Ubuntu Edge

Ubuntu Edge

The Ubuntu Edge is a "high concept" smartphone announced by Canonical Ltd. on 22 July 2013.The Ubuntu Edge is the next generation of personal computing: smartphone and desktop PC in one state-of-the-art device. The Edge is designed as a hybrid device, which will function as a high-end smartphone (with either Ubuntu Touch or Android), or—when used with a monitor, keyboard and mouse—be able to operate as a conventional desktop PC running Ubuntu.The Ubuntu Edge will also support dual boot, and will run along with Android.

What is Ubuntu edge

The Ubuntu Edge project aims to provide a low-volume, high-technology platform.A pioneering project that accelerates the adoption of new technologies and drives them down into the mainstream.

This beautifully crafted smartphone is a proving ground for the most advanced mobile technologies on the horizon, a showpiece for true mobile innovation. And at the heart of it all is convergence: connect to any monitor and this Ubuntu phone transforms into an Ubuntu PC, with a fully integrated desktop OS and shared access to all files.

The Ubuntu Edge is our very own superphone, a catalyst to drive the next generation of personal computing.

The Hardware

Edge will be powered by a multi-core processor and a 4GB RAM.The internal storage will be 128GB. A micro-SIM slot will be available. 8 MP rear camera and 2 MP front camera will be also available. The screen will be a 4.5" sapphire crystal display with 1280 x 720 HD resolution. On the connectivity side Edge will have Dual-LTE, dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4 and NFC. GPS, accelerometer, gyro, proximity sensor, compass, barometer etc will enpower from the input side. It'll have Stereo speakers with HD audio and allows user for dual microphone recording and active noise cancellation. Edge will have a 11-pin connector providing simultaneous MHL and USB OTG. A 3.5mm jack and a silicon-anode Li-Ion battery will also empower the device.

The Software

Next-generation hardware deserves innovative software. The Ubuntu Edge will dual-boot both the Ubuntu phone OS and Android, and convert into a fully integrated Ubuntu desktop PC.Ubuntu mobile is designed with the interface to create a beautiful home screen that’s free from the usual clutter. You can navigate by swiping over an edge of the screen: open your favourite apps on the left edge,switch instantly between open apps from the right, and use the system and app toolbars at the top and bottom respectively.

Specialist data artists have designed Ubuntu’s welcome screen, with graphics that evolve over time to reflect your use of the phone. We’ve reinvented the inbox so you can read and respond to texts, emails and social media posts in an instant.

From mobile... to desktop. Yes, it’s the full Ubuntu desktop OS used by millions on a daily basis -- and it runs directly from the phone, so you’ll be able to move seamlessly from one environment to the other with no file syncing or transfers required. The core OS and applications are fully integrated with their smartphone equivalents, so you can even make and receive calls from the desktop while you work. Finally, you can also boot the phone into Android.

On the software side, it will boot Ubuntu Touch along with Android. The Android part will also ship the Ubuntu for Android technology and according to the campaign Ubuntu Edge will be the first phone to dual-boot between different operating systems,it will also be able to be used as a fully integrated Ubuntu desktop PC when docked with a monitor. In physical dimensions, the device will measure at 64 x 9 x 124 mm.

PROJECT LOON-Balloon Powered Internet

What is Project Loon ?

Project Loon is a study and development project being developed by Google with the mission of providing Internet access to rural and remote areas.

Technology

The balloons will drift through the stratosphere—which is about twice as high as commercial planes fly—to deliver 3G service to off-the-grid areas. They are carried around the Earth by winds and they can be steered by rising or descending to an altitude with winds moving in the desired direction. People connect to the balloon network using a special Internet antenna attached to their building. The signal bounces from balloon to balloon, then to the global Internet back on Earth.

Google launched 30 balloons so far around Canterbury, New Zealand, as part of an effort to build a global ring of balloon-borne Internet relay points in the stratosphere. Depending on the success of the project, Google had decided to carry Project Loon to different nations and looks like India might be one of the lucky ones.

A decade ago, the European Union founded the CAPANINA project to deliver broadband from high-altitude platforms in the stratosphere. Back in 2005, it successfully produced broadband wireless access at distances of up to 37 miles (60 kilometers) from a free-floating balloon in the stratosphere over northern Sweden.

Tim Tozer, an expert on wireless, satellite, and HAP communications at the University of York in Great Britain, was part of that effort. He spoke with National Geographic about the current state of the science—and the promising future beyond Google's balloons.

