Latest Technology Inventions

Cloud storage

Analysts predict that the latest technology inventions in cloud computing will significantly influence how we use our computers and mobile devices.

Cloud computing is where tasks and file storage on your computer are performed and stored elsewhere.

By using an internet connection you can connect to a service that has the architecture, infrastructure and software to manage any task or storage requirement at less cost.

The advantages of cloud computing is that it eliminates the difficulty and expense of maintaining, upgrading and scaling your own computer hardware and software while increasing efficiency, speed and resources.

Your computer’s processing speed, memory capacity, software applications and maintenance requirements are minimized.

You could store and access any size or type of file, play games, use or develop applications, render videos, word process, make scientific calculations, or anything you want, by simply using a smart phone.

As a comparison, let’s say you had to generate your own electricity. You would need to maintain, upgrade and scale these resources as required to meet your demands. This would be expensive and time consuming.

Cloud computing could be compared to how a utility provides electricity. It has the architecture, infrastructure, applications, expertise and resources to generate this service for you. You just connect to their grid.

Microsoft, IBM and Google are some of the companies that are investing heavily into the research and development of cloud technology.

 

3D Printed Car

The latest technology inventions in 3d printing are rapidly changing how things are being made.

It’s an emerging technology that is an alternative to the traditional tooling and machining processes used in manufacturing.

At the International Manufacturing Technology Show in Chicago, a little known Arizona-based car maker created a media sensation by manufacturing a car at the show.

It was a full scale, fully functional car that was 3d printed in 44 hours and assembled in 2 days. The video below shows the car being made.

The car is called a “Strati”, Italian for layers, so named by it’s automotive designer Michele Anoè because the entire structure of the car is made from layers of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (A.B.S.) with reinforced carbon fiber into a single unit.

The average car has more than 20,000 parts but this latest technology reduces the number of parts to 40 including all the mechanical components.

“The goal here is to get the number of parts down, and to drop the tooling costs to almost zero.” said John B. Rogers Jr., chief executive of Local Motors, a Princeton and Harvard-educated U.S. Marine.

“Cars are ridiculously complex,“ he added, referring to the thousands of bits and pieces that are sourced, assembled and connected to make a vehicle.

“It’s potentially a huge deal,” said Jay Baron, president of the Center for Automotive Research, noting that the material science and technology used by Local Motors is derived from their partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge,Tennessee.

This technology can use a variety of metal, plastic or composite materials to manufacture anything in intricate detail.

People tend to want what they want, when they want it, where they want it, and how they want it, which makes this technology disruptive in the same way digital technologies used by companies like Amazon and Apple disrupted newspaper, book and music publishers.

Imagine if you could customize and personalize your new car online and pick it up or have it delivered to you the next day at a fraction of the cost of buying one from a dealership?

What if you could make a fender for a Porsche, or a tail light for a Honda, for a fraction of the cost of buying from a parts supplier? How revolutionary would that be for the automotive industry?

It’s already happening.

Jay Leno, the former Tonight Show Host and avid car enthusiast is famous for his collection of vintage automobiles.

Related: See: “Jay Leno Restores 100-Year-Old Electric Car”

One of the challenges with collecting antique cars is replacing parts. You can’t buy them because they’re obsolete and having a machinist tool the part doesn’t always work and often requires costly modifications until the part fits.

So Leno uses 3d printing technology to make parts for his cars. “These incredible devices allow you to make the form you need to create almost any part”, says Leno.

John B. Rogers Jr. believes that in the near future a car will be made in just 60 minutes.

The company is already organizing a worldwide network of “Microfactories” where you can order and pickup your personalized, customized car.

 

Car Gps Tracking

Car Gps Tracking is fairly common in new vehicles, providing drivers with tracking and navigation.

However, latest technology inventions have made car gps tracking systems more sophisticated, allowing for a wide range of additional uses.

Smartbox technology is one example of how car gps tracking systems are being used to lower car insurance.

A comprehensive recording of a driver’s habits allows insurance companies to provide “pay-as-you-drive” car insurance.

City officials in New York City are considering how car gps tracking could be used as “Drive Smart” technology.

Most large cities have a limited capability to change the infrastructure of their roadways.

A car gps tracking system that integrates with traffic information would give drivers the ability to select routes in real time that were more fuel efficient, less congested, faster or shorter.

A driver’s recorded routing selection could then be used to penalize or reward drivers by lowering or increasing their related licensing fees or by calculating mileage based “road-use” fees.

