Versatile Amphibian

Following the thoughts on the 'green-ness' of telecoms companies, it struck me that the forthcoming auction of digital dividend spectrum in the UK is a great opportunity for the Government and Ofcom to stop tinkering round the edges of both the green agenda and Digital Britain and take some positive action. Auctioning the spectrum (suitable for LTE) to the highest bidder is a safe move, but it won't bring us any closer to either meeting the pledge to halve our carbon emissions by 2050, or the rather shorter term objective of giving everyone the option of connecting the Internet with reasonable bandwidth. Instead, I propose a scheme based on rewarding operators for being part of an industrial and social commons. The carrot in this scheme is free spectrum for cellular LTE use. The value of this is yet to be established, however we have many data points to choose from, for example: GSM licenses in the UK cost £142,560 per 2*200KHz slot per annum. This adds up to about £16m per...

I've been asked to contribute of a debate on 'green telecoms', specifically how the telecoms industry can enable other industries as they seek to reduce carbon emissions. A couple of thoughts I've had on the subject: First , should the telecoms industry contribute to the industrial commons by making certain data available to all, in the same way that GPS signals are open to anyone with a receiver? Tom Tom's HD Traffic service is one service that makes use of data on handset movement to route traffic. Could this data benefit everyone, reducing jams and hence emissions? Second , is there a benefit to a short range car-to-car communications system, a kind of automotive social networking that enables ECUs to communicate with each other? Besides the obvious benefits around collision avoidance, could such ad-hoc networking help manage traffic flow and even enable the sharing of services such as GPS routing and even in-car entertainment? Sounds interesting conceptually - ...

I had an interesting (and informal) chat with the VP Sales of a large film distributor yesterday, whose responsibilities cover monetisation of content rights post-theatre. We covered many subjects, but he seemed most concerned by the ongoing decline in the DVD market; where revenues are falling due to lack of demand, BluRay is failing to prop up the market and the industry appears to be suffering from a lack of vision, similar to that which has led to the gross destruction of value in the music rights business. This is a classic strategic problem and one which cannot be solved simply. I am not, in case it was unclear, an advocate of the cognitive school of strategy! Instead, I thought it'd be fun to lay out how I'd use a hypothesis-based approach to seek and select options for turning around the post-theatre film monetisation business. To start with, I see four broad value models in this business: "buy-to-own" sales of DVDs; "pay-per-view" either through vid...

Yesterday I had a chat with a colleague who's looking at transformative ways of reducing the cost of sending parcels to China. We came up with the following thought experiment, which was quite fun - I thought it was worth sharing. We started out with the assumption there is a fixed cost of cargo planes along the route from the UK to China and a very much lower cost of sorting a parcel, which varies based on the labour cost in the territory the plane lands in. The main determining factor on the cost per parcel is the utilisation ("degree of fullness") of the cargo space in any given plane, the secondary factor being the number of times it is sorted. A parcel takes a pre-determined route through the system, with a fixed number of interchanges, independent of the utilisation of the planes that carry the parcel at each stage. It occured to me that this is analagous to the switched telephone network; our thought experiment was to imagine that the international parcel post work...

I inadvertantly walked into the lady's loos at work today - in my defence, it seems the building's designers decided to mix up the sex's respective bathrooms by floor! Why was this revalatory? Well, I barely needed to push open the first of two doors before I knew something was amiss - by the time the second one was cracked open, I was already turning back. Pride intact, I might add! "I knew something was amiss" got me thinking - there were no visual clues that this was not the gents (besides the huge sign on the door, but I was texting at the time and had my head down...). The only thing I can assume was that the smell was not quite the same, triggering a subconscious "this is not right" reaction. I thus successfully passed a context problem and prevented myself suffering (psychological) harm! Now, my success in this simple task might seem trivial, however it immediately occurred that an pseudo- AI might find solving a similar context problem rather di...

In my last post about future mobile phone design concepts, I talked about the thin film contact lens as screen. This time I'll talk briefly about a more radical possibility - using neurological techniques to place images directly into the brain without light shining on the eye. Before considering this concept, please take a look at this link, to a technology called Brainport . In brief, Brainport uses electrodes mounted on tongue to transmit images from a head-mounted camera to the brain, in effect enabling the blind to see. This is a laudable objective and a very clever product, for the device appears to work rather well, however this type of technology offers a tantalising possibility for the communication device designer of the future. Just like the contact lens screen overlays images onto the line of sight, a neural feed like that suggested by Brainport could overlay images without any device in the visual field. In effect, the user would be surrounded by a sphere of virtual sc...

This post is a quick intermission in my thoughts about future mobile design. When I talked about contact lens screens, I mentioned the need for wireless power supplies to connect devices to each other. The BBC today reported on a company called Witricity who have developed a wireless power system that connects the mains to devices using low frequency resonance. I'd imagine that such a system is relatively lossy, however, when combined with ever more efficient batteries (driven in part by increasing demand from the automotive sector ) or even portable fuel cells it could form the basis of a "personal power grid". A thought that occurs while writing this, is that the battery pack of such a device - or individual devices if the PPG* doesn't happen - could synchronise with power, just as they synchronise data over the air. *: sorry, I can't resist a good acronym!

Continuing the theme of future mobile design, stimulated by this link from MIT's Fluid Interface Group, this post is a quick look at some ideas for possible futures in machine-to-man communications. The screen of the future, if you like. First off, a confession. I love my iPhone. It's a great piece of technology that just works; well enough to get me excited about handsets for the first time in years. It's also led to a spate of people wandering around, head down in their smart phone, writing emails, tweeting, surfing the web, playing games or another one of the tens of thousands of things you can get an app for. This is a shame, because the iPhone has lots of next generation functionality that's exciting to use, but has lost some of the mobility that made cellphones compelling in the first place. The Fluid Interfaces Group device gets around this "heads down" problem by projecting an interactive screen onto a surface by means of a small projector (and presu...

A colleague recently sent me the following link describing a project by MIT's Fluid Interfaces Group, related to next generation interaction solutions. Besides being an interesting (and occassionally amusing) presentation, it reminded me of some thinking I participated in on a similar front, which I thought was worth sharing. For ease of reading, I'll break the subject into multiple posts, starting with image recognition . Wouldn't it be great if my computer could see what I saw, tell me everything I want to know about it? I'd look at a product on a shelf and know everything about it. I could look at a billboard advertising a film and instantly know where and when I could see it. I'd never forget a name... This might sound like something out of Minority Report, but in fact the "wearable webcam" concept has been around for some years now and I'm slightly surprised that its still not made it commercially. Microsoft have been very active in this space ...