The businesses of West Houston came together this week for the Houston West Chamber of Commerce Golf Classic.  Percento Technologies was a proud sponsor of this event, offering sun screen, tee bags, and Romea and Julieta Cigars (along with complimentary Percento branded cigar cutter and lighter).  The weather was perfect and the day was successful for great golf and strengthening buisness relationships and forming new business relationships.

This is Percento’s 7th year to sponsor this event.  We love the Houston West Chamber of Commerce.

Percento is a Managed IT Support Services company.  For more, click here.

How fast will PCs boot up in the future? I asked industry experts to explain what’s involved and what could lead to PCs that boot up in seconds.

One of the key components in getting a PC to start quickly is the BIOS, or basic input/output system. The BIOS, which is present in every Windows PC and Apple computer, is the first piece of code run when the computer starts up, also referred to as firmware. The BIOS serves to initialize and identify system devices such as the hard-disk drive, DVD/CD drive, networking components, USB ports, the video card, keyboard, and mouse.

I chatted with Surendra Arora, vice president of business development at BIOS supplier Phoenix Technologies, and Stephen Jones, the company’s chief technical officer, as well as Mark Doran, a senior principal engineer at Intel’s Software and Services Group.

And I exchanged e-mail with Fadi Zuhayri, senior manager at the Intel Software & Services Group. Zuhayri said that UEFI, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, provides the foundation for reaching instant-on one day. But a number of factors, including the operating system, need to come together to achieve fast boot times in under 10 seconds. “So we are getting at near-parity to instant on. The technology foundation is there to make it happen,” Zuhayri said.

Q: What is UEFI and why is this replacing the traditional BIOS and why is it instrumental in achieving faster boot times?
Surendra Arora (Phoenix): The reality is UEFI was started for various reasons. I’m not sure boot speed was one of the reasons that UEFI was started. The real reason was to move away from assembly code. That was what the bring-up process used to be. Hard-coded or machine-level coding. Now C [language] is being used. You can do it at an abstracted layer that’s built on APIs [application programming interfaces]. This [UEFI] allows you to standardize things, use multi-threading. We’ve paralyzed initialization so you can boot extremely fast.

Q: So how fast can boot times be now? For example, my Dell Adamo [laptop] that has a solid-state drive can boot to the Windows log-in in roughly 20 seconds.
Arora: The OS and the components that you use lead to the complete experience. What we at Phoenix can do is hand off what we do to the OS extremely fast. It used to be 10 to 15 seconds and now we’re trying to get it to three to five seconds. That’s the Phoenix component.

Stephen Jones (Phoenix): UEFI solves a problem that our industry has internally. The old styles of doing BIOS, which were invented by IBM in 1981 for the IBM PC–that architecture doesn’t hold up anymore. It wasn’t designed to handle [today's] complexity. So as PCs get more complex, you try to keep that complexity from causing boot times to run away. I’ve actually demonstrated a PC booting in 75 milliseconds. Which is less than the time it takes to snap your fingers. So the question is why does it take three to five seconds for the BIOS to boot? The answer is that people want laptops that can boot from the DVD drive or a USB key and so forth. When you have all of that functionality, it does take three to five seconds.

Q: And how much do other components like solid-state drives–which may have nothing to with the BIOS–affect boot times?
Jones: Solid-state disks make a huge difference. But even the Apple iPhone [which uses flash memory, the same basic technology used in solid-state drives] is not instant-on. When you hold the button down and turn the iPhone “off,” then you push the button and turn it on, you will see the Apple logo one-and-a-half seconds later and some eight seconds later it will actually give you the desktop. That’s booting. That’s not instant-on. That’s the same problem the PC has.

Q: What other advantages does UEFI have?
Mark Doran (Intel): It means we can introduce new components without having to wait for a brand new operating system release. So the pace of innovation of innovation–the OS and the platform–is decoupled in a sense. Decoupling means that if I want to go build a machine that is put together in a pretty different way today than the way it was put together two years go but I still want run the OS that was shipped a while ago…Can I do that? We want to make sure the answer is yes more often.

