New Google Glass Patent Is The Most Comprehensive Yet For Google’s Face-Based Wearable Computer

The USPTO has published a new patent application today from Google, which describes in comprehensive detail the complete system that would go on to become Google Glass, originally filed in August of 2011. The newly discovered patent describes not only individual components of Glass as we’ve seen previously, but the overall system, including display, frames, image projection and capture, wireless connections, sensors and more.

Some of the technical drawings included in the patent look a lot like the Google Glass we’ve come to know and love from its public appearance adorning sky divers and tech company founders who could be mistaken for jewel thieves. But others depict designs that resemble cheap paper 3D glasses, and hipster specs you might expect to see at Warby Parker. Google is clearly looking at multiple ways to bring Glass to market, aside from the sci-fi style visor it’s been showing around.

The text of the patent gets into extreme technical detail, offering a granular look at how Glass actually functions. It describes how the lens mounted display would operate in relation to the movement of a wearer’s head to keep the projected image consistent, and how objects in the real world can be overlaid with digital images to create augmented reality experiences. It goes into detail about various configurations of glasses arms and where the housing for the ‘brains’ of the device could be located relative to the rest of the glasses apparatus, and talks about building touch-sensitive surfaces into frame to accept user input.

Google also describes the limitations of current wearable tech interfaces in a section on background, which it uses to essentially give a reasoning for its creation of Google Glass. Existing systems were, in a word, deficient, according to the company’s filing:

Both head-mounted and heads-up displays can be connected to a video source that receives a video signal that the device can read and convert into the image that they present to the user. The video source can be received from a portable device such as a video player, a portable media player or computers [...] The functionality of these types of displays is, however, limited to passive actions wherein the display simply receives information from an external source and presents it to the wearer in limited forms. Accordingly, further advances in wearable devices including displays have been needed.

Some of the more interesting elements from the detailed description of the patent include alternative display methods. We’ve seen the use of lens-mounted displays in the current prototype, but the patent also describes alternatives including “a laser or LED source and scanning system [that] could be used to draw a raster display directly onto the retina of one or more of the user’s eyes.” That sounds a little terrifying but also potentially exciting.

Overall, the patent is primarily about locking down Google’s IP with respect to the Glass project in as technically detailed a manner as possible, but it’s an interesting read for gadget heads or engineers who want to learn more about the nitty-gritty background behind Google’s most daring consumer hardware project.

The Chromebook Pixel hides a Konami Code secret

Yesterday, Google revealed the rumored Chromebook Pixel to the world. Though the pseudo-netbook comes with the very hefty price tag of $1300, and you might not feel that what it packs under the hood is worth the price of a Surface Pro and iPad Mini combined, the device at least has something of a sense of humor. Like all good pieces of technology, it responds to the venerable Konami Code.

If you enter the code into the Pixel, up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right, then B followed by A, you’ll activate a little light show displayed on the Pixel’s LED strip, which is located on the cover. You won’t unlock more functionality that you might find justifies the $1300 price, but hey, it’s always great to see the Konami Code chugging along into 2013, appearing in mediums that don’t have anything to do with Konami, cheat codes, or even video games.

Wired captured the light show in GIF form, in which the Pixel’s LED strip jumps between various colors of light. We haven’t gotten our hands on a Pixel to try out the code just yet, but Wired reports that the code is simply entered using the keyboard’s directional keys. The report doesn’t say if the code takes priority, or if you can only enter it in specific apps.

If you look closely at the light show, it seems to actually play the Konami Code back at you. Clever stuff.

The two things everyone is mainly focusing on with regards to the Chromebook Pixel is the exorbitant price and that it hides a Konami Code easter egg. If that doesn’t sum up the public’s reaction to Google’s fancy new Chromebook, we don’t know what else does.

San Jose Airport Searches for Google Boost

Mineta San Jose International Airport has been losing commercial traffic and carrying a heavy debt burden, but a potential new revenue stream from jets owned by top Google Inc. executives and others could give the city-owned facility a lift.

On Friday, San Jose officials will publicly review a plan, backed by airport management, for the construction of a private facility that would house jets belonging to Google Chief Executive Larry Page, his co-founder, Sergey Brin, and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. The city council is expected to vote on the project in the spring.

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Cyberwar With China Is Here, Like It or Not

“Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults.” Benjamin Franklin wrote that.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” The Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu wrote that.

