Telepresence Options - Best Of The Web

Google calls for fast adoption of VP9 video compression

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:32:44 -0500

Story and Images by Brian Dolan / Mobi Health News

Google has nearly completed its work on its VP9 video technology and is keen on seeing its application being picked up quickly. At its Google I/O conference on Wednesday, company employees spoke about the technology being a higher-quality alternative to the dominant video codec, H.264.

According to the company, the move to VP9, which is now available in testing on both Chrome and YouTube, will help save user bandwidth costs. While the VP9 specification will be finalised by June 17, developers can now access the same through Chrome's about:flags mechanism and access YouTube's VP9 channel.

Apart from the cost saving benefits of VP9, an additional feature that can become its main USP is the lack of royalty payments. Google defended this decision by stating that it wanted to facilitate the video projects that start-ups, programmers, schools and others may want to launch.

There are a few problems with this announcement, though. The first problem is that Google is trying to do too much, too fast. Web browsers on a software level can be updated quickly. However, it takes a lot longer for hardware to come up with the needed support and chips so as to decode the videos without killing the battery life. With the VP8 - around in the market for the last three years - still proving a task to decode for most of the industry, the VP9 may prove more of burden than a blessing.

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11 Governments Are Meeting in Peru to Figure Out How They Can Control the Internet

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:20:41 -0500

Story and Images by Refreshing News

Remember SOPA? Remember how when we the people finally defeated SOPA everyone got so stoked that confetti poured out of their eyeballs and its opponents downloaded films and albums and pirated video games in celebration? Well, shortly after SOPA there was CISPA--the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act--a bill that is both scarier than Zombies and much less well known than SOPA .

On April 18, three days after the Boston Marathon bombing, CISPA passed in the House of Representatives. Obama's White House has expressed "fundamental concerns" about CISPA. They are justifiably a bit turned off by how CISPA doesn't specify precisely how it intends to spy on the internet--and when it is ok to spy on internet users--and that is a terrifying prospect.

As a Canadian, these American "fuck up the internet" bills have always been disconcerting. While Canadian sovereignty would ideally save anyone who lives in this country and errs on the wrong side of a SOPA or a CISPA--with so much internet traffic filtering through American-owned web servers--it is not out of the question that American jurisdiction could be called against an international cyber-offender. The state of Virginia, for example, claimed jurisdiction against the Hong Kong-owned Megaupload who was hosting their website in that state.

But now it appears that it's going to be even easier for international copyright offenders to be tried in court by the interests-and lobbying power-of Hollywood. Starting today, 11 countries--Canada, America, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, Brunei, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand--are having a secret (no members of the public and no press) meeting in Lima, Peru to figure out what can be done about copyright offenders who transmit Hollywood's precious content over the interweb's tubes without paying for it.

The meeting is held under the banner of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Agreement. They're looking to sign an international treaty that will create world government-esque laws to handle anyone who downloads an early leak of Iron Man 3 illegally.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling this the "biggest global threat to the internet since ACTA." If you remember, ACTA (the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is an international, internet-policing treaty that was shut down by the European Parliament with a 92 percent nay vote. Luckily for Europeans, no EU country is anywhere near the TPP negotiations in Peru right now--and European politicians are now quick to distance themselves from the policies that ACTA is trying to ram down the world's throat.

But in North America, the ACTA movement is still very much alive. Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government passed a bill in March that makes Canada more ACTA-friendly by allowing customs officers to destroy counterfeit goods and ratcheting up the criminal penalties against copyright offenders. And the United States has seized hip-hop blog domains without warning or trial, because they were alleged to host pirated material.

A leaked chapter outlining some preliminary discussion to re-examine intellectual property has revealed that TPP wants to add further checks and balances to restrict fair use. Those behind TPP want to make sure that if a teacher is trying to show some copyrighted material in their class for the purpose of education, or if a humorist using copyrighted material in an article for the purpose of satire, they're doing so under what TPP calls a "good faith activity."

