IBM Atlas

The social graph--an image of a person's connections to friends, family, and colleagues--has been in the news since Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg suggested earlier this year that this information could be invaluable to businesses looking to spread their products to a large audience. (See "Building onto Facebook's Platform.") Now IBM is exploring how different visualizations of the social graph could be useful within businesses, as a way of helping people work more efficiently and make better connections. Last week the company, which launched its social-software platform, Lotus Connections, earlier this year, released a tool called Atlas that uses the data in Connections to help users analyze their relationships with business contacts.

"As people start using social software and expanding their professional networks, there's actually a lot of value in the relationships that you can determine from statistical analysis of that data," says Chris Lamb, senior product manager for Connections.

Atlas and other Connections tools are based on IBM research into social computing that began in 2002, says product manager Suzanne Minassian. Aimed at helping workers organize around common goals, the research focused on adapting popular social tools such as bookmarking and blogging for business purposes, and integrating them with each other. The larger Connections suite allows workers to create profiles, blog, form communities around common interests, share bookmarks, and plan and track projects as a group. Each component of Connections is integrated with the others, so a user can move seamlessly between tools. IBM has been using features included in Connections for several years internally, and Minassian says that there are more than 400,000 profiles in the system.

Atlas's most powerful features rely on the data available through Connections, Lamb explains. It collects information about professional relationships based not only on job descriptions and information readily available through the corporate directory, but also through blog tags, bookmarks, and group membership. Atlas can be configured to look at e-mail and instant-message patterns, and to weigh different types of information more or less heavily. The result, Lamb says, is a set of tools that go beyond the simple networks that are clear from a corporation's structure.

Atlas's four features are Find, Reach, Net, and My Net. Find and Reach are both focused on finding experts in particular fields. Through Find, a user enters search terms and receives a list of experts, ranked based on information gleaned from social data, the level of the expert's activity in the community, and any connections he may have to trusted associates of the user. Reach then helps the user plot the shortest path to make the connection, suggesting people the user already knows who could put him in touch with an expert. Net and My Net are primarily meant to help people analyze their existing networks. Net shows patterns of relationships within particular topic areas at a company-wide level. For example, it might analyze data on people interested in social computing and produce a map of how those people connect with each other through blog readership and community involvement. My Net allows individuals to analyze their own networks, showing them who they are connected to and how frequently they stay in touch with those people.

Lamb says that executives might want to use Atlas's Net component to see, for example, how well two companies are integrating after a merger. Alternatively, he says, a salesperson might want to use My Net to make sure that she has good connections across the company to people familiar with the products it sells.

Rob Koplowitz, an analyst with Forrester Research, says that employing social-computing features within a business is as important as using these tools for informal relationships. One key feature of social software designed particularly for businesses is its ability to protect sensitive data, he says: "I'm able to generate relationships and content that might not be appropriate outside of my enterprise. In the consumer space, you assume that the information is public, and that's what you have access to." But with software designed for large corporations, he says companies can assume that access is more secure, and they have the option to make more information available. While Koplowitz thinks that companies will have to be careful about how they choose to configure Atlas and what information they choose to use to build the social graphs, he also says that Connections' integration of social tools is potentially very useful, and something that might eventually become part of more casual networking tools.

Atlas is now being sold through IBM Software Services for Lotus, in part because it requires configuration based on how a business wants to access and analyze information.

Intel introduced one of the smallest flash-memory-based hard drives on the market. The chip, also known as a solid-state hard drive, competes with similar chips from Samsung, which store data in gadgets such as Apple's iPod nano and iPhone. But the Intel chip comes with a standard electronics controller built in, which makes it easy and inexpensive to combine multiple chips into a single, higher-capacity hard drive.

The move highlights Intel's effort to establish itself as a leader in flash-memory chips and to make them a replacement for the bulky and conventional magnetic hard drives that store data on most of the world's computers. Smart phones and so-called ultramobile computers will require some kind of dense, durable storage system in order to bring the power of desktop computers to handheld devices.

