Li-Fi, Next Big Revalution in Telecom Industry to Transfrom Our Lives

Li-fi is an innovative idea in IT, one that aims at eventually replacing radio frequency wireless signals with those that come from light sources. This type of technology is still being developed, and may have the potential to introduce vastly improved wireless services.

New reports from the BBC show that Chinese researchers are developing a microchip light bulb that could enable up to 150 Mb per second of data transfer. This idea, also known as visible light communications or VLC, is just being pioneered in various applications. Scientists point out that visible light spectrums are part of the greater electromagnetic spectrum, and that this kind of application of light energy could help to unlock the puzzle of how to offer enough frequency capacity for a seemingly exponential demand. 

In terms of its practicality, light-based data transfer would differ from existing radio frequency setups in a key way. Unlike radio energy, light does not penetrate physical barriers. That would require a different model where wireless systems need to be placed in the same room or space as endpoint devices or LAN network pieces. This would involve various pros and cons, but would generally require a pretty big user adjustment and a different idea of how to provision services. Chinese teams are expected to unveil more about Li-fi technology later in the fall of 2013.

LiFi is designed to use LED light bulbs similar to those currently in use in many energy-conscious homes and offices. However, LiFi bulbs are outfitted with a chip that modulates the light imperceptibly for optical data transmission. LiFi data is transmitted by the LED bulbs and received by photoreceptors.

LiFi's early developmental models were capable of 150 megabits-per-second (Mbps). Some commercial kits enabling that speed have been released. In the lab, with stronger LEDs and different technology, researchers have enabled 10 gigabits-per-second (Gbps), which is faster than 802.11ad. 

Benefits of LiFi:

• Higher speeds than Wi-Fi.
• 10000 times the frequency spectrum of radio.
• More secure because data cannot be intercepted without a clear line of sight.
• Prevents piggybacking.
• Eliminates neighboring network interference.
• Unimpeded by radio interference.
• Does not create interference in sensitive electronics, making it better for use in environments like hospitals and aircraft.

By using LiFi in all the lights in and around a building, the technology could enable greater area of coverage than a single WiFi router. Drawbacks to the technology include the need for a clear line of sight, difficulties with mobility and the requirement that lights stay on for operation.

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Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish ~ Steve Jobs

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a
very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death,
leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not
far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
 

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

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5 Best Phones to Use as Wireless Modems

Over the past few years, cell phone technology has greatly increased, allowing up to five laptops to be connected to one device.

Hybrid Phones and Tablets

The first cell phone we’re going to look at s the Samsung Galaxy Note; this is a hybrid tablet and cell phone, has a huge screen, and uses a touch screen stylus. It’s also LTE capable, which means faster data transfer speeds.

For Modem Use, Check with Cell Phone Carrier

Keep in mind, that tethering your cell phone with your lap top maybe an additional cost with your cell carrier. It’s important to note that cell phone speeds vary dramatically with tethering based on your cell phone carrier and geographic location.

Using the iPhone as a Modem

One of the more popular smartphones on our list is the apple iPhone, which can be tethered wirelessly through WiFi, or via the cable.

Other Phones Used for Modems

If you’re using an HTC device, with the windows phone seven operating system otherwise known as mango, now you can also tether.

Another great phone for tethering is the Samsung Galaxy S2. This phone offers ease of use and comes with 4g technology.

The Motorola Droid Razr is not only a powerful phone running on the android OS, but it’s thin and get excellent battery life.

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The Future of Green Technology

So you've heard of green buildings, green businesses, green products, and green living, but have you ever heard of green technology? If you have, are you clear on what exactly makes technology “green”?

We've come across a lot of people who had similar questions about “Green Technology”: what it is, what it's used for and if you're just now using it without even knowing!

Skipping the complicated scientific definitions, green technology is simply any technology that is more efficient and environmentally friendly. If you're not sure what that means, one example is a printer that uses less energy and ink for printing but still gives you the results you're looking for. That's green technology- it's both efficient and environmentally friendly! 

Green technology grew out of the 1960's and 70's as a response to increased prices of oil, and the widespread realization that fossil fuels could be running out soon. The sustainability movement and green technology soon became intertwined as a way to not only insure a cleaner world for tomorrow, but also the idea of a civilization that was self-sustaining, and not environmentally draining.

