iTnews: Angel investor seeks geek chic innovations

As a journalist at iTnews:

Australian Web site developer Geekdom is seeking geeky ideas for its online business incubation program.

The program, dubbed ‘Geeksville’, targets projects in Australia and offers successful applicants angel funding, mentoring and business resources.

According to Ian Naylor, Chief Technology Officer of Geekdom, the program aims to ‘bridge the gap’ between budding and business-ready stages of an idea.

“Typically VCs will not fund an idea from inception,” Naylor explained. “Effectively, they are stage two investors once the business has been bootstrapped for a period and a modicum of success has been achieved.”

“The core area of our business is developing with investment in mind,” he said. “Using our venture capital connections, we have a good idea of what has a chance to be picked up.”

Geeksville was formed early this year, when Geekdom executives realised that its core Web site development business structure could support external as well as internal innovations.

The incubation program has now been running for six months and is slated to publically launch its first batch of start-up companies soon.

A six month time to market is among a loose set of selection criteria for Geeksville hopefuls. Other criteria include: innovative ideas for the online market; and a project’s manageability.

While the incubator program has a distinct focus on Australian innovations, it encourages applicants to focus on both local and international markets to create scalable opportunities.

Along with salary, resources, mentoring and business structure, successful applicants also receive access to other resources within Geekdom’s parent organisation, the Photon Group.

The Photon Group encompasses more than 50 other companies, including strategic communications company Love, Naked Communications, and European public relations consultancy Hotwire.

“As an incubator we see our value not just in providing money, but structure and resources,” Naylor told iTnews, “so really the less you [applicants] have, other than the idea, the more value we can add.”

more

iTnews: Video game GPUs find use in biological modelling

As a journalist at iTnews:

Forget supercomputers -- researchers have devised a method of using graphics processing technology from video games in complex biological modelling.

Applied to a new area in biology called agent-based modelling, the technology could enable a wider range of researchers and medical practitioners to simulate processes graphically.

Agent-based modelling simulates the behaviours of complex systems by predicting the actions and interactions of its various components.

Currently, researchers in this field of work either manually develop, or use toolkits to build, code which runs directly on a computer’s CPU (central processing unit).

According to Roshan D'Souza of the Michigan Technological University, such code often has limited scalability, so large-scale models often require the use of a supercomputer.

D’Souza is attempting to make large-scale modelling more accessible with the use of graphic processing units (GPUs) that currently are used in video games to do parallel computation for the purpose of realistic rendering of scenes.

Using GPUs, researchers could simulate large-scale models with tens of millions of cells on a regular desktop costing under US$1400, he expects.

“Currently, if you want to simulate a model anywhere close to what we are handling, you have to go to a supercomputer costing a few million quid,” he told iTnews.

“GPUs are cheap – [costing around] $400 -- and are a bang for the buck,” he said. “You can do sufficiently large models to handle quite a large portion of the scenarios.”

Another benefit of using GPUs is that they produce real-time simulations, whereas supercomputers calculate simulations offline without real-time visual display.

Results of GPU simulations may not be any better than those produced by a supercomputer, nor do GPUs replace supercomputers in simulating ultra-large models comprised of billions of agents, D’Souza said.

However, by providing a cost-effective method for large-scale modelling, GPUs could be used by physicians to do diagnostics or to plan individualised treatment plans for patients.

“The big picture is this: in the near future, when your local physician starts using ABMs [agent-based models] … he/she will not be able to access a supercomputer,” D’Souza said.

“But for sure he/she can buy a GPU and insert in into his/her desktop,” he said.

In the past, GPUs have been used for research into fluid simulation, n-body dynamics and protein folding.

The application of GPUs in agent-based modelling came as an ‘accident’, D’Souza said, when investigating CAD (computer-aided design) tools to detect design errors in mechanical engineering designs.

