Wi-Fi a lifeline alternative access to 3G

Here’s a review of an article of NY times on Wi-Fi access, when the 3G wired network is clogged and cannot be accessed, it’s really been a rude shock to see that so many proud owners of 3G smart phones like iphone’s, Blackberry’s etc., are not able to access the networks due to congestion, I could not have imagined this in my wildest of dreams. How could that it be ? Nevertheless it is a harsh fact, and now lets move on to check the alternatives.

Coming back to the article review, it deals with number of ways a mobile customer can access the network through a Wireless-Fidelity or Wi-Fi connection while in the vicinity of a hot-spot, a location where a nomadic user can log on to an available Wi-Fi network without actually having to do anything, as most of the times the mobile device automatically detects and connects the user to an available wireless network and the technology lets the user to do so.

Network providers set up these Wi-Fi hotspots in high density areas such as airports, cafeteria and other important locations people access often, in order to support the communication needs of the people. But in case your mobile settings need you to log on to one of such a Wi Fi connection, you need to tweak settings in your phone once, so that it logs on automatically next time.

Article gives some good information for the US users caught in the midst of a 'network clog' to check on the alternatives till the 3G networks are more accessible in the future. In this aspect AT&T is providing an alternative access to its customers with a Windows Mobile Phone, can now be able to access company's roughly 20,000 hot-spots across the country. And some of the Wi-Fi apps, that work when you are a subscriber to a Wi-Fi connection of any of the service providers, let the user to sniff out the nearest Wi-Fi location.

nytimes article

In developing countries the networks are still in evolutionary stages from the existing 2G/2.5G stages. There are lessons to be learned for Asian telecom operators from this, particularly in China and India, in how they are going to deploy their 3G networks, as with the case of Western and other mature Asian markets like Japan and Korea, that could not mange to capitalize on profits with a relatively quick switch to 3G networks.

More Reading

1.What is Wi-Fi ?

2.What is 3G ?

Grid computing, the new commodity

European researchers have created a platform for trading computing resources that allows the selling and buying of standardised computing resources. In the process, they could make computing a utility like electricity.

Grids are not new. They have been around for quite a while, made famous by the SETI@HOME network, a charitable effort where ordinary computer users ‘volunteered’ their unused computer processing power to analyse signals from space. SETI hoped to find patterns in the signals revealing extraterrestrial intelligence.



That aim may not been achieved, but the effort brought the power of grid computing to the attention of the general public. Still this is not news.

What is new, is that the EU-funded GridEcon project has created a commodity market platform that enables users to bid on available computing capacity, or put out a tender for a specific computing time slot.

This spot and future market mechanism is enabled by a computing platform developed by the GridEcon project.
A big idea

This is a big idea. It is true that organisations can already rent ‘cloud’ computing capacity from companies like Amazon, HP and others, but they generally only offer their spare capacity.

The beauty of GridEcon's platform is that it is open – users can buy and sell computing capacity on their own terms. And buyers can also be sellers. If a company has a large computer park it can offer its spare capacity, but if it has a temporary need for much greater capacity it can bid for it on the marketplace.

GridEcon built a virtual trading floor for computing resources, a platform for validating new market-based services, published extensive studies on the economics and mechanics of computing resource marketplaces, and generated a buzz around the concept.

The project has just completed its work, and already it is receiving queries from companies interested in launching the world's first open marketplace for computing capacity as a commercial venture.
The platform

The platform is GridEcon's second key result. It consists of a marketplace, the interface and a fundamental market mechanism, which focuses on spots (or bids for immediate capacity) and future markets, where capacity is required at some later date. It comprises a set of prototype implementations of market-based services.

Underlying this is the workflow engine, middleware that routes inputs from the marketplace to the components that execute the task. "One of our key goals with the platform was to make it easy to use and set up," explains Prof. Dr Jörn Altmann, technical director of the GridEcon project.

"So this workflow engine hides the underlying complexity of the system, because we did not want the user to have to deal with that."

Various services complete the system; some integral to its operation, like the execution engine and the monitoring and history services; and some as stand-alone services that significantly increase the value of the platform, like capacity planning and an insurance broker.