Contrary to popular belief, green tech isn't just about wind turbines, solar panels and alternative fuel, but rather the areas of its application extend to building construction, sustainable purchasing, and even green chemistry. Below are some remarkable green tech examples:

1. Solar Spray
   
   Solar panels are used to turn sun rays into energy, but they’re often expensive, bulky and are not particularly attractive. In comes the amazing solar spray! Developed by a Norwegian company called EnSol AS, once sprayed over your ordinary windows it turns them into solar panels that convert sun rays into watts you can use to power your home. The best part? The spray is transparent!
    
2. The Power of Footsteps
   
   When considering alternative energy sources, companies usually look to sun and wind power, but Power leap decides to do just the opposite of that. Their alternative idea uses inside energy generated by human foot traffic to harness energy. Train stations, sidewalks, public parks are all great examples of places this technology can be applied. 

3. Science City heating system
   
   In many parts of the world, a significant amount of energy is used to cool homes in summer, and just as much is used to hear those homes in winter. In Switzerland, Science City, part of the ETH Zurich campus, has developed a pioneering system that stores the heat of the summer underground, only to pump it back up to heat the homes during winters- talk about thinking outside the box. 

These aren't just ideas, they're actually projects in the making, and what’s even more amazing is that these just scratch the surface. Will we be seeing flying cars in the near future too? But one thing is for sure: future technology is looking a lot greener.

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The Future of Flexible Phones

Imagine a smartphone that's bigger to look at then it is to carry around in your pocket. No, we're not talking about some fanciful Dr Who gizmo. We're talking about the near-future of smartphone design.

You see, the next big thing in smartphone display technology has nothing to do with resolution. There are only so many pixels packed into a square inch that the human eye can see, after all.

Nor are we talking about a bold new panel technology. In fact, this fantastical gadget that we're discussing today will use OLED technology, which has been around for years.

Rather, the future is fully flexible. The recently released Samsung Galaxy Round and LG G Flex are but tantalizing glimpses of a whole new approach to mobile phone design. One that abandons the clumsy, fragile bricks that we carry around with us today in favor of something bandier and tougher.

Early steps

The aforementioned Galaxy Round and G Flex are only the first step on the road to fully flexible phones. You might be surprised to hear that they're even that, if you can remember the release of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the Nexus S before it.

Both Google-approved phones, which launched in 2011 and 2010 respectively, featured banana-like bends in their screens. Their similarity to the LG G Flex, however, was only skin deep.

The Samsung Galaxy Nexus

These curved phones simply used curved glass to achieve their effect. The actual display panel was as straight and as rigid as ever. With the LG G Flex, meanwhile, the whole display bends subtly upward towards the two ends.

Of course, you might question the benefits of such an approach. LG would say that it mimics the immersive quality of its curved OLED TV sets when watching HD video - a kind of wrap-around effect that pulls you into the picture. There's also the fact that it fits the contour of your face more readily when making calls.

Material benefits

But the truth is, both the LG G Flex and the Samsung Galaxy Round are initial steps towards something completely different. In future, these bendy displays will be attached to similarly flexible bodies, creating whole devices that move and flex. Eventually, you'll be able to fold your smartphone up like a piece of paper.

The most immediate benefit of this technology, though, will be significantly tougher smartphones. Why? Because a key part of the development of these flexible phones is the replacement of fragile glass components with plastic ones.

Of course, that's the theory. In practice, replacing these traditional materials has posed a considerable problem for component manufacturers.

The LG G Flex

There's a reason we still use such a heavy, fragile material as glass to cover a large part of our £600 smartphones. Glass isn't just handy for its transparency - it also acts as a brilliant barrier.

"It has been challenging to make robust enough flexible OLED displays," a spokesperson for Finnish tech company Canatu Oy told TechRadar. "Materials for OLED emitting layers are very sensitive to air and moisture, and it has been difficult to develop air and humidity-tight enclosure packages that withstand extreme repeated bending and folding."

It's very tricky to find a flexible polymer that can get close to the performance of good old glass when it comes to keeping out the elements. Of course, various material solutions have now been formulated, which is why the flexible phone revolution looks set to begin.

Enter OLED

As we've hinted at already, current and forthcoming flexible displays utilise the unique properties of OLED technology.

OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diode, which means that the thin layer of material that emits the light necessary for an electronic picture is made up of organic compound. Unlike LCD technology, each pixel in an OLED display lights itself, rather than relying on a separate backlight system.

That's why OLED displays appear so vibrant, with such deep blacks. Black OLED pixels are essentially pixels that haven't been turned on.

