Virtua Team Talk

Predominantly, Virtua’s portfolio has previously been focused on the UK market… things have however started to change over the last few month! In particular, a business associate offered Virtua the opportunity to provide remote desktop designs for over 50 sites in Kenya – what an opportunity…

The scope of the project was to provide 2G & 3G iBwave propagation models, with complete cable overlays, system schematics, 3D models, bill of materials, and detailed link budgets for each of the sites. These would all be completed based on responses on a detailed brief and building plans provided by the customer. To add to the challenge, the fast pace at which the customer was rolling out each site meant that we were given a four day turn-around to complete and model each design.

We immediately set about developing our in-house iBwave templates and confirmed the ‘In-Country’ guidelines, just in time to receive the details of the first site – ‘Times Tower’ located in Nairobi, consisted of 36 floors, of which 7 were heavily populated (the rest of the building is office space). After modelling the building according to the scaled drawings, which included obstacles, walls and ceiling heights, the main DAS infrastructure could be designed. Using ZTE BTS & Node B specifications, we could model the powers correctly for this system and calculate the capacity requirements – a feat only possible because we sought such detailed information from the client in advance and planned accordingly.

There were of course a few other little challenges to consider: knowing that this site had external macro dominance issues on the upper floors, we had to ensure that we compensated for this by increasing the proposed antenna RSSI/CPICH values on these floors. We then compared them to the existing macro coverage in this building to ensure IBS scheme dominance. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are in business or IT then it won’t have escaped your notice that the new buzzword on the street is “Cloud Computing.” Interest in the cloud gained momentum throughout 2010 but many experts believe the hype will become reality this year – 2011!

At least for the organisations that have got their ‘cloud strategy’ sorted that is.

So what exactly is all the fuss about? At its most basic level cloud computing is very similar to the internet or to be more precise it is all about the delivery of computing power over the internet. Basically it is a mechanism that turns software into a “service” where customers don’t pay for a licence but only for how much of the service they actually use. In other words it makes computing power and storage space a “commodity” that can be purchased when needed and scaled up when necessary. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the world’s biggest networking opportunities for the web community took place this month in Austin Texas. Known as the “Southwest by Southwest Interactive Festival” or SXSW, it draws thousands of devotees every year which some cynics have dubbed a ‘geek paradise’.

In 2007, for example, a little known micro-blogging site called Twitter first launched here and there are plenty of people attending this year who want to emulate their success. Technology enthusiasts and a myriad of start-up companies have flocked to the event for one prime reason: to get their applications noticed and on to the mobile phones of trend-setting early adopters.

One mobile phone app called ‘Foursquare’ launched here in 2009 and picked up 5,000 users in four days. Today it is a sizeable social media player boasting some seven million users. Foursquare is a mobile application allowing users to “check-in” at different locations (from cafes to concerts to office buildings) and send that information to friends also using the app.

A spokesman from Foursqare describes the SXSW festival as “a great little laboratory for developers” adding, “The conference atmosphere has turned the event into a really good launch pad for start-ups because you have just the right amount of people that are in this early adopter community. And they’re all here not so much to go to the conference, but to go to the parties, hang out and socialise.”

And it is the ‘socialising’ element that is critical because a lot of the apps being developed are tools that allow people to go out and socialise as Facebook and Twitter can testify. So what are some of the hottest applications in town this year – and who are the people behind them?

“Scvngr” is a location-based mobile app similar to Foursquare that asks individuals checking in to a location to complete challenges created by businesses, institutions or fans of the application. When a Scvngr user checks in to a location, like a restaurant or a show the application presents a list of real-world challenges. This could be asking the individual to answer a question or riddle or to accept a dare to earn points and seek a reward. Discounts on products or free goods are then sometimes awarded to those that successfully accomplish the tasks.

Seth Priebatsch is the 22 year-old Scvngr chief executive who gave the keynote speech this year at SXSW in front of 2,500 attendees and some 3,500 others who watched from screens in 11 other rooms at the convention centre. He said that, “the reason we’re at South by Southwest, and the reason everyone else is here, is that it’s the most concentrated influx of exciting, fun, early adopter, tech people who are willing to try out anything at least once.”