GridEcon designed and tested one market mechanism, but if a company wants to develop some other market mechanism, then they can easily plug new functionality into the platform. It means GridEcon is enormously flexible and could be used for a wide variety of potential market types. The platform is available under open source license terms and the entire code is available at the GridEcon website.

The project is really on top of the real needs faced by users. "We started developing a fixed price quotation broker, which can give users an indication of price at a future date as a backbone for their bidding on the futures market,” explains Sonja Klingert, project coordinator at the International University in Germany.

A couple of months into that work, she tells ICT Results, Amazon brought out some ‘futures’ functionality on their Elastic Computer Cloud platform, EC2. “It was encouraging, because it showed we were going in the right direction," she concludes.
Commercial future?

"Our role was to build the platform and test it – and the results of our testing phase were indeed positive with respect to functionality and response times. But it is there for somebody else to turn it into a commercial venture,” notes Klingert.

“We are making the website more attractive to business people, so they can see its potential and go live with it."

Some consortium partners have been approached by people interested in creating a business around this paradigm, and the number of visitors looking at the website rose dramatically at the beginning of the year, and that trend is increasing.

The platform is the most visible of the project's results, but the consortium also produced an astonishing amount of research on the mechanisms, market types, pricing issues and economics of cloud computing.
Gold dust

It is perhaps a little less tangible, but the team's original research represents a thorough and profound review of the market potential of grid- and cloud computing, and as such it represents commercial gold dust.

One paper, the ‘Taxonomy of Grid Business Models’, systematically outlines all the various roles and services in grid computing, revealing 17 commercial niches that companies could occupy.

And it is just one of two-dozen papers produced by the consortium. The team gathered all the key texts in a 150-page book, which is freely available to download from their website.

Finally, the project organised a series of workshops around the topic of grid computing marketplaces and the economics of cloud computing.

In all, the work of the GridEcon project represents an all-points effort to establish successful and open grid computing markets, and it has the potential to revolutionise the use of computing resources in small- and medium-sized enterprises.

The GridEcon project received funding from the ICT strand of the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme for research.

Source: ICT RESULTS.

What are people actually doing on the web ?

This is a news story running on the popular Web space Yahoo by none other than Melanie Lidner at Forbes.com, the news report delves deeper into the latest trends in terms of peoples interests on the web and whats actually happening inside the popular Web World. According to the news report which credited the Analysis to ComCore, a webdata tracker, Americans spent a whopping 302 billion minutes online only the last month.

Now these figures are only about USA, what about whole lot of other people from China, which recently overtook in terms of density, the EU, Australia, then Asia Pacific, India etc., Now if take into account all these factors the market is expanding at a relatively faster pace than we might think. And among all of the industries User generated data is making the kill.

An in depth detailed analysis done by the site has this incredible figures to disclose.

Google, as we all know, attracted some 127 millon unique visitors last month, a 62% more of what it attracted three years ago at 76 million UV's, 7 million more than the next nearest popular web giant Yahoo.

Notice that there are other search engines too, which are not taken into account here. And what about those who directly hit the links without using the search engine. There is a point here to be noted, How many times Have I used the search engine today, 5 times, 10 times, in all of my browsing time today. It is a very less percentage of time that I spent browsing the Internet. If we take into account all these factors, the average usage time will be some where around 302 billion minutes only for America, leave alone the rest of the world.

The news story focused on the trends in the Web world where companies have no other alternatives other than to do more research to know what people actually are doing on the web.

What with the huge influx of traffic by the video media based YouTube and Social Networking sites such as LinkedIn, MySpace and more, people are moving more towards online social forums and blogs to look for discussions and information.

The news story also reported that the almost unknown, Glam Media, an advertiser-supported collection of Blogs and other Women related content Catapulted to 18th spot, now that is like, What All The Women Actually Are Doing On The Web.

User generated data is the in thing today, with more and more people have stormed the web world. The Web World is all the more focused on the User trends online.

What Are People Actually Doing On The Web ?