Light channels bring GPS-like technology indoors

As reported by the Boston Globe - Imagine this: You step into a vast department store to buy a new blender, and your smartphone leads you straight to the right aisle, and then lights up with a coupon for the KitchenAid model to your left.

The one remaining on the shelf has already been opened, so using your phone again, you summon a store clerk who finds a fresh box out back. Then you quickly pay with a wave of your phone over a small, glowing box that serves as a checkout register, which automatically adds points to your rewards account.

Welcome to the future of brick-and-mortar shopping, made possible by a GPS-like technology that works inside buildings and is made by Boston tech start-up ByteLight. But instead of beams from satellites that can’t penetrate walls, ByteLight uses LED light bulbs, now in so many stores, to transmit data via their pulsing light waves to the camera in a smartphone.

“The opportunity for indoor location is enormous,” said ByteLight chief executive Dan Ryan. “Right now, it’s a bit of a Wild West scenario, in that there’s a million different technologies that are trying to figure out a solution for this. Nobody’s quite gotten there yet, but we think there’s going to be an incredible opportunity.”

Indeed, indoor location technology is a huge emerging field with stiff competition and many of the biggest names in the business. Google Inc. has designed its maps application to help Android users navigate through more than 10,000 buildings worldwide — including airports, shopping malls, museums, and college campuses.

Indoor location tracking has too many potential applications to count, Ryan said, but ByteLight is focused for now on the retail industry.

The In-Location Alliance, a collaborative effort by mobile giants Nokia, Samsung, and Sony, and 19 smaller companies, is working on an indoor navigation system that determines a user’s position via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, by triangulating distances between hotspots and mobile handsets.

And Apple joined the fray in March when it bought indoor location start-up WiFiSlam for $20 million.

“What they lack,” Ryan said of ByteLight’s rivals, “is the ability to put a dot on the map that’s accurate, and that’s the piece that ByteLight fills in.”

Google says it can pinpoint a user’s location within several meters. Apple’s newly acquired WiFiSlam is accurate to about 8 feet. ByteLight says its margin of error is less than a meter.

Several large retailers are testing ByteLight’s navigation technology as a tool for improving employee efficiency, but customers are not yet using the system, Ryan said. He declined to name the companies.

Further along is the glowing box — ByteLight’s light field communication device, which is designed to outperform the much-hyped near field communication, which uses radio signals to perform tasks such as contactless payments within stores. But near field communication is unsupported by many mobile devices, including Apple’s iPhone, whose aluminum backing blocks radio frequencies.

By contrast the ByteLight box uses light waves for such transactions, and is compatible with every camera-equipped smartphone. The company says its glowing box will make its commercial debut Wednesday at 100 retail locations in Shanghai.

Ryan and cofounder Aaron Ganick began thinking seriously about LED data transmission as undergraduates at Boston University, where they worked at the school’s Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center.

“This entire world is shifting over to LEDs,” Ryan said. “So you’re going to have this enormous infrastructure that’s deployed across every single building in the entire world. What can we do with that? What opportunities become enabled?”

The pair figured out a way to manipulate the pulsing light waves emitted by LED bulbs so they send data as they flicker. Using microchips mounted to the bulbs, the ByteLight technology causes the LED bulbs to flicker very fast — too fast for the naked eye to see — and, in doing so, to communicate information to a smartphone through its camera lens. The communication between light bulb and smartphone enables shoppers using a retailer’s mobile application to navigate through a store, receive special offers on the products in front of them, or be located by a sales representative.

Ryan said the duo realized after some experimentation that “LEDs’ digital nature means that you can switch [the lights] on and off so fast that you can transmit a data signal to a user indoors.”

Ryan and Ganick devoted themselves full time to ByteLight in 2011, a year after graduation, when they were accepted by the Summer@Highland accelerator program hosted by Highland Capital Partners in Cambridge. Last year, the company announced $1.25 million in seed funding, led by VantagePoint Capital Partners of San Bruno, Calif.

Indoor location tracking has too many potential applications to count, Ryan said, but ByteLight is focused for now on the retail industry.

