Nolsen Bedon, Ltd.

There is a jetstream that circles the earth at high altitudes. Some scientists are trying to devleop turbines that could be positioned in the jetstream to generate prolific amounts of electricity. These generators will ned to fly or hover at thirty-five thousand feet or more to work, but if machines robust enough could be built, harnessing just 1 percent of the energy in the jet stream could power the whole of human civilization around the world.

I’ve been attending Computex in Taipei this week and of particular interest to me this year is the WiMAX Expo and the growth potential of this technology.

Taipei, Reuters

Japanese electronics maker Fujitsu Ltd. said it aims for 100 billion yen (US$951 million) in sales of its WiMAX-use microchips in the year starting April 2011, up from virtually none in the year ended March 31.

A new high-speed Internet technology, WiMAX provides wireless data over long distances, allowing faster Internet downloads while on the move. WiFi, by contrast, only works near a transmitter.

WiMAX services will be launched on a commercial basis as early as this year in Taiwan. In Japan, a group led by KDDI Corp. plans to start WiMAX operations next year.

Fujitsu expects its power-efficient communication chips to drive the company’s overall WiMAX chip sales, Makoto Awaga, general manager of Fujitsu’s microchip unit, told Reuters at COMPUTEX yesterday. COMPUTEX is the world’s second-biggest computer show.

Energy efficiency is critical for any electronic component that goes into a mobile device as users seek extended use on a single battery.

The WiMAX chip sales target of 100 billion yen is about 2 percent of Fujitsu’s total revenues in the year to March 2008 of 5.3 trillion yen.

Awaga said the number of WiMAX users globally is likely to reach up to 50 million by 2012.

I hope Awaga is referring to Japan. I believe that global adoption will be both quick and far reaching and we should see the number well surpass 50 million before 2012. Getting WiMAX adoption in just a few major metropolises in eastern China will easily push the number past a hundred million.

“By 2011 or 2012, certain progress should have been made on commercial operations, and various services will have become available,” Awaga said.

“Counting users in the United States, Japan, BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China), Asia, and part of Europe, the number will probably be about 40 to 50 million.”

A source in Europe has told me that unfortunately mobile access to the Internet especially while roaming is still extremely expensive for Europeans.

Awaga said, despite expectations by some industry specialists, WiMAX may not be competing with another high-speed telecommunications technology called Long Term Evolution (LTE) to be the fourth-generation mobile phone standard of choice.

“Fourth-generation services will be an improvement of the current third-generation services in one form or another. Voice communications are an integral part the new services,” Awaga said.

“WiMAX, on the other hand, focuses on speedier transmissions of data, setting aside voice communications. It is possible to carry voice over WiMAX. But I’m not sure if it makes very much sense,” Awaga said.

Sachio Semmoto, founder of Japanese broadband Internet and wireless company eAccess Ltd, said in May LTE will beat WiMAX in the race for 4G wireless networks because many large operators are throwing their weight behind it.

Although WiMAX counts Intel Corp as a supporter, LTE got ahead in the race after Vodafone, Verizon Wireless, China Mobile and Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, have rallied behind it.

Shares in Fujitsu were down 1.4 percent at 841 yen in afternoon trade, under-performing the Tokyo stock market’s electrical machinery index, which rose 1.1 percent.

By Anupreeta Das
San Francisco, Reuters

Taiwan, Japan and Israel are just some of the emerging hotspots for innovation outside the United States, as venture capitalists continue to pour more dollars into global investments, a new survey said.

Nearly three out of every five of U.S. venture capitalists, or 57 percent, are now investing outside the country, compared with 46 percent last year, the 2008 Global Venture Capital Survey found.

The survey measured the opinions of nearly 400 venture capitalists from around the world, including 163 U.S.-based firms, and was conducted by Deloitte LLP and the National Venture Capital Association, a U.S. trade group.

