Wearables no longer refer only to fashion on the runways of Paris. Wearables will be on parade at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, 2015. Devices that snuggle into fabrics, wrap around your wrist or stick to your tummy make people into walking displays of cutting edge technology.

When you talk about wearables, you’ll hear about MEMS (micro-electro mechanical systems). One definition says: MEMS is the integration of mechanical elements, sensors, actuators, and electronics on a common silicon substrate through microfabrication technology. You can learn more at a CES Conference Track running from 9am – 4:30pm on January 6, 2015.

Early this year, one research firm noted that the global wearable technology market was $750.0 million USD in 2012 and is expected to reach $5.8 billion in 2018. Not everyone agrees. In fact, a panel of analysts will chew on that prediction in the Venetian’s Marco Polo room.

Another presentation will be about Valencell’s PerformTek, sensor technology based on more than 20 patents, that measures real-time biometric data. Tiny optomechanical sensor modules are embedded in earbuds to provide information for gaming, performance coaching, and fitness training. The blood flow, heart rate monitoring technology removes extraneous noise to provide accurate readings. The sensor module includes an optical emitter, an optical detector, specialized optomechanics, and an accelerometer. It should be interesting to hear Dr. Steven LeBoeuf, President, explain the product during the conference.

Smart watches to wearables have been providing information about our movements and our bodies. From information comes knowledge. But what good is knowledge if we don’t act upon it? That’s where Ben Waber, CEO of Sociometric Solutions comes in. He analyzes communication patterns identified by social sensing technology. Coming at it with a PhD from the Human Dynamics Group at the MIT Media Lab, Waber translates information into suggestions for improving how employees work and collaborate.

Sociometrics Dashboard graphs information for use by organizations wanting to improve employee performance.

Wearable Sociometric Badges capture face-to-face interactions and extract social signals from speech and body movement and by measuring the proximity of each individual. Waber’s talk will incorporate ideas from his book People Analytics.

Discussions will also address how OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) and embedded systems integrators can take advantage of MEMS and sensors for wearable devices. A roundtable will include top executives from several companies. InvenSense pioneered the industry’s first high-volume, commercial MEMS fabless business model. Benedetto Vigna, VP from STMicroelectronics, a large semiconductor company headquartered in Switzerland, will talk about his company’s involvement. Another company on the panel, Bosch Sensortec GmbH from Kusterdingen, Germany develops and markets a wide portfolio of MEMS sensors and solutions for smart phones, tablets, wearable devices. They offer 3-axis acceleration, gyroscope and geomagnetic sensors, integrated 6- and 9-axis, environmental sensors, and software.

QuickLogic helped make WiiU Game Pad possible.

If you’ve used a WiiU Game Pad, you’ve experienced the expertise of QuickLogic an inventor of customizable semiconductor solutions for mobile and portable electronics that should have a few words about gaming. Another panelist, PNI Sensor, develops geomagnetic sensors and sensor fusion technology for consumer products, the military, and scientific organizations. Stephen Whalley, Chief Strategy Officer, MEMS Industry Group will act as moderator.

In addition to this conference track, the Wearable Tech Awards will be given out the next day on Wednesday, January 7 on the Haymarket Stage of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. Ten smart products from glasses to watches, health and fitness trackers, virtual reality, and new apps will take a walk in front of the judges.

Winners of the $1.3 million in cash awards from Intel’s Make It Wearable challenge that the company threw out a year ago will be announced. The Challenge combined competition and an entrepreneurial mentorship program. The products that were considered had to be a sensor or computing device that is attached, embedded or worn on the body. It had to be based on Intel technology. Steven Holmes, Vice President – Intel New Devices Group, will speak about Smart Device Innovation.

Instead of asking What’s in Your Wallet?, the question at CES will be What are You Wearing? and that’s not referring to Armani.

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Today’s announcement from the well-known full service semiconductor company, Global Foundries and QuickLogic (NASDAQ:QUIK), will interest those looking for ultra low power (ULP) sensor hubs. The new ArcticLink 3 S2 is optimized for smartphones and the new wearable devices.