                                                

HOW LOON WORKS

Project Loon balloons travel around 20 km above the Earth’s surface in the stratosphere. Winds in the stratosphere are generally steady and slow-moving at between 5 and 20 mph, and each layer of wind varies in direction and magnitude. Project Loon uses software algorithms to determine where its balloons need to go, then moves each one into a layer of wind blowing in the right direction. By moving with the wind, the balloons can be arranged to form one large communications network.Project Loon is able to take advantage of the steady stratospheric winds, and remain well above weather events, wildlife and airplanes.    
                                                   

 

HOW IS LOON DESIGNED

The balloon envelope is the name for the inflatable part of the balloon. The balloons are made of polyethylene plastic. They are approximately 15 meters in diameter and the entire apparatus is about 12 meters tall. Each balloon is powered via solar panels. They are specially constructed for use in superpressure balloons, which are longer-lasting than weather balloons because they can withstand higher pressure from the air inside when the balloons reach float altitude. A parachute attached to the top of the envelope allows for a controlled descent and landing whenever a balloon is ready to be taken out of service.

The balloons will float along the winds in the stratosphere, approximately 20km above the surface. At such a distance, they cannot be seen with the naked eye. Each balloon is equipped with transceivers to communicate with nearby balloons and with a regional ground station and the specialized antenna Google developed to receive the signal. The balloons provide the equivalent of 3G service using the 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz ISM bands in an area that’s roughly 40 kilometers in diameter. They also communicate with each other to maintain the positioning necessary to form a functioning network.The company adds that the balloons are designed to stay aloft for “100+ days.”

While the project is still in pilot phase and the chances of it coming to India are still isolated, it would definitely be favourable to most Indians. India being a developing nation still needs to reach out to rural areas and educate them about the internet. With Project Loon, rural areas will not just get internet but can even learn more about surfing.

                                                   

NEW FEATURES IN SQL SERVER 2014 !

SQL Server 2014

Microsoft announced SQL Server 2014 at this year’s TechEd 2013 conference in New Orleans. Quentin Clark, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for SQL Server, said that Microsoft is getting ready for the upcoming SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 1, on June 25, 2013 release. Some of the most important new features in SQL Server 2014 include the following :

1.  Hekaton-In-Memory OLTP Engine

The new In-Memory OLTP Engine (formerly code-named Hekaton) will provide OLTP performance improvements by moving selected tables into memory. The In-memory OTLP Engine works with commodity hardware and won’t require any application code changes. A built-in wizard will help you to choose which tables go in memory and select the stored procedures that will be compiled into machine code for high performance execution. Another advantage of Hekaton is that individual rows are never locked even when they are being written into a table. The RDMS writes the updated row to a new location and also maintains a pointer to this location in the old row. This technique is known as ‘Optimistic Concurrency’.

2.  Windows Azure Integrated Backup

The new backup option is integrated into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). It lets you back up a SQL Server database to Windows Azure. You can also use it to quickly restore database backups to an Azure VM.

3.   xVelocity – Column-store indexes feature of SQL Server 2014

This feature allows continuous loading of data, speeds up query execution by storing columns in an effective way, allows compression of data in the index, enables DBAs to load and delete data in existing column-store indexes, and so on.

4.  Improved Scalability

SQL Server 2014 will have the ability to scale up to 640 logical processors and 4TB of memory in a physical environment. It can scale to 64 virtual processors and 1TB of memory when running in a virtual machine (VM). New buffer pool enhancements increase performance by extending SQL Server’s in-memory buffer pool to SSDs for faster paging.

5.  SQL Server AlwaysOn

AlwaysOn Availability Groups have also been integrated with Azure, providing AlwaysOn capabilities in the cloud. AlwaysOn Azure integration enables you to create asynchronous Availability Group replicas in Azure for disaster recovery.

Like the new Azure backup feature, the Azure AlwaysOn Availability options are completely integrated into SSMS. Other enhancements to AlwaysOn Availability Groups include the ability to have up to eight replicas—up from four in SQL Server 2012.

6.  Business Intelligence and Data Visualization Enhancements

SQL Server 2014 gives you a  new data visualization tool, code-named Data Explorer. Data Explorer enables data analysis in Microsoft Excel, and its can work with a wide variety of sources including relational, structured, and semi-structured data such as OData, Hadoop, and the Azure Marketplace.