Although the United States maintains its preeminent position as global leader in innovation, National Venture Capital Association President Mark Heesen said there will be more venture activity in those destinations ranked No. 2 and No. 3 in the survey. “The secondary trends are more interesting because it shows the up-and-coming locations,” Heesen said Monday.

The United States held the top spot in each of the sectors measured — semiconductors, software, biopharmaceuticals, medical devices, and alternative, or clean, technology.

But Germany ranked second for innovation in alternative energy and medical devices. Fifteen percent of venture capitalists said Taiwan had the best semiconductor technology, after the United States. India ranked No. 2 for software innovation, followed by the UK, Israel and Germany.

“While the U.S. isn’t losing ground, the globalization of innovation is underway,” said Mark Jensen, national managing partner of Deloitte’s venture capital services.

International is hot

U.S. venture capitalists have begun pumping more money into start-ups in other countries; last year, they put in nearly US$9 billion, or one-fifth of all dollars they invested, into international investments.

About US$2.5 billion of this amount went to China and India, still two of the hottest emerging markets for venture dollars, compared to US$1.9 billion in 2006, according to data from Thomson Reuters and NVCA.

“Asian countries have advantages over the U.S. when it comes to technology,” said Dixon Doll, founder of DCM, an Asia-focused venture firm.

In addition to well-trained and “reasonably priced” engineers, countries like China and India “typically know and can figure out the relevant ways to build local services… optimized for the requirements of local users,” Doll said.

The combination of local talent and local markets has led tech giant IBM to focus more keenly on emerging economies, said Claudia Fan Munce, the managing director of IBM’s Venture Capital Group, in a recent interview.

International Business Machines Corp. does not invest in start-ups, but instead partners with traditional U.S. venture capital firms in their search for marketable technologies.

Fan Munce said her international travel has shot up in the past year because more and more venture capitalists are looking beyond U.S. borders for the next big idea.

She listed Canada, Peru, Vietnam, Russia and Ireland as new centers for technological innovation, in addition to the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

“IBM follows the money,” she said. “We want to go (to emerging markets) when they have dealflow.”

This means more and more Mobile web access.

By Sheena Lee
Taipei, Reuters

Microsoft Corp expects global unit sales of its Windows Mobile software for mobile phones to grow at least 50 percent per year in fiscal years 2008 and 2009 as demand for smartphones rises rapidly.

“Fifty percent growth is the minimum,” Eddie Wu, the software company’s managing director of OEM embedded devices Asia, told Reuters on the sidelines of a news conference on Tuesday.

He said Microsoft expects to sell 20 million units in its 2007/2008 fiscal year ending in June, and expects to grow at least 50 percent annually over the next two years. It sold over 11 million units of its Windows Mobile software in its 2006/2007 fiscal year ended June.

“We’re actually still seeing very good growth (for our mobile software) in markets like Europe and the United States,” said Wu.

Wu added that growth of Windows Mobile is seen fastest in Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Brazil, Russia and India.

Microsoft’s mobile communications division provides operating systems for smartphones and other mobile devices based on the Windows Mobile platform. Its clients include South Korea’s Samsung Electronics, Motorola, High Tech Computer (HTC) and Asustek Computer.

Microsoft competes against Symbian-based operating systems which are used by vendors such as Nokia and LG Electronics.

It also faces stiff competition from other players such as Apple Inc, Blackberry maker Research in Motion, and Palm Inc.

“Even if Microsoft is growing at a rate of 50-60 percent, it doesn’t mean they can gain that much share since Microsoft and Apple¡¦s mobile operating system is still much smaller compared to the Symbian system,” said Citigroup analyst Kevin Chang.

“But they (Microsoft) are one of the few players which are offering touchscreen platforms so that is helping them grow,” said Chang, adding that vendors such as Sony Ericsson may soon also launch touchscreen smartphones with Windows Mobile.