“I used GPUs for this,” he recalls, “then I was looking around for other ‘stuff’ to do with the GPU. I found that people had already worked on molecular dynamics, fluids, protein folding etc – but agent-based modelling was open.”

“With a $1,400 desktop, we can beat a computing cluster,” he said of the technology. “We are effectively democratising supercomputing and putting these powerful tools into the hands of any researcher.”

“Every time I present this research, I make it a point to thank the millions of video gamers who have inadvertently made this possible,” he said.

more

iTnews: 'Spoken tokens' touted as ultimate security

As a journalist at iTnews:

An Australian market for biometric voice authentication is taking shape from early adopters in the banking, government and service industries.

According to Chuck Buffum, who is Vice President of Caller Authentication Solutions for Nuance Communications, more Australian companies are likely to be authenticating their customers with ‘spoken tokens’ within the next few months.

In Sydney to meet with customers this week, Buffum expects the local voice authentication market to grow to within three months of more mature markets such as the U.S., U.K. and Canada by mid-2009.

“It’s very early in the market take up,” he said, estimating there to be eight to 10 consumer-facing biometric voice authentication deployments in the world currently.

“That will change in the next few months,” he said, citing discussions with Australian banks and government agencies, which are expected to deploy the technology within six to nine months.

Currently, Nuance’s voice authentication technology is used by subscription television provider Austar to handle orders for its premium services and movies.

The authentication and call steering system is said to have achieved an initial return on investment in less than 12 months, and currently handles more than 1.5 million (51 percent) calls per year.

Besides the convenience and cost benefits of an automated voice authentication system, Buffum expects the biometric technology to provide consumers with greater account security.

“All around the world, there is more and more attention on protecting personal information and keeping that secure,” he told iTnews.

“Companies need to be encouraged to recognise that vulnerability and use suitable technologies to protect their customers,” he said.

Buffum warned of the public availability of personal information on the Internet. Such information often is used to secure accounts with traditional authentication protocols, he noted.

Social networking sites such as Facebook were highlighted as sources from which malicious persons may obtain information such as a person’s date of birth and hometown.

Search engine queries can be used to obtain yet more personal information about a target, as evidenced by the hacking of U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s e-mail account this week.

With the right design and security settings, biometric voice authentication methods could provide greater security by combining ‘something you know’, such as a password, with ‘something you are’, through your voice print, Buffum said.

Binary voice prints in Nuance’s software consist of 28 features, which are vocal characteristics such as the geometry of one’s vocal tract and behavioural patterns such as cadence, rhythm and volume.

The system determines the statistical likelihood of a caller and his or her saved voice print, and authenticates the caller in accordance with the security threshold set by the company.

Some transactions such as airline timetables may require lower security thresholds than others, such as banking, Buffum said.

Noting that ‘nothing is as good as iris scanning’, Buffum estimates the security level of voice authentication to be similar to that of fingerprint technology, and ahead of face scanning.

A hacker could make an audio recording of an account holder’s interaction with a voice authentication system and play it back to gain access, but such attacks could be thwarted by requesting the caller to repeat a random series of words, he said.

“The Mission Impossible squad can always break in,” he said, “but with this technology, you can at least keep everyone else out.”

“2009 is the year of the early adopters,” Buffum said of the Australian voice authentication market.

“Hopefully you’ll be counting them [deployments] on more than one hand -- but that’s around the figure we’re looking at.”

more

iTnews: Mobile operators warned of 'dumb pipes' ISP scenario

As a journalist at iTnews:

Mobile broadband operators need to look beyond flat-rate access offerings to future-proof their business, analysts say.

Recent research from analyst firm Ovum suggests that operators could bolster their revenues by leveraging subscriber information and network-based assets.

Melbourne-based Ovum analyst Nathan Burley likened the current mobile broadband market to last decade’s fixed broadband offerings that bundled access with services such as e-mail, hosting and content.

As consumers turned to other Web sites for their online activities, fixed broadband ISPs were muscled out of content revenue and into what analysts call a ‘dumb pipes’ scenario.