A new wireless cardiac "patch" could allow doctors to continuously monitor patients' hearts and record electrocardiograms (EKGs) while they are on the go. Such highly portable continuous monitors could help doctors treat cardiac patients, and they may soon become crucial tools in diagnosing conditions in otherwise healthy people, say the device's developers.

Developed by researchers at the Interuniversity Micro-Electronic Centre (IMEC), an independent nanotechnology research institute in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, the flexible stick-on device is a variation of a Holter monitor, a portable EKG tool currently used by cardiologists to help assess and diagnose their patients. But Holter monitors require a number of electrodes to be stuck to the body and connected, via a tangle of wires, to a bulky recording device worn at the hip.

In contrast, the new device just sticks onto the patient's chest and wirelessly sends electrical signals detected from the heart to a credit-card-like receiver. These signals can be analyzed and used to sound an alarm as an early warning when dangerous heart rhythms, or arrhythmias, are detected, says Bert Gyselinckx, the director of IMEC's Wireless Autonomous Transducer Solutions program. For example, the device could be used to alert emergency services to problems suffered by elderly cardiac patients who live alone.

The new device consists of a flexible circuit board just 60 millimeters long and 20 millimeters wide that contains all the circuitry to detect and transmit the EKG signal up to 10 meters. The flexible board slips into a Lycra patch with three sticky points of contact that act as the EKG electrodes. Short wires within the pouch connect the contact points to the circuit board via snap-on sockets. "This makes it easier to attach the electrodes," says Gyselinckx.

The signal is sent to the receiver using an off-the-shelf wireless transmitter, which uses technology similar to Bluetooth but at much lower power, says Gyselinckx. The receiver is a smart card--a pocket-sized card with an integrated circuit embedded in it--that also incorporates a thin battery. "It looks and feels like a credit card," Gyselinckx says. The card can store the EKG data on an embedded two-gigabyte flash-memory device, or it can be hooked up to a handheld computer or cell phone to relay the data to a clinic.

There is a general trend to make heart-monitoring devices wireless because they are so much easier to use, says Mike Kingsley, director of exercise-physiology laboratories at Swansea University, in Wales.

Already, consumer products are available that monitor the heart and send the signal wirelessly to a watch. But these products only detect heart rate, in terms of beats per minute, says Kingsley. "An EKG gives you a lot more information about the way the electrical current is traveling through the heart," he says. A cardiologist can use this data to determine the morphology and behavior of the heart, both of which are vital to making a diagnosis.

Many hospitals have started installing wireless EKG patient-tracking systems, says Gyselinckx, as a way of keeping tabs on their patients and locating them if they get into trouble. But such systems amount to little more than Holter monitors hooked up to a central hospital tracking system that monitors the patients' whereabouts and EKGs.

The IMEC device does have limitations: in its current form, it can't record as much of the heart's electrical activity as a clinical EKG can. "It doesn't give you an overall picture of the heart--only a snapshot," Kingsley says.

Even so, it is still very useful because it allows all arrhythmic events to be detected, says Hans Stromeyer, chief medical officer of Monebo, in Austin, TX, which has developed a wireless EKG device that is worn like a belt. "And continuous monitoring can pick up events that the patient will not be aware of," he says. This has huge potential in preventative medicine because it can help doctors detect and treat serious heart conditions before they progress and cause irreparable damage.

Indeed, the IMEC team is developing the heart patch as part of a larger project, called Human++, aimed at designing telemedicine technologies for preventative health. Continuously monitoring the vital signs of otherwise healthy people in the general population could make it possible for doctors to preempt a variety of serious illnesses through early detection, Gyselinckx says.

Wireless home-based monitoring and diagnosis is already beginning to happen, says Stromeyer. It has demonstrated its usefulness in long-term recovery and is much cheaper than hospital rehabilitation.

