Electrosmog 2.0 unleashed

Why does this woman have such a great smile ? Because she's chatting up with friends on Facebook all day long from her office through a Wifi hotspot connection while answering one of the many GSM calls from her lovers ? Most likely. Or maybe it is just a side-effect of her exposure to the electrical field generated by the wireless devices she is using ? Who knows ?

There has been a massive worldwide adoption of wireless communications technology over the past decade and this is an ongoing trend -note that neither the telecom crisis in 2000 nor the financial crisis in 2007 had any impact on the ever growing user base of mobile operators (a very profitable business). As a result, the urban environment we live in is often saturated with electromagnetic waves. This is called the electrosmog.

Measuring accurately the electrosmog is not an easy task: it requires the use of expensive devices as well as following a measurement protocol. However, providing an approximative measure is possible with affordable electronic parts and good engineering -the main innovation shown below actually lies in the use of a shoe box as packaging material... not so stylish but at least 100% recyclable! ;)



Such a device is useful if you want to have a rough idea of your unwanted exposure to electrosmog. How much exposed am I in my bedroom where I spend 10 hours a day ? (OK I'm a lazy guy;) ? How far is this $500000 house from a telecom mast ? What if I stand near people using wireless devices ?

All of the questions above require instantaneous recurrent measures to get answered, and these can only be delivered by a personal electrosmog meter. Such devices already exist, but in my opinion their price and features can be much improved for the consumer market.

Below are a few snapshots of the data output provided by my low cost device which provides both average electrical field density in Volt per meter and peak statistics for the GSM/DECT, UMTS and Wireless LAN frequency bands.

Shanghai surprise

As a celebration for the International Year of Astronomy 2009, a total solar eclipse will take place on July 22nd. If you have a chance to get into the path of totality, don't miss it! This is a very unique mind-blowing experience.

The July 22, 2009, total solar eclipse begins at sunrise in India, and from there the Moon's shadow zips across eastern Asia. The track crosses China for much of the morning before leaving the mainland near Shanghai. Observers just south of this city will experience nearly 6 minutes of totality. The track then moves out over the Pacific Ocean.

If you cannot make it this time, check out the following map of the forthcoming total eclipses of the Sun. Maybe there is one closer to your place in a few years!

Open source hardware

Embedded product development is on the edge of going mainstream as the main barrier for product innovators, which used to be the lack of ready-to-use, customisable & documented hardware has collapsed. Indeed companies such as Raisonance from France or Hitex from Germany now provide low-cost and full-featured devices to get quickly started on a project.

The latest Primer2 whose design is fully documented is built around the latest STM32 microcontroller from ST Microelectronics and is about the size of a cellphone, and comes with a 128x160-pixel color touchscreen, audio capabilities, a built-in USB port, a MicroSD card slot, and other features, such as an accelerometer and an infrared transmitter/receiver, that allow developers to quickly add extra capabilities to their applications.

The STM32 circle online community, named after the open source CircleOS project that powers the Primer2, counts around 6000 developers from hobbyists to professionals who want to quickly turn a concept into an attractive-looking demonstrator -rather than a conventional engineering development board- with minimal design-start investment.

The explosion of the mobile phone market has made embedded devices affordable enough for new usages in home automation or environmental monitoring for instance and this is clearly a market opportunity for innovators... which should receive a boost from Microsoft who is trying to commoditise the embedded software development process with its .Net MicroFramework... but the task is tedious given that there is a number of hardware manufacturers (Atmel, Freescale, Microchip, NXP, ST Microelectronics, Texas instruments) who are adressing vertical markets each with a significant market share... -no Intel-like company in the embedded world to partner with that is!

Electrosmog 2.0

The "no cellphone under the age of 12" advertising campaign recently launched by the city of Lyon is the first ever of this kind in France. Indeed, the telecommunications industry still is a flagship industry in France and RF safety -that is the effects on the human body and the environment of radiofrequency radiation- is not really a major concern today. As a result, independent research in the field do not get enough public funding (this is an understatement) and the government's rules regarding human exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields are laxists (another understatement;)

However, the topic is taking momentum amongst the scientific & medical communities and, as for other environmental related health issues (pesticides, food additives, chicken flue, nuclear safety, etc...) it will take some time to make the headlines, but it undoubtedly will... Why ?

Because even though there is still not enough evidence of their nocivity -equally due to the lack of hindsight and the lack of proper monitoring and funding- the effects of RF radiation on human tissues & the hormonal & nervous systems are obvious. The questions to answer are rather : when does it become nocive ? to what extent ? how can we best accomodate for it -at both individual and collective levels ?