Mobile broadband operators such as Telstra currently support a bulk of their customer’s activities through services such as mobile TV, games and customised music sites.

But with the growing popularity of smartphones that feature more user-friendly Web browsers, mobile broadband operators may soon go in the way of their fixed-line counterparts, Ovum predicts.

“If you look at these smartphones, browsers on the phones are getting better and you are seeing users of these handsets use the phones for their own content on the Internet,” he said.

Burley named the Blackberry Bold, Nokia N96, HTC Touch Diamond and Apple’s iPhone as examples of game-changing devices.

“In terms of the iPhone, Apple’s strategy to some degree is to relegate the [mobile broadband] operator to offering access only,” he said.

“It’s a very open model for content providers,” he told iTnews.

While this open model could mean less content-based revenue for mobile operators, Burley points out that external content could bolster data access revenue.

Additionally, mobile operators could have a place in the value chain for supporting third-party content and other services by leveraging in-depth information about their customers and network-based assets such as location.

Areas such as social networking applications could benefit from customer metadata, Burley said, highlighting opportunities for advertising revenue.

“On the Internet, if you look at the people [companies] who have prevailed in terms of advertising revenue, it [their success] sits on a lot of information about their subscribers,” he said.

But not all operators will be successful in gaining a share of the advertising pot, analysts predict, due to the strong competition between broadcasters, Internet businesses and traditional media.

Ovum suggests that mobile broadband operators consider options such as: having their own paid-for content and service offerings; offering their own and third-party content on an ad-supported basis; and providing access to free Internet-based content to drive usage and hence access revenues.

more

iTnews: 'Cognitive radios' to improve wireless devices

As a journalist at iTnews:

Researchers are developing intelligent radios that can sense their surroundings and adjust their mode of operation accordingly.

Dubbed ‘cognitive radios’, the technology is expected to reach the market within five years, finding uses in public safety devices and wireless networks.

Cognitive radios build on the concept of ‘software defined radio’, in which most functions in a radio device are performed by software-controlled digital electronic circuits.

Similar to how a modern day cell phone signs on to different networks while roaming, a cognitive radio is designed to be adaptive to its situation.

“A cognitive radio is aware of its environment, its own capabilities, the rules within which it can operate, and its operator’s needs and privileges,” explained Charles W. Bostian, an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech.

“It is capable of changing its operating modes in ways that maximise things that the user wants while staying within the rules ... is capable of learning in the process and of developing configurations that its designer never anticipated.”

Adaptive, cognitive radios could enable techniques such as dynamic frequency sharing, in which radios automatically locate unused frequencies, or share channels based on a priority system.

In public safety, cognitive radios also could be used to provide interoperability between various signals and automatically adjust radio performance.

“For example, if its user is inside a building where there is little or no public safety radio coverage, the radio may automatically switch to a VoIP mode and reach the dispatcher through a WiFi access point and a telephone line,” Bostian said.

“These ideas are research topics now, and some of them will soon reach the market,” he said.

“It will mean more business and more equipment to sell for the wireless infrastructure manufacturers. They have nothing to lose and a lot to gain.”

Microsoft is researching the technology’s potential to alleviate bandwidth scarcity in wireless networking through its Kognitiv Networking Over White Spaces (KNOWS) research project.

The project works towards opportunistically accessing unused portions of the TV spectrum, and already has birthed a prototype that scans for unused frequencies by sensing the TV spectrum.

When an open frequency band is located, the device is designed to dynamically switch to it in a way that does not hurt incumbent TV receivers.

“I think dynamic spectrum access will be the first application for commercial wireless services like WiFi and WiMax,” Bostian told iTnews. “There is movement toward doing this in vacant U.S. TV channels.”

According to Bostian, current challenges in the development of cognitive radio are reducing cost and improving battery life.