Eventually, such a system would replace gasoline tax since these revenues will decline as more vehicles become less dependent on fossil fuels.

Air Into Water

Johathan Ritchey has invented the Watermill, which is an atmospheric water generator. It converts air into fresh water.

This latest technology invention produces fresh water at a cost of about 3 cents a liter (1 quart). Originally designed for areas that do not have clean drinking water, the Watermill is for households that prefer an eco-friendly, cost effective alternative to bottled water.

Atmospheric water generators convert air into water when the temperature of the air becomes saturated with enough water vapor that it begins to condense (dew point).

“What is unique about the Watermill is that it has intelligence,” says Ritche. This makes the appliance more efficient. It samples the air every 3 minutes to determine the most efficient time to convert the air into water.

It will also tell you when to change the carbon filter and will shut itself off if it cannot make pure clean water.

Vein Identification

 

Another technology innovation is the biometric identification and security device known as PalmSecure.

It works by identifying the vein pattern in the palms of our hands.

Similar to our fingerprints, vein patterns are unique to each individual. The purported advantages of this technology is that it is less expensive, easier to manage, and is more reliable than traditional methods of identification.

World’s Fastest Motor

 

A new motor developed by researchers at ETH Zurich’s Department of Power Electronics and marketed by the Swiss company, Celeroton, can spin in excess of 1 million revolutions per minute.

As a comparison, collapsed stars spin at 60,000 rpms, a blender at about 30,000 and high performance engines at around 10,000 rpms.

The matchbook-sized motor has a titatnium shell, ultra-thin wiring and a trade secret iron formulated cylinder. The need for smaller electronic devices requires smaller holes, which means smaller, faster, more efficient drills.

 

A House that Walks

A new prototype house walked around the campus of the Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridgeshire, England.

The eco-friendly house is powered by solar cells and minature windmills, and comes with a kitchen, a composting toilet, a system for collecting rain water, one bed, a wood stove for CO2 neutral heating, a rear opening that forms a stairway entrance, and six legs.

A collaborative effort between MIT and the Danish design collective N55, the house walks about five kilometers an hour similar to the walking speed of a human.

The legs reguire a software algorithm to calculate the movement and position of the legs to provide stability over varying terrain.

The house can turn, move forward or backwards, or change height as required and can be programmed with GPS waypoints for traveling to destinations.

10 Hot Technology Trends For 2016

What’s in store for enterprise IT in the coming year? Everything from IoT and microservices to wearables and virtual reality.

1)

At the beginning of every new year, technology analysts and pundits love to speculate about the new advances the next twelve months might bring. Countless organizations publish their forecasts of what will happen in the technology industry.

At Network Computing, we’ve combed through a lot of the expert opinions and generated our own list of trends that will be important this year to people involved in IT infrastructure. Some of these trends –like the Internet of Things and cloud computing — are household words in tech. In fact, these are so ubiquitous they even have their own topic sections on our website. Still, they merit close attention, since both are poised to achieve new levels of mainstream prominence this year.

Other technologies on our list, like blockchain and containerization, are fairly young. Both are worth watching because they look likely to skyrocket in importance in the coming years.

This list also highlights development trends, like microservices architecture and machine learning, and end-user computing trends, like wearables and virtual reality. In these cases, IT needs to make sure that it has the appropriate infrastructure in place to support the rapidly developing technology.

No one knows for sure which technologies will be most important for IT professionals in 2016, but the 10 that follow are well worth watching.

2)

IoT

The Internet of Things, or IoT, could be one of the most sweeping technological changes of our lifetime, and it’s getting a lot of attention from analysts and the press. In a nutshell, IoT involves installing chips, sensors, and software in a wide variety of objects and then connecting those objects to the Internet. The connected objects might include home appliances, wearable devices, vehicles, thermostats, locks or even small adhesive tags that could be used to track anything.

Manufacturers have already begun rolling out smartwatches, fitness trackers and smart home devices, but this is just the first wave. Analysts suggest that by 2018, there will be 22 billion IoT devices installed. For enterprises, the IoT could represent new ways to communicate with customers, new ways to track employees, and a host of other opportunities. The challenge for IT will be finding ways to store and analyze all the data generated by these new smart devices.

3)

Machine learning and cognitive computing

Since the dawn of the computing era, scientists have been fascinated by the idea of artificial intelligence, and today that idea is becoming reality. Several companies, including IBM, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft are investing in machine learning and or cognitive computing research. These systems function more like the human brain than traditional computer systems. They are able to understand natural language, to identify and categorize the content of images and video, and to make educated guesses and hypotheses in response to questions.