Electrosmog (RF radiation exposure -I am not talking about the 50Hz electrical wires exposure here) has been around since radio broadcasting took off and has kept increasing ever since.

• Eletrosmog 1.0 (radio & TV broadcasting) is characterized by high signal levels in the lower RF frequency range (below ~700MHz)


• Electrosmog 2.0 (wireless networks) is characterized by low to medium pulsed signal levels in the higher frequency range (above ~700MHz up to ~6GHz)

Electrosmog 1.0 mainly goes through the body whereas Electrosmog 2.0 is mainly absorbed.

Today the top contributors to Electrosmog 2.0 in terms of intensity (at short distance) usally are the microwave oven (~900 or ~2400 MHz), the DECT corless phone (~1800 MHz), the cellphone (~900 & ~1800 MHz) and the wifi devices (~2400 MHz). But the top contributors in terms of exposure (duration/distance) are the GSM (~900 & ~1800 MHz) and UMTS (~2100 MHz) base stations antennas.
Radars (military & civil) are the biggest contributors -but are usually not directed toward the ground ;) whereas satellite communications systems are the smallest.

Finally, it is interesting to note that "natural" radiations (from the cosmos) at the frequencies stated above are almost nonexistent.

Un-unified communications

Cisco recently announced the take over of Jabber & Postpath to complement their unified communication offering. This news item would have probably gone unoticed if the two companies were not editors of... open source software! I wonder if the next one on Cisco's shopping list isn't Digium ? -the well known editor of Asterisk! ;)

It really seems that Cisco's UC strategy is shaken since Microsoft launched its offensive in the field... and Microsoft's comment about the deal is quite acid :

"In early 2007, Cisco was touting their three year lead on Microsoft in UC. Now, Cisco seems to have decided they were running in the wrong direction - and perhaps even in the wrong race. In the last month, Cisco has added two new software pieces to their UC puzzle and are now playing catch up to companies like Microsoft and Nortel who have long seen that the path to UC was in powerful, well-integrated software, not wires. Cisco’s offering is the definition of un-unified communications. With more than 40 products, their solution is a patchwork of technologies and networking. The risk for customers is that a patchwork system is slower to roll out, harder to train users, and more expensive to manage and maintain over the long term." according to Microsoft's UC vice president.

Indeed, Cisco is no longer a challenger in the UC arena but is not the leader either. The challenger role has been taken over by Microsoft and Open source solutions, while historical telecom manafacturers (Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Siemens, etc) are no longer seen as old-fashionned, have adapted to the VoIP paradigm and have preserved a significant market share.

Furthermore they will not fight to death with Microsoft as they did with Cisco, because Cisco was attacking their core-business (voice switching) whereas Microsoft is on the edge (computer telephony integration). Their strategy against Microsoft consists in providing fully fledged interoperability (as well as for the other collaboration software editors like IBM or Novell) and a cheaper proprietary alternative.

However, I have to agree that this is nothing but the same patchwork architecture that was used in the TDM environment... indeed, VoIP has not changed much things in the application space to date (the only really new application that has come forth being the softphone).

Telepresence 3.0

Cisco and other players such as Polycom are making a lot of marketing fuss around telepresence solution (basically a HD video conference on large screen with audio surround effects) and it is often seen as a "green" solution as it is supposed to cut down business trips.

Frankly speaking, I find video conference solutions useless as they do not bring much value to existing web conferences (voice + application sharing), and do not substitute to a face to face meeting, but do require much more hardware and power!

However, I have to admit that I have been very impressed by the holographic telepresence demo made by Cisco a few months ago. I think there is a future for that kind of engaging communication experience, so long as engineers can make it an affordable box size solution!

Flashphony goes P2P

Enabling new application such as unified messaging, presence, videophone, etc... has probably been the most widely (mis)used selling point from Voice over IP technology vendors, well ahead of more basic but real benefits such as cabling, hardware and maintenance optimization.

Indeed, there are actually very few new applications that have come along VoIP. Amongst them, Flash based telephony is probably one of my favorite.

Along with the Ribbit project (which I have already addressed previously), there is a number of new projects popping out here and there that I wanted to share with you :

• Tringme bridges Flash with SIP


• Tokbox is a Flash videophone


• Vawkr is a chat room for web 2.0 sites

All this is very well, but one thing to bear in mind is that Flash telephony is based on a client/server architecture which results in poor scalability & call quality since all the network flows have to be bridged through the Flash interactive media server.

Hopefully, Adobe has announced support for P2P in the forthcoming Flash 10 release -making therefore all previous flashphony implementations legacy! Furthermore, the P2P feature will probably be embedded into Flash Lite, the Flash plugin for mobile devices (whose market penetration, although growing, is not so good to date because mobile OS vendors are considering it a major threat for their own API).

