Fwd: TokBox News: February 2013

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "TokBox Inc." <marketing@tokbox.com>
Date: Feb 27, 2013 8:16 AM
Subject: TokBox News: February 2013
To: <John.sokol@gmail.com>

OpenTok on WebRTC now supported in Firefox Now you can build video applications powered by OpenTok on WebRTC that work across iOS, Chrome 25+ and Firefox 21+. Learn More App of the Week: LiveNinja Learn how LiveNinja uses the OpenTok API to facilitate live video consultations with experts in the topics you care about. Register for Launch Hackathon Join us at the Launch Hackathon running March 2-4 in San Francisco. Register now! Happy video chatting,  The TokBox Team     115 Stillman Ave, San Francisco, CA 94107                                                                                                                     SF, NYC, SYDNEY To unsubscribe please click here

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Fwd: Optrix XD5 - Toughest iPhone 5 action video camera system Now Available

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Pedro Chen" <pedrochen@maxborgesagency.com>
Date: Feb 27, 2013 7:10 AM
Subject: Optrix XD5 - Toughest iPhone 5 action video camera system Now Available
To: <john.sokol@gmail.com>

New Optrix XD5 Transforms your iPhone 5 into an Incredibly Tough Action Video Camera System Now available, the XD5 fits the iPhone 5 like a glove for unparalleled protection against water and shocks Marin, CA – February 27, 2013 – Optrix, designer of ultra-rugged action video and sports specialty housings for the iPhone, announces the availability of Optrix XD5, the first ultra-rugged, camera optimizing system for iPhone 5 that enables users to record wide-angle HD videos under the most punishing conditions. Optrix XD5 system incorporates features from its award-winning XD4 product, including the 175 degree lens that enhances the iPhone 5's 1080p HD optics and the clear protective membrane that enables users to continue using their iPhone while in the housing.  It enhances the previous design with a thinner, lighter and stronger unibody, and a new rail mounting system for quick on-off for helmets, chest mounts, water sport mounts, handle mounts, and more. "Optrix is proud to unveil the world's toughest case that disaster proofs the iPhone 5," said John Willenborg, founder of Optrix.  "The XD5 is the only iPhone 5 camera system built for sports enthusiasts by sports enthusiasts." Designed using the same concept as a Formula 1 race car, the XD5 utilizes a "monocoque" protective unibody system that encapsulates the iPhone 5, shielding it from pressure and making it drop safe from up to 40ft.  In addition, the XD5's enhanced design utilizes a unique waterproofing seal that guarantees waterproof ability up to a depth of 15ft. "Many action sports camera systems exist in the market, but only the XD5 takes into account real life video capturing needs," added Willenborg.  "The ability to easily adjust shooting angles, access to all controls and its compatibility with multiple mounting options solidifies the XD5 as the ideal action camera system for the iPhone 5." The XD5 also incorporates a second door to access charging connectors, headphone jack and microphone, making it the ideal option as an everyday rugged case.  For iPhone 5 users wishing to enhance their videos, Optrix provides a suite of cutting-edge video recording and editing software and apps, including VideoPro, which adds full telemetry data such as speed, G-force, lap time and track map onto the video. Optrix XD5 action video making system can be found at select Apple, Best Buy and Target stores; and online at Apple.com, Bestbuy.com and www.optrix.com.  For additional information, visit our website or contact PR representative Pedro Chen at 305-374-4404 x139, PedroChen@maxborgesagency.com. About Optrix Optrix is a designer of ultra rugged action video and sports specialty housings for the iPhone. Obsessive attention to detail and purpose allow Optrix housings to offer unsurpassed protection while delivering stunning results. Redefining what you thought possible with an iPhone. ### Media Contact Pedro Chen Sr. Account Manager Max Borges Agency (305) 374-4404 x139 PedroChen@maxborgesagency.com

 

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Fwd: Nu Horizons Electronics Portal - Your Gateway to Today's Leading Technology Products

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nu Horizons Electronics <newsletter@nuhorizons.com>
Date: Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 7:39 AM
Subject: Nu Horizons Electronics Portal - Your Gateway to Today's Leading Technology Products
To: john

Please click here if you are unable to view this e-mail or if it is improperly formatted.