“At some level, it allows retail to really return to its roots,” Ryan said. “The origins of retail were general stores. You went down to the local store, the owner knew your name, knew what you liked. That aspect was lost as we transitioned to this big box model of retail. Now, when you combine indoor location with mobile phones, you can customize the shopping experience.”

White House Vetoes Ban on Sale of Some Apple iPhones, iPads

As reported by the Wall Street Journal: The Obama administration on Saturday vetoed a U.S. trade body's ban on the sale of some Apple iPhones and iPads, a rare move that upends a legal victory for smartphone rival Samsung Electronics Co.

U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman made the decision to veto the ban on the Apple devices, citing concerns about patent holders gaining "undue leverage." He said Samsung could continue to pursue its patent rights through the courts.

The action marked the first time since 1987 that a presidential administration had vetoed a product ban ordered by the U.S. International Trade Commission.

The ITC had ordered the ban on some older-model Apple iPhones and iPads in June after finding the products infringed a Samsung patent.

The ban had raised concerns among U.S. antitrust enforcers as well as some technology companies and lawmakers. They questioned whether companies should be able to use their essential technology patents to block rival products from the marketplace.

Apple on Saturday praised the administration for "standing up for innovation." The company had argued to the trade representative that the ban was inappropriate because Samsung had committed to license its patented technologies that were included in industry wide standards for wireless devices.

Once close business partners, Samsung and Apple have become increasingly intense rivals, sparring over the market for smartphones around the globe, with much of the momentum accruing to Samsung in recent months.

The rivalry has spilled into the courts, where barrages of competing patent claims have been lobbed in both directions. Last year, Apple won a jury trial and $1 billion in damages against Samsung over iPhone patents.

Samsung said Apple was the one that started the global patent wars between the two companies. It said the iPhone maker had sought to avoid paying for licenses of Samsung's patents.

The ITC, which has jurisdiction over certain trade practices, is an appealing legal option for patent holders, particularly tech companies, because the trade body can issue orders banning the importation of products that infringe upon another company's patents. Legal observers say it is easier to win an import ban at the ITC than it is to win a federal court ruling that would block product sales.

The ITC ruled against a key Apple theory across its recent litigation, which seeks to limit plaintiffs from using a broad class of patents to win injunctions against sales of infringing products. Such patents are submitted to industry groups that are setting key technology standards, and are deemed as essential to create products in certain categories—such as creating handsets that can communicate using a particular generation of cellular networks.

Apple has argued that in return for becoming part of an industry standard, companies usually promise those groups to license use of their patented technology under fair and reasonable terms.

But the ITC said Apple's argument wasn't valid, potentially hurting Apple's continuing efforts to change the way standards-based patents are used in legal cases.

The ITC order would have barred the U.S. sale or import of some Apple products still on store shelves, including a version of the iPad 2 made to work on AT&T Inc.'s network, and the iPhone4, which runs on AT&T and T-Mobile USA's airwaves.

Japan's robots eye car industry to take up smartphone slack

An automated pick and place machine used
to populate printed circuit boards.

As reported by Reuters: As the breakneck growth in the global smartphone market eases, the mostly Japanese companies that make the robots that build the phones are looking to automakers to take up the slack.

Robotics remains a strength in a Japanese electronics industry that has been hammered by competition from rivals in South Korea and Taiwan. Panasonic Corp, Hitachi High-Technologies, Yamaha Motor Co, Fuji Machine Manufacturing and JUKI Corp together make eight of every 10 component mounting robots.

The quickest of these can mount more than two dozen parts a second, some thinner than a tenth of a millimeter. A line of 10 connected robots can put together 5,000 smartphones a day.

But, as smartphone sales growth slows, the chip mounters are feeling the squeeze.

Sales at Panasonic's chip mounter business - one of its non-core, but niche market leading divisions at the center of a revival plan - dropped by a tenth in the year to end-March. The business has around a 30 percent global market share.

Katsuhiko Omoto, who heads Panasonic's factory automation unit, sees little prospect for a rebound this year. "We don't really see big growth," he told Reuters at the firm's headquarters outside Tokyo. Around a third of the cabinet-sized machines made there end up in Chinese foundries cranking out Apple Inc iPhones and other mobile devices.