QuickLogic is known as being an innovator of ultra low power programmable Customer Specific Standard Products — silicon platforms plus software solutions. Its next generation ArcticLink 3 S2 platform is sampling on Global Foundries own lower power 65 nanometer process technology. Global Foundries also prides itself on its 14nm FinFET leading edge technologies fashioned for high-volume, high-performance and power-efficient SoC applications.

Sensor hubs like the 3 S2 store sensor data and sensor algorithms and run them. They should execute those functions quickly. The ArcticLink 3 S2 Sensor Hub a context-aware sensor hub. It promises OEMs four times the computational capability, four times the sensor algorithm memory, and eight times the sensor data memory in a pin-identical footprint. The hub’s active power consumption is ~150μW, meaning the sub-system consumes less than 2 percent of system battery resources. A video explanation of the new ArcticLink 3 S2 can be viewed here.

The 3 S2 is completely compatible with the Android 4.x OS, including KitKat 4.4, and RTOS-based systems. It can support 12 sensors simultaneously, such as gesture, heart rate, gyroscope, and ambient light. The developer provides standard Android driver libraries so OEM systems can quickly integrate with the hub. Software, sensor and sensor algorithm engineers are able to customize the functionality of the ArcticLink 3 S2 through QuickLogic’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and Development Board.

Global Foundries’ 65nm LPe (low power enhanced) technology significantly improves power utilization while extending battery life by using innovative leakage reduction techniques. This makes it perfect for battery operated mobile applications that are cost sensitive. The semiconductor company’s technology is helping QuickLogic optimize its latest product.

Brian Faith, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at QuickLogic and an Adjunct Lecturer at Santa Clara University for Programmable Logic courses said: “This new collaboration with Global Foundries as the manufacturer for the S2 platform will help us meet our demanding time-to-market requirements with a technology that delivers the right balance of performance, power consumption, and cost.”
Gregg Bartlett, senior vice president of product management at Global Foundries pointed out: “As the industry continues its seismic shift from PC to mobility, a whole new set of applications and devices are driving the need for differentiated silicon solutions,”

QuickLogic Corporation is traded as QUIK on NASDAQ and has held a value in the mid $3.00 for the last five years. Global Foundries is privately held, owned by Mubadala Development Company out of Abu Dhabi. Global Foundries has three 300mm fabs and five 200mm fabs providing a full range of process technologies from mainstream to the leading edge from the US to Germany to Malta to Singapore.

The S2 Sensor Hub is expected to be production-certified in Q4 2014.

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Today is not a good day in Sprint land as according to a report the Wall Street Journal, the company’s board of directors has voted to abandon the acquisition of T-Mobile USA  amid insurmountable regulatory hurdles.

Sprint originally made an offer to buy T-Mobile USA to the tune of $32 billion dollars with the parent company of Sprint, Softbank, leading the negotiations and discussions about where the combined company would move post-merger.

The problem with this deal was that it was met with a lot of regulatory concern from virtually every single governmental agency involved, not to mention tons of public outcry. The Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) all voiced differing levels of opposition towards the deal. Sprint and Softbank clearly did not have the political clout that Comcast did when they acquired NBC/Universal from General Electric (GE) to make such a controversial deal go through. Even so, the reality of the situation was fundamentally difficult to argue against because Sprint would effectively be reducing the mobile carrier market from four to three competitors and removing the most competitive carrier from contention. Softbank’s CEO, Masayoshi Son, contended that the combined company would be evermore competitive than T-Mobile US on its own, however his statements appear not have been enough to convince regulators.

T-Mobile was also recently approached with a second cash-only offer a week ago, which came from French telecom company Iliad, to the tune of $15 billion, not much lower than the valuation that Sprint had given them for the whole company. This deal would also likely encounter much less regulatory scrutiny because Iliad has no presence in the US market and such an acquisition would also allow Deutsche Telecom to almost entirely divest from T-Mobile US while simultaneously still having some investment to potentially generate additional profit.

