TechWiseTV 117: The Cisco Cloud Intelligent Network

As a fundamental and critical part of a successful cloud implementation, the network is poised for incredible leaps of intelligence. An intelligent network endows the WAN with the efficiency of cloud and and the confidence of a private network. 

Using Cariden MATE Design

How to convert a Cariden MATE Design topology, deploy it to Junosphere, and import it into a Junosphere topology using a plan file from an existing Cariden MATE Design user

A Photo Service That Understands the Contents of Your Images

Everpix organizes photos after analyzing them with software that can detect things such as animals, outdoor scenes, and people.

Browsing digital photos usually means scrolling through them chronologically, unless they have been sorted into folders and collections. This week a startup company called Everpix began offering an alternative: a system that uses machine vision software to analyze each photo for its content so that photos can be browsed using categories such as “city,” “animals,” “people,” and “nature.”

The category-based view, called Explore, is now a feature of the company’s iPad and iPhone apps. It joins an existing feature of those apps and the company’s website that provides a way to browse the “highlights” from a collection of photos in a particular year. Those highlights are compiled into a scrollable collage by software that looks for signals suggesting that a photo is high-quality and interesting.

Thanks in part to the ubiquity of smartphone cameras, many people’s digital photo collections now contain thousands of images. At that size, they are becoming unmanageable with conventional tools such as Apple’s iPhoto, says Pierre-Oliver Latour, CEO and cofounder of Everpix, which is based in San Francisco. “We’re building something to solve this big problem that is coming where people are going to have too many photos and they begin to miss out on them and neglect them,” he says.

Many people have already reached that point, says Latour. Since launching quietly in 2011, Everpix has attracted tens of thousands of users to its service, which until this week cost at least $49 a year. The average new user uploads more than 10,000 photos, from sources including Windows and Apple PCs, mobile devices, and Facebook accounts, says Latour. A new free tier of the service, launched this week, offers a user access to just the last 12 months’ worth of photos; paying $49 a year allows access to an unlimited number.

Most photo organizing software relies on time stamps and user-created categories and folders, although some, such as Apple’s iPhoto, Google’s Picasa, and Facebook, use facial recognition as a way to find photos of particular people.

Everpix does not use facial recognition, but in a demonstration at the company’s offices, Latour and cofounders Kevin Quennesson and Wayne Fan showed evidence that their software understands much more than the categories its software now exposes to users. The software can identify when an uploaded image contains plants, babies, animals, water, or snow, for example. A database of word meanings has been integrated into the system so it can understand other ways to refer to the label it’s applied to a photo.

The image analysis software was trained by having many thousands of images labelled by crowdsourced workers, and the new Explore feature correctly categorises photos most of the time. When it doesn’t, a user can provide feedback to help Everpix train its software further.

Latour says future features will take advantage of the deeper understanding his company’s technology can mine from photos. During the demonstration, a search interface developed for internal research purposes was able to accurately find photos in response to queries such as “city photos with crowds from April 2012” and “city photos with people that are close to the camera.” Latour wouldn’t say whether that same interface would later appear in the Everpix website or apps.

A Nanofabrication Technique Doubles Hard Drive Capacity

Laboratory advance shows that nano-imprinting could help the hard drive industry meet its long-term goals for data storage capacity.

Researchers at HGST, a major manufacturer of hard disk drives, have shown that an emerging fabrication technology called nano-imprinting could be used to double the data storage capacity of today’s hard disks. They say the patent-pending work, done in collaboration with a company called Molecular Imprints, could lead to a cost-effective manufacturing process by the end of the decade.

Hard disk drives store data in magnetic material on the surface of a spinning disk. During production, this material is deposited as a thin film. Information is then written to the disk by changing the magnetic orientation of distinct individual units of the material, known as “grains.” A group of grains together make up a region that can store a single bit. Since the 1950s, when the technology was invented, hard disk manufacturers have continually found ways to keep increasing data storage capacity by reducing the area required to store a bit, most recently by using fewer and fewer clustered grains for each.

Now the industry is running up against limits to this strategy, partly because the particles’ magnetism becomes less stable when they are very small, a phenomenon known as superparamagnetism. “If I take a permanent magnet and I make it small enough, it becomes nonmagnetic,” explains Currie Munce, vice president of HGST Research.

here are also physical limits how small the recording regions can be. “If you continue to try to push these magnetized areas closer and closer together, they finally reach a point where they can feel their neighbors to such an extent that they have a tendency to flip over,” explains Grant Willson, a materials science professor at the University of Texas at Austin. That causes data loss. Willson is a cofounder of Molecular Imprints, although he was not involved in this research.

Researchers have known for years that patterning a disk with physically isolated, nanoscopic magnetic dots makes it possible to pack in more information than applying the material as a continuous film. The challenge has been developing an economical way to manufacture disks with the precise nanoscopic patterns in the circular tracks needed for the recording head to do its work.

The HGST researchers announced at last month’s SPIE advanced lithography meeting that they had used their proprietary nano-imprinting process to pattern a disk substrate with 10-nanometer-wide dots, closely packed and in circular tracks. They showed that a recording head can read and write information from these dots, and they reported that their process could print 1.2 trillion “magnetic islands” per square inch—enough to store about a terabyte on a 2.5-inch disk, which is double the capacity of today’s devices. (The most spacious drive currently sold by HGST can store four terabytes of data.) Since the dots can be made even smaller, the method would in theory allow for several more generations of capacity gains.