The language in this leaked TPP chapter is incredibly dense and dates back to February 2011--so not only is it a confusing bit of writing, but it will also likely be revised over and over during this meeting in Peru. As it stands, the EFF is worried that "the United States is trying to export the worst parts of its intellectual property law without bringing any of the [fair use] protections." And just like SOPA or CISPA, many people are concerned that the broad language in new legal terms like "good faith activity" will potentially lead to unjust prosecutions.

It may take a while before the results of this TPP meeting in Peru filter out to the press, but it's crystal clear that even though SOPA died, the Hollywood lobby is more than willing to generate new legislation and international partnerships to protect its interests. SOPA, for a combination of reasons, incited the ire of the public. We saw SOPA blackouts where websites like Reddit and Wikipedia went offline for a day, celebrities spoke out against it on Twitter; there was a bona fide cultural movement.

But now, the language behind international efforts like ACTA or TPP is getting more and more obscure, the reporting on such efforts less and less frequent, and the meetings being held to define these treaties are being held behind closed doors. The wheels of government are moving quickly to restrict international copyright online as much as possible--with the lobby of Hollywood thrusting it forward--in order to preserve the profits of content gatekeepers like the RIAA and MPAA.

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Samsung to Offer 5G Service by 2020:Tens of Gigabits per second

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:20:37 -0500

Story and Images by Yonhap News

SEOUL, March 12 (Yonhap) -- Samsung Electronics Co. said Sunday that it successfully developed a core technology of the fifth-generation network (5G) for the first time, aiming to enable users to access faster data services by 2020.

   The new wireless technology will enable customers to access a stream of data faster than the current fourth-generation network and download an entire movie in less than a second, the world's largest smartphone maker said.

   Under the new platform, users can download and upload data at speeds of up to tens of gigabits per second (Gbps), compared to 75 megabits per second (Mbps) posted by the fourth-generation long-term evolution (LTE) service.

   Samsung Electronics said it has successfully tested the platform using the 28 Gigahertz (GHz) waveband to transmit data at a speed of 1 Gbps, which earlier had been considered as a conundrum by global industry players.

   The tech giant said it used 64 antenna elements to overcome the issue, which allowed the device to exchange real-time signals under the platform. Samsung plans to make the service available to consumers by 2020, it added.

   Market watchers said Samsung's development will add vitality to global development of the 5G network and its commercialization, as well as help in making an international standard for the platform.

   Advanced countries have been vying to pre-empt the 5G market, with China and the European Union injecting large sums of cash into development of the new communication platform.

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Ringadoc adds another $700,000 for after-hours patient calls

Thu, 16 May 2013 12:15:50 -0500

Story and Images by Brian Dolan / Mobi Health News

This week San Francisco-based Ringadoc announced an additional $700,000 in funding for its seed round, which combined with its previously raised $1.2 million, brings its total round of funding up to $1.9 million. While Founders Fund's FF Angel led the round, the new $700,000 comes from Los Angeles-based Siemer VC, Telegraph Hill Group, and Dr. Lyle Dennis, who is the Chief of Neurology at Bon Secours Health System. Additional angel investors include: Practice Fusion Founder and CEO Ryan Howard and Sharon Knight, the former president of concierge medical practice company One Medical Group.

Ringadoc CEO and Founder Jordan Michaels told MobiHealthNews in an interview that the company plans to use the new funding to ramp up sales and marketing of its after-hours, practice management offering. Michaels said that Ringadoc has now helped facilitate north of 100,000 after hours calls to physicians for patients.

As we noted at the beginning of 2013 -- when Ringadoc added $450,000 to its coffers - Ringadoc planned to use those funds to scale its new offering Ringadoc exchange, develop new patient-facing apps, and to develop a premium service offering that could add video conferencing capabilities to the current voice-only communications offering.

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Virgin eyes Kiwi link-up

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:26:57 -0500

Story and Images by Christopher Adam / New Zealand Herald

A meeting with Sir Richard Branson looks set to pay dividends for Auckland video conferencing start-up FaceMe.

Mark Christensen and Danny Tomsett, the North Shore-based company's chief executive and chief technology officer respectively, travelled to Adelaide last week to discuss their business plans with the billionaire founder of Virgin Group.

