Say Hello to Google's new project, 'Project Tango' - 3D vision smartphone

Google announced a new research project Thursday aimed at bringing 3D technology to smartphones, for potential applications such as indoor mapping, gaming and helping blind people navigate.
The California tech giant said its "Project Tango" would provide prototypes of its new smartphone to outside developers to encourage the writing of new applications.
Project leader Johnny Lee said the goal of the project, which incorporates robotics and vision-processing technology, is "to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion."
"What if you could capture the dimensions of your home simply by walking around with your phone before you went furniture shopping?"Google said on its Project Tango web page.
"What if directions to a new location didn't stop at the street address? What if you never again found yourself lost in a new building? What if the visually impaired could navigate unassisted in unfamiliar indoor places? What if you could search for a product and see where the exact shelf is located in a super-store?"
The technology could also be used for "playing hide-and-seek in your house with your favorite game character, or transforming the hallways into a tree-lined path."
Smartphones are equipped with sensors which make over 1.4 million measurements per second, updating the position and rotation of the phone.
Partners in the project include researchers from the University of Minnesota, George Washington University, German tech firm Bosch and the Open Source Robotics Foundation, among others.

Another partner is California-based Movidius, which makes vision-processor technology for mobile and portable devices and will provide the processor platform.
Movidius said in a statement the goal was "to mirror human vision with a newfound level of depth, clarity and realism on mobile and portable connected devices."
"Google has paved the future direction for smart mobile vision systems and we're excited to be working with a company that shares our vision to usher in the next wave of applications that fundamentally alter how a mobile device is used to experience the world around us," said Remi El-Ouazzane, chief executive of Movidius.
"Project Tango is truly a groundbreaking platform and we look forward to seeing the innovation the developer community achieves," he added.

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ARTEMIS's pCell Technology

Technologist and serial entrepreneur Steve Perlman on Wednesday announced his new company, Artemis, and demoed its pCell technology.
pCell technology "consistently delivers full-speed mobile data to every mobile device concurrently, regardless of how many users are sharing the same spectrum at once," he claimed.
The theory is legitimate, but "you certainly do not have the whole network's capacity available to an unlimited number of users," said Philip Solis, a research director at ABI Research.
"The more users the network would try to communicate with simultaneously, the more complicated the signals would become," Solis continued.

How pCell Technology Works

Instead of trying to suppress interference, the pCell exploits it -- combining radio signals transmitted from multiple pCell base stations to, in effect, create a personalized wireless network around each mobile device. Think of it as a globe that accompanies the device. This gives each user the full capacity of the pCell.

When a user clicks on a streaming video website in a DIDO (Distributed Input-Output Technology, or DIDO) setup, the data is sent to the DIDO data center, which processes the video data into a radio signal waveform and sends it to the DIDO AP. The characteristics of the waveform are determined by algorithms on the back-end servers. That lets each PC making a request pick out its own video stream. The response uses the full bandwidth of the channel.

Uploaded data also gets the full channel bandwidth.

DIDO is cloud-based. The technology has been successfully tested at frequencies from 1 MHz to 1 GHz.

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Nokia's Android Smartphone

While it is widely expected that Nokia will unveil its first Android smartphone - Nokia X - next week at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2014,

it is rumoured that the company has more Android handsets in the works.According to a report by Chinese technology website tech.qq.com, Nokia is working on two android smartphone other than Nokia X.All three Android smartphones by Nokia are expected to hit the market in May-June. Nokia X is said to cost approximately $110 (6.8k
The device is said to have a 4-inch screen with 800x480p resolution and a 1-1.2 GHz dual-core Snapdragon 200 processor. It will have 512MB RAM, 5MP rear camera, Bluetooth 4.0, Android 4.4 (KitKat) operating system and 4GB internal storage     
   

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U.K. based Canonical Ltd.'s Ubuntu Touch OS finally got it's hardware partners and the company promises new phones this year!