Nano-imprinting, a technique that first emerged in the mid-1990s, consists of applying a soft material to a surface and then stamping it with a hard material covered with specific patterns. The resulting imprints then guide modification to the surface, such as etching or deposition of additional material. The soft material is then removed, leaving only the new designs on the original surface. The magnetic recording and semiconductor industries both view the technique as a promising solution to the puzzle of how to reliably manufacture structures and patterns smaller than about 20 or 30 nanometers.

To design their stamp, the HGST researchers used molecules called block copolymers, which can be engineered to line up in repeating patterns on a treated surface—a technique called “directed self-assembly.” “We think we can implement [the process] in manufacturing,” says Munce.

HGST’s engineers will also focus on making the dots as small as physically possible (See “Fabrication Trick Offers Fivefold Leap in Hard Drive Capacity”). Munce says around 15 or 20 years from now they will run up against another size limit. By then, he says, provided several further refinements to the technology, “I may have bought myself another factor of 20 in capacity gains.”

The innovation effiency index

Gadget Gets Under the Hood to Bring Analytics to Driving

A $70 device will tell you how efficiently you’re driving, and can even call 911 for help in the event of an accident.

You probably have a rough idea of how much you spend on gas each week, but chances are you don’t calculate the cost of each trip down to the penny. Unless you’re Ljuba Miljkovic, that is, who knows that in a recent week he spent $7.50 to drive over 47 miles.

Miljkovic is a cofounder of Automatic, an automotive tech startup that offers a small gadget that connects to your car’s onboard computer and wirelessly transmits the data it collects to your smartphone. This can reveal how efficiently you’re driving, how much individual trips are costing you, and tips for solving potential engine troubles. It can also determine where you parked your car and, if its built-in accelerometer senses you’ve been in an accident, call 911 for help.

The device combines two burgeoning trends—the “Internet of things,” where traditionally offline gadgets are connected to the Internet to amplify their usefulness (see “50 Disruptive Companies 2013: Nest’s Smarter Home”), and the mining of data that’s collected by our devices for meaning (see “Every Step You Take, Tracked Automatically”). By putting these two together, the company thinks it can get users to conserve gas and spend less—and make a profit itself while doing so.

“Your car is a black box today. You don’t know anything about it,” cofounder Thejo Kote says. “Using the information that is already there, and just presenting it in a useful way to people can have a really big impact on behavior and hopefully help people save money.”

Automatic grew out of research conducted by Kote and another of the company’s cofounders, Jerry Jariyasunant, while both were in graduate school in the systems engineering department of the University of California, Berkeley. Specifically, it blossomed from the realization that most people don’t really know anything about their cars, or about how much it really costs to drive, Kote says.

Automatic’s gadget plugs into the diagnostic port of your car—an outlet below the steering wheel of every car sold since 1997 that connects to the vehicle’s onboard computer and is used mainly by car mechanics for identifying and solving problems. The device will be available for people to preorder starting Tuesday, for $70, and will start shipping in May.

Phil Magney, who leads automotive electronics analysis at market researcher IHS, says the market for products that attach to your car’s diagnostic port and transmit data to your smartphone is growing. He adds that Automatic’s emergency-calling feature is a shrewd addition, giving it the ability to compete against telematics companies like OnStar.

The first step is to plug the device in and pair it with an Automatic app on your phone. When you start your car, the device will begin reading data—such as your speed—and send it to your smartphone via Bluetooth. That data is uploaded to Automatic’s servers for processing, and then sent back to the app in more user-friendly formats such as a driver score, on a scale of 1 to 100, that considers how often you brake hard, accelerate rapidly, and drive over 70 miles per hour (three factors that have a large impact on fuel efficiency).

A diagnostic feature can give you advice about what may be wrong if your “check engine” light comes on, and also enables you to turn the light off. A “beta” 911-calling feature uses the device’s built-in accelerometer to detect a car crash and notify Automatic to robocall your nearest 911 center with your name, car type, and approximate location.

Since the in-car device doesn’t have GPS—a decision Miljkovic says helps keep costs down—the app occasionally uses the phone’s GPS to reconstruct trips, determine where you parked, and estimate how much trips cost (the 1.4-mile trip to my office costs 33 cents, Miljkovic says). When you stop driving, the app automatically logs your location. And the device can tell when you add gas to the car, and which gas station you stopped at.

Initially, the company will offer only an iPhone app, since the two latest iPhones support low-power Bluetooth, but Kote says Automatic plans to release an Android version in the fall.

Sven Beiker, executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University, says that while there are similar products on the market and in development aimed at “green” driving, Automatic’s solution is inexpensive and looks uncomplicated to use, which could help it catch on. “Very often if just the interface is appealing and easy to use, people will start changing their behavior,” he says.

Here’s Where They Make China’s Cheap Android Smartphones

Apple and Samsung, beware. Practically anyone can make a smartphone these days.

A little over a year ago, 38-year-old entrepreneur Liang Liwan wasn’t making smartphones at all. This year, he expects to build 10 million of them.

Liang’s company, Xunrui Communications, buys smartphone components and then feeds them to several small factories around Shenzhen, in southern China. There, deft-fingered workers assemble the parts into basic smartphones that retail for as little as $65.

