Interesting Technologies

My connected weight

2010-11-14T17:28:00.018+01:00

This story started this summer with a telephone call on the top of a mountain in Switzerland. It was a former counterpart in a strategical partnership of our companies. He was looking for some support to promote the use of their Connected Wellness products together with our company. Wellness is a fast growing market, but I was mainly interested because I think wellness technologies, will eventually help us to optimize the medical market. And of course I love all things that can be connected to the Internet (“Internet of things” is one of the current buzzwords). A few weeks later we had call to discuss this further and I guess that I received a body monitor because of my critical questions. It is called Youw8 (‘you-weight’) and the dashboard will show your weight, BMI, body fat percentage and muscle mass.

The technology

One of the problems of connected devices is that they need some kind of connection. Ethernet cables are probably the best choice for in home and there are also fibre for in home solutions available.

Performance and security are ensured with ethernet cables, but you really don’t want cables for all connected devices. Wireless is an alternative and we all use Wifi on our laptops at home and that's fine. But if you want to connect a wireless thing without a keyboard, life gets complicated. You can use the remote control for audio and video equipment, or you can do the initial configuration by using an USB connection to a PC. Or extend the solution to a free Ethernet port and have a wireless solution between the device and the Ethernet connected receiver. With Youw8, they did the latter.The device (a scale in this case) comes with a small receiver box which connects to your broadband modem or router via an Ethernet cable. The wireless connection works in the free 865 MHz band and with these frequency a long distance can be reached with low power consumption. In this case the advantage is that you you only have to connect the receiver to a free ethernet port. The coupling between the device and the user is done on the website were you create a account and type in the number that is on the back of the receiver.

The bandwidth consumption is limited to 30 kbps when the data is transferred. When the data can’t be transferred it is stored on the device. This is not only useful when you take your scale for a holiday (and afterwards see how your weight evolved), but allows the extension to devices that typically are not always in range of the receiver, like activity and glucose monitors. I personally think that this technology can extend the wellness monitors to real medical monitors.

Installation

That was real easy. Unpack, connect the receiver to a free port on the ethernet switch, create an account and enter the 6 digit code. The most complicated part was ensuring a power port for the receiver. Also part of the installation is the measurement of you waist, for which a measuring tape is added. The website also allows to select buddies and you can see who is also using on a Google map. There is also an iPhone application available.

First use
As it measures weight and body fat, I was standing bare foot on the scale. Hmm, this can not be correct, it showed about half my weight. Perhaps change some settings with the three buttons on top or the one on the bottom? Pressing these buttons had no result. The manual has no reference to these buttons, and also the web site had no answers. So I mailed the helpdesk and got a response direct after the weekend. It turned out that the scale should stand on a solid underground and not on the carpet in the bedroom. In the next version of the manual and site this will be added. And the buttons are not linked to a function, but you wonder, especially when it doesn’t work as expected. In the next model there will no more buttons.

So problem solved; for me. My wife noted that this new scale makes your one kg heavier, therefore she hardly uses it.

Use after three months
With some discipline I’m now weighing myself every day and almost every day I check the site. All my measurements are correctly added because it recognizes you based on your weigh

t and body fat percentage. If one of my other family members uses it, this shows up on the site in a list of unrecognised measurements. Also measurements that are not made with bare feet, do show up in this list.

The measurements are shown on a dashboard and in a view with shortly bouncing bars and the mouseover gives the details. Reports are available in daily, weekly and monthly views. By using the view with the daily results I actually found out that there is a pattern in my weight changes. I build up weight during the weekend and loose on the working days.
As I wanted to loose some weight I made a personal weight plan. This was needed because I found out that in the last 20 years I gained 10 kg. More over I felt that my Metabolism slowed, which made my weight gain faster. Time to stop this. I changed small parts of my eating habits and lost weight. One day my weight was below the target weight, so I expected balloons, congratulations on the site; but it only mentioned 0,3 kg to go. Even on the day were I reached the exact weight it simply mentioned 0,0 kg to go. A bit unexpected.

Conclusion
This body monitor is a very user friendly solution both in technology and use.

There are some small improvements, but the main potential is in adding other wellness products. And the extension to the professional and medical markets.
In the end our company decided not to promote this product, but it helped a bit in awareness creating and some colleagues using similar devices (but Wifi connected).
And I lost some weight during this experiment.

Link: http://www.youw8.com/

Philips NetTV experience

2010-08-15T22:13:00.015+02:00

A few weeks back I bought myself online a 32 inch Philips LED NetTV. This was to replace the 11 years old 28 inch Wide-screen TV, which sometimes showed a curved screen.

