Fusion Render Cloud

Catching up with post - CES comments, my attention has been captured recently by the press release from AMD, referring to the peta-flop supercomputer project powered by 1000 (one thousand) ATI Radeon GPUs and running... surprise surprise... the OTOY software. OTOY has been mentioned here a few times. I was the lucky one to attend two sessions by Jules Urbach (2007 and 2008) and they were just blowing the audience away... When Jules was presenting his real time rendering software, there was complete silence in the room with an occasional sound of people picking their jaws from the floor... Jules has been promising us the render cloud for some time. Algorithms constructing the virtual reality that is undistinguishabe from real reality running on massive server farms and client computers running just a tiny layer of client software to display the rendered VR.

There is a short interview with Jules on the AMD site (http://www.amd.com/us/fusion/Pages/otoy.aspx). In the background you may notice some scenes from virtual worlds synthetized by Jules. This stuff is at least one year old, so you may only try to imagine where they are now... And where they will be in six months, when the Fusion Cloud is ready. To get some more glimpse of where all this is heading, I recommend watching the CES session by Dirm Meyer, the CEO of AMD (http://www.mogulus.com/amdunprocessed). Even more interesting are the envisioned scenarios of fused gaming and cinematics that will be coming soon. Moving the rendering process to the cloud means the output becomes virtually platform independent, so synthetized VR can be presented on anything, starting from cell phones and ending on large cinema displays, likely with 3D. High end gaming without the need to install and run locally any significan software. That will redefine gaming and virtual worlds. Is this the last frontier to disappear in the cloud?

Qualcomm Android Netbook

Netbooks are just great. Simple, inexpensive, portable computers with a primary function to access the Internet. It would not be a far stretch to bring the 80/20 Pareto rule here, saying they deliver in terms of personal computing 80% of what we expect from a personal computer. Or may be even for 80% PC users they deliver all the need? Netbooks are great, but really both the hardware and the software is not ready for netbooks yet. I mean client side hardware and software. We are getting close. Intel with the Atom chip is aiming at perfect netbook design. Perfect meaning enough processing power to render Web pages quickly and very little battery drain to keep the machine running for hours (if not days) on a single charge. But what we really still lack is a client operating system designed from scratch to be a Web - client operating system.

At 2009 CES this month Qualcomm demonstrated Google's Android OS on the Snapdragon platform. Android had initially been targeted at mobile phones, as had been the Qualcomm chips. Nowadays phones are more computers than phones and what still keeps us thinking of them as phones are their tiny screens and lack of large qwerty keyboards. But as I mentioned a few weeks before - the Snapdragon platform is capable of delivering much more than just a phone. With dual core, 1.5GHz processor, WSXGA and cellular/bluetooth/WiFi conenctivity, the Snapdragon is more than enough to power a netbook. Couple that with power efficiency being the primary and long time target set by Qualcomm engineers and suddenly we may be getting the best netbook hardware possible. And suddenly we realize the best netbook hardware platform is the native platform to run probably the most promising netbook OS - the Android. Android may not be the most capable netbook OS at the moment, but being designed from ground up to be a network OS and with Google behind it I am sure it will soon prove its primacy.

The open question now is which company will present the first Snapdragon / Android netbook... It will happen in 2009. But who will be behind it? HP? Lenovo? Toshiba? HTC? Place your bets...

Slacker Mobile

Last week Slacker announced the Slacker Mobile application for Blackberry smartphones. I downloaded it almost immediately to find out it is one of the must have applications for the device. Slacker is a music service, similar in nature to the Pandora, mentioned here a number of times. Both stream personalized music and both have been available for the iPhone for some time. But the difference Slacker gives is station caching. So you can create your personalized radio stations and pre - cache some or all of them (in my case the Slacker Mobile says it can cache 53 stations on the 16GB micro SD card, half occupied by songs I transferred there from iTunes). 53 stations is a lot.

The idea of caching is fantastic for mobile personalized digital radios. Cellular data connectivity is still too slow (in many places where 3G coverage does not exist), too expensive (when roaming) or non existent in places you would like to listen to music (like a plane). Of course both Pandora and Slacker know your music preferences, so it is conceptually pretty straightforward to push a pack of songs to a device you will listen to while being off-line. I have no idea why Pandora has not prepared such functionality, but on the other hand the move by Slacker is brilliant, as it suddenly opens an entire new market for them: portable connected music players.

Technically the application has professional looks and behaves as expected with two exceptions I would like to focus on:

• Station caching can be done only via USB connection by means of running an application on the host PC. This approach is flawed. Many Blackberries have Wi-Fi (my Bold has one) that idles most of the day and, especially, most of the night when the device sits silently in the dock charging batteries and displaying a clock. That idle time could have easily been used to refill the cache with new music automatically. This way every morning I would pick up the Blackberry full of new music to make my day. Instead in the evening I have to manually connect the Berry via USB to my laptop, launch the Slacker Sync application and wait until it finishes its job. Let us hope Slacker will makes idle Wi-Fi synchronization available soon.
• Some people report it works over Wi-Fi connection, some it does not. Seems the answer is simple, but the workaround requires some investments. Slacker, like Pandora, restricts the availability of the service to the United States only. And guess what that means... If your external IP address is in the US, it will work, if not in the US, it won't. Sure, I had this issue with Pandora too. But with Slacker Mobile it is even more painful. Imagine you are American and you subscribe to it to have music on the go. Then you cache some stations, board a plane to Europe, listening to the cached music on board. You land in London or Paris or Warsaw... You know streaming music over cellular network while roaming will cost you some $100 a song, so you never do that. But when you arrive at your hotel, you log on the Wi-Fi network just to see the Slacker service cannot serve you, as you are not in the US... Of course without moving an inch, you could turn on your 3G cellular data and keep on streaming for roughly $1000 an hour. This is because cellular data is likely connected to the Internet where your home network is, so the external IP (the one Slacker can check) will be in the US. My solution to this problem has been relatively easy to implement, as I already have a VPN tunnel configured on my DFL-800 router. So it was enough to add Slacker's IP to the group handled by the VPN connection, and suddenly all my LAN devices connecting to Slacker servers appeared as they were located in the US. That did the trick and the Blackberry started playing music.

Late Friday night I selected a few Slacker radio stations and configured them as "cached". Then left it connected to fill the cache and Saturday morning boarded a bus for a snowboarding trip to the mountains. On the bus I was able to fully enjoy and discover new music stored on the Blackberry as cached radio stations. Not paying too much attention whether I was within cellular coverage or not. Cached mode definitely has been the missing link between personalized Internet radio and mobile devices. Slacker is the champion. The breakthrough application for the Blackberry. It works fantastic at home and in the office too. Thanks to really unbelievable stereo speakers built in the Blackberry Bold, able to fill the room with rich sound. The charging pod has been perfect for the night bedside mode, converting the Blackberry into an alarm clock. The same pod is now perfect for using the Berry as a desktop radio. My last wish for today may be connecting the Blackberry alarm clock with the Slacker Mobile, so I can be waken up by the sound of my favorite music.