However, a Flash server will still be required as a registrar and to handle some signalling trafic as well. A good way for Adobe to protect its revenues, all the more some alternative implementations of the Flash media server such as Wowza or Red5 become increasingly popular.

Our body

"Our boby" also known as "bodies" and "bodyworld" is a fascinating exhibition that show in details how is made and how works the human body. The bodies presented are all real human bodies provided by the Anatomical & Technologies foundation of Hong-Kong.

The exhibition has been seen so far by more than 30 million people and is currently being held in Lyon, France. This is a very unique opportunity to discover & learn in a way that is normally reserved to surgeons only.

Visit the web site for more information (only in French).

Below is an excellent commented tour of the exhibition that took place in the USA.

web 2 - voice 0

The introduction of voice interactions into the social web seems to be a failure in most cases as reported by most observers of the voice 2.0 scene. This article published on the LatestGeekNews blog unveils voice applications usage on Facebook statitics that clearly show how useless they seem to be. It is very much likely that the mainstream Facebook user is not quite the target for these applications, but another major concern about voice applications is that their unicast connection model does not fit well in the social networking space, built around multicast connections. Furthermore, a voice interaction is by nature conversational and content-rich unlike instant messaging interactions : engaging in a phone conversation is a much deeper experience than dropping a chat line on a wall under a nickname cover; not only is it real-time, it is also real-life!

Looking beyond voice applications for the social web, it is an understament to say that the voice 2.0 has not come up with much innovation as pointed in a recent article on FierceVOIP that acknowledges the failure of the VoIP industry to deliver more than IP transport: "Voice 2.0 is here, but there's been no big killer application, it's all just variations of a theme for call forwarding and voice mail and some APIs to slap voice into a web service."

The telecommunication industry, who has embraced the unified communication concept -that is preserving communications silos by providing unified access- is clearly not fostering innovation -which will come from software companies. But after all, this best-of-breed approach is maybe just commonsense as suggested in this crystal clear post from a media expert.

There is however an area where voice 2.0 seems to have delivered its promises : voice search. Indeed, the is a real market need for that kind of application, notably for nomadic users, and providers are fighting to differentiate themselves from the plain old voice search services :

• Google focuses on ASR technology


• Chacha is powered by real agents


• Jingle is building a voice ad network


• Yahoo focuses on mobile web-enriched content

Big blue wants to be big green

The costly mainframe technology was ditched out in the 90's in favor of x86 based server platforms but global warming considerations give a significant TCO advantage to large systems according to IBM. The company has performed several surveys regarding the energy efficiency of IT systems and is coming up with results that fully support their green computing approach.


Nearly 60% of the total energy consumption of a computing system is dedicated to cooling.

The remaining 40% are mainly used for powering peripherals (70%) and the CPU (30%).

When taking a closer look at the CPU, it turns out to be idle 80% of the time. Indeed, the processor activity rate is only 10% for a x86 Microsoft Windows system, 25% for a x86 Unix system but can reach up to 75% for a mainframe system.

Beyond these technical facts, IBM research have come up with calculations that have a much greater marketing impact :

• A single search request on the internet affords for the electrical comsumption of a 70W bulb in a year



• An avatar on Second Life requires as much energy as a middle-class brazilian

A Gartner study says information technology was responsable for 2% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions last year - equivalent to all the planet's airlines combined.

Big blue strategy to address the market is three-fold : better cooling, enhanced hardware design and last but not least virtualisation.

Find out more about the greening of corporate data centers on the Raised Floor blog and on the IBM website.

HMI 3.0 : sensitive objects ?

HMI 1.0 (Human Machine Interface) was keyboard/screen. HMI 2.0 came with the mouse and the graphical user interface. What will be the HMI 3.0 ? Voice recognition technology is so complex that I doubt it will ever reach maturity. The successful come back of touch screen technology in the mobile computing segment seems to have given a new momentum to haptic technology -to such an extent that Microsoft is about to releasing its own MS Surface product.

Remember the cutting-edge HMI in "Minority report" ? This is precisely what haptic technology is all about. Sensitive object, a spin off from the French National Research Center (CNRS), has developed a technology based on the recognition of sound waves propagated in an object when the user touches it. A tap on an object produces a pattern of sound waves through the material. This pattern creates an acoustic signature that is unique to the location of the impact.

With this technology, it is possible to turn most objects into usable HMI. Beyond the "demo flat" marketing hype presented in the video below, the technology can have many innovative & useful applications across many domains of activity.