They got the chance to take part in the meeting after winning a business challenge competition last year.

Christensen said Branson had indicated there was scope for using FaceMe's technology within the Virgin Group, from its international call centres to its media and airline divisions.

"They'd be a great client to get on board," he said. "We talked a lot around use cases of FaceMe, in particular referencing those use cases into his [Branson's] business units."

Christensen said Branson was also keen to use FaceMe on Necker Island, the Caribbean island he owns.

"He gets interviewed a lot [on the island] and has a very poor performance on Skype," he said.

If Virgin Group was to use FaceMe's technology, it would become the company's biggest client.

After lengthy research and development, FaceMe - a browser-based video-conferencing system - hit the market in 2010.

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Encoder for 8K "Super HI-Vision" Developed

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:22:45 -0500

Story and Images by INAVEATE

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation and NHK, Japan's national public broadcasting organization, have developed the world's first HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding) encoder for 8K ultra HDTV "Super Hi-Vision" (SHV).

Dubbed as the broadcasting medium of the near future, SHV features 16 times the number of HD pixels and a 22.2 multichannel surround sound experience.

HEVC, which offers roughly double the data compression of AVC2 and about four times that of the MPEG-2 standard currently employed for digital HDTV broadcasting, is set to be adopted as an international standard this year.

The high-volume SHV images are divided into 17 horizontal rows. The parallel processing of these rows makes it possible to achieve real-time coding of SHV images. The deterioration of picture quality at the row boundaries has been lessened by having rows share data concerning the speed and direction of moving objects.

NHK and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation are pursuing research and development of real-time coding of the 120 Hz frame frequency of SHV.

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Skype with care - Microsoft is reading everything you write

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:08:11 -0500

Story and Images by The H Security

Anyone who uses Skype has consented to the company reading everything they write. The H's associates in Germany at heise Security have now discovered that the Microsoft subsidiary does in fact make use of this privilege in practice. Shortly after sending HTTPS URLs over the instant messaging service, those URLs receive an unannounced visit from Microsoft HQ in Redmond.

A reader informed heise Security that he had observed some unusual network traffic following a Skype instant messaging conversation. The server indicated a potential replay attack. It turned out that an IP address which traced back to Microsoft had accessed the HTTPS URLs previously transmitted over Skype. Heise Security then reproduced the events by sending two test HTTPS URLs, one containing login information and one pointing to a private cloud-based file-sharing service. A few hours after their Skype messages, they observed the following in the server log:

65.52.100.214 - - [30/Apr/2013:19:28:32 +0200]
"HEAD /.../login.html?user=tbtest&password=geheim HTTP/1.1"

They too had received visits to each of the HTTPS URLs transmitted over Skype from an IP address registered to Microsoft in Redmond. URLs pointing to encrypted web pages frequently contain unique session data or other confidential information. HTTP URLs, by contrast, were not accessed. In visiting these pages, Microsoft made use of both the login information and the specially created URL for a private cloud-based file-sharing service.

In response to an enquiry from heise Security, Skype referred them to a passage from its data protection policy:

"Skype may use automated scanning within Instant Messages and SMS to (a) identify suspected spam and/or (b) identify URLs that have been previously flagged as spam, fraud, or phishing links."

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Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA

Wed, 15 May 2013 08:56:45 -0500

Story and Images by James Bamford / Wired

Army General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, is having a busy year -- hopping around the country, cutting ribbons at secret bases and bringing to life the agency's greatly expanded eavesdropping network.

In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia.

Designed to house about 4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators, analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private contractors, it will have a 2,800-square-foot fitness center open 24/7, 47 conference rooms and VTCs, and "22 caves," according to an NSA brochure from the event. No television news cameras were allowed within two miles of the ceremony.

Overseas, Menwith Hill, the NSA's giant satellite listening post in Yorkshire, England that sports 33 giant dome-covered eavesdropping dishes, is also undergoing a multi-million-dollar expansion, with $68 million alone being spent on a generator plant to provide power for new supercomputers. And the number of people employed on the base, many of them employees of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, is due to increase from 1,800 to 2,500 in 2015, according to a study done in Britain. Closer to home, in May, Fort Meade will close its 27-hole golf course to make room for a massive $2 billion, 1.8-million-square-foot expansion of the NSA's headquarters, including a cybercommand complex and a new supercomputer center expected to cost nearly $1 billion.