Now that this deal has officially fallen apart (the second failed acquisition of T-Mobile by another carrier), there is a chance that T-Mobile could be acquired by Iliad, or that they could continue to drive forward and steal more customers. T-Mobile recently announced that it had over fifty million subscribers and that it had gained over 7.6 million new customers in the past five quarters or. The company also reported that its earnings had the greatest revenue growth of any carrier last quarter and that it does not see any signs of stopping. T-Mobile’s overall competitiveness is very likely what made regulators become hesitant of Sprint’s acquisition because of Sprint’s relative weakness against all other carriers.

Now that this deal has fallen apart there is also talk that Sprint’s current CEO, Dan Hesse, is to be put out to pasture. Hesse has been Sprint’s CEO for the past seven years and oversaw potentially one of the worst collapses of a carrier ever with their network coming in as the weakest of all four carriers year after year. While Sprint is certainly not in free fall, it has struggled to be a competitive carrier with AT&T and Verizon almost since its merger with Nextel in 2005. As such, it makes sense that Softbank would want to replace Hesse, especially considering that was supposedly already the plan with the T-Mobile acquisition since T-Mobile’s firebrand CEO John Legere would be expected to replace him.

Based on the news, T-Mobile’s stock dropped sharply by nearly nine percent while Sprint has taken a hammering of over 16%. Obviously, Sprint’s investors are more worried about not having T-Mobile and T-Mobile’s investors are disappointed that they don’t get a buy-out, even though there’s still a very good chance that the Iliad offer could still net them a significant bonus. It will be interesting to see what both companies will do in the wake of this announcement and whether or not Sprint can finally wake up and start being competitive with the others. T-Mobile will very likely continue to push forward as they have and introduce new disruptive programs to shake up the mobile industry.

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Yesterday’s 7-1 World Cup Semi-Final rout of Brazil by Germany will go down in the record books for many decades to come for a multitude of reasons. Sure, Brazil is the host nation and they’ve been picked by many, including Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog to win it all. But yesterday, the German national team proved all of them wrong with an impressive 7-0 display up until the 90th minute when Oscar scored the face-saving only goal for Brazil. Now that we know that World Cup Semi-Finals can have as many points scored as an American Football game, it comes as no surprise that such a game stirred up quite a ruckus on Twitter.

According to the BBC a record 35.6 million tweets were sent during the course of the 90 minutes of the game’s play. It also broke the record for the most tweets per minute with 580,601 tweets in a single minute. This happened when Germany scored their fifth goal on Brazil, obviously setting off a firestorm on Twitter. Any game that reaches a 5-0 result is pretty much considered a rout or much much worse. The previous tweets-per-minute record for a sporting event was set by another World Cup match, when Brazil played against Chile, which had 389,000 tweets per minute. Previous to that, the 2014 Superbowl held the record at 382,000 tweets per minute, which isn’t that much of a surprise but only stands to show the evermore increasing importance of Twitter.

In addition to setting off a firestorm of tweets that probably sent Twitter’s network engineers in a scramble to ensure there was enough bandwidth the game also took up 6 of the 10 top trending spots on Twitter. The #BrazilvsGermany hastag took the top spot while players like Miroslav Klose took the top spot for being the most tweeted during the game.

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Google’s Cloud Platform has been predicting the winners of the World Cup since the round of 16 and so far has been 11/12 after getting 8/8 correct in the round of 8. Google’s Cloud Platform combines Cloud Dataflow, BigQuery and Compute Engine in order to arrive at their final results.

According to their predictions, which have been almost perfect with the exception of the France v Germany game (I predicted Germany) with Germany beating France, defeating Google’s perfect record. In fact, Google gave France a 69% chance of winning that game, but the result was 1-0 with Germany defeating France.

So, then, why did Google get things wrong? Well, they claim that they got things wrong for a lack of data, not getting enough data points that could help them more accurately adjust the percentages of each team’s probability. Google’s predictions are based upon an inductive model that is derived from game-play data rather than a model based off of changes in betting behavior or certain pre-existing models. The FiveThirtyEight Blog has had a running World Cup Prediction table that uses a different model that is based upon ESPN’s SPI (soccer player index) and has some flaws including not accounting for player injuries and suspensions. They have, however, posted a blog that addresses these losses to the Brazilian team in the Semi Final and Final.