But this didn’t matter that much for us; we are probably not the most critical viewers. The real reason was that we wanted a flat screen after our redecoration project. Moreover, the lack of the flat screen prevented us from taking decisions on where to put the wall decorations. A painting and a Pub Clock were waiting in the living room for their final destination. As I think that Internet & TV will merge sooner or later, I decided to by a Philips NetTV. Let’s see the results of this technology project and my resistance to spend a lot of effort on it.

Installing the TV

The physical installation was easy because it is not that heavy, so I could do it by myself. Although it has a lot of interfaces, my installation part was easy. Connect the analog coax and scart cables. Perhaps later on I will connect on the digital audio to the surround system. The automatic channel detection went roughly OK. I thought I was missing one channel, but it turned out that it automatically labeled one of the channels with the TV program displayed. The label was "As th", which is short for "As the world turns" (apparently). Changing the order of the channel in a similar way as on the old TV, was pretty easy. Even with analog TV the quality is very good compared with the old one. So we made a step forward there. And all done in one evening, outside regular TV hours.

Installing NetTV

Now the interesting part: ensuring the NetTV functions will work. NetTV obviously requires a link to the Internet. The distance between the TV and the modem in our local 19” cabinet (closet where all utility facilities enter the home) is only 10 meters, but getting it there via the floor is not an option; because there is parquet on the floor and no possibility to put it behind skirting. So I thought I had to make this connection via the crawl space, which would also mean drilling a hole through the parquet and floor of 15 cm. Then I found out that you can also use the TV's USB port for inserting a special Wifi adapter (PTA01).

So I bought one, together with an additional ethernet switch. I installed the ethernet switch in the closet and moved my FON access point to the closet; this obviously required additional power and ethernet cabling, but was not that complex. Plug in the USB Wifi, find the WPA key in the administration, configure and go. Easy enough.

Configuring NetTV

Somewhere in the activation process it asked to register. I tried to use my Club Philips account but the system did not seem to react properly; error messages (like NetTV off-line) were shown. By searching on the Internet I found that on http://www.syndication.philips.com/monitor/internet/ you can find the status of all Philips Internet Services. Strange to find this via a Philips forum discussion and not via the site itself. As all services were green, I did the off-on trick and like a PC everything really started working. In the mean time I registered the device via a PC as this was suggested in the manual. But I also had to register via NetTV. This resulted in this device being registered two times in the Club Philips environment. I wanted to clean this up, but it is not clear which one to remove without the need for re-registering when using the netTV again.

Using NetTV

When selecting NetTV, there is a limited set of selected content available. As this set includes rain-radar (buienradar), Youtube, Picasa, some gamesites, a major news site and the two major content organizers (RTL and NOS) and there is the option to go to the rest of the Internet, that doesn’t limit that much. The content organizers have a limited set of content at this moment. The quality of the streaming video is generally at least as good as the analog quality. Sometimes channels stop and continue without any message, others start with a buffering message and when they stop in the middle, buffering is shown again. Youtube also has a good quality. Navigating with remote control not that easy. The remote control number (eg for pause) doesn't seem to work, but with arrows it works. It was fun using it together with my kids; I never heard about Justin Bieber, but now I've seen him performing. The fun part was that the first videos we found were the imitations. The user-interface is easy enough for a 9 year old kid to use. Showing holiday pictures with Picasa on-line went pretty good. The only problem was that the slideshow crashed when there was a video needed to be played. The games in NetTV are Casual games. I played “4 in a row” with with my son and it worked good. Handing over the remote control seems a bit strange, but did not reduce the fun.

There is one more thing

One of the features that in not promoted as NetTV, is very interesting. It is the Electronic Program Guide. When you select it, the browser NetTV clearly starts. The TV channel you were watching is displayed in the upper left corner. An improvement would be if this is displayed directly when the guide is selected. Now it is shown after the browser has started.

Conclusion

For me it is clear that with this NetTV we made a step towards Internet TV. Hopefully Philips will add features and improvements, because it has potential for more. They really need to improve he installation and registration process. With respect to the performance issues experienced, the problem is that you never know what the cause is. It cloud be my Wifi connection, my DSL connection being overloaded, or even performance issues at the server side. Of all the possible causes, I hope that it isn’t my Wifi connection, otherwise I’ll have do physical work underneath the floor.

Ethernet interfaces in a high traffic growth environment

2007-09-16T21:47:00.000+02:00

(This article was written for the IEEE Communications Magazine, but not accepted due to technical limitations (the number of pages they can allocate for 100 G subject), it migth be published later)

Introduction

For this article a part of KPN’s ISP network is explored. KPN is the incumbent operator in The Netherlands, offering fixed and mobile, voice, data, internet, TV and ICT services. The local broadband market is well developed, probably due to the presence of both cable and telephony infrastructure in almost every household. And because of the generally dense population, fiber and wireless services are also offered by new entrants. 70% Of the households in The Netherlands are using broadband Internet and from these 5 million broadband connections; KPN has a market share of approximately 40%.
Currently the highest Ethernet interface speed is10 Gbps.