The climax, however, will be the opening next year of the NSA's mammoth 1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center. The centerpiece in the agency's decade-long building boom, it will be the "cloud" where the trillions of millions of intercepted phone calls, e-mails, and data trails will reside, to be scrutinized by distant analysts over highly encrypted fiber-optic links.

Despite the post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the NSA says that citizens should trust it not to abuse its growing power and that it takes the Constitution and the nation's privacy laws seriously.

But one of the agency's biggest secrets is just how careless it is with that ocean of very private and very personal communications, much of it to and from Americans. Increasingly, obscure and questionable contractors -- not government employees -- install the taps, run the agency's eavesdropping infrastructure, and do the listening and analysis.

And with some of the key companies building the U.S.'s surveillance infrastructure for the digital age employing unstable employees, crooked executives, and having troubling ties to foreign intelligence services, it's not clear that Americans should trust the secretive agency, even if its current agency chief claims he doesn't approve of extrajudicial spying on Americans. His predecessor, General Michael V. Hayden, made similar claims while secretly conducting the warrantless wiretapping program.

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Case Study: VideoCentric Visual Collab in Abu Dhabi

Wed, 15 May 2013 08:09:27 -0500

Story and Images by VideoCentric

VideoCentric, the UK's leading video conferencing & visual collaboration integrator, and
Nessco, the international leader in the field of telecoms system integration for the Oil and
Gas Industry, have been working in partnership to design, supply, install and maintain the
video conferencing and collaboration suites for the Abu Dhabi Gas Development Company
(Al Hosn Gas) onshore sour gas field development - Shah - which is on track for completion
by late 2014.

The collaborative suites, to be installed at Shah are to include video conferencing systems based
on Cisco codecs, 60" Panasonic displays, SMARTBoard interactive whiteboards and Revolabs audio
integration, Wolfvision Ceiling cameras and bespoke AMX touch panel developments, designed
and programmed by VideoCentric themselves.
The Shah Gas collaboration suites aim to improve productivity by enabling better communication,
less travel and more engagement with partners of the project and across the distributed Shah
Gas workforce. The integration of collaborative systems such as the interactive whiteboards with
the video conferencing equipment and bespoke touch controllers enables users to easily launch
video collaboration sessions for project reviews and management, board meetings and regular
project updates, reducing the need to travel and providing the means to a much faster time to
response, helping the project to stay on track and allowing units to work more productively

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How Google is melding our real and virtual worlds with games, apps ... and Glass

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:42:07 -0500

Story and Images by John Koetsier / VentureBeat

"The world around you is not what it seems," says Ingress, the virtual game that uses the real world as its gamespace. And, perhaps, when Google's semi-independent division Niantic Labs is finished with its mission, we humans won't be, either.

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and usable. Note carefully that Google says nothing about the Internet in that statement.

In the last few eye-blinks of human history, we've created virtual worlds: cyberspace, virtual reality, the World Wide Web ... places that exist in our devices, on our computers, in our servers, on the internet, and in our heads. But there's also a space in which we live and walk and eat and breathe. Realspace. Meatspace. IRL. The real world, so we say, that we can touch and taste and smell.

Google's trying to bring those world together, partly through the work of Niantic Labs.

Augmented reality is nothing new, of course, with marketing-focused companies like Layar building connections between physical and virtual reality and Ikea's most-downloaded branded app of 2012 doing similar things. Other startups have explored AR capabilities as well, such as Caterina Fake's Findery, which invites people to leave geo-tied notes that others can discover and read.

But when a company with the resources of a Google tackles the problem, and has a tool in Google Glass that seems destined for significant developer (and probably user) penetration that can actually create interconnections between the real and the virtual perhaps more efficiently than any other previous product, you've got something interesting. And potentially huge.

So a couple of weeks ago, I chatted with the man who's leading that effort.