber array through an efficient microlens optical system that can be assembled with conventional high-volume packaging tools.
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This one does not count as a new speed record – yet. It’s not real. Once Big Blue demonstrates Holey Optochip in the real word like this and this then it probably will be fastest toy in town. The raw speed of one transceiver is equal to the bandwidth consumed by 100,000 users at today’s typical 10 Mb/s high-speed internet access.
At one terabit per second, IBM’s Holey Optochip will offer unprecedented amounts of bandwidth to move data like machine-to-machine communications (M2M) and other Internet of Things (IoT) components as well as posts to social media sites like Facebook (FB) and Twitter, videos to YouTube and digital pictures to Pinterest.
But wait what if we use WDM within the light going thru Optochip.
Or better yet QAM 16 or even QAM 64
Or even more betterer QAM 256 running inside each wavelenght of WDM.
Earlier this month Eastern Michigan University sent a mass email dismissing to the entire student body and an unknown number of recent EMU graduates. Julie Baker at AnnArbor.com reports that the message dismissed the students from the university and canceled all further enrollment. The article says the mass email was sent from the email of Associate Director of Academic Advising Molly D. Weir. EMU says it is investigating how it happened. The dismissal message said in part;
“As a result of your Winter 2012 academic performance, you have been dismissed from Eastern Michigan University … you will be ineligible to register for classes … you will not be eligible to resume coursework at EMU until Summer 2013 at the earliest.
Eastern Michigan University President Susan Martin emailed statement addressed to students, faculty and staff reads: “I deeply apologize for the incorrect email many of our students received this evening indicating they were dismissed from the University. This message was a terrible mistake and I regret the undue alarm and concern it caused.”
Vice President of Communications Walter Kraft denied any claims that this event was the result of a breach of security or a hack. EMU is pointing the finger at a contractor. Mr. Kraft said; “An outside company that we contract with for this notification process, GradesFirst, sent the dismissal message to the entire student body instead of the file of 100 or so students who were supposed to receive it,” he said. “GradesFirst has offered an apology for its role in this matter.”
VP Kraft added EMU will continue to investigate to find exactly what went wrong and take whatever steps are necessary to make sure it never happens again according to AnnArbor.com.
We are not amused
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Why are they outsourcing their communications with their customers? Goes to show that if you let others control your message, they will screw it up.
Didn’t Longfellow say “If you want something done right; do it for yourself?”
Council imagines the Internet of Things as a world where everything can be both analog and digitally approached. It reformulate our relationship with objects – things- as well as the objects themselves. Any object that carries an RFID tag relates not only to you, but also through being read by a RFID reader nearby, to other objects, relations or values in a database. In this world, you are no longer alone, anywhere.
Cisco’s Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2011-2016 reports that Internet traffic continues to grow at unprecedented rates. Cisco says that the second leading source of internet traffic will be machines.
The networking giant says the source will be from machine-to-machine communications, or “M2M.” Brian Bergstein at MIT‘s Technology Review says to think of sensors in cars and in appliances, surveillance cameras, smart electric meters, and devices still to come, monitoring the world and reporting to 
each other and to centralized computers what they’re detecting. The chart below, reprinted from the Cisco report, shows just how extreme the jump in machine-to-machine communications could be. Cisco says M2M will grow, on average, 86 percent a year, reaching 508 petabytes a month, or half a billion gigabytes by 2016 .
ARM (ARMH), the semiconductor company whose chip technology powers most modern smartphones, has come up with a chip for the Internet of things (IoT). Om Malik at GigaOM reports that the Cortex-M0+ is an energy-efficient chip, optimized for use in everything from connected lighting to power controls to other home appliances. In a press release, the company explains:
The 32-bit Cortex-M0+ processor … consumes just 9µA/MHz … around one-third of the energy of any 8 or 16-bit processor available today, while delivering significantly higher performance …[to] enable the creation of smart, low-power microcontrollers to provide … wirelessly connected devices, a concept known as the ‘Internet of Things.’
At GigaOM’s Mobilize 2011 event ThingM CEO Mike Kuniavsky said that “ubiquitous network connectivity, cloud-based services, cheap assembly of electronics, social design, open collaboration tools and low-volume sales channels create an innovation ecosystem that is the foundation for an Internet of things.”
GigaOM says Freescale and NXP (NXPI), both are major suppliers to the automotive and home automation industries have signed up for the new ARM chip technology. Freescale and NXP have locations in the Farmington Hills, MI area.
Om Malik at GigaOm recently noted that Atheros, a division of Qualcomm (QCOM) launched a new very low power consuming Wi-Fi chip, AR4100P, focused on the “Internet of Things.” He predicts that soon, there might be Wi-Fi in everything around us, including Samsung’s (005930) Wi-Fi enabled washing machines, which Malik wrote about earlier.
According to the blog, the new “highly integrated 802.11n single-stream Wi-Fi system-in-package with integrated dual IPv4 IPv6 networking stack” is focused on smart home and building controls and appliances. Atheros and other chip companies such as ARM are betting that the Internet of Things will prove to be a new giant market opportunity.
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The new Atheros chip also includes an IPv6 stack as well as 802.11n to give end-to-end control of your home appliances.
The Internet of Things now has smell-o-vision from Olly. Olly takes services on the Internet and delivers their pings as smell according to his web-site. Whether it’s tweets, a like on Instagram, Olly will be sure to let your nose know about it. Mint Foundry, a graduate design lab at Mint Digital dedicated to exploring the potential of web-connected objects developed Olly.
It is possible to change Olly’s smells in an instant. It has a removable section in the back which can be filled with any smell you like. It could be essential oils, a slice of fruit, your partner’s perfume or even a drop of gin.
NetworkWolrd posted a long-lost version of an internal Apple video, “BlueBuster.” The video is a spoof of the classic movie Ghostbusters. Chris C. Anderson at the Huffington Post explains that Apple (AAPL) spoofed “Ghostbusters” in a parody music video based on Detroit born Ray Parker’s song “Ghostbusters.” “Bluebusters” was intended as an internal promotional rallying cry in which Apple defeats the global domination aspirations of “Blue,”aka IBM (IBM).
As Paul McNamara at Network World’s Buzz Blog points out, “It was clear that the metaphor of Apple as the liberator of the office worker wasn’t confined to the famous 1984 commercial.”
As prophetic as the theme of this video has turned out to be, the author can’t help but smile a bit at a young Jobs decked out in a Macintosh inspired Ghostbusters Uniform. Aside from a resemblance to Harold Ramis, Apple CEO Steve Jobs doesn’t make much more of a splash in the video. And yes, Apple managed a “Bluebusters” spoof that ran the full 4:20 of the song.