The global market for chip mounters is forecast to grow to $7 billion by 2015, according to industry researcher Technavio, from $4-$5 billion now.

Panasonic, which has bled red ink for years from its struggling television sales, announces its April-June quarterly results later on Wednesday. Operating profit is expected to increase nearly 30 percent to almost 50 billion yen ($510 million), according to StarMine's SmartEstimates, which uses top analysts' forecasts based on accuracy and timeliness.

Panasonic's component mounting robots business brings in around 1.4 percent of sales, but earns 6 percent of operating profit.

SMARTPHONE SALES ARE SLOWING

Smartphone sales are still growing, and market tracker IDC predicts annual shipments will top 1.5 billion by 2017, up from 917 million this year - but the blistering growth of the past five years is slowing.

IDC sees sales increasing by around 15 percent this year in mature markets such as the United States, down from 20.6 percent last year, and this will slow further to just 4.6 percent by 2017. In emerging markets - China accounts for around a third of global demand - growth will slow to 12 percent this year from more than 35 percent.

Omoto reckons Panasonic could boost its share of the chip mounting market by wooing the many smaller Chinese mobile phone makers that are gaining ground on Apple. The U.S. firm's Greater China sales slumped 43 percent in April-June from the previous quarter. Beyond that, Omoto, whose operating margins have slipped to 8 percent from 10 percent, is looking to reduce his smartphone related business to a quarter from 30 percent by selling more of his robots to the automaking industry.

DRIVING CHANGE

Automatic parking, collision warning systems, cameras, and complex engine and suspension management computers add up to an under-the-hood boom in auto electronics. Drivers are also shifting to hybrids and electric cars, which tend to have more electronics than traditional gasoline models.

"The amount of electronics in a car is only going to increase," said Naoki Kobayashi, deputy chief engineer at Toyota Motor Corp's luxury Lexus brand, noting the recently launched IS model has one fifth more electronic control units than its predecessor.

Hitachi High Technologies, a majority-owned subsidiary of conglomerate Hitachi Ltd, is also eyeing opportunities among auto manufacturers and their supply chains.

"It looks as though the smartphone and tablet markets have peaked," said Masatoshi Kurosawa, a general manager at the Hitachi firm, adding he doesn't yet see any new consumer gadget to make up for the slowing smartphone momentum. His company and other chip mounters typically have around 10 months advance notice of new product launches when manufacturers begin shopping around for new production equipment.

MAKING THE SWITCH

Switching to supplying the autos industry requires chip mounters to focus less on speed and miniaturization and more on component traceability, said Hiroshi Nakamura, a managing officer at JUKI.

"For the past several years the market has focused on smartphones, and that has meant everyone focused on making fast machines," he said. "Automakers have stricter safety concerns which means they avoid cutting edge components."

In JUKI's showroom basement, Nakamura showed off one robot that snaps six photographs every time a component is mounted on a circuit board. That data is stored on a database allowing automakers to quickly trace any production faults.

Yamaha Motors, a long-time chip mounter supplier to the autos industry, has noted increased competition from rivals that have until now been more focused on smartphones. Its response has been to seek business at Chinese smartphone foundries which are buying fewer of Panasonic's high-speed mounters by offering to automate work, such as fitting connectors, that is still done by hand.

That kind of offer is going down well in Taiwan where annual wage increases of over 10 percent are pushing up labor costs.

"Wages in China, Thailand and Vietnam are rising and that's increasing the appeal of automation," said Hiroaki Fujita, who heads Yamaha Motor's Hamamatsu-based chip mounter business.

JUKI, which last month agreed to take over Sony Corp's chip mounter business, is also interested. "If it's faster than by hand then that's enough," said Nakamura.

U.S. Air Force Squeezing Extra Life from GPS Satellites

As reported by SpaceNews: The U.S. Air Force’s intensifying scramble to do more with less in difficult fiscal circumstances has produced a brewing success story on the GPS program, where engineers are implementing a plan to extend the life of up to 60 percent of the satellites in the positioning, navigation and timing constellation.

The plan involves a new charging method that reduces the rate of satellite battery degradation, thereby extending the satellites’ lives. The scheme is being successfully tested on orbit, and Air Force officials say that if all continues to go well, the project could add a combined 20 years to the life of the GPS 2R- and 2R(M)-series satellites, which together comprise the backbone of the constellation.