Let's Stay Connected! Follow us on twitter! Become a Fan! Linkedin You Tube

Introducing Allegro's Smallest Integrated Current Sensor IC The Allegro ACS711 consists of a linear Hall sensor circuit with a copper conduction path located near the surface of the die. Applied current flowing through this copper conduction path generates a magnetic field which is sensed by the integrated Hall IC and converted into a proportional voltage. [more information] Atmel SAM4L ARM-based Cortex-M4 MCUs Redefine the Power Benchmark The Atmel® SAM4L family sets new low-power and efficiency standards for ARM®-based Cortex®-M4 microcontrollers (MCUs). Used in hundreds of millions of Atmel AVR® MCUs in the market today, the SAM4L family features ultra-low Atmel picoPower® technology and consumes just one-third the power of current solutions. [more information] Atmel CryptoAuthentication™ ATSHA204 The Atmel ATSHA204 is the first CryptoAuthentication product to integrate the SHA-256 hash algorithm with a 4.5Kb EEPROM, providing robust and cost-effective hardware authentication and secure key/data storage. Features such as small outline plastic packages and a single-wire interface make the ATSHA204 ideal for handheld electronic systems or any space-constrained embedded system. [more information] Intelligent Digital Signage Applications Digital Signage is more prevalent and diversified than ever. Digital signage could be seen in supermarkets, restaurants, transportation centers, retail stores, kiosk and more. The interactive kiosk introduces another business - E-Board for meeting in corporate and education in schools. Axiomtek's Digital Signage solution is an excellent platform to manage and broadcast visual and audio content effectively to provide visitors with information, entertainment and a variety of other content. [more information] LTC4370 - Two-Supply Diode-ORCurrent Balancing Controller The LTC®4370 is a two-supply current sharing controller which incorporates MOSFET ideal diodes. The diodes block reverse and shoot-through currents during start-up and fault conditions. Their forward voltage is adjusted to share the load currents between supplies. Unlike other sharing methods, neither a share bus nor trim pins on the supply are required. [more information] LTC3626 - 20V, 2.5A Synchronous Monolithic Step-Down Regulator with Current and Temperature Monitoring The LTC®3626 is a high effi ciency, monolithic synchronous buck regulator using a phase-lockable controlled on-time, current mode architecture capable of supplying up to 2.5A of output current. The operating supply voltage range is 3.6V to 20V, making it suitable for a wide range of power supply applications. [more information] P400m Enterprise SATA SSD Our P400m drive provides enterprise-level performance and reliability with superior data protection that is unmatched by competing products. Built from the ground up using our extended performance and enhanced reliability technology (XPERT) and 25nm MLC NAND, the P400m SSD provides an optimal balance of endurance and speed. [more information] Micron M500 SSD Micron's next-generation M500 solid state drive (SSD) is designed to meet the increasingly demanding needs of the mobile computing market. The M500 delivers strong performance, greatly reduces power consumption, and provides exceptional data protection. It is offered in three thin, ultra-compact form factors in severaldifferent capacities. [more information] Ultra small, high efficiency dual-output AC-DC power supply N2Power leads the power density race with its high efficiency XL330-54 CS AC-DC dual-output power supply. Our advanced technology yields a very small footprint, reduces wasted power, and offers the highest power density in its class. This efficient design means reduced energy costs, a greater return on your investment, greater reliability and longer product life. [more information] New Enhanced Brightness 7" Display From the Leader in Low-power, Sunlight Readable LCDs Pixel Qi's new enhanced brightness 7" display, the PQ070WS02, addresses the widespread need for outdoor-capable, mobile products. Pixel Qi's patented technology combines a highly efficient transmissive optical structure with unique reflective technology to create a display that outperforms conventional sunlight readable displays in power and readability. [more information] High Power TVS for Ethernet Interfaces RailClamp® TVS diodes are speci? cally designed to protect sensitive components which are connected to high-speed data and transmission lines from overvoltage caused by ESD (electrostatic discharge), CDE (cable discharge events), and EFT (electrical fast transients). [more information] 3-Axis Digital Gyroscopes for Enhanced Motion-Control Realism and Image Stabilization ST's latest gyroscopes feature excellent accuracy as a result of their unique and patented mechanical structure based on a single driving mass. The L3GD20 and L3G4IS boast superior output stability over time and temperature, removing the need for any further calibration on the customer's side. [more information] STM32 F3 Series Mixed-Signal MCUs The STM32 F3 series of microcontrollers combines a 32-bit ARM® Cortex™-M4 core with DSP and FPU instructions running at 72 MHz with advanced analog peripherals for more flexibility at a competitive cost. [more information] Advanced Memory Solutions Winbond DRAM product portfolio consists of high performance Mobile DRAM and Specialty DRAM. These products are widely used by leaders in the consumer, communication, computer peripheral and automotive markets. Besides discrete parts, Winbond also offers Known-Good-Die (KGD) in wafer format to SiP and MCM customers. [more information]

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Recent purchase by Yahoo is a video conference broadcast-style cloud App

FROM JM:

It is pitched as "Radio call-in shows for the digital age."