There is also a lot of interest in using portable heart monitors to assist in drug trials. This is because one section of the EKG trace, known as the QT segment, has been shown to be a good indicator of changes in heart activity caused by drug toxicity, says Stromeyer. Highly portable monitors such as the IMEC device could be particularly useful in such an application.

But for now the IMEC team is working to enable the device to record as much data as a clinical EKG can. The team is also working to make the patch more pliable with a combination of flexible organic electronics and thin-film silicon electronics, with the aim of licensing the technology.

Increasingly, people connect to the Internet through mobile phones, video-game consoles, or televisions. The problem is that a lot of Internet content isn't available for all of these devices, and many websites crash when loaded on a mobile device. Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and father of the Internet, worries that this is effectively cutting some people off from the information that is freely shared on the Internet. Speaking at the Mobile Internet World conference in Boston earlier this week, Berners-Lee said that the W3C is working on defining a set of standards that developers can use to build websites that work with mobile devices, as well as with desktop computers, so that the mobile Web doesn't break apart from the World Wide Web. This week, the W3C also launched a new tool that developers can use to test their websites for compatibility with mobile devices.

The overarching goal of the initiative, according to Berners-Lee, is to keep content available regardless of the devices available to a person. "I like being able to choose my hardware separately from choosing my software, and separately from choosing my content," Berners-Lee said at the conference. There needs to be just one Web, he explained, and it needs to work on phones.

Many websites are far from Berners-Lee's vision. Some developers don't have websites that work with mobile devices and don't make mobile versions of their sites, seeing this as an added technical headache. For developers who do want their websites to be available everywhere, a common practice is to build special versions of sites for mobile devices, with pared-down features and, sometimes, content.

In some parts of the world, the mobile phone is the primary way that people access the Internet, and content should be available to those people as much as it is to people using a desktop computer. The system doesn't work well for those in wealthier nations, either. Users with devices such as the iPhone want to be able to access sites from their mobile device at the full capability that the iPhone has, says Matt Womer, the W3C's mobile-Web-initiative lead for North America. Users don't want to see a pared-down site.

On the other hand, Womer notes that mobile-device users shouldn't be forced to download large images or be redirected to several different pages, since users pay by the kilobyte.

Mobile sites can also be hard to find, because there are no standards for creating domain names. Some sites use the prefix "mobile" instead of "www," for example, while other sites use the prefix "wap." Womer says that the result can be confusing for users, who shouldn't have to know to look for special prefixes. "I think in the end, what's best for the user is one URL that works everywhere," he says.

The W3C's current suggestion for people writing Web pages, Womer says, is to separate information about how to present content from the content itself. The content can be described through hypertext markup language (HTML), the language traditionally used to describe Web pages, while the presentation can be handled with separate style sheets. Womer says that the W3C is collecting information about devices so that developers can tailor the presentation to the capabilities of the hardware.

The W3C's new tool, called the mobileOK checker, will look over code to see how well it follows the W3C's guidelines. Womer says that the tool won't be able to assess everything--some things, such as determining the readability of text against a background color, require human judgment--but it will consider a great deal of variables and provide specific instructions for what needs to be fixed.

"The importance of standards cannot be overestimated," says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software, who is working with the W3C's mobile-Web initiative. In addition to making browsers for desktop computers and mobile devices, Opera makes browsers for the Nintendo Wii and other game systems. "To deal with the complexity that is out there, there can only be one Web," von Tetzchner says.

The new Amazon Kindle e-reader, unveiled yesterday, is the latest in a line of ever-improving black-and-white e-paper displays that don't use much power and are bright even in daylight; they more closely reproduce conventional paper and ink than do backlit displays. But bigger technology leaps are imminent. E-paper pioneer E Ink--the company whose technology underpins the Amazon gadget's display--is prototyping versions of the electronic ink that are bright enough to support filters for vivid color displays, and that have a fast-enough refresh rate to render video.