The life extension is expected to save the Air Force tens of millions of dollars, and that carries a premium as the combined pressures of declining defense spending and sequestration put the squeeze on all Air Force programs, space being no exception.

USAF Capt. Jacob Hempen

Gen. William Shelton, commander of Air Force Space Command, cited the effort during a Senate hearing in April, and credited Capt. Jacob Hempen, who serves with the Air Force’s 2nd Space Operations Squadron, with making it happen.

An electrical engineer by training, Hempen’s introduction to military space came on a different program. While serving in Afghanistan as a flight test engineer, Hempen, who comes from a military family and graduated from the US Air Force Academy, was tasked with fixing a satellite connectivity problem that was hampering critical unmanned aerial vehicle operations.

The stakes were high: Because of the problem, certain military activities were facing a suspension of a month or more.

Hempen had virtually no experience in the space arena — he had never collaborated with the Joint Space Operations Center, which coordinates command and control of U.S. military satellites and never worked with the Air Force space community.

His superiors gave him two to three days.

The fix worked. Operations continued.

In an interview, Hempen said the experience taught him the importance of military space. It also landed him in a position with the Air Force’s space program.

It was there that Hempen was presented with a new challenge: implementing a plan to extend the lives of the existing GPS satellites. The Air Force is always looks for ways to stretch the lives of its operational satellites, but implementing solutions across large constellations presents obvious challenges.

“The key is identifying a large group of satellites where a single improvement solution can be applied,” Hempen said. “In this case, 60 percent of on-orbit GPS satellites have a common bus with common components that wear out, one of which is batteries. By extending the use of these batteries, constellation sustainment can be improved across GPS.”

Managing battery life for satellites requires a tricky calculus.

Satellites charge when their solar arrays are directly exposed to the sun’s rays. During this time, the arrays simultaneously charge the batteries and power the space vehicle. While the satellite is on the dark side of the orbit, the vehicle runs on batteries.

Unlike a cell phone or electric toothbrush that reaches a full charge over a predetermined amount of time, satellite batteries can be charged at different rates. The energy can be pushed into the battery at a high rate quickly, or it can be stored more gradually at a slower pace, according to industry sources.

Air Force officials discovered that when some of the GPS satellite batteries are powered over a certain rate threshold, they can overheat, accelerating their natural rate of decay.

And since batteries in space today are virtually impossible to replace, longer-lasting batteries represent one of the keys to longer-lasting satellites.

The current GPS constellation consists of 31 operational satellites of different generations made by two different manufacturers. The Air Force focused its effort on the GPS 2R and 2R( M )spacecraft built by Denver-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems. The first of these satellites was successfully launched in 1997 and 19 -- representing 60 percent of the constellation -- are operational, according to GPS.gov, a government-managed GPS information website.

Hempen credited Warren Hwang, who works in the energy technology department at Aerospace Corp., with coming up with the idea of lowering the charging rate of the GPS 2R and 2R (M) batteries. Based in El Segundo, Calif., Aerospace is a federally funded not-for-profit research center that provides engineering advice on Air Force space programs.

According to Hempen, Hwang suggested that the battery charging rates could be lowered to a level that enabled the satellites to perform reasonably well while minimizing the rate of degradation. Hwang declined to be interviewed for this article.

“My role was to lead the project from theory to start of execution,” Hempen said. This entailed devising and conducting a series of tests, first in laboratory-based simulations and later on the satellites themselves.

The group needed to act quickly: The more time spent developing and implementing the test plan, the more degradation incurred by the satellite batteries, reducing the return on investment of resources.

The test program, which is ongoing, has since been taken over by the Air Force GPS operators and is running smoothly, Hempen said. “We knew our approach was sound,” he said.

If the project is successfully implemented, GPS experts at the Air Force and Aerospace Corp. estimate that it will help the service wring an additional 20 years of operation across 2R and 2R(M) satellites. Given that each satellite was designed to operate for eight years, that is the equivalent of more than two additional spacecraft that likely would cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars to build and launch.