This was noted as one of the first four purchases that Yahoo! has made.
Mentioned fourth paragraph down.
http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/blog/morning-edition/2013/02/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-buys-fourth.html


First Look: OnTheAir's Video Call-In Show Platform Makes Hangouts and
Ustream Seem Static
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/27/ontheair/

Here's how it works. A host sets up an OnTheAir show and selects a
start time. They receive a unique URL that leads to a landing page
with a countdown to their show. OnTheAir lets them schedule tweets for
an hour and a few minutes before the show starts to promote
themselves. When the show starts, the host begins live video streaming
 to the audience.

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New Worldwide Movement To Destroy As Many Security Cameras As Possible!

http://youtu.be/r-NVjn-gRMg

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New Imaging Device That Is Flexible, Flat, and Transparent

http://gizmodo.com/5986221/radical-new-image-sensor-turns-your-entire-display-into-a-digital-camera

http://www.osa.org/en-us/about_osa/newsroom/newsreleases/2013/new_imaging_device_that_is_flexible,_flat,_and_tra/

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Canons mixed reality headset

http://m.extremetech.com/extremetech/#!/entry/canons-mixed-reality-headset-aims-to-change-the-way-millionaires,51264d4b94f4be71693936d0/1

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1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS. World's highest resolution video surveillance platform by DARPA

http://youtu.be/QGxNyaXfJsA

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Google Is Working On A UDP Replacement Called QUIC

FROM: http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/22/looks-like-google-is-working-on-a-udp-replacement-called-quic/

Francois Beaufort had a very good day yesterday. Not only did the leaked video of the Chromebook Pixel he discovered earlier this month turn out to be real, he also noticed that Google started work on a new web protocol in Chrome called QUIC. This protocol, it seems, aims to update the User Datagram Protocol(UDP), a core part of the Internet protocol suite that also includes TCP, for example.

UDP is often used for applications that need real-time connectivity (video conferencing, games etc.). It opens up a direct connection between two machines, which makes it perfect for real-time applications and streaming data where low latency is very important. In return, however, it lacks some of the reliability controls of other Internet protocols like the TCP protocol.

QUIC also focuses on data streams, it seems, but with the extra benefit of adding a built-in encryption layer and some basic reliability controls.

It looks like the project was merged into Chrome just a few days ago, but work on the project seems to have started late last year. And while some people noticed it at the time, the project has mostly gone unnoticed. Now, however, it looks like it is becoming a core part of the Chromium project – the open source initiative behind Google’s Chrome browser.

We contacted Google for a comment about this, but all we got from a spokesperson was the company’s usual non-denial that “the team is continuously testing new features. At this time, we have nothing new to announce.”

With SPDY, of course, Google is currently working on a similar initiative for HTTP, and it looks like a lot of the work on SPDY may flow into the HTTP 2.0 standard. Google probably hopes to achieve something similar for UDP with QUIC. As it aims to make the web faster, more reliable and more secure, the company is clearly not content with just making its applications faster, but it has a vested interest in also pushing forward some of the low-level technologies that make today’s Internet work in the first place.

SPDY

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

SPDY (pronounced speedy)[1] is an open networking protocol developed primarily at Google for transporting web content.[1] As of July 2012, it is an open de facto standard protocol, the group developing SPDY has stated publicly that it is working toward standardization (available as an Internet Draft).[2] The first draft of HTTP/2 is using SPDY as the working base for its specification draft and editing.[3] Open source reference implementations of SPDY are available in Chromium[4], Mozilla Firefox[5]and Opera[6]. SPDY is similar to HTTP, with particular goals to reduce web page load latency and improve web security. SPDY achieves reduced latency through compression, multiplexing, and prioritization.[1] The name "SPDY" is a trademark of Google, and has no acronym defined.[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC

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MIT researchers build ultrahigh-definition Quad HD (4K) TV chip

From:  http://www.kurzweilai.net/mit-researchers-build-ultrahigh-definition-quad-hd-4k-tv-chip

At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference this week, MIT researchers unveiled their own Quad HD video chip design.