Configuration

The focus is on the part of the network that connects to the public infrastructure of the Amsterdam Internet Exchange. (AMS-IX). This is generally not public information, but it is the least sensitive part of the network. It is being used for peerings with over 200 AMS-IX connected organizations. The traffic between the peers and the service platform and users takes the path over a router, DWDM equipment and the AMX-IX switch. The technology used on the IX is Ethernet, as this is the most efficient solution to handle traffic between the AMS-IX connected routers.
In the event of failure, the links function as a backup for each other. Any of the two links can handle all the traffic. As the traffic is above the highest Ethernet interface speed, bundling (a.k.a. aggregation) of multiple interfaces is being used.

Traffic history

For capacity planning purposes the weekly high of all the different connections are being noted. This offers a great opportunity to create insight in the traffic history of the AMS-IX connection.

The slight decrease during the summer periods is followed by a strong growth in the months following. When studying this figure more in-depth the annual growth shows high variations.

Annual growth
2003 39 %
2004 162 %
2005 228 %
2006 81 %
Average 127 %

The high variation is partly caused by moving peers from private connections to public IX infrastructure and back. This is being done in order to limit the investments in interfaces.
The peak traffic with the AMS-IX was 27 Gbps in June 2007.

Expected traffic growth

We believe that our future traffic growth will be lower than it has been over the past few years. This decrease is mainly due to high broadband penetration already reached. The traffic will continue to grow because of increasing access speeds and intensifying use of high bandwidth applications like video.
To explore the future traffic volumes, three scenario’s have been drawn up. The first and highest growth scenario is a continuation of the average annual growth of 127%. The second and lowest growth scenario is based on the lowest annual growth of 81%. The third scenario consists of simply doubling the traffic every year, in other words: plus 100% every year.

As can be seen, in 2009 a traffic volume of 100 Gbps will be reached and around 2012 – 2013 the traffic will hit the 1 Tbps level.

Limits of current interfaces

Currently the maximum Ethernet interface speed is 10 Gbps exist. An approach for understanding the impact of the growth, is exploring the limits of aggregation of 10 Gbps interfaces.
The traffic volumes have to be handled by interfaces. An interesting point is that traffic volumes are at a level where they cannot be handled by one interface. This was especially true at the end of the life cycle of interfaces, but when 100 Gbps interfaces become available, they will be aggregated from the start.

Interface Aggregated interfaces
100 Mbps No aggregation
1 Gbps 2
10 Gbps 3 (so far)

In the current configuration on both locations, three 10 Gbps interfaces are aggregated to facilitate the traffic. Two upgrade cycles are foreseen for the remainder of this year.

The current available maximum of aggregation is eight times 10 Gbps and sixteen times 10 Gbps is underway.
There are several reasons for letting aggregating 8 interfaces being the maximum:
Even though larger numbers of aggregates will be possible, it seems wise not to overstretch above the earlier aggregation experience. There are always issues with solving hardware / interfaces limitations by software. An other reason for having 8 interfaces as the maximum limit is the total number of interfaces. In the above configuration, having 8 AMS-IX connected 10 Gbps interfaces, would mean about 60-70 10 Gbps interfaces on the two routers. They will all become obsolete when upgrading to higher speed interfaces, and reusing the 10 Gbps Router interfaces is only possible using equipment of the same supplier.When using 16 interfaces as the maximum as reference of determining the introduction moment for higher speeds interfaces, over 130 10 Gbps interfaces will have to be replaced on the two routers. Because the routers connect to other equipment, the total number of interfaces is of course twice the number of router interfaces. This means 130 interfaces in the 8 aggregate case and 260 in the 16 aggregate case.

Based on the expected traffic growth the timeline for replacing the 10 Gbps interfaces is as follows:
8 interfaces as maximum: Q4, 2008 – Q1 2009
16 interfaces as maximum: Q3, 2009 – Q3, 2010
The differences of these timelines mean installing over 60 router interfaces in 1 to 1.5 year in the core of the network. Due to the exponential growth rate, this means up to 5 new 10 Gbps router interfaces a week when reaching the 16 aggregate levels. This is obviously an operational challenge compared to the ten interfaces of a year ago.