Manufacturers built about 700 million smartphones last year. But the market has taken on a barbell shape. On one side are familiar names like Apple and Samsung, selling pricey phones for $300 to $600; on the other, several hundred lesser-known Chinese brands supplied by a thousand or more small factories.

The change began in 2011, when computer-chip makers began selling off-the-shelf chipsets—the set of processors that are the brains of a touch-screen phone. Those, plus Google’s free Android operating system, made smartphones much easier to produce.

The flood of inexpensive devices could hurt struggling phone makers like Nokia and might also force Samsung and Apple to offer cheaper models. “They have reached their peak,” Liang said during an interview near his office in Shenzhen, which has become a hub for electronics makers. “In [manufacturing] technique we are close to the same level. Then the only difference will be the cost and the brand.”

Larger Chinese companies, like Lenovo and Huawei, have also swarmed into China’s market with midrange phones that cost closer to $200. Lenovo captured 12 percent of China’s market last year.

Cheap phones: Workers assemble $65 smartphones at Guo Wei Global Electronics, one of hundreds of small Chinese factories now building mobile computers.

Liang’s phones are the ultracheap kind. He builds them at several Shenzhen factories, like Shenzhen Guo Wei Global Electronics, a nondescript building that opened in 1991 as a manufacturer of fixed-line phones and audio equipment. At Guo Wei, young Xunrui engineers lounge about, smoking cigarettes and drinking warm Coca-Cola while playing games on various brands of laptops.

One floor up, past a metal detector and an enclosure where high-pressured air blows dust and other impurities off workers’ blue smocks, are the production lines—five of them, each with 35 young workers able to solder together and box up 3,000 smartphones a day.

Guo Wei has had to make some investments to get into the smartphone game, including importing new solder inspection equipment from Korea. One production line costs around $1.6 million to set up, according to Li Li, a production manager at the factory who showed off the equipment.

“The techniques are very complicated compared to older phones,” says Li, who joined the factory 17 years ago to work in a department that repaired fixed-line telephones.

But the real reason for the switchover to smartphones was that last year large chip makers, including the Taiwan-based MediaTek and Spreadtrum, started offering “turn-key” systems: phone designs plus a set of chips with Android and other software preloaded. Spreadtrum says it may sell 100 million units this year.

Each chipset costs $5 to $10, depending on the size of a phone’s screen and other features. In total, Liang says, his cost to make a smartphone is about $40. He says he can manufacture as many as 30,000 smartphones a day for brands such as Konka Mobile and for telecom operators like China Unicom.

In the United States, a smartphone’s high cost is generally masked by wireless companies, which discount them steeply if consumers agree to a contract. In China that happens as well. Liang says his phones retail for about $65 or $70 but can cost only $35 with a contract.

That is making China, now the world’s largest smartphone market, a challenging place for foreign firms to compete. Apple accounts for 38 percent of U.S. smartphone sales, but its share in China is 11 percent and falling. Google has even bigger problems making money. Even though the devices use Android, they often don’t come with Google’s apps and search tool installed (see “Android Takes Off in China, But Google Has Little to Show for It”).

Liang says his aim is to make smartphones that are affordable, even if they aren’t yet as good as an iPhone. That means the camera and LCD screen might not be the best, and the battery life could be shorter. “I always use this word ‘acceptable,’” he says. “A lot of users only need an acceptable product. They don’t need a perfect product.”

What’s certain, Liang says, is that the quality of the phones his factories produce will rise. “There is no profit at the bottom,” he says. “Everyone is trying to improve their techniques.” 

Su Dongxia assisted with interpreting and research.

Why We Need More Solar Companies to Fail

Solar manufacturers like Suntech are struggling. Hundreds need to die for the industry to recover.

Suntech, a Chinese company that as recently as 2011 was the world’s largest producer of solar panels, is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. It’s running low on cash, owes bond investors half a billion dollars (which it failed to pay Friday), and is saddled with payments on billions of dollars in loans as it struggles to make money in a market flooded with its product.

If Suntech fails and shuts down its factories, that might not be a bad thing. Some industry experts say that hundreds of solar companies need to fail to help bring the supply of solar panels back in line with demand. That would slow the fall in prices and, as demand recovers, allow companies to justify buying new equipment and introducing the innovations that will ultimately be needed for solar power to compete with fossil fuels.

But there’s a good chance that Suntech, and many other companies in China, will be bailed out by local governments, which would delay the much-needed reduction in production capacity. Worldwide, solar companies have the capacity to manufacture between 60 and 70 gigawatts’ worth of solar panels a year, but demand in 2013 is only expected to be about 30 gigawatts.

The worldwide glut of solar panels—which has lasted nearly two years—is partly the result of big government-backed investments in factories in China, where two-thirds of solar panel production capacity is located. The surplus has been good news for consumers and installers, because it’s helped drive a precipitous drop in solar panel prices. They’ve dropped 60 percent since the beginning of 2011, according to GTM Research. Solar panels sold for $4 per watt eight years ago. Now it’s common to buy them at 78 cents per watt, says Jenny Chase, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

But the rapid decline in prices has been hard for solar manufacturers. As prices have dropped, they have been able to lower costs because the price of materials has been falling and they’ve made incremental imprvements to existing manufacturing equipment. But in many cases costs haven’t fallen fast enough for companies to keep up with the falling prices for their panels, eliminating profits and making it difficult to invest in the new equipment needed to keep reducing costs.