While the technology is expected to reach the market within five years, it will take twice as long to become commonplace, Virginia Tech researchers predict.

more

iTnews: Contact centres urged to look offshore for staff

As a journalist at iTnews:

Australian contact centres need to look offshore to solve staffing issues, claims customer service outsourcing agency, Convergys.

Convergys’s statement comes on the heels of the 2008 Australian Contact Centre Industry Benchmark Study, which highlighted high levels of employee attrition in the contact centre industry.

Conducted by ACA Research, the study found staff turnover, difficulty in recruiting and inadequate headcount to be the industry’s three greatest challenges.

Staff attrition was ascribed to the fact that only one-third of contact centre staff view their job as a career, while other survey respondents described their job as part-time, gateway, and transition gigs.

“In Australia, a lot of industries just don’t see a contact centre job as a career,” said Max Tennant, Senior Account Executive of Convergys.

“Top that off with the highly transactional functions in most contact centre jobs, and it just doesn’t make it [contact centre work] an appealing job for young people,” he said.

Tennant suggests that contact centre operators move some functions offshore, where the ‘highly transactional, monotonous functions’ that are required may be considered appealing.

He named the Philippines and India as prime offshore locations due to the language and customer service skills that are available.

“Culturally, the offshore agents are a lot more open to these transactional tasks that Australian agents may find monotonous,” he said, describing ‘hierarchical’ tendencies in the Asian culture, and adding that offshored contact centres tend to pay three times the minimum wage in host countries.

Contact centre operators could direct specific customer requests to locations with staff adept at those functions, Tennant said, noting that while Indian contact centres have been found to excel in backoffice functions, staff in the Philippines traditionally provide a better customer service experience.

“If you ask your customers, ‘would you prefer an offshore or onshore agent’, they will ask for onshore, because that’s what they’re culturally used to,” he noted.

“But if you say, ‘look, here’s our situation -- you can wait 45 minutes for XYZ and our operating hours are 9-5 -- would you like 24/7 service and all these other options if we provide offshore agents?’ They will say yes.”

“It’s important that offshoring needs to be a part of an organisation’s overall strategy and is not just a cost savings thing,” he said.

Teleworking and process automation previously have been heralded as solutions to staffing problems in the Australian contact centre industry.

However, Tennant said that there are some transactions that once automated, do not provide a satisfactory customer experience, and expects there to be insufficient Australian teleworkers to provide the required headcount to satisfy customer demands around the clock.

Convergys maintains 84 contact centres worldwide, which house a total of 45,000 agent stations -- most of which are staffed around the clock, Tennant said.

A majority of Convergys’s facilities are located in the U.S., where the business originated. The company plans to direct more of its clients to its 9 contact centres in India, and 14 in the Philippines.

more

iTnews: Supercomputing revenue to grow $6.4b by 2012

As a journalist at iTnews:

High Performance Computers (HPC) are extending their reach from academic research to government, manufacturing and financial industries, analysts say.

According to analyst firm IDC, revenue from HPCs -- which are commonly termed ‘supercomputers’ -- will grow by $6.4 billion during the next five years.

Industries experiencing the most growth in HPC applications are expected to be software engineering, mechanical design, weather, financial and digital animation.

Universities, which in 2007 spent more than $2.1 billion on HPCs, will continue to lead HPC spending with a forecasted spending of $3.2 billion in 2012.

Although optical and quantum technologies have received much attention as potential supercomputing technologies, most HPCs today are comprised of high performance configurations of ordinary technologies.

“Most high performance computers today are based on commodity technologies that are readily available in the open market,” explained Steve Conway, who is IDC’s Research Vice President of Technical Computing and Steering Committee Member of the HPC User Forum.

Speaking with iTnews in the lead up to IDC’s HPC roadshow in Sydney this month, Conway said that common HPC configurations include standard x86 microprocessors from AMD or Intel, and the standard Linux or Microsoft Windows operating system.

“The trick is in how these technologies are connected together in supercomputers that may have 100,000 or more processors each in some cases,” he said. “Increasingly, fibre optical connections are used to link the components together.”

