Technology’s Walking Dead, circa 2012…

As we all know all good things will have to come to an end, or at least that’s what Darwin would have you believe.  Well in technology, it’s more than a saying, it’s a reality.  Once again, we are at the “Tipping Point” for some technologies.  Wasabi Roll keeps tabs on this inevitability by hanging around the technology Morgues.  Creepy job, but someone has to do it…  So Wasabi proudly presents, this year’s Walking Dead…

Voicemail…

Yup, we told you this last year (See Wasabi Roll's Oct 28, 2011 article, Did you hear that thud? It’s Was the Death of Voicemail), but did you believe us, Noooooooo.  You kept leaving voicemails thinking your party was going to actually sit there, enter their code, and listen to a myriad of antequated messages in chronological order, just to get to your message, hah! 

In data prepared for USA TODAY, Vonage, an Internet phone company, says the number of voice-mail messages left on user accounts was down 8% in July from a year ago.  Why? You may ask, well, retrieved voice mail fell even further, 14% among Vonage users in the same period. "They hate the whole voice-mail introduction, prompts, having to listen to them in chronological order," says Michael Tempora, senior vice president of product management at Vonage.

As with most declining technology, the exodus is led by younger, more impatient users who are quicker to embrace alternatives — someone such as Neveen Moghazy, 33, who, unlike her voice-mail-loving father, rarely leaves messages but juggles texting, chat app WhatsApp and Google Voice.

Common sentiment, "If my friends call and I'm busy, I text them asking if it's urgent, or I just call them back later without checking voice mail," says the designer for an ad company in Atlanta. "It's just one less thing for me to go through."

VGA, DVID, and Bears, Oh HDMI…

VGA, HDMI and DVID cables and sockets could be made obsolete within the next two years.  Why, you ask?  Intel demonstrated a new technology on the 13th that promises to rid computers of many of the connectors and cables that are needed today to connect to a myriad of peripherals and other devices.

WiGig runs on spectrum in the 60GHz band -- frequencies considerably higher than today's Wi-Fi and suitable for short-range communications but highly susceptible to interference or blocking over longer ranges, so not likely to operate between rooms in houses and offices.  They plan to begin certification mid next year.

What Gelsinger promised-and Intel is, a decade later, planning to deliver-is the first analog radio built from digital technology. The engineers watching that keynote in the early 2000s thought that was impossible and, likely came close to a coronary upon seeing Gelsinger's promise, but they developed it anyway.

This advancement is now a cornerstone of Intel's wireless future and will be key to the company's capability to compete with long-time digital radio makers for future smartphones, tablets and other small, connected devices from sensors to micro robotics. Let's explore this unwired future.

Citizen Analog Radio, Rosepoint.. Rosepoint…

Intel demonstrated for the first time a working, all-digital WiFi radio, dubbed a "Moore's Law Radio." The CTO explained that an all-digital radio follows Moore's Law by scaling in area and energy efficiency with such digital chip processes as Intel's latest 22nm tri-gate technology.

The issue: According to Intel, once you shrink under 100 nanometers, performance drops off a cliff and the technology becomes nonviable. This is very different than digital technology, which becomes cheaper and faster as it shrinks, until the limits of Moore's Law are reached. Digital's innovation curve has given us devices that have increased in performance massively while at the same time dropping in price sharply. The analog limit, on the other hand, has us bottlenecked on bandwidth at the moment. It's the reason we are seeing throttling and other problems associated with network capacity limits.

In enters Intel with a chip code-named Rosepoint, which integrates the Wi-Fi radio inside an Atom chip. The chip has two low-power Atom cores, an integrated Wi-Fi radio as well as DDR3 memory and PCI-Express I/O interfaces. Higher-level integration reduces the number of chips and enable smaller and more power-efficient devices. Intel initially talked about Rosepoint in February, but this is the first time the company showed off a chip. Rattner did not say when the chip would reach devices.

Intel acquired 3G/4G modem technology when it completed the US$1.4 billion acquisition of Infineon Wireless last year. The company maintains that it wants to integrate communication radios in its low-power Atom chips, which are used in tablets, smartphones and netbooks.

The company is also doing research to pave the way for digital radios in future chips, removing the traditional analog radios being used for communications. Digital radios will reduce signal interference on chips, which will make it easy for the integration of CPUs and modems on a single chip. The ultimate goal for Intel is to bring the radio and CPU on one chip, with an example being Rosepoint.

The researchers are approaching the digital radio development as a mathematical issue, said Yorgos Palaskas, research leader, radio integration lab at Intel Labs. "We had to rethink radio problem," Palaskas said. "We wanted to tackle this as a computational problem." The company has resolved some of the equations involved, and is working to bring the transmitters to the transistor layer, Palaskas said.

Cellular infrastructure, C-Cell Run, Run Cell Run, C-RAN over Cell, Poor Cell…

Intel and China Mobile Research Institute in Beijing are designing a full-scale Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN). C-Ran is an alternative to traditional RAN, which is the basis for modern cellular communications. Instead of simply moving the proprietary base station hardware to the data center, it is replaced by standard Intel-based servers running a software-defined radio application. Dr. I explained that C-RAN technology will dramatically reduce both capital and operational expenses for wireless service providers while providing superior levels of wireless services to users with fewer dropped connections during periods of peak demand.

Getting Your Groupon

Now, after a spectacular debut on the Nasdaq, Groupon is a public company. On Monday, it reported its second-quarter earnings results. The numbers were dismal. They paint an unmistakable picture of the future of Groupon and other similar sites: The daily deals industry is drying up. Groupon reported that its customer growth slowed substantially over the second quarter; the amount of money that each customer spends on the site tanked; and the company’s “guidance” for the current quarter suggests that things are going to get a lot worse. The spin from Groupon’s executives was not very encouraging. In a conference call with analysts, the firm’s CEO Andrew Mason kept talking up Groupon Goods, a service in which Groupon sells discounted merchandise to customers—in other words, something completely different from the coupons that earned the firm its IPO.

Why?  “Groupon is not an Internet marketing business so much as it is the equivalent of a loan sharking business,” said Rakesh Agrawal, an analyst and journalist who spent many years working in the local advertising business, wrote a series of devastating articles about Groupon. Its sweet-talking sales staff would also promise that I’d get long-term benefits from the deal. All those Groupon customers would likely spend more than their Groupon amount, and if they liked my food, they’d keep coming back even without a deal. Many cash-poor businesses apparently didn’t consider the other possibility—than in exchange for taking a lump sum now, they were signing up to give heavily discounted stuff away to deal-hungry customers who would never step into their stores ever again. If that happened, my $2,500 in immediate Groupon cash might cost me $7,500 in lost revenue over time—“a very, very expensive loan,” as Agrawal put it.

Source(s):

• http://www.cio.com/article/716152/Intel_Works_to_Extend_Mobile_Device_Battery_Life_By_Solving_Radio_Problems
• http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/04/is-voicemail-dying-too/
• http://ricker-wasabi-roll.blogspot.com/2011/10/did-you-hear-that-that-was-death-of.html
• http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/08/groupon_earnings_report_the_daily_deals_site_s_crummy_business_model_is_finally_dead_hooray_.html

So “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;”

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About Rick Ricker

An IT professional with over 20 years experience in Information Security, wireless broadband, network and Infrastructure design, development, and support.
For more information, contact Rick at (800) 333-8394 x 689·