The new feature, code-named GEOFlow, will able to provide visual data mapping in Excel. Other BI enhancements include the ability for Power View to work against multidimensional cube data in addition to tabular data models.

7.  Cache frequently used data on Solid State Disks (SSDs)

SQL Server 2014 can cache active and frequently used data in SSD and store others on disks. SSDs come to your help if you are stuck with bigger active data that you cannot fit in memory.

8.  Improved Integration with Windows Server 2012

SQL Server 2014 will also provide support for Windows Server 2012’s new Storage Spaces feature. Storage Spaces enables you to create pools of tiered storage that can improve application availability and performance. SQL Server 2014’s Resource Governor can take advantage of Windows Server 2012’s automated storage tiering. Plus, you can use the Resource Governor to manage and limit application IO utilization.

MOZILLA TO DEVELOP OS BASED ON ANDROID

Mozilla, who are popular for their successful internet browser, are entering the mobile race, developing a new web-centric OS that will directly compete with Google, Apple and Microsoft.

           If  Mozilla rings any bells it's because they're the tech boffins who put together Internet Explorer, the browser that Windows defaults to. Mozilla took the leviathan computing company on with its Firefox browser, and today it stands as the second most popular browser worldwide.Now the company who was underdog to Microsoft looks to be playing the same role, but this time against internet tycoon Google.

             Mozilla Announced on the discussion forum that they have begun coding for phones and tablets. The Mobile operating system will draw on Android code, with Mozilla writing as much fresh code as possible. The hybrid-like operating system will be named Boot To Gecko. It is an unusual name for an OS, until you remember Gecko is the rendering engine employed by the Firefox browser that interprets web page coding and displays it in a screen-friendly format, a homage to its origins.

              Even though Android coding will form the operating system's foundations, Mozilla hope to add a much more open wrapper around it than Google currently do, making it more versatile as an operating system.Its shared foundations will also make Boot To Gecko compatible with the same phones as Android, competing as a direct alternative to Google.Often, when you select a link from an application native to the Android or iOS market, the operating system will have to open a new webpage in the browser. Boot To Gecko aims to limit this by making applications much more web-centric.If the venture proves successful, Mozilla will be waging war against industry giants, with Google, Apple and Microsoft dominating many facets of the technological world. 

                

                Mozilla have acknowledged the project is in infancy and have chosen to make the development public in hope it will attract talented enthusiast coders who will contribute to the Boot To Gecko's cause.According to their project team, all of the code development will be completed and shared with the public as soon as it is written.

Researcher Andreas Gal, who announced the development, admits the company has set a high target, but wants to do it "the way we think open source should be done.Gal says his ultimate goal is to break "the strong hold of proprietary technologies over the mobile device world," implicitly referring to the practices of Apple, Windows Phone and Google.

MOBILE CLOUD COMPUTING-The World On A Cloud

                      The cloud has been nothing short of a revolution in the computing world.if you thought that cloud computing was the next big thing, it’s time to wake up!

Cloud computing has evolved at such an alarming pace that it has gone mobile! It’s time to usher in a new kind of cloud computing- the Mobile Cloud Computing.

What is Mobile Cloud Computing?

Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is a blend of mobile computing and cloud computing. It can be thought of as a further development of mobile computing and an extension of cloud computing.

MCC provides cloud based services to users through Internet and mobile devices. In MCC, the mobile device based computing, data storage and information processing has been taken up by the ‘cloud’ and this happens entirely outside the mobile device.

Why Mobile Cloud Computing?

Mobile devices have a wide range of constraints – from weight, size, ergonomics, battery life to heat dissipation from the mobile processors, etc. These constraints take a toll on the mobile hardware resources such as processing speed, memory size and storage capacity. Most of the applications in today’s mobile devices are resource-intensive and in most cases, exceeds the capabilities of the device’s performance.  In such a scenario, mobile computing can effectively harness the power of cloud computing providing virtually limitless processing power and storage capabilities with access to up-to-date databases.

Developers see this as an opportunity to make cloud computing a platform for mobile application development. By bringing up the computing and data processing phases into the ‘cloud’, the capability requirement of mobile devices can be reduced drastically. More and more mobile devices (including low-cost and non-smartphone devices) will be able to access the cloud, thus providing greater quality services to a larger span of mobile subscribers.