IBM demonstrated the capabilities of cognitive computing when its Watson system participated in — and won — the television game show Jeopardy. Today, only 1% of developers are embedding cognitive capabilities into their apps, but by 2018, more than half of developers will likely do so.

4)

Microservices architecture

Developers are beginning to embrace a new approach to developing applications and web apps. In microservices architecture, applications are comprised of many small pieces that communicate with each other via APIs. With this approach, it becomes much easier to roll out frequent updates, which helps enable continuous delivery and agile development methodologies.

As Forrester analyst Randy Heffner wrote in a report, “With increasing frequency, microservices are appearing in enterprises’ efforts to achieve better software architectures, especially among those operating at scale, such as eBay, Google, Netflix, and Wal-Mart.”

5)

Adaptive security

As cyberattacks against large companies continue to succeed with alarming regularity, it is becoming apparent that the existing security measures at most enterprises are inadequate to keep up with the rapidly evolving nature of attacks. Gartner recommends that organizations move to an “adaptive security” model that uses predictive analytics to anticipate where attackers will strike next.

According to Gartner, “Relying on perimeter defense and rule-based security is inadequate, especially as organizations exploit more cloud-based services and open APIs for customers and partners to integrate with their systems.” The research firm said that adaptive security will be one of the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2016 and added, “Application self-protection, as well as user and entity behavior analytics, will help fulfill the adaptive security architecture.”

6)

Virtual/augmented reality

Several firms, notably Facebook’s Oculus Rift and Microsoft, will release virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) headsets this year. Some analysts suggest sales of these devices could top 12 million units this year.

VR and AR offer unique opportunities for consumer entertainment, particularly in regards to gaming, but some industry watchers think that VR and AR will have an even bigger impact on enterprises. Companies could use the headsets for design work, engineering, construction, training and communications. Microsoft, in particular, seems to be targeting its HoloLens augmented reality device at this market.

7)

Cloud computing

At this point, cloud computing is hardly new, but this is one trend that isn’t going away any time soon. IDC predicts that by 2018, half of IT spending will be cloud-based. Many organizations are overcoming their security and compliance concerns and embracing the cloud wholeheartedly.

This year, analysts and vendors suggest that hybrid cloud computing models will come to the fore. Look for software makers to release a new crop of tools designed to improve cloud interoperability and automate management of the hybrid cloud.

8)

mart personal assistants

Consumers have grown accustomed to using voice-activated assistants like Siri or Google Now on their mobile devices, but personal assistants are moving into the enterprise. With the launch of Windows 10, Microsoft put its Cortana assistant onto desktops and laptops, and other companies are likely to follow suit.

In the coming year, analysts expect these personal assistants to get much smarter, thanks to developments in machine learning and cognitive computing. Researchers at MIT, the University of Texas at Austin, and making strides with this technology, which could find its way into enterprise products this year.

9)

Wearables

IDC predicts that manufacturers will ship 111.1 million wearable devices in 2016, a 44.4% ,increase from the 80 million units shipped in 2015. In the past, the most common types of wearables have been smartwatches, like the Apple Watch, or fitness trackers like those from Fitbit. That could change this year as rumors suggest Google will launch an enterprise version of its Glass wearable this year.

For businesses, wearables represent a new opportunity for interacting with consumers, as well as new ways to provide information to employees. If the technology takes off, organizations may soon be at work creating a new generation of mobile apps designed for wearables.

10)

Blockchain

Of all the technologies on our list, Blockchain may be the least well known, but it is definitely poised to impact data centers in the coming year. Blockchain is the technology underlying Bitcoin, and some analysts suggest its potential enterprise uses could far exceed its helpfulness in tracking digital currency.

Blockchain is a distributed database that is used to record an ever-growing list of transactions. It doesn’t require any permission to access it, but it’s nearly impossible to tamper with the data it holds. In other words, everyone can see what is written there, but no one can erase or change it.

In the future, Blockchain could be used to track many different kinds of data, to speed and secure financial transactions, or even to prevent voter fraud.

10 WiFi Networking Blogs You Should Read

Check out these WLAN expert blogs for WiFi tips, opinions on hot industry trends, and more.