Q: What about boot times from Intel’s perspective?
The assumption used to be that you had to completely initialize the machine. Most conventional BIOS code is built with that set of assumptions. But [now we try] to only execute the code that we absolutely have to and hand off to the OS as fast as possible. On the desktop it’s not unusual that it’s 25 to 30 seconds between flipping on the power and the first piece of the operating system code begins to load. We’ve been able to get that down to under five seconds.

Q: And hard drives versus solid-state drives?
Doran: The faster your hard drive, the longer it takes to spin it up from a standing start. 7200 [rpm] takes longer than 5400. Changing that hardware can make a significant difference. It’s around five seconds for a 7200-rpm drive to come up to speed. Obviously, an SSD can be a big contributor there. It takes virtually no time.

Q: What are the fastest system boot times that you’re seeing now in tests at Intel?
Doran: I can say we have systems [brands] that you would recognize that are booting in single-digit seconds, start to finish. The UI is up and you’re able to log in.

Source

Ukraine police arrested five individuals accused of being part of a cyber-crime ring that used the Zeus Trojan to steal $70 million from U.S. bank accounts, the FBI said Oct. 1.

The arrests were made Sept. 30, and targeted people the FBI described as “key suspects responsible for this overarching scheme.” Authorities in the United Statesand the United Kingdom the week of Sept. 27 have been taking action as part of an international crackdown on cyber-crime. According to an FBI news release:

“Operation Trident Breach began in May 2009, when FBI agents in Omaha, Nebraska, were alerted to Automated Clearing House(ACH) batch payments to 46 separate bank accounts throughout the United States. Agents quickly realized the scope of the crime and partnered with local, state, and federal partners, cybercrime task forces, working groups, and foreign police agencies in the Netherlands, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom to bring those responsible to justice.”

According to the FBI, the gang “targeted small- to medium-sized companies, municipalities, churches, and individuals, infecting their computers” with a variant of Zeus, which was used to swipe bank account numbers, passwords and other log-in data. All told, the thieves attempted to steal $220 million, “with actual losses of $70 million from victims’ bank accounts.”

The fraudsters also used foreigners on U.S. student visas as mules. The mules opened bank accounts under fake names and transferred the stolenmoney overseas, authorities said. In addition to the arrests in the Ukraine, on Sept. 28 UK police arrested 19 people accused of involvement in cyber-theft from banks, while the FBI charged dozens of people in the United States.

“No one country, no one company and no one agency can stop cyber-crime,” FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said in a statement. “The only way to do that is by standing together. For, ultimately, we all face the same threat. Together, the FBI and its international partners can and will find better ways to safeguard our systems, minimize these attacks and stop those who would do us harm.”

Source

It turns out there was more to Google’s WebM technology than just a plan to revolutionize Web-based video. The company also wants to revolutionize still images on the Web with a new format called WebP.

Google plans to announce the new WebP graphics format today along with its research that indicates its use could cut image file sizes by 40 percent compared to today’s dominant JPEG file format. That translates to faster file transfers and lower network burden if Google can convince people to adopt WebP.

WebP, like JPEG, lets its users trade off image quality for file size. And like JPEG, it’s a “lossy” format, meaning it doesn’t perfectly reproduce an original image but tries to keep as true to the original as possible when viewed by the human eye.

Unlike JPEG, though, it’s not built into every camera, Web browser, image-editing program, pharmacy photo-printing kiosk, and mainstream operating system in existence. That’s not stopping Google, though, whose goals with WebP are ambitious even if not as ambitious as replacing JPEG.

“When we took a bunch of images, recompressed them from their current lossy formats into WebP, we saw on average about 40 percent decrease in size, which is staggering,” said Richard Rabbat, lead product manager on Google’s “make the Web faster” effort. Shrinking images by that much is particularly important considering that, by Google’s estimate, “65 percent of bytes on the Web are from images,” he said.