Although the Chinese government supported the rapid growth in solar manufacturing capacity, it now says the current situation is unsustainable and recommends allowing the least competitive companies to fail. “Beijing knows that you cannot have 500 module makers in China, which is what you currently have,” Chase says. The story is not necessarily the same for local governments, which want to keep companies open to avoid losing thousands of jobs.

The situation has delayed the commercialization of advanced technology that would have required new manufacturing equipment. For example, Suntech has been promising for years to scale up production of its Pluto solar cells, which are based on designs from the University of New South Wales that set new records for efficiency and can generate significantly more electricity than conventional ones (see “The Chinese Solar Machine”). But that technology has been put on hold.

Clues Suggest Malware Is Moving from PCs to Mobile Devices

Researchers report signs that moneymaking malware common on PCs is being adapted to mobile phones and tablets.
The fact that smartphones and tablets don’t need antivirus software or regular software updates is a major reason for their popularity. That could soon change, however, as security companies report evidence that criminals are getting close to finding efficient and profitable ways to compromise many mobile devices at a time.

If that happens, many more people would be exposed to mobile malware, and Apple and Google could be forced to regularly push out security updates for their mobile operating systems just as Microsoft does for Windows.

Smartphones and tablets don’t support the kind of criminal ecosystem associated with desktop and laptop computers. With PCs, people make money by using malicious Web pages and weaknesses in browsers and other software to install malware that steals login details or sends spam.

Criminals haven’t yet figured out a reliable business model for mobile, says Chris Astacio, a researcher at security company Websense. So far, attacks on mobile devices have been limited by the need to distribute malicious apps through mobile app stores, where Apple and Google take measures to screen out malware and quickly remove anything that does slip through.

Astacio believes that attackers will soon deliver mobile malware through Web pages instead, essentially the same approach that drives most infections on conventional computers. In a presentation last week at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, he reported evidence that the software currently causing most infections on laptops and desktops—according to figures from both Websense and another security company, AVG—could soon target mobile devices, too.

That software is Blackhole, which Astacio is investigating. It’s an example of an exploit kit, a package used by criminals to install malware onto people’s computers when they visit a compromised Web page. Blackhole, found on someNBC websites last month, assesses a victim’s computer so as to covertly offer them malware they are vulnerable to. The kit is an efficient way to distribute moneymaking malware at large scale.

While reverse-engineering the latest version of Blackhole, Astacio noticed that the software now specifically looks out for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. Astacio believes Blackhole’s developers are preparing to target mobile devices with malware that can take control of a phone or tablet through its mobile browser.

“This all comes down to efficient hacking for mobile attackers—you already have the infrastructure set up for exploit kits to profile and target mobile devices,” says Astacio. “Mass mobile compromises seem to be the natural progression.”

Jaime Blasco, who leads the malware research labs at security company AlienVault, agrees with Astacio’s gloomy prediction. “The bad guys haven’t found the right way to get money from the user,” he says, “but probably it will happen.”

Mobile operating systems, particularly Android, are not particularly difficult to make malware for, says Blasco, and there are signs that criminals are working to adapt methods used to target PCs. “We have found samples of Zeus and SpyEye on mobile,” he says. Those are two common malware packages that have infected millions of desktops and laptops and that steal banking credentials. Blasco says that he believes so-called “ransomeware,” software that locks up access to data and demands payment to release it, will appear on mobile devices, too. Personal data on smartphones such as contact books, text messages, and photos could be a lucrative target.

Some malware for mobile devices has already appeared that could have a significant impact if coupled with the large-scale distribution offered by Blackhole. An Android app found recently by security company TrustGo on 100,000 phones in China spends victims’ money by abusing an SMS-based payments system. It was distributed and infected 100,000 phones in China through an alternative to Google’s app store popular in the country. Last fall it was found that some Samsung Android phones could be taken over through their browser, and other researchers have demonstrated similar attacks (see “How a Web Link Can Take Over Your Phone”).

Kevin Mahaffey, chief technology officer and cofounder of mobile security company Lookout, believes that new, profitable malware will eventually force Apple and Google into copying Microsoft’s approach to protecting its Windows operating system. In 2005, the company released a reinvented update tool for its operating system, which at the time was troubled by frequent new security problems. “Microsoft stopped everything to build Microsoft Update,” now a core part of Windows, says Mahaffey, and created a sophisticated workflow able to act quickly to patch new problems.

Apple and Google currently issue patches for their mobile operating systems only a handful of times each year, so many people can remain exposed to a vulnerability even long after a fix has been developed. Updates to Android devices are particularly rare because mobile carriers choose when to pass along Google’s latest upgrades to their users and many often choose not to.

“To constantly have to update those devices is a business decision they don’t want to have to make,” says Astacio. 

Micro 3-D Printer Creates Tiny Structures in Seconds

Faster printing could see the technology move from research labs to industry.

Nanoscribe, a spin-off from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, has developed a tabletop 3-D microprinter that can create complicated microstructures 100 times faster than is possible today. “If something took one hour to make, it now takes less than one minute,” says Michael Thiel, chief scientific officer at Nanoscribe.

While 3-D printing of toys, iPhone covers, and jewelry continues to grab headlines (see “The Difference Between Makers and Manufacturers”), much of 3-D printing’s impact could be at a much smaller scale. Micrometer-scale printing has shown promise for making medical and electronic devices.

Thiel says it should be possible to speed up his company’s microprinting technique even more in the future. Nanoscribe plans to start selling its machine in the second half of this year.

