Qualcomm Has A Plethora Of Automobile Modems

Qualcomm had an IoT event in San Francisco yesterday and the company wanted to talk a bit more about IoT, also known as Internet of Things. They started off with a catchy phrase – Internet of Hype to Internet of Everything.

Dave Aberle said that up to a billion dollars in revenue is coming from the non-mobile market. More than 10 pecent of Qualcomm revenue will come from the non-headset market. They call this market Internet of Everything, but we believe that not all of that market should be called IoT.

IoT is not just the wearable market; it is car modems, connected speakers, action cameras, some smart SanDisk storage solutions, home automation kit and more.  Aberle mentioned that Qualcomm has 40 car design wins in the market with 15 different OEMs. We saw some names including Audi on the slide, but the list of obviously much longer.

Qualcomm is the leader in connected car and 4G LTE market, while Nvidia is the leader in Infotainment car systems, having some huge customers behind it, including the Volkswagen Group.

Qualcomm wants to expand its presence in IoT, including automotive solutions, and we expect more IoT designs from them in the near future.

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Russia Banking On Home Grown CPUs

A Russian firm announced its intention to build its own homegrown CPUs as part of a cunning plan to keep the Americans from spying on the glorious Empire of Tsar Putin and oil oligarchs.

Moscow Centre of SPARC Technologies (MCST) has announced it’s now taking orders for its Russian-made microprocessors from domestic computer and server manufacturers.

Dubbed the Elbrus-4C, it was fully designed and developed in MCST’s Moscow labs. It’s claimed to be the most high-tech processor ever built in Russia. They claim it is comparable with Intel’s Core i3 and Intel Core i5 processors, although they do not say what generation as one spec we found claimed it could manage a blistering 1.3 GHz which is slightly less than an average mobile phone.

MCST unveiled a new PC, the Elbrus ARM-401 which is powered by the Elbrus-4C chip and runs its own Linux-based Elbrus operating system. MCST claimed it can run Windows and Linux distributions. Yhe company has built a data centre server rack, the Elbrus-4.4, which is powered by four Elbrus-4C microprocessors and supports up to 384GB of RAM.

MCST said the Elbrus-4.4 is suitable for web servers, database servers, storage systems, servers, remote desktops and high-performance clusters.

Sergei Viljanen, editor in chief of the Russian-language PCWorld website said that the chip was at least five years behind the west.

“Russian processor technology is still about five years behind the west. Intel’s chips come with a 14nm design, whereas the Elbrus is 65 nm, which means they have a much higher energy consumption.”

MCST’s Elbrus-4C chips are powered by a 4-core processors, and come with an interface for hard drives and other peripherals. The company finalized development of Elbrus-4C in April 2014, and began mass production last autumn.

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FitBit Files IPO As Sales Double

Fitbit, the maker of wearable activity trackers, has filed to go public and has reported some strong sales numbers in its presenation.

The company seeks to raise as much as US$100 million, according to a regulatory filing, though the amount is subject to change. Fitbit plans to list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “FIT.”

The filing reveals what seems to be a healthy business. The company sold roughly 10.9 million devices in 2014,more than double what it sold in 2013 and more than eight times as many as it sold in 2012.

Fitbit also more than doubled its revenue between 2013 and 2014, to more than $745 million. Sales in 2012 were about $76 million.

The company posted net income of nearly $132 million in 2014, up from a loss of roughly $52 million the year before.

Meanwhile, the company’s paid active users grew from 2.6 million in 2013 to 6.7 million in 2014.

Fitbit, founded in 2007, makes a number of activity-measuring bracelets and trackers that can be synced with an online dashboard and mobile apps. The company also provides premium services like virtual coaching and customized fitness plans.

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Intel Rewards RealSense Developers

Intel has awarded  $1m to a number of developers as part of its RealSense 3D App Challenge, which was launched last year.

Announced by Intel president Renee James at Computex 2014, the RealSense App Challenge was part of Intel’s efforts to boost RealSense globally and generate software innovation around the ecosystem.

More than 7,000 software creators in 37 countries applied to compete, and 400 were selected to develop new applications for entertainment, learning and collaboration.

Several hundred developers of creative app ideas in these categories received the latest edition of the RealSense 3D Camera and RealSense software development kit, which included free tools, examples and application programing interfaces with which to develop their ideas.

Intel announced on Thursday that the grand prize winner, who picks up $100,000, is Brazilian developer Alexandre Ribeiro da Silva of Anima Games.

His Seed app requires gamers to use reflexes and rational thinking to solve puzzles. The goal of the game is to guide a little floating seed through its journey to reforest a devastated land.

The second prize of $50,000 was awarded to Canadian developer David Schnare of Kinetisense. His OrthoSense app uses RealSense to help medical professionals remotely rehabilitate a patient who has suffered a hand injury by tracking their range of movement over time.

“This practical application of human-computer interaction is an impressive example of how technology can make our lives better,” Intel said.

Another notable winner was Lee Bamber from the UK, who received recognition for his virtual 3D video maker. The app allows a user to record themselves as a 3D hologram and then transport to a variety of scenes.

