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Category: internet – Page 193

2016 was an indelible year for the telecom industry as it marked Mukesh Ambani led Jio’s foray into the sector which led to industry revenue getting caught in a downward spiral as old players’(Vodafone, Idea, Bharti Airtel) saw their profits and subscriber bases dwindling rapidly. The erstwhile flourished industry narrowed to a handful of players with 2019 opening up new challenging frontiers for the sector. It kept surfacing up in headlines owing to several significant developments, let’s dive into what kept India’s telecom sector abuzz throughout 2019.

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Elon Musk’s SpaceX would like to further expanded testing of its Starlink satellite internet by connecting the network to aircraft.

SpaceX would like to further expand testing of its Starlink satellite internet by connecting the network to aircraft, the company revealed in a recent request to the Federal Communications Commission.

Elon Musk’s space company on Nov. 6 asked the FCC if SpaceX could add Starlink user terminals “on a Gulfstream jet for a period of up to two years.”

“SpaceX seeks experimental authority for operation of one user terminal aboard each of up to five private jets while they are on the ground at an airport, and in flight over the United States (including its territories and territorial waters),” the company wrote in the FCC filing.

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Harun Šiljak, Trinity College Dublin

Google reported a remarkable breakthrough towards the end of 2019. The company claimed to have achieved something called quantum supremacy, using a new type of “quantum” computer to perform a benchmark test in 200 seconds. This was in stark contrast to the 10,000 years that would supposedly have been needed by a state-of-the-art conventional supercomputer to complete the same test.

Despite IBM’s claim that its supercomputer, with a little optimisation, could solve the task in a matter of days, Google’s announcement made it clear that we are entering a new era of incredible computational power.

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The Internet of Things can create tiny efficiencies that amount to a lot of money. Ben Fahy reports on how the IoT is changing the way businesses work.

Back in the 1830s, a depressed minister from Massachusetts named Lorenzo Langstroth got into beekeeping as therapy. His hobby eventually led him to develop the moveable comb hive, an innovation that allowed honey to be harvested without destroying the colony of bees. Since then, the art of beekeeping hasn’t changed much, but Bruce Trevarthen, the founder and CEO of the LayerX group, thinks some smart technology and a bit of connectivity might be the next big bee-based breakthrough.

ModuSense, a division of the Hamilton-based tech company/incubator, focuses on providing industrial Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, particularly for the primary sector. But when it kicked off around four years ago, Trevarthen felt that target was still too broad, so he decided to focus on improving the productivity of one sector in particular: apiculture.

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What we pay attention to shapes our opinions and views and our opinions and views shape our actions—well beyond clicks and taps on a screen.

But this is only the beginning. The internet and its enabling tools were the last great generation of technology. New generations are already making their presence known. In coming decades, technology will more compellingly seduce our attention, will escape its silicon-and-glass cage, will animate the inanimate, and even shape our biology.

The answer isn’t to do away with technology. There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle—nor should we want to. Besides negative outcomes, technology remains a powerful tool for good too. But as individuals, as a society, we need to become far more aware of how we interact with technology, to keep a closer eye on business incentives, and to consciously employ our tools in ways that firmly align with our goals.

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