JPEG is a powerful incumbent. Microsoft has been trying for years to promote an alternative, now standardized as the royalty-free JPEG XR format, which offers greater dynamic range, a wider range of colors, and more efficient compression. But JPEG XR so far hasn’t made much progress beyond standardization and native support in Internet Explorer and Windows. An earlier effort, JPEG 2000, also hasn’t much dented JPEG’s popularity.

Google, like Microsoft, knows it’s in for a long effort to promote its graphics format.

“The challenges are tremendous,” Rabbat said. “We foresee it’s going to be a very long conversation.”

It’s begun that conversation with some that share Google’s faster-Web motivations: browser makers. “We’re talking to other browser vendors about supporting WebP,” he said. “Initially, we want to spread this widely on the Web.”

WebP is derived from WebM, Google’s open-source, royalty-free technology for encoding and decoding video. The higher compression efficiency measurement came from a sample of 1 million images that Google plucked from the Web. Of them, about 90 percent were JPEG, and Google’s tests showed WebP offering the same quality with 40 percent smaller file sizes. The remaining 10 percent were formats such as PNG and GIF, which are used more for illustration images such as logos rather than the photo-oriented JPEG.

Google plans to release WebP software to let people judge image quality for themselves. At first that will include a utility to convert graphics into WebP images, but more important perhaps in the long run is support built into Google’s Chrome browser.

“We expect in a few weeks we will have native support for WebP in Chrome,” Rabbat said.

That browser move is where Google’s efforts to speed up the Web are interesting. Because Google has some very popular Web pages along with a widely used if not dominant browser, the company can make something practical and real out of technology that in another company’s hands would be merely academic unless it signed up partners.

Google’s doing the same thing with other Web technologies, for example by building into Chrome the SPDY protocol to speed interactions with Web servers, and the Native Client software to run downloadable software at native rather than JavaScript speeds. With Chrome as a vehicle and Google’s Web properties as a destination, neither of those need be universally adopted for Google to benefit.

For some more details on WebP, check Google’s blog post on it or the open-source WebP project site, which includes an FAQ, the WebP converter command-line tool, and gallery.

Image-quality techies also will want to look at Google’s detailed studies comparing WebM to JPEG and JPEG 2000.

The company wants WebP to be used beyond just its own servers. However, it will be tough to persuade Web developers to create variations on their current Web pages that use WebP rather than JPEG images, especially with no browsers supporting it today.

But Google has an answer: check to see if the browser supports WebP, and if it does, generate the necessary WebP images on the fly for delivery to the browser, Rabbat said.

“You don’t have to make a decision–do I need to rebuild my corpus [of graphics] into WebP?” he said. “The conversion happens pretty fast. It’s just a bit of CPU [processor power] you have to throw at the problem. When you’ve done the conversion once, you can cache the image so you don’t have to do it again.”

There is a penalty for the quality. Encoding WebP images takes about eight times longer than JPEG, Rabbat said, and decoding them somewhat less than twice as long. He also observed, though, that “a lot of technologies for lossy compression were invented in the 1970s when processors were slow and memory was expensive.”

And hardware eventually could work in WebP’s favor.

One convenient feature of WebP is that any hardware that supports WebM video encoding or decoding also supports WebP. That means a mobile phone with hardware support, for example, could take WebP photos.

Source

If you thought location-aware search and other mobile mapping technologies were cool, hold onto your hat. A new wave of innovation in the mobile market will bring augmented reality to smartphones, allowing users to interact virtually with their surroundings.

Augmented reality, or AR, is a term that refers to technology that superimposes computer-generated content over live images viewed through cameras. The technology, which has been used in gaming and in military applications on computers, has been around for years. But thanks to more sophisticated devices, faster wireless broadband networks, and new developments at the chip level by companies like Qualcomm, it has become inexpensive enough to put into smartphones and tablets.

Even though these are still the early days for the technology–chip vendors like Qualcomm are just now giving demonstrations–augmented reality could have a major impact on smartphones in the coming years.

“The idea that a mobile device knows where I am and can access, manipulate, and overlay that information on real images that are right in front of me really gets my science fiction juices flowing,” said Mark Donovan, senior analyst at ComScore. “It’s just beginning now, and it will likely be one of the most interesting trends in mobile in the next few years.”