Once recorded, they can then change the camera position over the course of the playback to add an extra dimension to a video blogs, storybook or v-mails, for instance.

“The idea of the app is that you can choose the backdrop then set the lighting as you would in a studio then do the acting,” Bamber explained in his video.

Doug Fisher, SVP and general manager of Intel’s Software and Services Group, said in a blog post that now the app challenge is complete “the real work begins”, as Intel Software will continue to encourage all finalists to bring products to market.

“We also will continue mobilising our resources to inspire, educate and advance innovation through programmes such as the Intel Developer Zone, where developers can engage to find new software tools and build industry relationships,” he said.

“Human-computer interactions will no longer be defined by mice, keyboards and 2D displays. Our physical and digital worlds are coming together. When they do, the opportunities for us as consumers and businesses will explode.”

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USAA Exploring Bitcoins

USAA, a San Antonio, Texas-based financial institution serving current and former members of the military, is researching the underlying technology behind the digital currency bitcoin to help make its operations more efficient, a company executive said.

Alex Marquez, managing director of corporate development at USAA, said in an interview that the company and its banking, insurance, and investment management subsidiaries hoped the “blockchain” technology could help decentralize its operations such as the back office.

He said USAA had a large team researching the potential of the blockchain, an open ledger of a digital currency’s transactions, viewed as bitcoin’s main technological innovation. It lets users make payments anonymously, instantly, and without government regulation.

The blockchain ledger is accessible to all users of bitcoin, a virtual currency created through a computer “mining” process that uses millions of calculations. Bitcoin has no ties to a central bank and is viewed as an alternative to paying for goods and services with credit cards.

“We have serious interest in the blockchain and we think the technology would have an impact on the organization,” said Marquez. “The fact that we have such a large group of people working on this shows how serious we are about the potential of this technology.”

USAA, which provides banking, insurance and other products to 10.7 million current or former members of the military, owns and manages assets of about $213 billion.

Marquez said USAA had no plans to dabble in the bitcoin as a currency. Its foray into the blockchain reflects a trend among banking institutions trying to integrate bitcoin technology into their systems. BNY Mellon and UBS have announced initiatives to explore the blockchain technology.

Most large banks are testing the blockchain internally, said David Johnston, managing director at Dapps Venture Fund in San Antonio, Texas. “All of the banks are going through that process of trying to understand how this technology is going to evolve.”

“I would say that by the end of the year, most will have solidified a blockchain technology strategy, how the bank is going to implement and how it will move the technology forward.”

USAA is still in early stages of its research and has yet to identify how it will implement the technology.

In January this year, USAA invested in Coinbase, the biggest bitcoin company, which runs a host of services, including an exchange and a wallet, which is how bitcoins are stored by users online.

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Text To 911 Has Low Adoption Rate

Only 5% of the nation’s 6,500 emergency dispatch centers are capable of receiving and responding to emergency text-to-911 messages.

That’s not good enough for more than 41,000 signers of a Change.org petition. They want Congress to pass legislation requiring emergency centers to update their systems to accommodate texting.

Text-to-911 would have provided much-needed help for Lisbeth (not her real name), a mother of two who said she was repeatedly battered by her boyfriend in her home over several years. One day three years ago, when he was yelling at her, she tried to call 911 on her cell phone for help, but he broke down the door where she was hiding and demanded to know whom she was calling.

“I was trying to whisper, but he got in and punched me and asked me who I was talking to,” Lisbeth said in an interview. That time, a neighbor overheard the fight and called 911 to bring police to the scene.

“911 works, but I wish it worked with text,” she added. “If they had it back then, it might have made a difference.” Lisbeth later moved into a shelter for abused women in California’s San Fernando Valley and said her life has improved for herself and her children. “Anybody who is going through the same situation as I was should ask for help,” she said.

The Federal Communications Commission last yea rrequired U.S. carriers and makers of some texting apps to provide emergency texting with their services, but the FCC doesn’t regulate the nation’s emergency dispatch centers. Instead, the centers are regulated locally by 3,200 different states, counties and cities, even though many of those jurisdictions receive federal funds for the dispatch centers.

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai last August expressed concerns that FCC mandates for carriers might give the public a false impression that they can send texts to emergency responders when so few are prepared to receive texts.

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Qualcomm Gives Snapdragon More Umph

Qualcomm has released a new Trepn Profiler app for Android which will profile Snapdragon processors and tinker with them.

The Trepn Profiler app identifies apps that overwork the CPU or are eating too much data. The app will pinpoint which of the apps drain the battery faster.

All data that will be obtained by this app can provide information you need to know which program is slowing down your phone.

Most Android phone users will not give a damn, but developers will find it useful. Those who are interested in testing roms, custom kernels, and their own apps can use the data gathered by the Trepn Profiler.

Developers can measure optimisation and performance on Snapdragon-powered mobile devices. Data are real-time include network usage, battery power, GPU frequency load, and CPU cores’ load. Key features also include six fast-loading profiling presets, and an advanced mode to manually select data points and save for analysis.

The Advanced Mode allows profiling a single app or device, offline data analysis, and increasing of data collection interval. This special mode also allows longer profiling sessions, displaying two data point in one overlay, and viewing of profile data.