Global smartphone unit shipments grew 52.5 percent from a year ago to hit around 12 million units in 2007, based on data by Gartner, and the market is set to continue to increase in high double-digits in 2008 and in 2009, analysts said.

Microsoft also said earlier this year that it would offer full Web browsing capabilities for mobile phones in the third quarter this year, following in the footsteps of Apple’s iPhone, which has won praise for the way it displays Web sites as they would appear on a computer.

According to the following article China now has almost 600 million cellphone subscribers.

By Janet Ong
Beijing, Bloomberg

China Mobile Ltd., the world’s largest phone company by users, lost more than US$26 billion in market value in Hong Kong trading Monday after the government said it will merge smaller operators to increase competition.

The shares fell 8.2 percent to close at HK$114.90, the biggest drop in more than six years. The stock was the largest contributor to the MSCI Asia Pacific Index’s 2.1 percent decline.

The nation’s two biggest fixed-line companies will also provide wireless services under the government plan, threatening China Mobile’s dominance of a market with 583.5 million customers.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. cut its rating on the carrier, which has two-thirds of the country’s subscribers, to “sell” Monday.

The new regulatory regime may “seriously threaten” China Mobile’s advantages, said Goldman Sachs analysts Helen Zhu and Lucy Liu, who cut the rating from “neutral” and lowered the 12-month share-price estimate to HK$105 from HK$135.

“The government wants to balance the telecom industry instead of having just one dominant player,” said Teresa Chow, who helps manage US$1.1 billion at RBC Investment Management Asia in Hong Kong, including China Mobile shares.

“The move is positive for the two fixed-line operators and will broaden their revenue.”

Under the plan, the parent of fixed-line carrier China Telecom Corp. will buy a mobile-phone network from China Unicom Ltd.’s parent, which in turn will merge with the company that controls China Netcom Group Corp., the Ministry of Industry and Information said in a statement on May 24.

China Mobile Communications Corp., the state-owned parent of China Mobile, will take control of fixed-line carrier China Tietong Telecommunications Corp., the ministry said.

The government said it plans to create a more balanced market structure through the reorganization and new regulations, according to the statement jointly issued with the Ministry of Finance and the National Development and Reform Commission. It didn’t give details of the rules.

After the revamp is completed, China will issue three licenses to offer third-generation high-speed mobile services. The country had more mobile-phone users at the end of April than the combined populations of the U.S. and Japan.

Geneva, AFP

The number of mobile phone users worldwide soared to over 3.3 billion by the end of 2007, equivalent to a penetration rate of 49 percent, the International Telecommunications Union said in a report Friday.

Africa showed the strongest gains over the past two years and more than two thirds of all mobile subscribers were from developing countries by the end of 2007, the ITU said.

This is “a positive trend that suggests that developing countries are catching up,” the report said.

Mobile subscription growth stood at 39 percent annually in Africa between 2005-2007, and 28 percent in Asia over the same period.

India and China added 154 million and 143 million new subscribers, respectively.

The global annual average growth rate stood at 22 percent, the ITU said.

Mobile phones are eclipsing traditional fixed lines and in Africa they account for nearly 90 percent of all telephone subscribers, the report said.

“The continued growth in the mobile sector is matched by no-growth in the fixed-line sector. Fixed telephone penetration has been stagnating at just under 20 percent globally for the last years and growth has been below one percent between 2005 and 2007,” it said.

While developing countries have made great strides in mobile growth, a significant ‘digital divide’ remains for Internet use and particularly the availability of broadband connections, it noted.

High-income countries account for 66 percent of all fixed broadband subscribers although they only represent 16 percent of the world’s population, while developing countries have just one percent of fixed broadband users but 38 percent of the global population.

“Low-income countries, where broadband access remains very low, risk falling behind in an area that is particularly important in delivering innovative applications and services,” the ITU warned.

Some countries have made progress and the ITU highlighted Chile, Senegal and Turkey as states where almost all Internet subscribers have now gone high speed.