Printing microstructures with features a few hundred nanometers in size could be useful for making heart stents, microneedles for painless shots,gecko adhesives, parts for microfluidics chips, and scaffolds for growing cells and tissue. Another important application could be in the electronics industry, where patterning nanoscale features on chips currently involves slow, expensive techniques. 3-D printing would quickly and cheaply yield polymer templates that could be used to make metallic structures.

So far, 3-D microprinting has been used only in research laboratories because it’s pretty slow. In fact, many research labs around the world use Nanoscribe’s first-generation printer. The new, faster machine will also find commercial use. Thiel says numerous medical, life sciences, and nanotechnology companies are interested in the new machine. “I’m positive that with the faster throughput we get with this new tool, it might have an industrial breakthrough very soon,” he says.

The technology behind most 3-D microprinters is called two-photon polymerization. It involves focusing tiny, ultrashort pulses from a near-infrared laser on a light-sensitive material. The material polymerizes and solidifies at the focused spots. As the laser beam moves in three dimensions, it creates a 3-D object.

Today’s printers, including Nanoscribe’s present system, keep the laser beam fixed and move the light-sensitive material along three axes using mechanical stages, which slows down printing. To speed up the process, Nanoscribe’s new tool uses a tiny moving mirror to reflect the laser beam at different angles. Thiel says generating multiple light beams with a microlens array could make the process even faster.

The smallest features that can be created using the Nanoscribe printer measure about 30 nanometers, says Julia Greer, professor of materials science at the California Institute of Technology.

“This is very challenging to do, and the Nanoscribe tool excels at it,” Greer says. “I don’t think there is another company out there that is capable of such precision.” Greer’s research team uses the first-generation Nanoscribe printer to create and study materials that could be used for catalysts and to make strong, lightweight structures, but she acknowledges that its slowness is a drawback.

The Brain Activity Map

Researchers explain the goals and structure of a new brain-mapping project.

A proposed effort to map brain activity on a large scale, expected to be announced by the White House later this month, could help neuroscientists understand the origins of cognition, perception, and other phenomena. These brain activities haven’t been well understood to date, in part because they arise from the interaction of large sets of neurons whose coördinated efforts scientists cannot currently track.

“There are all kinds of remarkable tools to study the microscopic world of individual cells,” says John Donoghue, a neuroscientist at Brown and a participant in the project. “And on the macroscopic end, we have tools like MRI and EEG that tell us about the function of the brain and its structure, but at a low resolution. There is a gap in the middle. We need to record many, many neurons exactly as they operate with temporal precision and in large areas,” he says.

An article published Thursday in Science online expands the project’s already ambitious goals beyond just recording the activity of all individual neurons in a brain circuit simultaneously. Researchers should also  find ways to manipulate the neurons within those circuits and understand circuit function through new methods of data analysis and modeling, the authors write.  

Understanding how neurons communicate with one another across large regions of the brain will be critical to understanding how the brain works, according to participants in the project. Other efforts to map out the physical connections in the brain are already under way (see “TR10: Connectomics” and “Mapping the Brain on a Massive Scale”), but these projects look at static brains or can only get a rough view of how regions of the brain communicate. The new project will probably start applying its novel and yet unknown technologies on simpler brains, such as those of flies, and will probably take decades to achieve its goals.

Numerous leaders from the fields of neuroscience, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology are expected to collaborate on the effort. “We need something large scale to try to build tools for the future,” says Rafael Yuste, a neurobiologist at Columbia University and a member of the project. “We view ourselves as tool builders. I think we could provide to the scientific community the methods that could be used for the next stage in neuroscience.”

In addition to deepening fundamental understanding of the brain, the project may also lead to new treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders. “If we truly understand how things like thoughts, cognition, and other features of the brain emerge, then we should have a better understanding of mood disorders, Parkinson’s, epilepsy and other conditions that are thought to arise from brain-wide circuitry problems,” says Donoghue.

Details about which technology ideas will be given the green light and how much money will support their development are expected to be revealed in the White House announcement that is still to come. The project is likely to be supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and private foundations, participants say. It’s not yet clear how much money will be needed or which technologies will be given priority.

Whichever particular technologies emerge, nanotechnology is likely to be involved, in part because of the need for smaller and faster sensors to record neuronal activity across the brain. Existing sensors can record the electrical activity of neurons, but these chips can typically monitor fewer than 100 neurons at a time and can’t record activity from neighboring neurons, which would be necessary to understand how neurons interact with one another.Paul Weiss, director of the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, a participant in the project, says that nanofabrication techniques could address this problem, with smaller chips bearing smaller electrical and even chemical probes. “We’ve had over a decade a fairly substantial investment in science and technology to develop the capability … to control how what we make interacts with the chemical, physical, and biological worlds,” he says.

Novel optical techniques could also aid the mapping project. Currently, many research groups use calcium-sensitive fluorescent dyes to study neuron firing, but Yuste wants to develop an optical technique that uses voltage-sensitive fluorescent dyes for a faster readout. “Neurons communicate using voltage,” he says. “We would like to develop voltage imaging so we will be able to measure neuronal activity directly.”

While many things about the project are uncertain, one thing is clear—there is going to be a lot of data to store, share, and analyze. “We have just begun to scratch the surface of how you deal with data in high-dimensional spaces,” says Terry Sejnowski, a computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute. “If you are talking about one million neurons, no one can even imagine what that looks like–it is way beyond what we can perceive in three dimensions.”