Perhaps equally important is the possibility that the same life-extending technique can be used on other Air Force satellite programs, according to Hempen. “Both the new battery method and GPS methodology used to determine how to improve constellation sustainment can be applied to other satellite constellations,” he said.

House Pulls Transport Appropriations Measure that would have removed Truckers Hours of Service Requirement

As Reported  by Trucking Info: Just as the House was set to consider an amendment that would reverse the recent changes in truck driver hours-of-service rules, leaders pulled the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill from the floor.

It was evident that the bill, which would have implemented the $44 billion budget the House adopted three months ago, did not have enough support, said Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers, R-Ky.

A close follower of the issue said that all of the Democrats in the House opposed the bill because it cut too much, while some Republicans opposed it for the same reason and others because it cut too little.

In theory the House could take up the bill again after its August recess, but Rogers does not think it likely.

“I am extremely disappointed with the decision to pull the bill from the House calendar today,” he said in a statement.

“The prospects for passing this bill in September are bleak at best, given the vote count on passage that was apparent this afternoon.”

Rogers said the bill was the “best possible effort” to fund transportation and housing programs while making budget cuts. The bill would cut $4.4 billion from current spending, to a level below what the programs had in 2006, he said.

“I believe that the House has made its choice: sequestration – and its unrealistic and ill-conceived discretionary cuts – must be brought to an end,” Rogers said.

He also said that the higher funding levels in the Senate’s $55 billion appropriations bill are not achievable. The Senate is considering its bill Wednesday and Thursday.

The House’s move could lead to use of a Continuing Resolution to keep these programs funded while until both chambers can pass and reconcile an appropriations bill.

Hours of Service
Before the bill was pulled the House was going to consider a proposal by Rep. Richard Hanna, R-N.Y., and several others to cut off funding for implementation or enforcement of the hours-of-service rule that went into effect on July 1. It would leave the prior rule in place.

The amendment is supported by 16 trucking and shipping interests, including American Trucking Associations, the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association and UPS, as well as the Transportation Intermediaries Association, the National Retail Federation and the National Grocers Association.

Hanna, joined by Reps. Tom Rice, R-S.C., Trey Radel, R-Fla., and Todd Rokita, R-Ind., said in a Dear Colleague letter that the new rule decreases driver flexibility and raises costs – complaints that have been aired by all of the industry interests.

His letter also notes that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is working on a field study of the 34-hour restart provision of the revised rule.

“Common sense dictates that the field study should be completed before the issuance of the final rule,” Hanna and his colleagues wrote. “Nonetheless, the study is still ongoing and the final rule has been put into effect.”

Earlier this month a FMCSA spokesperson said that data collection for the study was on track to be done by the end of July.

Congress ordered the study in last year’s highway bill, at the insistence of ATA.

The association’s view was that the agency should confirm in the field a finding from a laboratory study that daytime sleep is not as restorative as nighttime sleep.

That finding is the scientific basis for the new requirement that a driver take two periods off between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. during his 34-hour restart.

It remains to be seen if the data from the field study will be persuasive enough for the agency to reconsider its approach to the restart.

UK Drivers to be banned from wearing Google Glass

As reported by The Telegraph: The UK Department for Transport has acted before the invention goes on general sale amid fears that users could be distracted.

Google is expected to put the device, which is worn like a pair of glasses, on the market next year.
Although smaller than normal spectacles, Google glass – essentially a wearable computer – places a small screen just above the right eye.

Users can tell the glass to take a picture, record a video and read messages. According to Google it will have the benefit of interacting with the web, but be less intrusive than a mobile phone.

However the DfT stressed it would not be acceptable for motorists to wear Google Glass.

A spokesman said: “It is important that drivers give their full attention to the road when they are behind the wheel and do not behave in a way that stops them from observing what is happening on the road.

“A range of offences and penalties already exist to tackle those drivers who do not pay proper attention to the road including careless driving which will become a fixed penalty offence later this year.

“We are aware of the impending rollout of Google Glass and are in discussion with the Police to ensure that individuals do not use this technology while driving.”

Warrantless Cellphone Tracking Is Upheld

As reported by the New York Times: In a significant victory for law enforcement, a federal appeals court on Tuesday said that government authorities could extract historical location data directly from telecommunications carriers without a search warrant.