Attendees at the conference believe that applications like Facebook have built a type of “social layer” around the world that works successfully. Now the prediction from SXSW is that the next 10 years will be devoted to creating a sort of “game layer” on top of the ‘Social Layer’ which could fundamentally change how people interact with their environments.

Similarly, the networking service “Hashable”, launched in October 2010, is attempting to do away with physical business cards and to work as a platform to facilitate business introductions, prompting people to leave their comfort zones and meet others. When a Hashable user meets a potential business connection, the e-mail address or Twitter username of that person is noted along with the location of the meeting, and that information is then sent to other friends and business colleagues using the application. The New York-based Hashable team are adding close to 1,000 users a day and have already signed up tens of thousands of business-minded individuals.

Another start-up “Instagram”, has developed a photo-sharing application for the iPhone which enables people to take photographs and immediately share them with friends through a Twitter-style feed. The San Francisco-based firm launched Instagram only five months ago and already claim an incredible 2.5m users.

Clearly the combination of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In etc together with emerging mobile phone apps is changing the communication landscape that we live in. Like it or loathe it the digital age is opening new modes of interactive communication and events like SXSW is the breeding ground for the new toys that are set to change our lives.

Over the last twenty years or so we have witnessed a phenomenal move forward in processor technology as silicon chips have grown ever more powerful but also smaller in size. Now engineers have developed a computer chip made of even tinier “nanowires” whose computing functions can be changed by applying small electric currents. These “programmable logic tiles” as they are called, are being heralded as the new building blocks of a new generation of ever-smaller computers.

The work on this technology, reported this month in ‘Nature’ magazine, may well outpace the shrinking of chips made with current manufacturing techniques which currently etch chips down from chunks of larger material. The new ‘nanoprocessors’ in contrast, can be built up from minuscule parts. Apparently a group of scientists and engineers at Harvard University has spent the last few years developing these ‘nanowires’ – each made of a core of the element germanium and sheathed in a silicon shell, thousands of times thinner than a human hair.

The technology has now developed to a level at which the wires are reliable enough to enter the world of computing.  Small circuits made of nanowires have been assembled before, but the latest work is unique in terms of the complexity of the resulting circuit. Also, the tiles can be “cascaded” to yield far more complex circuits.  The prototype design is based on a mesh of five hundred nanowires within a 1mm-square area also criss-crossed with normal metal wires. Together with a hair-thin stack of semiconductor materials laid on top, this mesh acts as a collection of transistors.  When an electric current is passed through the chip the normal wires can change the “threshold voltages” of each transistor making the whole ensemble completely programmable.

The team of scientists were able to demonstrate the changeable nature of their chip by re-programming it to do a number of mathematical and logical functions. This new development in processor technology represents a quantum leap forward in the complexity and function of circuits built from the bottom-up with many people predicting that ‘nanoprocessors’ will probably underpin the integrated systems of the future.

Interestingly, for some time the scientific community believed that the manufacturing methods used in making current chips were close to reaching a final limit in size – a threshold, below which the relentless shrinking of the chips seen in recent years would no longer be possible. The new nanowires, however, can in principle be made to occupy an area just one-eighth of what many thought the limit might be. There is a downside though. At the moment the new devices operate at significantly slower speeds than current chips so are not set to suddenly replace existing technology. In other words current designs will still keep the lead in number-crunching power though nanowire chips could eventually win out in terms of size and efficiency. Also, the nanowires suffer less leakage of electrical current than current transistors, so chips should be as much as 10 times more efficient.

In summary, because of their very small size and very low power requirements, these new nanoprocessor circuits are set to become the building-blocks that can control and enable an entirely new class of much smaller, lighter-weight electronic sensors and consumer electronics.

Working in the field of Telecoms and mobile phones we are obviously interested in these types of developments as our engineers need to keep abreast of developing technologies. It seems that once again, just when we thought processors could get no smaller a new leap forward in technology has re-written the rule book once again.