The Science article also sketches out a rough time line. Within five years, it should be possible to monitor tens of thousands of neurons; in 15 years, one million neurons should be possible. A fly’s brain has about 100,000 neurons, a mouse’s about 75 million, and a human’s about 85 billion. “With one million neurons, scientists will be able to evaluate the function of the entire brain of the zebrafish or several areas from the cerebral cortex of the mouse,” the authors write

Japan’s Economic Troubles Spur a Return to Nuclear

Some of the nuclear power plants shut down after the Fukushima disaster could restart soon.
As the second anniversary of the nuclear disaster at Fukushima nears, Japan is considering restarting nuclear reactors across the country in an effort to ease a recession that began at the end of 2012 after years of economic stagnation.

All 50 of the country’s reactors were shut down after the disaster, when a powerful earthquake and tsunami caused a cascade of problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that culminated in large releases of radiation. Just two reactors have since been restarted.

This week, the CEO of Areva, which supplies fuel for Japanese nuclear power plants, predicted that two-thirds of the reactors in Japan will be restarted within the next several years, and that half a dozen may restart by the end of the year. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe recently promised to begin restarting plants within the year, but it might be hard to meet that goal because the necessary safety upgrades will take some time.

Public sentiment in Japan turned sharply against nuclear power in the wake of the disaster, which displaced thousands from their homes. But shutting down the reactors has strained the country’s electricity supplies, making it necessary to import large amounts of fossil fuels to make up the difference.

In Japan, natural-gas power plants can cost several times as much to operate as nuclear power plants, says Paul Joskow, the president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and formerly a professor economics at MIT. But restarting the nuclear plants will require convincing local governments to accept a new regulatory regime that’s been put in place to improve safety, and “that hasn’t happened yet,” he says. A recent survey suggested that half of all Japanese mayors would approve plant restarts if reactors met the new safety regulations.

The impact of the disaster at Fukushima has been felt around the world. The most striking example is Germany, which quickly shut down some of its nuclear power plants and made plans to close the rest. This has forced the country to rely more on fossil fuels, including coal, even as it attempts to meet strict targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions (see “The Great German Energy Experiment” and “Can Japan Thrive without Nuclear Power?”).

Even China, which has led the world in nuclear reactor construction, has scaled back its plans and become more selective about where it plans to build its plants, Joskow says. Nuclear power has also stalled in other countries, including the United States, but this is mostly due to the high cost of building new plants, not to the safety concerns emerging from Fukushima.

Before the disaster, Japan had relied on nuclear power for about a quarter of its energy and had planned to increase that to roughly 50 percent by 2030 to ease dependence on imported fossil fuels and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, according to a report this year from the Institute of Energy Economics in Japan. The country has few domestic sources of energy. The report said that the shutdown of reactors in Japan, and the ensuing increase in fossil-fuel consumption, has hurt the balance of trade and increased electricity prices by 15 to 20 percent. It has also led to the loss of about 420,000 jobs as manufacturing is transferred out of the country, the report said.

The economic problems seem to be shifting public opinion in Japan. Last September, the ruling party issued a plan to permanently phase out nuclear power (see “Japan Approves Nuclear Phase-Out by 2040”). But it quickly softened its stance (see “Japan Isn’t Going Nuclear Free After All”). In December, the government lost power to Prime Minister Abe’s party, which promised to improve the economy and is emphasizing the need for nuclear power.

An Anti-iPad for India

Suneet Singh Tuli, the man behind the ultracheap Aakash 2 tablet, says the West doesn’t understand mobile business in the developing world.

A devout Sikh, Suneet Singh Tuli, 44, has found his own way to live by his religion’s central belief ofsarbat da bhala, or “may everyone be blessed.”

He wants everyone in India to be on the Internet.

To that end, Tuli’s London company, DataWind, is building very inexpensive tablet computers, which it assembles in China or with the help of support staff at its India offices. The idea, Tuli says, is to pair cheap tablets with ad-supported wireless service as a way to bridge the digital divide between poor and rich countries.

DataWind began winning attention last year when it struck a deal to supply India’s government with 100,000 of its Aakash 2 tablets, for roughly $40 each, by this March 31. That tablet works only near Wi-Fi points, but DataWind also sells an $83 commercial version called Ubislate 7C+, which comes with an unlimited mobile data plan for around $2 per month. Within 18 months, Tuli says, he hopes to bring the price of a basic tablet down to $25 and make the Internet connection free.

Tuli’s company is not a charity. DataWind plans to make money with its own app store and by displaying ads in its built-in browser (which also compresses websites for fast delivery over India’s slow wireless networks). MIT Technology Review spoke with Tuli about his company’s business model and the future of tablet computing in India.

You’ve said that you never intended to be in the hardware business. What do you mean?

We think that hardware is dead. A gigahertz processor costs $4. It’s good enough for most everything you’d want to do with a tablet, and not just for poor people in India. Hardware has gotten cheap enough that restaurants or resorts should be giving customers tablets to walk away with for free. Hardware is becoming a customer-acquisition tool.

So tablets should be literally disposable, like USB flash drives?

I don’t like the word “disposable,” but by 2015, you’re going to see tablets reach the stage where you can just pick one up at 7-Eleven. And for consumers in the developing world, tablets will be their first computer.