“For more people to benefit from the potential of broadband and the applications that it can deliver, governments need to do their share to ensure that high-speed technologies become more accessible as well as more affordable,” the ITU urged.

Peter Whoriskey
The Washington Post

Are you a human or a computer?

Over the Internet, it’s getting harder and harder to tell.

Some of the common tests used by Web sites to distinguish between legitimate flesh-and-blood visitors and malicious human-mimicking computers recently appear to have been outwitted.

Last month, the human verification tests, which typically require users to identify deformed letters set against a cluttered backdrop, were broken by a computer.

The computer then repetatedly created free Hotmail e-mail accounts and sent spam from them, according to Websense, the security firm that detected the hacking.

The attack followed similar ones this year against Microsoft’s Live Mail accounts and Google’s Gmail service. A little over a week ago, the security firm reported a similar attack on Google’s Blogger, a blog publishing system.

“What we’re noticing over the last year is that these tests meant to tell the difference between a human and a computer are being tageted by more and more malicious groups,” said Stephen Chenette, manager of security labs at Websense, the firm based in San Diego that reported the attacks. “And they are getting better at it.”

Spam, or unsolicited e-mails containing offers of Viagra, Rolex watches, pornography and the like, are the ultimate aims of such schemes.

Solving the human verification tests with computers allows spammers to rapidly create new e-mail accounts from which to issue spam, which is estimated by Ferris Research to cost the U.S. economy US$42 billion annually.

The problem of telling computers and humans apart has a long tradition in artificial intelligence theory.

In a landmark paper in 1950, British mathematician Alan Turing proposed that a machine could be said to “think” if it could carry on a conversation — via teletype — in a manner that was indistinguishable from a human.

But the practice of distinguishing humans from computers has taken on a far more practical role in the Internet age.

Anyone who has signed for an e-mail account, bought show tickets or created a free blog, is likely familiar with these modern tests of humanity: they ask visitors to identify a string of wavy, deformed letters.

The letters are supposed to be impossible for computers to read in the time allotted but relatively easy for humans.

“The free e-mail accounts and blogs are like gold to the malicious attackers,” Chenette said. The reason is that spam filters are less likely to block items from these free services.

WASHINGTON, Reuters

Scientists may have learned why some people retain sharp minds and clear memories despite having the so-called brain plaques and tangles that are the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.

In comparing the brains of these people to others who had all the memory-robbing symptoms of Alzheimer’s, the researchers said on Tuesday they found those who avoided dementia consistently had a larger part of the brain called the hippocampus.

It is a structure vital to memory formation located in the brain’s temporal lobe. Everyone has two of them — one on the left side and one on the right side of the brain.

Dr. Deniz Erten-Lyons of Oregon Health and Science University in Portland, who led the study presented at a meeting of the American Academy of Neurology in Chicago, said the findings could inspire new ideas for combating Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia in the elderly.

The brain tissue of people with Alzheimer’s disease contains abnormal clumps called amyloid plaques and irregular knots of fibers called neurofibrillary tangles.

Doctors have struggled to understand why some people with these plaques and tangles never experience the loss of intellectual and social abilities caused by Alzheimer’s.

“Right now, we focus a lot on amyloid plaques and these tangles in Alzheimer’s disease,” Erten-Lyons said in a telephone interview.

“And I think one of the important things of our study was emphasizing that there’s other things that we need to focus on as well — other mechanisms that we don’t know and do play a role in Alzheimer’s disease. That needs to be further investigated because these could create new targets for prevention and therapeutic strategy,” Erten-Lyons added.

His team studied the brains of 12 people who had extensive plaques and tangles but retained a sharp mind and clear memory, comparing them to 24 others who had extensive plaques and tangles and also had the usual Alzheimer’s symptoms.

Based on brain scans taken while they were still alive, the researchers found that the hippocampus in the clear-minded people was about 10 percent larger than in the other people. Their overall brain volume also was about 5 percent greater.