Statistics: Smartphones

In the 2010 second quarter, 42 percent of all consumer handsets sold were smartphones, up from 2 percent in the second quarter of 2009, according to NPD Group Inc, a market research firm.

Digital Wallet: Using smartphones to pay for purchases in stores

Bank of America Corp, the largest U.S. consumer bank, and Visa Inc, the world's largest payment processor, plan to begin a test program next month that lets customers use smartphones to pay for purchases in stores.

Story Highlights:

• The program will run from September through the end of the year in the New York area.
• Selected employees and customers would install small chips, supplied by Visa, in their smartphones that emit radio signals over very short distances. Customers would then wave  their phones with point-of-sale devices in stores and their bank account data would be collected and their purchases completed.
• Verizon Wireless, AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Discover Financial Services are working on forming a joint venture aimed at offering mobile payments services.

Rumors:

• A Google tablet, made by HTC, running Google’s Chrome OS, and available on the Verizon network, will go on sale on Nov. 26th this year. That’s Black Friday.
• Google is planning to launch the Chrome app store in October. That store would give web developers a marketplace for selling web-based applications and applications for an Android-based tablet as well as a Chrome-based one. Google is reportedly planning to charge just 5 percent commission on Chrome apps.

MIT researchers demonstrate the potential of Google Android smart phone

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), collaborating with Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), have created an application that performs supercomputing calculations in real-time, on a smartphone.

“It’s demonstrating that with a small processor, you can still get a meaningful answer to a big problem,“ said John Peterson, a research associate in the high performance computing group at TACC.

Story Highlights

• Accurate, real-time calculations on the phone take less than two seconds.

• In its smartphone form, the researchers imagine their method could be applied to “in the field” inverse problems like landmine detection, as well as to design problems like determining the optimal shape for structures.

• The real impact of the system may come in the application of these methods to aircraft or automobiles, which use control systems to react to inputs from the environment in order to achieve optimal safety and performance. Examples include traction control in cars and stabilization systems in jet fighters.

It’s Faster Because It’s C

"I was recently drawn into another discussion about a claim that project Foo was faster than project Bar because Foo is written in C (or maybe C++) and Bar is written in Java. In my experience, as a long-time kernel programmer and as someone who often codes in C even when there are almost certainly better choices, such claims are practically always false. The speed at which a particular piece of code executes only has a significant effect if your program can find something else to do after that piece is done – in other words, if your program is CPU-bound and/or well parallelized. Most programs are neither. The great majority of programs fit into one or more of the following categories.

• I/O-bound. Completing a unit of work earlier just means waiting longer for the next block/message.
• Memory-bound. Completing a unit of work earlier just means more time spent thrashing the virtual-memory system.
• Synchronization-bound (i.e. non-parallel). Completing a unit of work earlier just means waiting longer for another thread to release a lock or signal an event – and for the subsequent context switch.
• Algorithm-bound. There’s plenty of other work to do, and the program can get to it immediately, but it’s wasted work because a better algorithm would have avoided it altogether. We did all learn in school why better algorithms matter more than micro-optimization, didn’t we?"

The Un(?)fair Advantage of Latency Arbitrage

The Un(?)fair Advantage of Latency Arbitrage
"Technologically advanced traders are giving themselves an advantage that some people feel is just that unfair. Using techniques and technologies I’ll describe below, they squeeze every last microsecond of latency
out of their market data feeds and trading systems to give themselves a sneak peak of market prices that’s measured in milliseconds. Thanks to powerful algorithms and high-speed order executions systems that’s enough time for them to engage in “latency arbitrage” – the buying and selling of equities based on small price changes that have not yet been broadly recognized due to the varying speeds of market data delivery systems."

Tricks of the Trade and Key Technologies:

• Co-location
• Cut-through Switches
• Consolidation of functionality
• Hardware-based Feedhandlers
• Hardware-based Middleware

Implementing Arithmetic and Other Analytic Operations By Transcriptional Regulation

"The transcriptional regulatory machinery of a gene can be viewed as a computational device, with transcription factor concentrations as inputs and expression level as the output. This view begs the question: what kinds of computations are possible?"