Just as location-based services have begun to change how wireless subscribers use their cell phones and marketers reach an increasingly mobile audience, augmented reality will go a step further, bringing a wealth of collected data to users’ fingertips.

Today, GPS and other location-based technologies allow people to track and find friends on the go. It allows them to “check in” at particular locations. In other words, wireless subscribers provide information about their surroundings, such as where they are, and that information is stored and shared with others via the Internet cloud. That information can be used so friends can locate you, or it can be used by marketers to send you coupons and other promotions.

But as these location services are married to augmented-reality technology, mobile subscribers have the opportunity to allow the crowd-sourced data about a particular location to tell them about their surroundings. Think of Flikr and Wikipedia information layered on top of real-time images you can see via your phone’s camera and displayed on your smartphone’s screen.

For example, imagine you’re on a walking tour of New York City. You could stand in front of 97 Orchard St., the location for the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and get a virtual tour guide to tell you about the building and its history. Images of how the neighborhood looked 100 years could be overlayed on top of the existing image of the neighborhood on your mobile phone screen.

Facts and other information about the neighborhood and the people who lived there could be embedded onto the screen. And by clicking on an icon, you could hear audio, see video, or read text about what happened there. Other visitors could leave virtual comments about the tour. Maybe someone would leave a virtual note letting you know of a good pizza place a block away. That pizza joint might also insert an icon offering you a coupon.

AR could also be very useful in education. Biology students, for example, could use an augmented-reality application and a smartphone to get additional information about what they are seeing as they dissect a frog.

Toying with AR
These are just a few examples of how AR on a handheld device could be used to enhance user’s experience. Matt Grob, Qualcomm’s senior vice president of engineering and head of corporate research development, recently showed off the company’s augmented-reality technology at the EmTech conference at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. Grob and other Qualcomm execs have been demonstrating the new technology for the past few months at various conferences to drum up interest and excitement.

The company’s Snapdragon processors and a new software developer kit for Android smartphones will help provide the necessary foundation for building and using augmented-reality technology on cell phones.

In the Qualcomm demo, the company teamed with toy maker Mattel to create a virtual update to a classic game called Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. Using Qualcomm’s technology and the embedded smartphone camera, players could see superimposed virtual robots on their smartphone displays. The robots appeared in the ring, which was a piece of paper printed with the static image of the ring and its ropes. Players used the buttons on their handsets to throw punches, and their robots actually moved around the ring as the players physically circled the table where the image of the ring was placed.

Grob said gaming offers a huge opportunity for Qualcomm and its augmented-reality technology. But he said others will also see the usefulness of the technology over time.

“Augmented reality certainly enhances the gaming experience,” he said. “But it’s also a nice way for advertisers to improve their reach to consumers by bringing in contextual awareness between the device and the physical world.”

For example, marketers can insert animated coupons on top of real-life images of their products in stores. So when consumers walk by a box of cereal in the grocery store and look into their phone’s screen, they could get an instant rebate.

While augmented-reality technology has been around for a while and is already being used in some PC games, Qualcomm has advanced the technology by making it more affordable and usable for portable devices.

Grob said Qualcomm’s software developer kit for Android devices, which was announced earlier this summer, will be available in coming weeks. This will allow game developers and others to start developing applications using the augmented-reality technology. And these games and apps should be able to operate on current-generation Android smartphones. Grob said the technology is already mature enough for commercial use. The demonstration of the Rock’em Sock’em game used Google’s Nexus One Android handsets.

Qualcomm’s software developer kit will initially be available for Android, but other mobile platforms are expected to be added later.

ComScore’s Donovan said he expects to see a lot more experimentation with augmented-reality applications on mobile phones over the next 12 to 24 months, with more large-scale consumer services hitting the market in the next few years.

“It’s very early days still for the technology,” he said. “You’ll see some applications, but it could take a couple of years for someone to develop a meaningful use for augmented reality in mobile. But once they do, you’ll see it really take off. And then we’ll go from simply telling apps where we are, as we do today, to apps telling us about the world around us.”