All up this should enable developers to come up with more Snapdragon friendly apps.

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Apple Pay Headed To Canada

Apple Inc is gearing up to launch its electronic payments service in Canada in November, the first international expansion of Apple Pay, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The iPhone maker is in talks with Canada’s six biggest banks, Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank , Bank of Nova Scotia, Bank of Montreal, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and National Bank of Canada, the people told the Journal.

The banks are open to an agreement, but are not happy with Apple’s fee proposals and are worried about security vulnerabilities like the ones that U.S. banks experienced, the Journal said, citing the people.

It was still unclear if all six Canadian banks would launch Apple Pay at the same time, the Journal said.

Apple launched the service, a mobile payment app that allows consumers to buy things by holding their iPhone6 and 6 Plus devices up to a reader, in the United States in October.

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RadioShack Plans To Sell Customer Data

RadioShack plans to keep moving forward with its plan to sell its customer data, despite opposition from a number of states.

The company has asked a bankruptcy court for approval for a second auction of its assets, which includes the consumer data.

The state of Texas, which is leading the action by the states, opposed the sale of personally identifiable information (PII), citing the online and in-store privacy policies of the bankrupt consumer electronics retailer.

The state claimed that it found from a RadioShack deposition that the personal information of 117 million customers could be involved. But it learned later from testimony in court that the number of customer files offered for sale might be reduced to around 67 million.

In the first round of the sale, RadioShack sold about 1,700 stores to hedge fund Standard General, which entered into an agreement to set up 1,435 of these as co-branded stores with wireless operator Sprint. Some other assets were also sold in the auction.

The sale of customer data, including PII, was withdrawn from the previous auction, though RadioShack did not rule out that it could be put up for sale at a later date.

The case could have privacy implications for the tech industry as it could set a precedent, for example, for large Internet companies holding consumer data, if they happen to go bankrupt.

Texas has asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware for a case management order to ensure that in any motion for sale of the PII, RadioShack should be required to provide information on the kind of personal data that is up for sale and the number of customers that will be affected.

On Monday, Texas asked the court that its motion be heard ahead of RadioShack’s motion for approval to auction more assets.

The court had ordered in March the appointment of a consumer privacy ombudsman in connection with the potential sale of the consumer data including PII. RadioShack said in a filing Friday that it intends to continue working with the ombudsman and the states with regard to any potential sale of PII, but did not provide details.

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RedHat And Canonical Discuss Linux 4.0

Red Hat has been telling everyone  its plans to integrate the latest Linux 4.0 kernel into its products.

In a statement, a spokesman told us, “Red Hat’s upstream community projects will begin working with 4.0 almost immediately; in fact, Fedora 22 Alpha was based on the RC1 version of the 4.0 kernel.

“From a productization perspective, we will keep an eye on these integration efforts for possible inclusion into Red Hat’s enterprise portfolio.

“As with all of our enterprise-grade solutions, we provide stable, secure and hardened features, including the Linux kernel, to our customers – once we are certain that the next iterations of the Linux kernel, be it 4.0 or later, has the features and maturity that our customer base requires, we will begin packaging it into our enterprise portfolio with the intention of supporting it for 10 years, as we do with all of our products.”

Meanwhile, Canonical Head Honcho Mark Shuttleworth has confirmed that Linux Kernel 4.0 should be making its debut in Ubuntu products before the end of the year.

In an earlier note to The INQUIRER, Shuttleworth confirmed that the newly released kernel’s integration was “likely to be in this October release.”

The news follows the release of version 4.0 of the Linux kernel in a flurry of what T S Eliot would describe as “not with a bang but a whimper”.

Writing on the Linux Kernel Mailing List on Sunday afternoon, Linux overlord Linus Torvalds explained that the new version was being released according to schedule, rather than because of any dramatic improvements, and because of a lack of any specific reason not to.

“Linux 4.0 was a pretty small release in linux-next and in final size, although obviously ‘small’ is relative. It’s still over 10,000 non-merge commits. But we’ve definitely had bigger releases (and judging by linux-next v4.1 is going to be one of the bigger ones),” he said.

“Feature-wise, 4.0 doesn’t have all that much special. Much has been made of the new kernel patching infrastructure, but realistically that wasn’t the only reason for the version number change. We’ve had much bigger changes in other versions. So this is very much a ‘solid code progress’ release.”

Come to think of it, it is very unlikely that T S Eliot would ever have written about Linux kernels, but that’s not the point.

Torvalds, meanwhile, explained that he is happier with releasing to a schedule rather than because of any specific feature-related reason, although he does note that there have been four billion code commits, and Linux 3.0 was released after the two billion mark, so there’s a nice symmetry there.

In fact, back in 2011 the version numbering of the Linux kernel was a matter of some debate, and Torvalds’ lacklustre announcement seems to be pre-empting more of the same.

In a subsequent post Torvalds jokes, “the strongest argument for some people advocating 4.0 seems to have been a wish to see 4.1.15 – because ‘that was the version of Linux Skynet used for the T-800 Terminator.’”

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