We did a study to understand where the inflection point for PC deployment in the U.S. was: when did PCs really take off? Our assessment was that when the cost of purchasing PCs fell to within 20 percent of monthly salary, you started to see them in every home. In a place like India, there are about billion people for whom $50 meets that criterion.

What new businesses will ultracheap tablets lead to in the developing world?

There are going to be applications that will create billion-dollar opportunities, but we may not understand them in the West or be able to relate to them. My epiphany came when I saw a magazine ad in India that showed a minivan with a driver’s seat that could be laid down 180 degrees. I thought, “How dumb is that?” Then I realized that most of these minivans were used as taxis, and the taxi drivers actually slept in them.

In the same way, the applications of these tablets will be very unique, and I’m not sure that I can comprehend what all of them would be. But I’m hoping that if we own the platform, we can become the conduit for those applications and those businesses.

You’re practically giving away the tablets. So what’s your strategy for making this into a business?

The first killer app on these devices is going to be Internet access. We have 18 patents on how to deliver basic Web access, even on India’s GPRS networks. The idea is to bundle free Internet access with advertising on an affordable tablet. Basic browsing without audio or video streaming would be available for free, and we’d have a banner ad that runs on the top, which pays for the cost of data service and makes us money.

Does the Ubislate come with free Internet access right now?

In India, the free usage model is not in place yet. We have a Rs.98 ($1.80)-per-month data plan for unlimited usage. It is a fraction of what other plans cost, and we intend to drive it down to free.

What new opportunities do you see for apps in the developing world?

Nobody focuses on the problem of creating apps for somebody whose monthly income is $200. Those people are not part of the computer age or the Internet age; most of them are not literate. So we run app competitions in India to try to get people thinking from that perspective. The winner of our last competition was a group of students who designed a commerce app for “fruit walas,” the guys who run around with carts selling fruits and vegetables. These students created a graphically intuitive way of running a small vegetable business.

There are something like five million fruit walas in India, so if you had an app for them, there could be a lot of money to be made.

Electronic Sensors Printed Directly on the Skin

New electronic tattoos could help monitor health during normal daily activities.

Taking advantage of recent advances in flexible electronics, researchers have devised a way to “print” devices directly onto the skin so people can wear them for an extended period while performing normal daily activities. Such systems could be used to track health and monitor healing near the skin’s surface, as in the case of surgical wounds.

Skin signals: This device, applied directly to the skin, can record useful medical information.

So-called “epidermal electronics” were demonstrated previously in research from the lab ofJohn Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the devices consist of ultrathin electrodes, electronics, sensors, and wireless power and communication systems. In theory, they could attach to the skin and record and transmit electrophysiological measurements for medical purposes. These early versions of the technology, which were designed to be applied to a thin, soft elastomer backing, were “fine for an office environment,” says Rogers, “but if you wanted to go swimming or take a shower they weren’t able to hold up.” Now, Rogers and his coworkers have figured out how to print the electronics right on the skin, making the device more durable and rugged.

“What we’ve found is that you don’t even need the elastomer backing,” Rogers says. “You can use a rubber stamp to just deliver the ultrathin mesh electronics directly to the surface of the skin.” The researchers also found that they could use commercially available “spray-on bandage” products to add a thin protective layer and bond the system to the skin in a “very robust way,” he says.

During the two weeks that it’s attached, the device can measure things like temperature, strain, and the hydration state of the skin, all of which are useful in tracking general health and wellness. One specific application could be to monitor wound healing: if a doctor or nurse attached the system near a surgical wound before the patient left the hospital, it could take measurements and transmit the information wirelessly to the health-care providers.

Rogers says his lab is now focused on developing and refining wireless power sources and communication systems that could be integrated into the system. He says the technology could potentially be commercialized by MC10 (see “Making Stretchable Electronics”), a company he cofounded in 2008. If things go as planned, says Rogers, in about a year and half the company will be developing more sophisticated systems “that really do begin to look like the ones that we’re publishing on now.”

Gadget Gets Under the Hood to Bring Analytics to Driving

A $70 device will tell you how efficiently you’re driving, and can even call 911 for help in the event of an accident.

You probably have a rough idea of how much you spend on gas each week, but chances are you don’t calculate the cost of each trip down to the penny. Unless you’re Ljuba Miljkovic, that is, who knows that in a recent week he spent $7.50 to drive over 47 miles.

Miljkovic is a cofounder of Automatic, an automotive tech startup that offers a small gadget that connects to your car’s onboard computer and wirelessly transmits the data it collects to your smartphone. This can reveal how efficiently you’re driving, how much individual trips are costing you, and tips for solving potential engine troubles. It can also determine where you parked your car and, if its built-in accelerometer senses you’ve been in an accident, call 911 for help.

The device combines two burgeoning trends—the “Internet of things,” where traditionally offline gadgets are connected to the Internet to amplify their usefulness (see “50 Disruptive Companies 2013: Nest’s Smarter Home”), and the mining of data that’s collected by our devices for meaning (see “Every Step You Take, Tracked Automatically”). By putting these two together, the company thinks it can get users to conserve gas and spend less—and make a profit itself while doing so.

“Your car is a black box today. You don’t know anything about it,” cofounder Thejo Kote says. “Using the information that is already there, and just presenting it in a useful way to people can have a really big impact on behavior and hopefully help people save money.”