Outside of the academic sphere, current supercomputers have found uses in aircraft design for Boeing, assembly line modelling for Proctor and Gamble, and manufacturing simulation for Whirlpool.

IBM and Hewlett-Packard lead the fray, each occupying 32.9 percent of the HPC market. Dell currently owns 17.8 percent market share, while Cray owns 1.1 percent.

During the next decade, Conway expects supercomputers to reach speeds 1,000 times faster than today’s best by 2017.

These ‘exaflop’ computers will perform 10^18 calculations per second and will be able to process the informational equivalent of all 20 million volumes in the New York Public Library system in less than one second, Conway said.

But as energy concerns come to the fore, analysts expect the cost and availability of electricity to be biggest challenge for the HPC market.

While petascale supercomputers slated for delivery in the 2010 timeframe are expected to require as much as 20MW of power, similar projects could demand 60MW in the 2015-2017 timeframe.

“Today's biggest supercomputers consume enough electricity to power a small city,” Conway said. “In some cases where the infrastructure is lacking, adequate power is simply not available to an HPC site at any price.”

“The biggest challenge will likely be the cost and availability of adequate electricity to operate computers this large and power-hungry,” he said.

“When the sharply rising costs of oil and gas, it is no surprise that power and cooling has become one of the top few issues for HPC users.”

more

iTnews: University of Sydney takes records management online

As a journalist at iTnews:

The University of Sydney has completed the second stage of a decade-long move from paper to an electronic records keeping system.

Working with systems integrator Alphawest during the past four years, the university has implemented the Records Online 2 Web interface, which allows staff to create and manage student records online.

The implementation, which is estimated to have cost $160,000, has already delivered an annual return on investment of $675,000.

According to University of Sydney’s acting registrar Tim Robinson, Records Online 2 currently has 1,500 users out of a prime audience of 2,800 administrative staff.

It is estimated to have saved 10 minutes per week of physical filing work and reduced the need to create 10 or more physical files each year for 40 percent of its users.

Staff members are being introduced to the system in groups, in line with the project’s cautious approach to change management.

“One of the fundamental things we decided from the outset was that we weren’t going to go for the big king hit,” Robinson told iTnews.

“Making things simple is always time consuming,” he said, describing an aim to make the records keeping system user-friendly while maintaining a suitable privacy and access regime.

“An enormous amount of thought went into it; we knew that if it wasn’t simple, it would not be used,” he said.

The university took its first step away from its traditional paper registry in 2000, with the implementation of the Captira management tool in the back end.

Online search functionality was added shortly after, but it wasn’t until 2007 when users were able to access 98 percent of records management functions online.

The latest implementation of Records Online 2 now integrates the university’s records system with its business system, as well as allowing staff to access records via Microsoft Outlook.

Robinson noted that each stage of the implementation required ‘a lot’ of training for staff, estimating the cost of training to equal that of hardware and software combined.

“With an organisation as big as the Uni, we knew that we couldn’t train all these people in one go,” he told iTnews, describing one-on-one, roadshow, and small group training options.

After all administrative staff members are trained, the next challenge for Robinson’s team will be to introduce the Records Online 2 to academic staff, so they can access student records more efficiently.

Looking forward, Robinson expects the university to be looking to update its records management system again within the next three years.

He mentioned Microsoft Office SharePoint and an Open Source system that is in development at Curtin University as candidates.

“We’re always looking at what the next stage is,” he said. “I’m guessing by three years time, there will be some significant changes, and we’d be looking to update our systems.”

more

iTnews: Researchers find racial bias in virtual worlds

As a journalist at iTnews:

Real-world behaviours and racial biases could carry forward into virtual worlds such as Second Life, social psychologists say.

According to a study that was conducted in There.com, virtual world avatars respond to social cues in the same ways that people do in the real world.

