Visualise The World

June 28^th, San Diego. MIT Startup Showcase, Qualcomm Auditorium. Ubiquitous non line-of-sight communications is a key technology for enabling wider commercial applications of drones, according to Matt Grob, EVP and CTO of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

During his keynote at the inaugural MIT Startup Showcase in San Diego, Grob discussed drones and flying cars as a major part of Klaus Schwab’s 4^th Industrial revolution, a concept based on ubiquitous mobile supercomputing, intelligent robots and self driving cars. Automated flying cars will be with us much sooner than most people realise, and will be derived from drones, rather than existing land based cars but there is still much critical technology to be developed in that field. Helping the process is that regulations about drones are now becoming established and, with drones under 250g being exempt from registration, a new class of product is being established where rapidly evolving technology can be brought to market quickly, spurring innovation.

The showcase is staged by the MIT Startup Exchange, a body dedicated to fostering links between MIT generated startups and corporations. This event highlighted robotics with a focus on the way that the mutually reinforcing effect of readily available supercomputing and artificial intelligence along with access to big data leads to intelligent, connected systems that can solve urgent societal problems.

A talk by Sertac Karaman, Charles Stark Draper Assistant Professor of Aeronautics at MIT, provided an example of how automation can address problems caused by previous generations of technology. While the automobile has been mostly a good thing in the US where zoning and planning has delivered real quality of life improvements, in less developed countries it has delivered mainly congestion and pollution. Even in advanced societies, the inefficiency of ownership based transportation is causing a re-evaluation of that model and there is a new push to deliver mobility on demand. This is evidenced by the popularity of bicycle sharing schemes in urban centers around the world but these schemes have their own problems. Poor demand matching limits their usefulness since no available bike at your start point or (even worse) no available docking station at your destination make them unattractive compared to the guarantee of your own car. However these are problems which can be solved by automation and Karaman described an electronic tricycle which is delivered to the requester on demand and which takes care of parking at the end of the ride.

These abilities (which are also promised in a number of other, more commercial, autos) depend critically on the triad of robotics, automation and analytics and demonstrate one of the ways in which these emerging technologies will be used.

Klaus Schwab in part defined the previous three industrial revolutions in terms of the new freedoms they brought; perhaps the role of the fourth is to free us from some of their negative outcomes.

Jun 23, San Diego. The Evonexus Digital Media SIG hosted a distinguished panel of experts comprising David J. Mowrey, VP of Product Management at Clearleap, Steve Adler, CTO of MyTVStudio and Jamie Howard former CEO of Imagine Communications, to discuss the current and emerging technical and business challenges of delivering high quality streaming video. Moderated by Devang Thakkar of DCM Consulting, the panel covered many issues in a wide ranging discussion.

We have already entered the ZettaByte era, according to the panel, driven by video and the desire of consumers to watch a wide range of content on their own schedule, on a variety of devices. This includes programmed content, including live streaming, which has its own challenges, but also user created content from fixed and mobile sources, such as drones. (The user generated sector gained added emphasis yesterday with Youtube’s VidCon announcement that it will make it easier for users to stream live from their mobile device, catching up with apps like Periscope.) This trend will only strengthen with the advent of VR.

The huge and continuing growth in traffic stresses the ability of the infrastructure to deliver a reliable, high quality user experience and this will be addressed partly by low level engineering improvements such as decoupling the MAC and PHY to improve virtualisation of the network hardware (a technology which is not quite available yet) along with provisioning measures such as pre-positioning content near the edge along with localised multicasting. Load balancing among multiple CDNs was identified as a key approach, with DLVR.it singled out as an example of a company which is making this possible.

All three panelists had collaborated on the project to bring NFL games to live streaming and they shared some of the insights they gained as a result of that pioneering effort. Steve Adler pointed out the sheer complexity of the process: what looks to the user like a simple request actually results in over a dozen transactions, including rights and permissions verification along with metadata and ad insertion. To go along with this, the actual video also takes a circuitous route which can involve multiple up- and downlinks plus various transcodings, all of which result in a significant delay from real time. In the end, they were satisfied with a sub 20 second delay; their gold standard was to be on screens ahead of any live twitter commentary!

This complexity can cause reliability problems and if something does go wrong, it can be difficult to find the problem, resulting in extended outages like HBO’s loss of Game of Thrones for 40 minutes during a high-demand episode, so there must be a strong motivation to move to this technology and the panel addressed that in the business related part of the discussion.

Traditional broadcast models suffer from being detached from their customers, relying on second hand data such as ratings and on small data sets such as focus groups; streaming OTT allows the content owners direct access to first hand, detailed data from the largest possible data set. Ownership of the consumer is driving the interest of the established big players as well as the explosion of new subscription VOD services (over 100 in the last six months worldwide). The distribution channel is being usurped by the content providers and, while the cable operators are fighting back hard to avoid being reduced to common carrier status for their TV businesses, the trend is inevitable and the panel forsees a period of churn followed by a rapid consolidation around vertically integrated companies which can unify entertainment, social media and user produced video into a coherent platform.