Electronix Express Newsletter

STORIES

1. One New Infected Webpage Found Every Five Seconds
2. A Big Push For The Small Screen
3. Innovation: The View From The Top
4. A Cell Phone Made of ...Tapioca?
5. Public Wi-Fi: Be Very Paranoid
6. A Touch of Genius

1. One New Infected Webpage Found Every Five Seconds

Compounding the increase in infected websites is the use of web-hosting providers by small businesses and individuals where a hacker can break in and compromise all the sites that it hosts instead of just one. From January to the end of March 2008, Sophos identified an average of more than 15,000 newly infected web pages each day. Other findings noted that the United States now hosts more web-based malware than any other country at 42 per cent up from 25 per cent in all of 2007. China came in second at 30 per cent and Canada was 10th on the list hosting only 0.7 per cent of infected websites.

In contrast, Sophos found that just one in every 2500 e-mails was now infected, compared to one in every 909 in 2007.

How can companies protect their networks? Wang suggests that companies should invest in web security that scans a webpage for malware before granting access. As well, companies need to ensure that their web servers are protected with the latest security patches against hack attacks.

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2. A Big Push For The Small Screen

San Diego-based Qualcomm with its $5.7 billion-a-year collection of patents and licenses plans to offer the cell-phone industry's first broadcast TV service. Called MediaFLO, it is expected to include 20 channels of near-TV-quality programs, 10 music channels, and the cell-phone equivalent of a TiVo (TIVO ) in your palm, with the ability to store programming in the memory of your phone to be played back later.

The payoff could be huge. Within four years, as many as 26 million cell-phone users could be spending $3 billion a year on video subscription services, figures technology researcher IDC. With a potential market that vast, it's no surprise Qualcomm is facing growing competition. It's already in a race with phone services that offer their own versions of video on the go. What's more, a consortium that includes phonemaker Nokia (NOK ), chip giant Intel (INTC ), Microsoft (MSFT ), and Texas Instruments (TXN ) plans to offer a rival service, Modeo, later this year based on technology being tested in several European markets.

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3. Innovation: The View From The Top

CEOs and business leaders around the world see increased competitiveness, and they see challenges in their business models going forward. They see that all roads lead to innovation. With the Internet and the proliferation of semiconductors, you'll end up with trillions of things connected -- not just individuals but cars, roads, homes, appliances, health-care data, and pacemakers. All of these things are available today that weren't available in the past.

CEOs realize that you need to do innovative products. You need to have your products differentiated. But with product innovation, it's a certainty that your competition is shortly going to copy what you've done. There was just an announcement that Samsung has a pretty cool way to listen to music as an alternative to the iPod. There will always be the next hot car and the next great high-definition television. But with all of those things, the competition's going to react. It might take them a year or two, but it's inevitable.

In today's environment, with all the global opportunities that exist and these new technologies, the best way to make them unique for your own enterprise is to foster collaboration. In addition, you need to collaborate between companies and governments and educational institutions. For example, the breakthrough on the Cell processor, which is based on our Power architecture, would not have happened if these electronic giants, Sony (SNE ), Toshiba (TOSBF ), Microsoft (MSFT ), and Nintendo (NTDOY ), had not collaborated. These collaborations have lead to incredible breakthroughs such as high-definition television, consumer electronics in the home, and medical imaging.

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4. A Cell Phone Made of ...Tapioca?

Viruses, silkworms, salmon sperm, and potatoes are among the multitude of living organisms that scientists at companies and universities are trying to harness to make better parts for computers, MP3 players, cell phones, and other devices. In addition to Nokia, companies pursuing this path include IBM (IBM), Motorola (MOT), Fujitsu, Honeywell (HON), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), and dozens of startups.

"Morph is a dream based on real technology," says Mark Welland, head of Nanoscale Science Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, which is collaborating with Nokia on insulin research. In the past year, Nokia and University of Cambridge scientists have been melding proteins found in insulin into a material with the strength of spider's silk, which is as strong as steel and tougher than just about any other naturally occuring biological substance.

The bioscientists are building on half a century of research that had, until recently, focused chiefly on medicine. Biomaterials-materials that use part of a living structure-have long been used in artificial joints, dental implants and heart valves. Now, the same technology is being used to make devices. Biomaterials are already being pressed into service, thanks in no small measure to the rising price of fossil fuels. While so-called "bioplastics" also contain petroleum-based chemicals, starch-based resins derived from crops such as potatoes, corn, tapioca, and wheat can account for half of the final product's makeup.

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5. Public Wi-Fi: Be Very Paranoid

A survey of 14 airports in the U.S. and three in Asia by AirTight Networks, a company that sells gear to make wireless connections more secure, found that 57% of the networks were wide open. These included both networks for public and private systems used for airport functions such as baggage handling and ticketing. An additional 28% of the networks were protected by WEP, while only 15% used a stronger form of security, called Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA).

Here are a few simple steps that will make you safer when accessing public connections.

First, make sure your employer provides its business travelers with virtual private network (VPN) connections. VPN provides end-to-end encryption of all traffic; anyone who intercepts data will see nothing more useful than the network address of the VPN gateway. Second, if you don't have a VPN option, you'll have to seek out secure Web sites. You can tell a secure site by an address that begins "https:". Third, if you are visiting an insecure site, and that includes such popular mail services as Hotmail, Gmail (GOOG), and Yahoo! (YHOO), don't send or even read messages unless you are prepared to share them with the world. Finally, don't use a password for a Web mail account that you also use for online banking or anything else where privacy matters.

It is obvious the dangers are real, and simply understanding them will go a long way toward keeping you safe.

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6. A Touch of Genius

However, advanced touch interfaces, which let you move and resize screen objects with your fingers, are poised to become fixtures in homes and workplaces.

Basic touchscreens have been around since the days of the Apple Newton. They hit the mainstream with the introduction of the Palm and the Pocket PC. But simply replacing a mouse click with the tap of a stylus did not really change how we interacted with our electronic gadgets. The important new technology is "multi-touch," which can detect the simultaneous movement of two or more fingers on a display. This enables a range of more natural gestures, such as the two-finger stretch-and-pinch that gave the iPhone its initial wow.

Multi-touch is creeping into other products as well. The latest versions of Apple's MacBook Pro and Air notebooks support multi-touch gestures on an oversize touchpad. This is an improvement over the traditional touchpad; you can, for example, use pinch-and-stretch to resize windows, as on the iPhone. There have been persistent rumors of a touch-enabled Mac notebook or tablet, either of which could be a really exciting innovation. It has taken only six years for multi-touch displays to go from science-fiction special effects in the movie Minority Report to at least limited reality. It's up to the software companies to take us the rest of the way.

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