Collaborate for 'humanity research': it's free!

You may have heard about the SETI project, where it was asked for the collaborative union of the idle capacity of computers connected around the world to analyse vast amounts of information of signals captured from the space, searching for any extra-terrestrial communication. IBM is powering the project “World Community Grid” to contribute to different projects in humanity benefit (including AIDS, genome comparison, cancer, etc.). I have already tried it and the computer performance is not affected, try it!

There’s another curious initiative initiated in a University in Barcelona, where they want to take profit of the high capabilities of the Play Station 3 (20 times bigger that that of a normal computer). They’re researching molecular interactions that are useful for pharmaceutical research, and that requires very high calculation capabilities which become quite expensive. They discovered PS3 power and have started to recruit videogamers which can share the idle time of their consoles while connected to the internet.

Wireless world congress

For the second year in a row, Barcelona has been the host city for the GSM World Congress, the biggest annual event of the GSM Association, which gathers almost one thousand members in the mobile industry. Each year, the main players in the arena dress up to astonish the telecom world: no one can be left behind.

This year one of the main actors has been the content producers and internet companies. Probably operators trust them a lot to boost their 3G networks. Another interesting point is the strong irruption of Chinese manufacturers, while other big players have switched part of their business to other activities more related to IT solutions providers. For those readers that are Spanish speakers, you can check the Vodafone blog for this Congress with some interesting topics. Apart from the convergence happening in this world, what would you expect for the future of wireless communications?

Squeezing the spectrum

A more technical post today: let’s talk about ultra-wideband (UWB). The frequency spectrum for wireless communications is becoming quite scarce, and expensive for some operators… So it’s like a ‘natural resource’ with some slight differences: its amount is fixed and we know it (well, theoretically frequencies are infinitely extended, but other thing is that they are feasible), and their extensive use is not exhausting the resource nor polluting the environment…

UWB uses a very large bandwidth (more than 500 Mhz, imagine commercial UMTS mobile communications use carriers of 5Mhz…). And the more bandwidth tat is used, the more is the throughput. Although this is some kind of tricky because they have to use very high frequencies, and the range is very low Taking into account Shannon limit for the wireless channel, that states that the highest the bandwidth, the lower the signal to noise ratio required for a certain throughput. Also the emission levels permitted are relatively small. Therefore its main use will be for personal area networks.

Be an owner of the web

Have you ever dreamt of owning the web? Do you want to get part of the cake that you generate while web browsing? Now you can do it with AGLOCO. I got to know it when reading to my ex-colleague in Nortel Javier Alvira, now MBA Candidate in Stanford. Actually it’s an idea born in Stanford Business School, the cradle of so many successful internet start-ups.

It works essentially with a Viewbar that is added to the bottom of your browser and allows you to get the benefit from the money generated by your searches, ads, and anti-fraud and other software utilities. The idea is to refer as much people as possible so you can get benefit also from their navigation and referrals. However the Viewbar is not still available, just as a beta tester. It is an original idea, attracting people with revenue, so it seems a nice move...