 1)

Given the central role that wireless networking plays in the enterprise today, WLAN expertise is more valuable than ever. Getting a wireless network up and running is no small feat, and all the maintenance and troubleshooting required to keep end users happy can be tricky. Users expect ubiquitous wireless access and often are quick to blame the wireless network for any connectivity issues, so WLAN pros have to be on their toes.

Of all the resources WiFi engineers have to turn to for help, perhaps one of the best is the advice they can get from their colleagues. And fortunately, WiFi experts like helping each other out by blogging about their experiences in the trenches. In these WiFi networking blogs, you’ll find a wealth of WiFi troubleshooting tips, WLAN architecture design guidance, thought-provoking opinions on hot WiFi topics, and career advice. You also can get the low-down on WLAN products and technologies without the vendor hype.

With so many WiFi networking blogs on the web today, so it can be hard to know where to start. We chose 15 blogs to get you started. Our selection includes some big names in the WLAN community as well as a few up-and-coming bloggers. This set favors blogs that are updated more frequently, and includes experts who share their knowledge at Interop.

Continue on to meet our selection of WiFi networking bloggers. Expect to be educated and enlightened by this bunch of experts passionate about WiFi.

2)

Our list must start of course with wirednot by Lee Badman, a prolific blogger, and a longtime contributor to Network Computing. Badman, who works as a WLAN architect at Syracuse University and runs a small consulting company, keeps a close eye on WLAN industry developments and doesn’t hesitate to express his opinion. His technical background includes 10 years in the US Air Force as an electronic warfare systems technical. Badman is extremely active in the WLAN community, teaching classes and presenting frequently at conferences, including Interop, where is a past Mobility Track chair.

3)

Samuel Clements, CCIE Wireless and CWNE, blogs about wireless technologies and design at SC-WiFi. He works for a large VAR and has years of WLAN design, implementation and troubleshooting under his belt. In March, he took on the controversial topic of Radio Resource Management (RRM).

4)

My80211.com, “a blog by a WiFi engineer for WiFi engineers,” is penned by George Stefanick, a wireless architect at Houston Methodist Hospital System. He has worked in wireless communications since 1997 and focuses on high-density indoor deployments in the healthcare industry. His blog includes posts on Cisco wireless topics, WiFi tools, and WLAN design. Stefanick has become something of a regular speaker at Interop, where he has presented sessions on wireless network design and deploying an all-wireless office.

5)Check out these WLAN expert blogs for WiFi tips, opinions on hot industry trends, and more.

Andrew von Nagy is a well-known wireless networking expert and blogger who doesn’t shy away from controversial topics. Last year, he countered vendor claims that 802.11ac Wave 2 requires multi-gigabit backhaul. He’s also created a Wi-Fi capacity planner, which is available for free on his Revolution Wi-Fi blog. A CCIE-Wireless and CWNE, von Nagy also has served as technical editor for wireless LAN publications and speaks at industry conferences.

6)

Keith Parsons, managing director of Wireless LAN Professionals, is well-known for his broad technical experience and sharp wit. He is an author and editor of more than 30 technical publications, holds 65 technical certifications, and is a popular presenter at conferences, including Interop, where he has led sessions on wireless troubleshooting. On Wireless LAN Professionals, you’ll find a variety of guest blog posts from a wide range of WiFi experts.

7)

Rowell Dionicio, a network engineer at a large private university in the Bay Area and Network Computing contributor, writes comprehensive how-to articles and practical tips at Packet6. He also hosts a podcast about wireless networking, Clear To Send.

8)

Wireless Network and Applications Engineer Drew Lentz has a career that spans more than 20 years, half of it focused on wireless data deployments. At Wireless Nerd, he shares his passion for wireless networking in how-to articles, product reviews, and thoughts on industry trends. Lentz was chair of the Wireless and Mobility Track at Interop Las Vegas 2016. Inspired by brackets he saw a fellow WiFi engineer using at Interop, Lentz recently designed Wi-Fi Stand for mounting temporary WiFi access points.

9)

Fueled by caffeine, Joshua Williams, mobility architect and solutions strategist for an IT integration firm in Oklahoma City, shares his thoughts on WiFi and the world on his 802dotme blog. Williams’ career includes instructional technology roles in public schools. At Interop Las Vegas 2016, he was a panelist at a session that focused on WiFi issues in educational settings.

10)

Mitch Dickey, senior network engineer at the third largest public school system in Virginia, is a CCNA R&S and CCNA-Wireless. He recently posted an extensive blog about his experience at CiscoLive.