Both come to mind as the world is waking up a newly disclosed body of evidence from the Internet security firm Mandiant, publicly illustrating, in the starkest terms yet, how wide, deep and pervasive computer hacking attacks from China have become. As reported on the front page of today’s New York Times, numerous attacks on American, Canadian and British companies, dating as far back as 2006, have been carried out by a single unit of the China’s People’s Liberation Army. Mandiant, a firm based in Alexandria, Va., has identified it as Unit 61398, operating out of a single building just walking distance from the point in outer Shanghai where the Huangpu and Yangtze Rivers meet.

The company maintains that the unit has compromised the networks of at least 141 companies or organizations, and probably more than that, spending an average of 356 days perusing their networks. In one case, the attackers had unfettered access to a target’s computers and networks for a grand total of four years and 10 months.

Who do they attack? None of the companies are named. But, if you think back, you can remember some names that have disclosed attacks blamed on China, that might fit the bill: Google and Intel have over the years complained in public of attacks carried out by China. The Times says the army unit was the one responsible for the attacks carried out in 2011 against RSA, the security unit of the technology company EMC, which were described at the time as “extremely sophisticated.”

More recently, a series of attacks against media organizations have been attributed to China: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal (which, like this website, is owned by News Corp.), Bloomberg News, the Washington Post and the Associated Press are among them.

Other targeted industries include information technology, defense and aerospace, energy, transportation, satellites and communications, navigation, chemicals, health care and mining, to name a few.

What do the attackers take? Here’s a list taken directly from Mandiant’s report:

• product development and use, including information on test results, system designs, product manuals, parts lists, and simulation technologies;
• manufacturing procedures, such as descriptions of proprietary processes, standards, and waste management processes;
• business plans, such as information on contract negotiation positions and product pricing, legal events, mergers, joint ventures, and acquisitions;
• policy positions and analysis, such as white papers, and agendas and minutes from meetings involving high-ranking personnel;
• emails of high-ranking employees; and user credentials and network architecture information.

Most of the time, the victim company doesn’t even know that its information has been stolen until it is far too late to do anything about it.

Who gets the information in the end? It’s unclear, exactly, and so Mandiant engages in educated conjecture and looks at the available evidence. In one case in 2008, a targeted company suffered an intrusion lasting two and a half years, during which emails and attachments of the CEO and general counsel were stolen. During the same time period, news reports showed that a Chinese company had managed to negotiate a significant increase in the price of a certain commodity component with an unnamed victim company. It may be a coincidence, Mandiant concedes, but then again, it may not.

How do they attack? Usually by sending innocent-looking attachments in email messages. An employee at the target company opens it, triggering software embedded within it that gives attackers remote access to that employee’s machine, which then serves as a beachhead for more attacks. You can see a short video showing some of the attacks actually taking place in the video below.

Certainly, suspicions about China and its intentions, capabilities and actions in this area have pervaded for months. Knowledge about all this has probably circulated within the classified community for years, and no doubt plays a part in the concern among lawmakers and U.S. federal government agencies about the growth of the Chinese networking company Huawei.

Mandiant points to another: Unit 61398, it says, carried out a series of attacks against a unit of a Canadian company called Schneider Electric. The incident was first reported by security blogger Brian Krebs, and was carried out when the unit was an independent company called Telvent. What does the company make? Remote access tools, basically software that lets you control one computer from another computer far away.

The part that should scare you is what kinds of computers this software is intended to control: They’re known generally as SCADA systems, or supervisory control and data acquisition systems. They’re the stripped-down machines that sit between large industrial machinery like generators or pumps, or any other kind of big, automated equipment, and regular computers.

In a series of letters to customers in September of last year, Telvent disclosed that attackers traced to China had installed malicious software on its network, and had stolen files related to a key product called OASyS SCADA, which is designed to connect older IT assets to certain “smart grid” systems running on electrical power networks.

Attacks on SCADA systems can be very effective, in part because the machines involved are older and have tended to be less well-secured. How effective? Remember Stuxnet? The malware attack carried out by American and Israeli intelligence agencies against the Iranian nuclear research program? In that attack, nuclear centrifuges were caused to spin out of control, and ultimately explode. That was an attack against SCADA systems. We already know how easily attacks like it might be carried out here.