Working

Working on the backdrop of the cloud, MCC enables users to send service requests to the cloud through a web browser. The cloud has components that allocates the needed resources for the request and establishes the connection. Once this is done, monitoring and processing functionalities will kick in, ensuring quality of service until the connection is completed.

Advantages of MCC

The advantages provided by cloud computing apply to MCC as well. Developers and application managers need to have only a single instance of the application running on the cloud. This greatly eliminates the problems associated with different versions of the same program and makes the work of the developer far easier.

All users use the same version of the application and new updates can be made to the application without the user having to download the update.

The biggest plus is that application developers can run the same app in different platforms such as iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows.  As the mobile cloud provides computing and the storage, the need to develop and maintain multiple apps is eliminated.

Another area where MCC has been a real boon is in the social media market. MCC offers better integration with cloud based contents in social media and other sharing platforms. Apps having multiple user features can really help users to access data simultaneously.

The Future

With the advent of new technologies like HTML5 , CSS3, and cloudlets, there is no doubt that the cloud is going to play a very huge role in future application developments. Platform specific app development is going to be a thing of the past.

Mobile applications can greatly leverage on the cloud and provide a more reliable, scalable, and easy to use interface for the user.  Enterprises are sure to ride on this new wave as workflows become more mobile and fresh revenue streams start opening up.

Mobile Application Management (MAM)

Mobile Application Management 

MAM-the new tool set in Mobile Management              

           

                             A recent study says that the enterprise mobility market will hit by 2020.While many businesses are putting the finishing touches on their Mobile Device Management (MDM) strategy, others are already taking the next steps, investing in mobile applications, either buying them off the shelf or customizing them.

This is where Mobile Application Management (MAM) comes in.

                       MAM  is the delivery and administration of enterprise software to end users on their mobile device that may or may not be personal. Unlike mobile device managers (MDMs), which focus on device activation, enrollment and provisioning,  MAM’s focus is on delivering software, licensing, security, usage policy, access/user authentication, configuration, updates, maintenance, reporting and tracking, rollbacks and application refresh/retirement. If this sounds familiar, it is because enterprises have been doing this for ages. Except they have been doing it in a desktop environment. They now need to do the same for mobile devices.

                       Any organization’s BYOD(bring your own device) strategy should allow for enterprise applications to be used without compromising its implemented security policies. The goal is for an employee to be able to use both personal and enterprise applications on the same device, without concerns over privacy violations by their employer. A Mobile Application Management solution should allow enterprise IT policies to be enforced on enterprise applications – and only on enterprise applications – and ultimately reduce the cost of ownership for an enterprise.

                      I believe that MAM, or specifically, Mobile Application Portfolio Management(MAPM) is going to be as big and as important in 2013 as MDM was in 2012.MAM helps to ensure that enterprise applications are delivered in a secure fashion with adequate compliance controls to meet the mobile lifestyles of end users.

GOOGLE "X"

                                     Google get underway as a web search engine company and  had stunning growth in both revenue and business, ultimately turning into the technology monster we know today. Some of their initiatives like search engine, mail services, maps and navigation are frequently used by people across the world. 

THE "X" FACTOR

                                     Google X comprises of a group of people working on radical and sci-fi technologies aimed at solving some of the challenging issues the world is facing now. Though much of the projects are still in their early stages, few have started their prototype testing (Google Glass project). The ambitious experiments carried out at the Google X facility, require generous capitals, willingness to take apart and redesign things and above all, faith in great quantity.

                                     The Google X secret research lab is said to be located somewhere in San Francisco. The lab is known to support advanced robotics experiments as well as new age conceptual experiments. The ultimate goal of all robotics related studies are a future towards a “i-Robot” like scenario, where machines will be able to work independently without supervision.

DREAM ON AIR

                              The Google X team has revealed a plan to send Internet beaming helium balloons to the edge of space. The technology giant released up to 30 balloons carrying antennae linked to ground stations, an ambitious plan aimed at providing Internet access to around two-thirds of the global population, currently without web access.

                              The first of the series test balloons were released near Christ Church in New Zealand around the 3rd week of June 2013 with around 50 volunteer households already getting connected to the Internet through their home PCs. The ambitious “Project Loon” termed initiative includes ground stations connected to local Internet infrastructure beaming signals to a network of solar powered balloons placed near the stratosphere. Signals beamed back from the balloons (using mounted transmitter) will be caught by the consumer household antennae. Google X has reported plans to extend the project to more regions including Australia, South Africa and Argentina.


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