Automatic grew out of research conducted by Kote and another of the company’s cofounders, Jerry Jariyasunant, while both were in graduate school in the systems engineering department of the University of California, Berkeley. Specifically, it blossomed from the realization that most people don’t really know anything about their cars, or about how much it really costs to drive, Kote says.

Automatic’s gadget plugs into the diagnostic port of your car—an outlet below the steering wheel of every car sold since 1997 that connects to the vehicle’s onboard computer and is used mainly by car mechanics for identifying and solving problems. The device will be available for people to preorder starting Tuesday, for $70, and will start shipping in May.

Phil Magney, who leads automotive electronics analysis at market researcher IHS, says the market for products that attach to your car’s diagnostic port and transmit data to your smartphone is growing. He adds that Automatic’s emergency-calling feature is a shrewd addition, giving it the ability to compete against telematics companies like OnStar.

The first step is to plug the device in and pair it with an Automatic app on your phone. When you start your car, the device will begin reading data—such as your speed—and send it to your smartphone via Bluetooth. That data is uploaded to Automatic’s servers for processing, and then sent back to the app in more user-friendly formats such as a driver score, on a scale of 1 to 100, that considers how often you brake hard, accelerate rapidly, and drive over 70 miles per hour (three factors that have a large impact on fuel efficiency).

A diagnostic feature can give you advice about what may be wrong if your “check engine” light comes on, and also enables you to turn the light off. A “beta” 911-calling feature uses the device’s built-in accelerometer to detect a car crash and notify Automatic to robocall your nearest 911 center with your name, car type, and approximate location.

Since the in-car device doesn’t have GPS—a decision Miljkovic says helps keep costs down—the app occasionally uses the phone’s GPS to reconstruct trips, determine where you parked, and estimate how much trips cost (the 1.4-mile trip to my office costs 33 cents, Miljkovic says). When you stop driving, the app automatically logs your location. And the device can tell when you add gas to the car, and which gas station you stopped at.

Initially, the company will offer only an iPhone app, since the two latest iPhones support low-power Bluetooth, but Kote says Automatic plans to release an Android version in the fall.

Sven Beiker, executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University, says that while there are similar products on the market and in development aimed at “green” driving, Automatic’s solution is inexpensive and looks uncomplicated to use, which could help it catch on. “Very often if just the interface is appealing and easy to use, people will start changing their behavior,” he says.

Apple's biggest problem: People might quit?

There is speculation that some of Apple's best talent might quit because the company can't create the sorts of products it wants in Cupertino. But whose fault would that be?

There is something slightly entertaining about the alleged crisis at the world's most famous and successful company.

Just because a bunch of greasy-haired speculators have decided that Apple's shares are worth less than Google's (this week), garments are rended and teeth gnashed.

And then there's teens. Apparently, they're all fleeing the brand and rushing toward Microsoft's Surface. Which, apparently, isn't selling well.

In times of such rampant face-contorting and mind-numbing, I always remember the words of Mitt Romney: "Companies are people, too."

And so it is that in a rather more measured discussion about the future of Apple, Daring Fireball's John Gruber and his guest -- iPhone and Mac developer Guy English -- talked for quite a long time about Apple's real problem: people.

Gruber's fear is that the best engineers may decide that they cannot be satisfied at Apple.

"The problem isn't that Apple is bleeding talent, the problem is that they could," he said.

Some might suggest that there also could be an earthquake centered on Cupertino or that North Korea has better nuclear missiles than we think.

But the point is important because of the cult of personality (sometimes fostered by, well, Apple) that has always surrounded the company.

There's been a constant belief that Apple was really a lot of Steve Jobs, a fair dollop of Jony Ive and a touch of occasional fascination from Scott Forstall.

The greater truth has always been that there were many extremely wise and talented engineers having large ideas, but -- in public, at least -- small names.

One example was Tony Fadell, who left Apple to create Nest, a revolutionary thermostat.

English speculated that once you've created, say, the first iPhone, that might feel like your life's work. Whatever comes afterward -- at least within the markets that Apple operates -- may feel like so much of so what.

There will be those who imagine that all the speculation surrounding Apple's supposed, alleged, putative iWatch might suggest this is being created as some clever person's vanity project.

Perhaps this might have come out of some amusement on the part of a few Apple engineers, who wanted to see it emerge into real life.

Apple, though, is quite serious about entertainment. As serious as it is about design. It's hard to believe it would suddenly commit itself to frippery for frippery's sake. Yes, even wearable, profitable frippery.

In the end, every company's problem resides in retaining those people who really do the work.

Some employees don't want to be famous. They simply want their work to be famous. They simply want to feel as if they going to create products that everyone will talk about -- and, hopefully, covet.

It's not exactly every engineer who wants to hog the limelight. Somehow, limelight-hogging just isn't many engineers' thing.

Apple's biggest problem -- as with many companies -- will always lie in creating an atmosphere where everyone who works there believes that there is no better place for them to be a better creator.

It's inevitable for many to fear that Apple's ability to create new markets through surprising products is waning.

It's hard to avoid the perception that Tim Cook is less of a visionary and more of a supremely efficient manager.

Sometimes, though, supremely efficient managers are supremely wise in creating opportunities for their best people to consistently achieve.

That's Apple biggest test -- and potentially biggest problem.

It isn't merely about creating great products. It's about its people believing that creating great products is still possible.

Which leaves one little question: is there really one more gadget that humanity needs in order to make its existence easier and more pleasurable?

What gadget would that be?