Stealing intellectual property and trying to gain an edge in business negotiations is one thing. Penetrating the systems that run critical infrastructure is rather more serious, bordering on sabotage. Now that the government officially considers cyberspace a theater of warfare, similar to land, sea, and sky, this is starting to look serious.

Dish Network’s Charlie Ergen Gets Real: The Full Dive Into Media Interview

Last week, we hosted our second D: Dive Into Media conference in Dana Point, Calif. If you joined us in person, you got a day and a half to talk with and listen to the most interesting people in the media business as they spoke about the future of their industries. If you tuned in to our livestreams, you got a free, real-time sample of what that was like.

And if you missed the whole thing? Your loss!

But no worries: This week, we’ll start running complete videos of each of our onstage interviews and demos, so you can review them anytime you want. We’re kicking off today with Dish Chairman Charlie Ergen, who rarely speaks in public, but sat down with us for an hour.

We’re so glad he did, because he has got one of the most interesting perspectives on the way technology is reshaping the TV business — and the ways that the TV business is stubbornly and successfully resisting change.

Some of this stuff parallels thoughts you’ve heard from other people — but usually not those with this much skin in the game. Ergen is a billionaire with the third-largest pay-TV business in America. So getting this stuff right matters a whole lot to him.

There’s a lot of great stuff in here. Like:

• Ergen’s assessment of his odds as he tries to grab Clearwire’s spectrum out of Sprint’s clutches (low), and why he’s taking on CBS and every other broadcaster with his ad-skipping Hopper DVR (both for leverage and because his customers want it).
• His explanation of why he bought Blockbuster (real estate) and why he failed to challenge Netflix (too late, too timid).
• His take on cord-cutting, which you never hear pay-TV bosses say out loud. (Yep, it’s real. And cord-nevers — kids like his who don’t have pay TV and never had — are even real-er.)
• What he thought of the Bloomberg Businessweek piece that described Dish as “The Meanest Company in America,” and whether his company’s work culture will let it compete with the likes of Google and Facebook. (Dish is not going to be supplying private buses for its workers anytime soon).

And the nice thing is that you get to sample as much, or as little, as you like. Enjoy, and come back for more over the next few weeks:

[ See post to watch video ]

China to hit 246m Android and iOS devices this month, taking it past the US to become world’s largest market

This month, China is slated to pass the US to become the world’s top country for active Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. In January 2013, China and the US had roughly the same active device installed base: 221 million and 222 million, respectively. By the end of February 2013, China will have an estimated 246 million devices compared to 230 million in the US.

The findings come from Flurry, which tracks over 2.4 billion anonymous app sessions per day across more than 275,000 apps around the world, and says it can reliably measure activity across more than 90 percent of the world’s smartphones and tablets. Based on historical growth trends as well as the number of detected devices per country through the first of this month, the company estimated its numbers for the end of this month.

Here’s the historic data with the projection in graph form:

If China really does claim gold from the US in February, it will be exactly 12 months since Flurry reported that the country had become the world’s fastest growing market for smartphones and tablets. The company unsurprisingly doesn’t expect the US to take back the lead from China, citing the countries’ populations: just over 310 million versus over 1.3 billion, respectively.

The only country that could feasibly take that spot is India, which has a population of just over 1.2 billion. Yet it is currently in 10th place with 19 million smartphones and tablets, according to Flurry:

Interestingly, both the US and China have more than five times the active installed base than that of the UK, the world’s third largest market. Furthermore, both countries continue to see rapid device adoption.

China may no longer lead the world in growth, but it still commanded an impressive 209 percent rate on top of a base of 71 million devices from January 2012. The below chart excludes countries with less than half a million devices as of January 2012:

Only Columbia, Vietnam, Turkey, Ukraine, and Egypt grew faster than China. Year-over-year, compared to January 2012, the US added 55 million new devices, while China added 150 million new devices. Flurry says China would have passed the US earlier, given its growth rate, but the American holiday season delayed the inevitable for an additional two months.

See also – Duopoly: 98% of Q4 smartphone shipments in China were powered by Android or iOS, at 86% and 12% respectively and Despite the iPhone’s monumental Q4, Android still powered 50% of all smartphones sold

Image credit: Gary Tamin

The original Chromebook ran Firefox

Jeff Nelson, who began working for Google back in 2006, has shared a very interesting bit of history about a project that he worked on in his early days with the company: Google OS. His work eventually evolved into Chrome OS and spawned the Chromebook , but at the time Nelson’s web-based operating system was built around Firefox.

