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Inside the hyper efficient server

admin — Fri, 03 May 2013 08:59:23 +0000

Lou Covey
Editorial Director

Yesterday we unveiled the hyper-efficient data server at SLAC installed by a consortium of companies. In today’s video we take a look at the unit itself and how it reaches the energy/compute performance levels that could change how data centers operate.

This article sponsored by Clustered Systems

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Cool stuff you might have missed at Design West, 2013

admin — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:42:21 +0000

Every year I go to Design West in San Jose to look for the cool geeky products and displays that you aren’t “officially” supposed to be there to check out, because you’re supposed to be doing work related research. This year, it was either a little tougher to find this information or their just wasn’t as much, but I found three off-the-beaten track exhibits that you might have missed. They included an android-based streaming media device that could be used to bypass the movie service in hotels; a device that you can use as a low-cost, DIY car locator (take that Lo Jack); and an honest-to-gosh Enigma Machine from World War II. Check it out.

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Best of Show at ARM TechCon 2012

admin — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 20:34:35 +0000

The increased interest in reducing the cost of development in mobile products was highlighted by two little noticed awards at the ARM TechCon this week in Santa Clara. Qualcomm won “best in show” for hardware for their involvement in the DragonBoard development kit from Intrinsyc, and newcomer Esencia Technologies for software with their new support for floating-point architecture support.

Intrinsyc introduced the development kit earlier this year and is on a trade-show road trip hawking the $500 board to anyone who will listen. Unlike most of the development kits coming out recently (e.g. Raspberry Pi and Adapteva’s Parallellla), this one is specifically focused on products using android linux-based software and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor.

Esencia Technologies’ upgrade is a bit more broad in it application, opening up innovative uses of floating point arithmetic for wireless networking, voice and sound processing. EScalaPlus scalable Floating Point Architecture (FPA) opening effective FPA to new, growing applications. EScalaPlus supports up to 32 concurrent IEEE-754 floating point operations (FLOPs) per cycle. To keep area requirements low EScalaPlus offers the ability to optimize for operations strictly required by the application software and automatically removes unused hardware resources.

See an interview with Esencia’s Karl Kaiser here.

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me!box Media changes game for social video

admin — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:51:07 +0000

Product Review
By Lou Covey, New Tech Press Editorial Director

Video has become an increasingly significant part social media because it has a lot going for it.

First, it is passively engaging, just like television. The developed world is used to plopping in front of a screen and allow two dimensional images entertain, inform and cajole us into specific action. We are more likely to consume advertising content through video then we are through print which makes it the most valuable advertising platform. Second, it is ubiquitous. You don’t see many people walking down the street reading a newspaper or magazine. That usually requires a cup of coffee, a sidewalk cafe and about 30 quiet minutes. It is not unusual, however, to see someone walking down the street, watching a podcast on a mobile device. About 5 years ago I was taking the train to San Francisco riding in the upper deck and looked down to see a dozen people on the train watching video on phones and iPods. I knew video had jumped the chasm at that point.

But the passivity of the viewer is the one thing that makes it a negative. There is no easy call to action as there is with online text. You can embed links into the text, making it easy for the audience to go deeper into your content. You can collect much more data from a text document than you can from a video.

Me!box Media has changed that.

me!box is a video platform that allows producers to embed links, documents, other videos… any kind of link you would put into a text document… into a video (See how we did it here.)

The platform adds a relatively small bar on the right of the video. Links appear in sequence to when they are mentioned in the video. The platform allows the producer to stop the video at specific points, if necessary to allow the audience to view the additional content, or to let the video continue on as the audience looks at additional visual content.

There are some video platforms that offer this type of feature on a very limited level. For example, Youtube allows you to embed links to other Youtube videos, or become subscribers to specific channels. But no platform I’ve been able to find creates the level of engagement that me!box provides.

This is not an experimental platform. HP and Intel have used me!box for their training programs and me!box Media is talking to B2B publishing companies about incorporating the platform into their online publications. This latter use is where I see the real value.

Footwasher Media did several NTP video interviews that were shared with multiple publications last year. The online editors love them because they produced high traffic, and in fact, the produce high traffic on the sponsor sites that ran them as well. But the love wasn’t there among the sponsors for the very reason that engagement was only passive. The clients preferred the text content because it drove active engagement by the audience.

Video is high value to online publications because it keeps people on the page, but it is low value to many advertisers because it doesn’t drive people to their sites or material. You can insert ads into the video, but, again, there is no active engagement. Using me!box, publications can have the high, passive engagement of the video, which creates more impressions, but advertisers can get traffic directly from the video, get the audience to download additional content and actively share.

One downside to the publishers is that they may have to do a page redesign to accommodate the expanded width of the me!box platform.

“We don’t call it a redesign,” Me!box Media CEO Mark Jacobs told me. “ we say we are opening a larger value-add space.”

Jacobs has the data to back up the definition. Me!box videos get twice the play time, three times the engagement and and sharing, and up to five times the clocks-to-action and impressions of YouTube or Brightcove videos (see chart), according to Jacobs.

The me!box platform increases the value of online video.

“Typically, the me!box space becomes the highest return per square inch on a page. It’s like throwing out a free newspaper rack and replacing it with a video vending machine.”

Other than the rather annoying spelling of the company name (Really? An exclamation point in the middle? My spell checker actually swore at me) This platform opens the potential of social video for many applications.

You can find out more about me!box at www.meboxmedia.com. Tell ‘em the guys from Footwasher Media sent you.

Note: me!box is still a relatively new technology and is optimized currently only for the desktop/laptop world. The company is working on the third release of the product and starting from the mobile direction. Viewing video on the platform on handheld devices is still fairly sketchy.

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France’s Menta introduces the “chipless” FPGA

admin — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 19:47:35 +0000

In our continuing search for the “$10,000 Chip” we ran across yet another French company that brings us closer to our goal.

Menta S.A.S. based in Montpellier in the south of France has created what might be called a “Chipless” FPGA, a programmable IP core that allows designers to target any design platform, be it a traditional FPGA or an SOC…but you don’t have to buy the chip to get to the end of the design, implementation can be decided at the end of the process.

The soft IP core permits a standard RTL flow with design tools. Designers can modify the design according to their needs on the fly. A hard macro version of the soft IP can be a drop-in solution for rapid time to market.

But for our purposes, the elimination of the hardware early in the process means you can get to prototype faster and with less cost. New Tech Press dropped in on the Menta booth at DAC 2012 and chatted with the CEO, Laurent Rouget.

(New Tech press is debuting a new video tool with this report from our new partner Me!Box Media. The technology allows you to interact directly with the video, including sending comments back to us. Let us know what you think)

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