Add it all up, and it represents an emerging trifecta of color, video, and flexibility set to transform a display technology once seen as suited only for rigid black-and-white e-readers like the Kindle and the Sony Reader, and other niche applications like train-station schedule displays that don't need to change quickly. "This latest thing they've done with the video is a key milestone in the history of e-paper technology development," says Gregory Raupp, director of the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University. "Until this point, you have been limited to static image applications."

E Ink's basic technology uses a layer of microcapsules filled with flecks of submicrometer black and white pigment chips in a clear liquid. The white chips can be positively charged, the black chips negatively charged. Above this layer is a transparent electrode; at the base is another electrode. A positive charge on the bottom electrode pushes the white chips to the surface, making the screen white. A negative charge pushes the black chips up, rendering words and images.

But the basic technology only produces a black-and-white image. So, E Ink has been refining the ingredients, the electronics, and the mechanics of that process. For example, in recent months the company has developed ultrabright inks that reflect 47 percent of ambient light--a significant improvement over the 35 to 40 percent in existing E Ink black-and-white displays. Higher reflectivity versions should go into commercial products, such as the Sony Reader, in about two years.

This higher brightness makes color displays possible. E Ink uses transparent red, green, or blue filters affixed above the picture elements. In essence, software controls groups of microcapsules sitting below filters of particular hues, and it only turns the microcapsules white when those hues are sought. The E Ink filters are custom-made by a partner, Toppan Printing of Tokyo, to work well with the specific shades, brightness, and reflectivity of the E Ink technology. The first color experimentation began several years ago, but it has been steadily improving in brightness and contrast, says Michael McCreary, E Ink's vice president of research and advanced development. He offered no estimate for a commercialization date.

In another set of advances, tweaks to the E Ink particles and their polymer coatings, and to the chemistry of solution inside the microcapsules, have helped improve the speed at which the particles can move. McCreary says that for years, conventional wisdom held that E Ink technology could never be made video ready, because particles had to be moved through a liquid. But E Ink has done it, thanks to polymer particle coatings and "special stuff in the clear liquid," McCreary says in the company's Cambridge, MA, headquarters, two prototypes show the payoff. One is an e-reader display in bright, vivid color. Touch a button, and an image of a bunch of flowers appears; bring the display outside, and it shines brighter because it is reflecting ambient light. (As with black-and-white e-paper, until a user changes that image, the unit consumes virtually no power.) The other prototype, a six-inch display hooked up to a computer, showed a video clip from the animated movie Cars. It was a bit grainy but was switching frames 30 times per second. Two years ago, the switching time in products with E Ink technology was just one frame per second.

While the video version is still several years from market, "this was a landmark research advance in the history of e-paper," says Russ Wilcox, E Ink's CEO. Invoking the long-held dream for e-paper--that it can be an electronic replacement for real newsprint--he added, "You can imagine a USA Today weather chart where clouds are actually moving."

E Ink is working with several leading display makers to develop flexible transistors that will create E Ink and other color displays that are bendable and even rollable. LG Philips recently announced the world's first 14.1-inch flexible color e-paper display using E Ink technology. The color version uses a substrate that arranges thin-film transistors on metal foil rather than on glass. And last month, Samsung used E Ink technology to set a new world record in terms of the resolution of a large flexible color display. (Samsung's 14.3-inch screen has a 1,500-by-2,120-pixel resolution.) No commercialization date has been announced for these technologies.

Other companies are also making advances in e-paper. One of them, San Diego's Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, has developed a MEMS-based version that can produce video-ready refresh rates and will appear in monochrome and bicolor displays in the next year or so. (See "E-Paper Displays Video.") But E Ink is generally acknowledged to have the best technology in terms of simulating the look of paper, says Raupp, whose research lab has partnerships with 16 display makers, including both E Ink and Qualcomm. "Put the two side by side--which one looks like paper? There would be no contest," Raupp says of E Ink and Qualcomm. The move into video and color "expands the application space" and makes E Ink a leading candidate to become a fixture in flexible displays, he adds.