Quad HD is also known as 4K and ultrahigh-definition (UHD). The new Quad HD video standard enables a fourfold increase in the resolution of TV screens.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, several manufacturers debuted new UHD models.

There is no UHD content yet, but the Japanese government plans to launch the world's first 4K TV broadcast in July 2014, from communications satellites, followed by satellite broadcasting and ground digital broadcasting, NBC News Gadget Box has reported.

Nonetheless, 4K TVs are now on sale by Japanese makers including Sony, Panasonic and Sharp. Other manufacturers include South Korea's LG Electronics.

HEVC

[+]

A key to efficient video compression is predicting future video frames on the basis of past ones. This diagram concerns "intra angular prediction."

(Credit: ISO)

UHD also requires a new video-coding standard, known as high-efficiency video coding, or HEVC (aka or H.265).

Although the MIT chip isn't intended for commercial release, its developers believe that the challenge of implementing HEVC algorithms in silicon helps illustrate design principles that could be broadly useful.

Moreover, "because now we have the chip with us, it is now possible for us to figure out ways in which different types of video data actually interact with hardware," says Mehul Tikekar, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and one of the paper's co-authors.

How HEVC works

Like older coding standards, the HEVC standard exploits the fact that in successive frames of video, most of the pixels stay the same. Rather than transmitting entire frames, it's usually enough for broadcasters to transmit just the moving pixels, saving a great deal of bandwidth. The first step in the encoding process is thus to calculate "motion vectors" — mathematical descriptions of the motion of objects in the frame.

On the receiving, end, however, that description will not yield a perfectly faithful image, as the orientation of a moving object and the way it's illuminated can change as it moves. So the next step is to add a little extra information to correct motion estimates that are based solely on the vectors. Finally, to save even more bandwidth, the motion vectors and the corrective information are run through a standard data-compression algorithm, and the results are sent to the receiver.

The new chip performs this process in reverse. It was designed by researchers in the lab of Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering and head of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The chip's first trick for increasing efficiency is to "pipeline" the decoding process: a chunk of data is decompressed and passed to a motion-compensation circuit, but as soon as the motion compensation begins, the decompression circuit takes in the next chunk of data. After motion compensation is complete, the data passes to a circuit that applies the corrective data and, finally, to a filtering circuit that smooths out whatever rough edges remain.

Fine-tuning

Pipelining is fairly standard in most video chips, but the MIT researchers developed a couple of other tricks to further improve efficiency. The application of the corrective data, for instance, is a single calculation known as matrix multiplication. A matrix is just a big grid of numbers; in matrix multiplication, numbers in the rows of one matrix are multiplied by numbers in the columns of another, and the results are added together to produce entries in a new matrix.

"We observed that the matrix has some patterns in it," Tikekar explains. In the new standard, a 32-by-32 matrix, representing a 32-by-32 block of pixels, is multiplied by another 32-by-32 matrix, containing corrective information. In principle, the corrective matrix could contain 1,024 different values. But the MIT researchers observed that, in practice, "there are only 32 unique numbers," Tikekar says. "So we can efficiently implement one of these [multiplications] and then use the same hardware to do the rest."

Similarly, Chiraag Juvekar, another graduate student in Chandrakasan's group, developed a more efficient way to store video data in memory. The "naive way," he explains, would be to store the values of each row of pixels at successive memory addresses. In that scheme, the values of pixels that are next to each other in a row would also be adjacent in memory, but the value of the pixels below them would be far away.

In video decoding, however, "it is highly likely that if you need the pixel on top, you also need the pixel right below it," Juvekar says. "So we optimize the data into small square blocks that are stored together. When you access something from memory, you not only get the pixels on the right and left, but you also get the pixels on the top and bottom in the same request."

Chandrakasan's group specializes in low-power devices, and in ongoing work, the researchers are trying to reduce the power consumption of the chip even further, to prolong the battery life of quad-HD cell phones or tablet computers.

One design modification they plan to investigate, Tikekar says, is the use of several smaller decoding pipelines that work in parallel. Reducing the computational demands on each group of circuits would also reduce the chip's operating voltage.

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