Transport over WAN

Simply having higher speeds interfaces available for connections between routers and switches, could be the easiest part of the solution to an access provider. That is because the traffic has to be transported to end users that are typically 100’s of km’s away. This is also the case between the AMS-IX switch and the Rotterdam router, in the case used in this paper. The current optical network delivers 10 Gbps on several interfaces. There is already an ITU standard for 40 Gbps (STM-256), which can facilitate part of the traffic growth, but it is obviously not the needed Ethernet. Deploying this standard in the optical network (OTN), would mean a reduction of the number of interfaces in the network. It will include installation of routers close to the AMS-IX switches to act as an interface translators. This can probably be deployed before higher speeds Ethernet interfaces become available.
Deployment of 100 Gbps Ethernet over the OTN would solve the number of interfaces issue. The impact on the optical network however, could be rather significant. Using 40 Gbps Ethernet over the OTN will have less impact, but could be a solution for a very limited time, because of the growth rate.
An alternative could be a dedicated fiber solution for the Internet traffic.

There are options for getting 100 Gbps of traffic over the WAN before the end of 2009. Getting the technology in place for 1 Tbps over WAN in the 2012 – 2013 timeframe, is mind puzzling.

Conclusions

The case described in this article regarding the traffic between the AMS-IX and the ISP infrastructure is not the only area of concern of the network.
In other parts of the world with higher traffic volumes or higher traffic growth because of broadband deployments, similar issues may occur at an earlier stage.
For the higher speeds interfaces, it is simply the sooner the better for maintaining operational stability.
Aggregation should be regarded as an integral part of interface standard development, because the first implementations of the higher speeds interfaces, will include aggregation.
Traffic volumes of 1 Tbps between two end-points are only five years away.

-=-
Biography:
Ad Bresser is Chair Innovation Office at KPN Service Operations and one of the founding members of the Higher Speeds User group. In the past he was responsible for building KPNs ISP network infrastructure and he has been an executive board member of the AMS-IX association for four years. Before joining KPNs subsidiary Planet Internet in 1998 as an Internet architect, Mr Bresser worked as an engineer, consultant and architect with Cap Gemini for 9 years. In this timeframe he provided over 50 customers with network and Internet solutions.
Ad Bresser holds a BSc in technical computer science and in 1988 his thesis was on a diagnostics’ tool for Ethernet.

The Plaxo case

2005-04-22T00:33:00.000+02:00

As a kind of active user of Plaxo (http://www.plaxo.com/), I wanted to find out if we should regard is as a disruptive technology.

I like the simplicity of it, it's just about keeping up to date you contacts database, nothing more, nothing less. It links in Outlook (Express) and invites your contacts via e-mail to update their details. It also allows you to have access to your contacts over the Internet in a web browser and if you really want, you can also have your Outlook calendar, tasks, and notes on-line.

Pretty recent article in BusinessWeek.

When I analyzed what people find of it, I found out that discussion is around privacy, security and spam.
Privacy: Plaxo has the strictest privacy policies in place on the Internet that affects not only Plaxo but anyone who wants to acquire Plaxo. There is some concern about non-members information stored by members. Although one could probably argue that this falls also under the privacy policy, the best way to solve this is simply joining Plaxo ;-).Their privacy policy has also personnel consequences, they let one of the board member go that did not have a good background (Napster). The current CEO, Ben Golub came to the company from VeriSign and Plaxo's Privacy Officer is actively reacting on postings in several Forums.
Security: Plaxo publishes their security measures. There were a few (I counted two) security issues, which is almost unavoidable. They were solved in a few hours, no harm done.
Spam:The update request via e-mail can be annoying for non members and is by some regarded as spam. To Opt-out from Update Requests non members can stop receiving Update Requests from a single Plaxo member, or all Plaxo members (https://www.plaxo.com/opt-out). This link will be included in all Update Request. As in every society the best way to solve this is to teach the Plaxo users manners. According to Ben Golub, Plaxo will be trying that.

After some initial reservations, David course now recommends the free Plaxo contact information service. Looking at his picture, I don't know if I should thrust him ;-).

financially it sounds pretty stable, it is backed by: Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital and Google fame, along with individual investments from the likes of early Tim Koogle (Yahoo). Last year Cisco joined.
Revenue is generated by selling premium services: VIP support, Address book cleaner, Mobile / Wap access. Partnering is an other stream of revenues: birthday reminders with card send option and links to presents sites (and in every mail a link to stop receiving reminders for this person). Actually all changes in a plaxo member data could be a reason for strengthening the relation (moves, job changes). There is also a partnering with Yahoo in a combined Plaxo Outlook Yahoo search field. Other partners use Plaxo's open API so that they can integrate the self-updating address book, calendar, tasks, and notes into their own applications. Example: Modomail an e-mail service provider which synchronizes contact information between the Webmail address book and the Plaxo Network.

Competition:
AccuCard http://www.cardscan.com/products/accucard.asp
GoodContacts http://www.goodcontacts.com/ (also has networking options)AddresSender; http://www.addressender.com/
I did not test any of them, but they don't have Plaxo's clean looks.

Conclusion: Yes, Plaxo is a disruptive technology and the current dominant solution.