There.com is a relatively unstructured virtual world that brands itself as an online getaway where users can hang out with friends and explore an immense, unusual landscape.

Users, who were unaware that they were part of a psychological study, were approached by a researcher’s avatar for either a ‘foot-in-the-door’ (FITD) or ‘door-in-the-face’ (DITF) experiment.

The FITD technique works by first asking a participant to comply with a small request -– which, in this experiment, was “Can I take a screenshot of you?” -- followed by a moderate request: “Would you teleport to Duda Beach with me and let me take a screenshot of you?”

Participants who fulfilled the small request are expected to be likely to see himself or herself as being helpful, and thus be more likely to fulfil the subsequent larger request.

The DITF technique work works in an opposite way: the experimenter first makes an unreasonably large request to which the responder is expected to say no, followed by a more moderate request.

In the DITF condition, that large request was to have screenshots taken in 50 different locations, which would have required about two hours of teleporting and travelling.

As the researchers expected, DITF participants were found to be more likely to comply with the moderate request when it was preceded by the large request, than when the moderate request was presented alone.

But while results of the FITD experiment revealed no racial bias, the effect of the DITF technique was significantly reduced when the experimenter took the form of a dark-skinned avatar.

White avatars in the DITF experiment received about a 20 percent increase in compliance with the moderate request; however, the increase for the dark-toned avatars was 8 percent.

According to the researchers, skin colour had no effect on FITD experiments because the elicited psychological effect is related to how a person views himself or herself, and not others.

However, the DITF technique is said to reflect a psychological tendency to reciprocate the requester's ‘concession’ from a relatively unreasonable request to a more moderate request, and thus is affected by whether the requester is deemed worthy of impressing.

The finding is consistent with previous DITF studies -- in real and virtual worlds -- that demonstrate that physical characteristics, such as race, gender and physical attractiveness, affect judgment of others.

Numerous studies done in the real world show that people are more uncomfortable with minorities and are less likely to help them.

“This study suggests that interactions among strangers within the virtual world are very similar to interactions between strangers in the real world,” said Paul W. Eastwick, who conducted the study at the Northwestern University.

“You would think when you're wandering around this fantasyland … that you might behave differently,” he said. “But people exhibited the same type of behaviour -- and the same type of racial bias -- that they show in the real world all the time.”

more

iTnews: Kaspersky Lab patents dynamic antivirus technology

As a journalist at iTnews:

Kaspersky Lab has patented a method of antivirus scanning that assesses files according to when and how they first appeared on the computer.


The method has been granted Patent No. 7 392 544 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Internally, it has been unofficially named ‘FirstTimeCheck’.

By dynamically varying the scanning level and set of tools used for file scanning, FirstTimeCheck is expected to minimise the impact of antivirus scanning on the overall system performance.

The technology also makes it possible to extend the time taken to scan new files and files received via ‘high-risk’ sources such as suspicious Web sites, P2P networks and e-mail attachments.

“In the past, antivirus products were scanning files with a standard set of technologies,” said Nikolay Grebennikov, Kaspersky Lab’s Vice-President for Research & Development.

“Now, the antivirus arsenal includes many new technologies, which significantly raise detection rate, but use more RAM and CPU time.”

“The standard solution for this situation is to limit the usage of these technologies to a level where antivirus scanning will not affect users’ activities too much," he told iTnews.

Grebennikov explained that the ‘standard solution’ to limit the resource usage of antivirus programs has been to set strict limits on the time taken to scan files.

He described such methods as a ‘compromise’ that may affect the quality of scanning and decrease the level of user protection.

“The main advantage of our method is that it minimises the impact on the overall system performance,” Grebennikov told iTnews.

“Normally such a deep system scan would greatly affect performance of the computer it is running on, but our new technology manages to bypass this negative effect to ensure maximum system performance all the time,” he said.

Kaspersky Lab is working on implementing FirstTimeCheck in current products and plans to implement the technology in the next version of its consumer products.

more