Google hadn’t yet started working on Chrome — the first public release didn’t happen for nearly two more years. But Nelson was already spending the bulk of his day working on web apps inside a browser, and he was looking for a way to claw back some of the development time he lost every day by traditional operating system inefficiencies.

Nelson spent a lot of time closing and opening his browsers and clearing cache files. He found himself throwing precious minutes away waiting for those operations to complete, and figured there had to be a better option. Nelson began hacking away at Google OS.

Its beginnings sound a lot like Webconverger or xPud — with little more than Firefox sitting atop a stripped-down Linux base. Nelson’s goal wasn’t to build a web-first OS at the time. He wanted something super-fast to do his development on, and he started out by loading the entire OS into RAM. That immediately took care of most of his file system bottleneck issues.

Relying on RAM for storage means you don’t have a lot of room for software bloat, and Nelson had to rely on web apps and keep local installs to a minimum. His work was continually autosaved to networked and local storage to prevent data loss, and for years Nelson worked on Google OS running entirely in RAM.

Initial reactions to Nelson’s OS were tepid at best, but as it became increasingly clear that web apps really could provide a complete computing experience, Google started pursuing the idea of a browser-based operating system. In 2009, Chrome OS was finally announced and then released on the Cr-48 the following year.

In its present form, Chrome OS doesn’t quite deliver the kind of speediness Nelson would have enjoyed in his RAM disk setup. Maybe the next generation of Chromebooks will offer a bit more giddyup.

Update: Several current Google employees have come forward to question Nelson’s claims. At this point it seems more likely that his work was a 20% project that happened to utilize a lightweight OS that ran a browser, and not the inspiration for Chrome OS itself.

Day Two at D: Dive Into Media 2013, in Pictures and Tweets

After Monday’s kickoff with Nancy Tellem, Yusuf Mehdi, Anomaly Productions, David Eun and Charlie Ergen, D: Dive Into Media 2013 already had plenty of star power and great moments in the bank.

Tuesday was a parade of still more great guests — 19 in all — and the discussion online was vibrant. Here’s a sampling of what our attendees saw at Day Two of #DMedia:

You can also get the overview of the day’s events via Storify.

Marissa Mayer Wants Fewer Yahoo Mobile Apps

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer says the Internet giant has too many mobile apps, and the total number should come down. With the company offering several dozen apps currently (and just today acquiring a new one), Mayer, in remarks made at a Goldman Sachs conference in San Francisco, said she’d like to trim that number to about 12 to 15.

“Ultimately, you don’t want to trouble users by making them download too many apps,” she said. “But many apps are single-use.”

The hope, she said, is that each Yahoo user will have on their smartphones “the two to four apps that matter most to them.”

One mobile opportunity she also sees is around Yahoo Groups. As communications within groups of people move to the phone and other mobile devices, Mayer said, there are “all kinds of possibilities” for Yahoo.

comScore: Apple #1 smartphone maker in U.S. with 36.3% market share

comScore, Inc. today released data from the comScore MobiLens service, reporting key trends in the U.S. smartphone industry during the three month average period ending December 2012. Apple ranked as the top smartphone manufacturer with 36.3 percent share, while Google Android led as the #1 smartphone platform with 53.4 percent share.

Smartphone OEM Market Share

125.9 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones (54 percent mobile market penetration) during the three months ending in December, up 5 percent since September. Apple ranked as the top OEM with 36.3 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers (up 2 percentage points from September). Samsung ranked second with 21 percent market share (up 2.3 percentage points), followed by HTC with 10.2 percent share, Motorola with 9.1 percent and LG with 7.1 percent (up 0.5 percentage points).

MacDailyNews Note: This comScore report covers the period of October 1, 2012- December 31, 2012. iPhone 5 was released in the U.S. and Canada on September 21, 2012 and faced severe supply constraints for much of the period covered by this report.

Smartphone Platform Market Share

Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform with 53.4 percent market share (up 0.9 percentage points), while Apple’s share increased 2 percentage points to 36.3 percent. Blackberry ranked third with 6.4 percent share, followed by Microsoft (2.9 percent) and Symbian (0.6 percent).

Source: comScore, Inc.