The closely watched case, in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, is the first ruling that squarely addresses the constitutionality of warrantless searches of historical location data stored by cellphone service providers. Ruling 2 to 1, the court said a warrantless search was “not per se unconstitutional” because location data was “clearly a business record” and therefore not protected by the Fourth Amendment.

The ruling is likely to intensify legislative efforts, already bubbling in Congress and in the states, to consider measures to require warrants based on probable cause to obtain cellphone location data.

The appeals court ruling sharply contrasts with a New Jersey State Supreme Court opinion in mid-July that said the police required a warrant to track a suspect’s whereabouts in real time. That decision relied on the New Jersey Constitution, whereas the ruling Tuesday in the Fifth Circuit was made on the basis of the Federal Constitution.

The Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on whether cellphone location data is protected by the Constitution. The case, which was initially brought in Texas, is not expected to go to the Supreme Court because it is “ex parte,” or filed by only one party — in this case, the government.

But the case could renew calls for the highest court to look at the issue, if another federal court rules differently on the same question. And two other federal cases involving this issue are pending.

“The opinion is clear that the government can access cell site records without Fourth Amendment oversight,” said Orin Kerr, a constitutional law scholar at George Washington University Law School who filed an amicus brief in the case.

For now, the ruling sets an important precedent: It allows law enforcement officials in the Fifth Circuit to chronicle the whereabouts of an American with a court order that falls short of a search warrant based on probable cause.

“This decision is a big deal,” said Catherine Crump, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s a big deal and a big blow to Americans’ privacy rights.”

The group reviewed records from more than 200 local police departments last year, concluding that the demand for cellphone location data had led some cellphone companies to develop “surveillance fees” to enable police to track suspects.

In reaching its decision on Tuesday, the federal appeals court went on to agree with the government’s contention that consumers knowingly give up their location information to the telecommunications carrier every time they make a call or send a text message on their cellphones.

“That means it is not protected by Fourth Amendment when the government goes to a third-party service provider and issues something that is not a warrant to demand production of those records,” said Mark Eckenwiler, a former Justice Department lawyer who worked on the case and is now with the Washington law firm Perkins Coie. “On this kind of historical cell site information, this is the first one to address the core constitutional question.”

Historical location data is crucial to law enforcement officials. Mr. Eckenwiler offered the example of drug investigations: A cellphone carrier can establish where a suspect met his supplier and how often he returned to a particular location. Likewise, location data can be vital in establishing people’s habits and preferences, including whether they worship at a church or mosque or whether they are present at a political protest, which is why, civil liberties advocates say, it should be accorded the highest privileges of privacy protection.

The decision could also bear implications for other government efforts to collect vast amounts of so-called metadata, under the argument that it constitutes “business records,” as in the National Security Agency’s collection of Verizon phone records for millions of Americans.

“It provides support for the government’s view that that procedure is constitutional, obtaining Verizon call records, because it holds that records are business records,” said Mr. Kerr, of George Washington University. “It doesn’t make it a slam dunk but it makes a good case for the government to argue that position.”

An important element in Tuesday’s ruling is the court’s presumption of what consumers should know about the way cellphone technology works. “A cell service subscriber, like a telephone user, understands that his cellphone must send a signal to a nearby cell tower in order to wirelessly connect his call,” the court ruled, going on to note that “contractual terms of service and providers’ privacy policies expressly state that a provider uses a subscriber’s location information to route his cellphone calls.”

In any event, the court added, the use of cellphones “is entirely voluntary.”

The ruling also gave a nod to the way in which fast-moving technological advances have challenged age-old laws on privacy. Consumers today may want privacy over location records, the court acknowledged: “But the recourse for these desires is in the market or the political process: in demanding that service providers do away with such records (or anonymize them) or in lobbying elected representatives to enact statutory protections.”

Cellphone privacy measures have been proposed in the Senate and House that would require law enforcement agents to obtain search warrants before prying open location records. Montana recently became the first state to require a warrant for location data. Maine soon followed. California passed a similar measure last year but Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed it, saying it did not strike what he called the right balance between the demands of civil libertarians and the police.