If Internet.org ever hopes to be successful with its goal of bringing affordable internet to the next 5 billion people, the cost of delivery will need to be much cheaper than it is today. Today, members of the coalition — which includes Facebook, Qualcomm, Ericsson and others — released a substantial 70-page white paper that outlines some of the initial steps that are on the drawing board. According to the group’s estimates, data delivery is currently 100 times too expensive to execute the vision of Internet.org, but all of that could change within the next decade. To accomplish this, Internet.org is seeking ways to bring a tenfold improvement to the cost of delivering data, along with apps that are 10 times more efficient. For Facebook’s part, it highlights technologies such as HipHop for PHP and the HipHop virtual machine, which allows its existing servers to accommodate 500 percent more traffic than before, and its Air Traffic Control system, which allows it to simulate different mobile networks and congestion systems around the world. Similarly, Facebook is looking to compression technologies such as WebP — currently in use on its Android app — to replace image formats such as PNG and JPEG, which alone could reduce network traffic by 20%. Another challenge is looming, however, as Qualcomm estimates that the demand for data will double each year over the next 10 years, ultimately increasing 1000 fold over where it is today. To meet that demand, it’s lobbying for a substantial spectrum reallocation, along with technologies such as carrier aggregation, LTE-Broadcast and LTE Direct. Combine this with more unconventional approaches that it’ll reveal at a later date, and you begin to appreciate the massive undertaking that lies ahead for the partners of Internet.org. Filed under: Internet , Mobile , Facebook Comments Source: Facebook , Internet.org (PDF)
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Internet.org targets efficiency and cost reduction to connect the next 5 billion
An anonymous reader writes “A suburban Los Angeles school district is taking a novel approach to tackling the problem of cyber-bullying. It’s paying a company to snoop on students’ social media pages. ‘The district in Glendale, California, is paying $40, 500 to a firm to monitor and report on 14, 000 middle and high school students’ posts on Twitter, Facebook and other social media for one year. Though critics liken the monitoring to government stalking, school officials and their contractor say the purpose is student safety. As classes began this fall, the district awarded the contract after it earlier paid the firm, Geo Listening, $5, 000 last spring to conduct a pilot project monitoring 9, 000 students at three high schools and a middle school. Among the results was a successful intervention with a student “who was speaking of ending his life” on his social media, said Chris Frydrych, CEO of the firm.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Apple has a new trick up its sleeve with the iPhone 5s that was talked about on stage during its recent reveal event, but the impact of which won’t be felt until much later when it gets fully taken advantage of by third-party developers. Specifically, I’m talking about the M7 motion coprocessor that now takes the load of tracking motion and distance covered, requiring much less battery draw and enabling some neat new tricks with tremendous felt impact. The M7 is already a boon to the iPhone 5s without any third-party app support – it makes the iPhone more intelligent in terms of when to activate certain features, and when to slow things down and converse battery life by checking less frequently for open networks, for instance. Because it’s already more efficient than using the main A-series processor for these tasks, and because changing these behaviours can themselves also save battery, the M7 already stretches the built-in battery to its upper limits, meaning you’ll get more talk time than you would otherwise out of a device that’s packing one. Besides offering ways for Apple to make power management and efficiency more intelligent on the new iPhone 5s, the M7 is also available for third-party developers to take advantage of, too. This means big, immediately apparent benefits for the health and activity tracker market, since apps like Move or the Nike+ software demoed during the presentation will be able to more efficiently capture data from the iPhone’s sensors. The M7 means that everyone will be able to carry a sensor similar to a Fitbit or equivalent in their pocket without having to cart around a separate device, which doesn’t require syncing via Bluetooth or worrying about losing something that’s generally tiny, plus there’s no additional wristwear required. And the M7′s CoreMotion API is open to all developers, so it’s essentially like carrying around a very powerful motion tracking gizmo in your pocket which is limited in function only by what developers can dream up for it. So in the future, we’ll likely see gesture-controlled games (imagine the iPhone acting as a gesture controller for a title broadcast to Apple TV via AirPlay), as well as all kinds of fitness trackers and apps that can use CoreMotion to limit battery drain or change functionality entirely depending on where and when they’re being used, as detected by motion cues. An app might offer very different modes while in transit, for instance, vs. when it’s stationary in the home. Apple’s iPhone 5s is an interesting upgrade in that much of what’s changed takes the form of truly innovative engineering advances, with tech like the fingerprint sensor, camera and M7 that are each, in and of themselves, impressive feats of technical acumen. What that means is that, especially in the case of the M7, the general consumer might not even realize how much of a generational shift this is until they get their hands on one, and new software experiences released over the hardware’s lifetime will gradually reveal even more about what’s changed. 
Occasionally, lobsters turn up with malformed claws due to a genetic mutation—but even among those lobsters, Lola is an oddity. On one side, she has a perfectly normal claw, and on the other, five mini-claws. Read more… 