U.K. based Canonical Ltd.'s Ubuntu Touch Operating System for Smartphones (a rival to Android) finally got it's hardware partners. The company will be building mid-high end phones with BQ and Meizu, the first manufacturers to confound to the company. It was revealed by the founder of Ubuntu (Mark Shuttleworth) itself.
Canonical had just signed it's first deal to supply a smartphone with its mobile operating system, Canonical founder and product strategy leader Mark Shuttleworth revealed in an interview here at the LeWeb conference. He wouldn't say which company has agreed to use the Linux-based OS, but said it will be offered on high-end phones in 2014.
"We have concluded our first set of agreements to ship Ubuntu on mobile phones," Shuttleworth said. "We've shifted gears from 'making a concept' to 'it's going to ship.' That has a big impact on the team."
And, he said, Canonical is in board-level discussions with several others: "We are now pretty much at the board level on four household brands. They sell a lot of phones all over the world, in emerging and fully emerged markets, to businesses and consumers."
It's significant progress for a nine-year-old company that has specialized in the Ubuntu version of Linux. But it's a very long way to making even a small dent in the dominance of Google's Android and Apple's iOS.
Shuttleworth knows he's got big incumbent powers to reckon with, along with smaller mobile OS players such as Windows Phone from Microsoft, Tizen from Samsung and Intel, and Firefox OS from Mozilla and a host of carrier partners. He thinks Ubuntu Touch, with a flexible programming foundation beneath and an immersive services-first interface on top, will find a place, though.
"Volume is important. We want to do stuff that people use every day," he said. He doesn't want Ubuntu to occupy only a small niche of the mobile market.l So how will Ubuntu Touch make it to the big leagues? Partnerships with those who offer services -- partnerships with companies like LinkedIn, Baidu, Facebook, Evernote, and Pinterest is one way. Those with online services see Android as a vehicle to drive people to Google services, and they're looking to back an alternative that will give them top billing, Shuttleworth said.
Ubuntu Touch puts those services front and center in a rich way that elevates them beyond mere app icons.
"The look is fresh and clean. It's much more usable than any of the other new phones," Shuttleworth said.
A second part of the sales pitch is that Ubuntu Touch is open, something that appeals to some business partners. It's based on the open-source operating system also at the core of the Ubuntu product for personal computers and servers. And it can run apps written for that Linux kernel, for a Java layer on top that's not far removed from Android's app underpinnings, or Web apps that are the lifeblood for Firefox OS.
It's hard to imagine that Android developers will eagerly to produce a sister version of their apps, no matter how easy the developer tools make it, unless Ubuntu Touch spreads widely. Shuttleworth believes they will, though, since they already have to reckon with a fragmented Android device market and Ubuntu Touch isn't far removed.
"We make no claims for Android compatibility, but we make it super easy for you to target both at the same time and super cool for you to do so," Shuttleworth said.
Another part of the sales pitch is carrier support. He's won Ubuntu Touch endorsements from Vodafone, 3, EE, KT, SK Telecom, Verizon, Deutsche Telecom, T-Mobile, PT, and more, he said. And the final piece: software written natively for Ubuntu Touch will also work on Ubuntu-based PCs and, someday, Ubuntu-based tablets and TVs.
Shuttleworth founded Canonical in 2004, back in the day when Linux on the desktop was, if not exactly a contender, at least a more widely discussed alternative to Windows PCs than it is today. Since then, the company expanded to the server market, with a major focus on cloud-computing infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services' EC2.
Mobile came next -- but so far profits have not followed for the company. Shuttleworth sold Thawte Consulting to Verisign in 1999 for $575 million and and has enough wealth for space tourism -- he became a cosmonaut on a Russian Soyuz trip in 2002. And he's been willing to subsidize Canonical while it grows a business.
If he wanted, the company could become profitable on its PC and server business right now by dropping the mobile work. But for now, it invests in its future because Shuttleworth thinks dumping mobile would cut the company off from a major part of computing.
"It would give it a lifespan measured in years," Shuttleworth said. "Not decades, years." 

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