Google says they got the France v Germany wrong because in the first four games of the World Cup, France simply took more shots and had more shots on target than Germany. Additionally, their shots were from a location closer to the goal than Germany’s indicating a stronger likelihood that they would have such things happen against Germany as well.

Google also said that in their first four games, Germany allowed their opponents to take more dangerous shots. This made the possibility that France would be able to score against Germany a much higher probability. Germany also allowed their opponents to pass better in their third of the field, which is a major factor in many games’ final scores. And the statistics in the game continued in Google’s favor in the Germany v France game with the exception of the final score itself. France had 13 shots and 9 on target while Germany only had 8 and 6 on target, indicating that France had plenty more chances and merely squandered them (or was merely unlucky).

Even so, its interesting to see how even though we have all this data and all these great models, nothing can make up for good old human error (in this case, France’s inability to put the ball in the back of the net). Google also has some interesting predictions for the next round, The Semi Finals. They predict that Germany has a 59% chance of beating Brazil, and that does not take into account the loss of Neymar to a broken back. They’ve also lost Thiago Silva to a suspension due to collecting his second yellow in his last game, which Brazil is obviously appealing.

In terms of Netherlands vs Argentina, Google has Argentina winning with 61% odds in their favor, but I believe that does not take into account the loss of Angel Di Maria. But as Nate Silver stated in the FiveThirtyEight blog above, very few players outside of Lionel Messi and Ronaldo have anywhere near a significant enough impact on a team’s ultimate performance.

Overall, it will be interesting to see how accurate Google’s predictions will ultimately be and whether or not they can improve upon their record using their own cloud platform to do the work. Obviously, this is a promotional post by Google to promote how they can do so much vast data crunching with their platform and how it provides clear and accurate results (even though their model is mostly responsible for that).

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The German government has announced that they will be switching away from Verizon for internet services as an ISP for the German government. They noted that the reasons for this decision had to do with increased demands on the network and the prevalence of the NSA in Verizon’s business. Based on the translation that was available, it appears as though the German government is merely using this as an opportunity to switch internet services to a company that is German. Sure, the likelihood that their networks will get snooped on by the NSA will probably go down, or at least become more difficult.

However, usually, such moves are usually just being used by the companies not involved to gain an upper hand on their competition, which is in this case Verizon. While the German government hasn’t quite made it clear who they intend to replace Verizon with, it is quite clear that the NSA’s snooping and relationship with Verizon has made doing business in Germany difficult for Verizon. This will likely not be the end of such moves by European governments and I suspect there will be more companies that will lobby their governments to switch to local ISPs or technology companies in order to ‘better protect’ themselves. While simultaneously taking an opportunity of bad PR on the part of American companies to snatch away their business.

According to an AP report, Verizon was unable to keep the contract (which they’ve held since 2010) due to the fact that they weren’t able to meet some core requirements of the German government put on the company, likely as a result of the NSA’s snooping revealed by Edward Snowden and publications like Der Spiegel. As a result of not meeting the German government’s demands on these requirements, Verizon is losing the contract in 2015 to another company, likely one based in Europe or even Germany.

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As we fight for our Net Neutrality rights in the US, Europeans, who have their Net Neutrality rights already set in stone are about to get Netflix. Netflix has been the core of many of the Net Neutrality debates in the United States because of how successfully it has challenged the cable operators (who are also ISPs) traditional businesses. Netflix has announced they they plan to expand their service into more European countries than they are already serving, adding the two biggest countries in Europe.

Countries where Netflix is currently available – Credit: thebestofnetflix.com

So, in addition to the US, Canada, and basically ALL of the Americas, Netflix is also available in the U.K., Ireland, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Netflix plans to add Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Effectively, Netflix is doubling the coutries that they’re serving in Europe, but in reality they’re more than doubling their potential audience with the addition of Germany and France, the two biggest countries in Europe.