 LG's flexible OLED display

 

That lack of a backlight also relates to why OLED is so suited to being made flexible - and why LCD is not. OLED panels are far simpler, slimmer, and more self-contained than LCD solutions, and they can be laid on a plastic substrate rather than glass. In order words, they can stand up to being bent.

Of course, there are practical considerations when it comes to replicating this process on an industrial scale. Canatu Oy told us that "flexible backplane technology has been expensive and low yield" up to now. 

We've actually had the screen technology to make flexible displays possible for some time. While there have been a number of false starts over the past 40 years relating to limited e-ink solutions, the likes of Sony have been demonstrating working flexible OLED displays since 2007.

However, those aforementioned manufacturing impracticalities have ensured that such designs never got beyond this experimental prototype stage and into a final product.

 Samsung's Youm flexible display

 

Samsung appears to have picked up the baton in recent years, and the company showed off a working flexible OLED display that it called Youm at CES 2013 (an earlier Samsung Galaxy Skin concept revealed in 2011 turned out to be the word of speculating students). This display could be worked into 'S' shapes, and formed into wrap-around display - one that goes off the edge and around the corner of a smart device.

But the key thing holding back the launch of fully flexible or foldable smartphones has nothing to do with the displays. It's everything else that makes up a smartphone that's the problem.

Power struggle

Put simply, while OLED screens can be made to bend, batteries, processors, and other vital internal components cannot. Or at least, they couldn't until relatively recently.

Back in 2011, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology announced that it had developed a fully flexible RAM chip. Enabling the reading, writing, and retention of data on a flexibly chip is essential to a fully flexible phone. Of course, refining such a concept to a practical, manufacturable level takes time, but the knowledge has been there for a while.

An even bigger obstacle in creating completely flexible phones has been creating a battery that can withstand similar manipulation. Batteries tend to take up a large part of a smartphone's mass. More problematically, they tend to be filled with liquid or gel-like substances, which don't lend themselves well to heavy flexing. In fact, doing so can be downright dangerous.

The solution has been to create a solid (or semi-solid) state battery. These will be much safer under load, and it's now just a question of ensuring that this new safe battery technology is up to the task of powering a multi-core smart device for an entire 16 hour day - something that even existing rigid battery designs can struggle with.

Early electronic printing techniques have proved expensive and impractical, but promising solutions to this key issue are starting to be found. Professors at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), for example, have come up with a flexible battery that utilises carbon nanotubes.

As well as being flexible, this battery technology is fully scalable. "This battery can be made as small as a pinhead or as large as a carpet in your living room," said NJIT professor Somenath Mitra. 

 LG's flexible cable batteries

 

Meanwhile LG Chem recently announced that it had produced a kind of cable battery that could be bent and even tied into a knot without heating up during use. It probably won't be ready for mass production for another few years, though.

LG's great local rival, Samsung, is also working on flexible solid state battery technology which will bend without catching fire.

Other vital smartphone components appear to be ready to make the jump to a flexible format. The aforementioned Finnish company Canatu Oy has just launched its fifth generation of Carbon NanoBud (CNB) films, which enable the replacement of indium tin oxide (a solid conductive material) in capacitive touch sensors.

"Our production line for CNB films and touch sensors is in operation and marks an important milestone going to volume manufacturing," explains a Canatu Oy spokesperson, adding that there are plans for a mass volume plant in the second half of 2014.

In other words, here is another vital component in flexible touchscreen displays that is just about ready to roll out to commercial products.

Give and take

So, given the break-throughs in these key technological areas, when will we see properly flexible phones in our shops?

Industry insiders believe that it's less than two years away. "Canatu estimates (the) first fully foldable products will be in the market in 2015," claims a spokesperson for the company.

It's an estimate that appears to back-up the projections of the smartphone manufacturers themselves. According to a slide the company recently showed to investors, Samsung anticipates that its first bendable smartphone will be ready to go in 2014, while its first fully foldable smartphone will be on the market either towards the end of 2015 or the beginning of 2016.

And don't for one minute think that this is likely to be another dead end gimmick to file alongside phones with 3D displays. Dr Kinam Kim, president and CEO of Samsung Display, recently told analysts that "flexible display penetration could rapidly increase to 40% by 2018."

That's not to mention the technology's virtually guaranteed adoption by the automotive and fashion industries. Expect the cars of the near future to feature dramatically swooping digital displays that mould and form to the shape of a dashboard, and shirts that utilise paper thin and stretchable OLED displays to alter the colour and pattern of the 'fabric.'

It seems as if the future really is flexible, and it's going to be phones that lead this somewhat bendy-legged charge.

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