While this news may be welcome by many, the sad truth is that the Netflix experience in the US is not going to be comparable to the one that Europeans are experiencing. Because of the way that content licensing works in Europe and who holds the copyrights it makes it incredibly difficult for Netflix to have the same size library in Europe as they do in the US. However, adding Germany and France into the mix should also increase the availability of content to Netflix users in Europe because of the sheer size of Germany’s and France’s media markets.

Realistically, though, we won’t really know what to expect from Netflix in these countries until the service launches, primarily because they will probably be making deals with content providers up until the last day. And if Netflix’s past experiences in the US are any similar to what they were in Europe, it will be a slow and steady improvement over time. But the good thing is that for shows like House of Cards, Europeans will not have to worry about whether or not they will get the content because Netflix owns the rights to it.

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As we fight for our Net Neutrality rights in the US, Europeans, who have their Net Neutrality rights already set in stone are about to get Netflix. Netflix has been the core of many of the Net Neutrality debates in the United States because of how successfully it has challenged the cable operators (who are also ISPs) traditional businesses. Netflix has announced they they plan to expand their service into more European countries than they are already serving, adding the two biggest countries in Europe.

Countries where Netflix is currently available – Credit: thebestofnetflix.com

So, in addition to the US, Canada, and basically ALL of the Americas, Netflix is also available in the U.K., Ireland, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Netflix plans to add Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Effectively, Netflix is doubling the coutries that they’re serving in Europe, but in reality they’re more than doubling their potential audience with the addition of Germany and France, the two biggest countries in Europe.

While this news may be welcome by many, the sad truth is that the Netflix experience in the US is not going to be comparable to the one that Europeans are experiencing. Because of the way that content licensing works in Europe and who holds the copyrights it makes it incredibly difficult for Netflix to have the same size library in Europe as they do in the US. However, adding Germany and France into the mix should also increase the availability of content to Netflix users in Europe because of the sheer size of Germany’s and France’s media markets.

Realistically, though, we won’t really know what to expect from Netflix in these countries until the service launches, primarily because they will probably be making deals with content providers up until the last day. And if Netflix’s past experiences in the US are any similar to what they were in Europe, it will be a slow and steady improvement over time. But the good thing is that for shows like House of Cards, Europeans will not have to worry about whether or not they will get the content because Netflix owns the rights to it.

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Teledyne Dalsa cameras incorporate CMOS technology for high speed, high resolution imaging.

VUE comes with custom built propulsion and battery management systems. The car has a fully digital instrument cluster, and vehicle diagnostic display. The HMIs include information from the car’s radar system which provides information for the driver.

The Driver’s Vue … uh View

The infotainment system is based on the QNX Neutrino Realtime Operating system a true microkernel operating system. QNX promises that virtually any component can fail — and be automatically restarted — without affecting other components or the kernel. Their graphics technology allows images from video, OpenGL ES, HTML5, and Qt 5 on a single display.

Jin Xu of QNX said: “The VUE project car offers a preview of what is possible in terms of autonomous driving and connectivity and demonstrates the value of supporting educational programs with state-of-the-art software tools. We are proud to support them with QNX OS technology, tools, and training.“ 

Components are neatly packaged in the rear of the car

The car contains two electric motors and a 12 volt battery to power the accessories. The vehicle weighs 1,741 pounds, has a 77 inch wheelbase, 98.4 inches in overall length, and is 56.6 inches wide. The lightweight, small vehicle lends itself to electric mobility with a 45km range in city driving.


Alexandre Imbeault, a university student on the VUE project, was showing their project off at CES 2014

VUE had several sponsors based around the world. B3CG Interconnect, outside Montreal Canada and Plattsburgh, New York, manufactures cable, harnesses and electrical mechanical assembly; Phoenix Connect, based in Bloomberg, Germany prides itself on design solutions for the future using trend-setting connection and automation technology. They are active in the field of renewable energies in infrastructure or for complex device connection. Elektrobit is based in Finland.

Future goals are to include voice controls via EB GUIDE Speech Target Framework and EB Navigation integration. 

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