So IBM is apparently working like crazy on some next-gen communications technology that — ready to have your mind blown? — “uses light instead of wires to send information.” We know, this is some crazy future crap up in here, but check it out. Apparently this so-called light-based communications system is supposed to be ten times more power efficient than others in its class, and can transfer data at speeds far greater than our current 4Mbps token-ring networks and even the next-gen 10BASE2 Ethernet (as if!); if optical data communications are actually real, well, it’s just in time because we’ve been seriously maxing out our Tandy 1000 playing MUDs. Touting such other gibberish as “high definition content,” and “ex-aflop supercomputing,” IBM’s Optocards (which feature integrated “Optochips”) can apparently move data at up to 8Tbps / 1TBps per second, which isn’t quite up to snuff to compete with Alcatel-Lucent’s latest, but is still, like, way more than necessary for accessing the Engadget BBS.
Sure, the researchers at Alcatel-Lucent have already sent data 50 miles at 25.6Tbps, but it looks like now they’re going for distance rather than speed: the company announced yesterday that it’s now pumped bits over a 1584-mile long link at 16.4Tbps. Sure, that’s slightly slower than the record, but being able to firehose bits at distances like that is even more impressive, if you ask us (you didn’t). The core tech is essentially the same as used in the earlier speed record: bundling several 100Gbps optical signals at different wavelengths into one multiplexed transmission, shooting it down fiber, and splitting it up at the end. This latest test used 164 different channels and updated transmitters and multiplexers to hit the record — which is fine and all, but guys, if you’re using that old school 25.6Tbps gear anymore we know a few people who are interested.
IBM’s new prototype 48-way optical databus takes up just 3 mm of width on a PCB, and is capable of a truly ridiculous data rate of around 8 Tbps. That’s roughly 5,000 high-definition video streams per second. Even better, this “green optical link” is a hundred times more power efficient than conventional electronic connections, so the environment benefits too.Who needs a databus with such a high data rate? For the time being, probably only petaflop supercomputer designers needing to route vast numbers of bits very quickly between parallel processors and memory banks. Before too long though, the size and weight savings offered by that lower power consumption could mean you’d see scaled-down versions of the technology in your laptop or even your phone.
The cleverest bit is that the guys at IBM made these new “optocard” circuits by using commercially available parts and standard techniques like surface-mount soldering. This means the innovations may make it into real products much sooner than if they’d used custom technology.
It’s apparently “the world’s fastest and most highly integrated optical databus to date,” and all that amazing speed is powered by little laser beams, guys… frickin’ laser beams. And that’s just cool. [Physorg]
FiOS, you ain’t got nothing on this: Alcatel-Lucent researchers in France have successfully transmitted optical data at an absolutely blazing sped of 16.4 Tbps over a distance of over 1,500 miles.The transmission was done with the goal of achieving a 100 Gbps Ethernet connection, which, as I’m sure you’d agree, is a goal we can all get behind. All sorts of fancy, confusion-sounding technologies were used to get the blazing optical transmission, including “a highly linear, balanced optoelectronic photoreceiver and an ultra-compact, temperature-insensitive coherent mixer.” I kept telling them that they just needed a more balanced optoelectronic photoreceiver! I’m glad they finally listened.
We’re still pretty far from seeing speeds anywhere near this in consumer connections, as the technology being works on here will go towards the internet’s backbone rather than in a line to your house. But I mean, honestly, at what point is bandwidth so fast that it doesn’t matter if it gets any faster? When we’re talking about speeds that’ll allow you to download a full HD movie in 15 seconds versus 3 seconds, you really start to lose the right to complain about it. Those 50 Mbps connections we’ll start seeing offered to consumers in the next few years should be just plenty for the time being, no? [IT News Australia via Slashdot]
Web-based word processors keep closing the gap with Microsoft Office. Since its launch, Zoho now has 650,000 users, a 30 percent increase from just last November, the company tells us. It is doing 2 million user sessions per month. And its users have created more than one million documents on Zoho Writer (1.6 million, if you include its online presentation and spreadsheet products, Zoho Show and Zoho Sheets).
Today, Zoho released an update to Zoho Writer that includes:
Docx Suppor?the ability to export documents in the new docx Word file format (this is in addition to existing support for doc, txt, html, pdf, odf, sxw, rtf files).
Thesaurus?a thesaurus in ten languages (English, Czech, German, Greek, French, Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Slovak).
Groups?Now you can save emails forgroups instead of re-entering each one every time you want to share a document.
Enhanced support for Endnotes/Footnotes, Headers/Footers?Formatting is now maintained when a document is exported, as are manual page breaks.
Zoho still has along way to go to catch up to Microsoft Word, and it trails Google Docs in usage, but it is making steady progress.
Google has announced that it has joined a consortium to build a new trans-Pacific cable between Japan and California.
The Unity consortium is a joint effort by Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, Google, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet and SingTel and will initially increase Trans?Pacific lit cable capacity by about 20 percent, with the potential to add up to 7.68 Terabits per second.
Google’s Manager of Network Acquisitions, Francois Sterin, explains the deal:
“[Google’s] participation in building Unity ultimately helps provide our users with faster and more reliable connectivity.
If you’re wondering whether [Google is] going into the undersea cable business, the answer is no. We’re not competing with telecom providers, but the volume of data we need to move around the world has grown to the point where in some cases we’ve exceeded the ability traditional players can offer. Our partnership with these companies is just another step in ensuring that we’re delivering the best possible experience to people around the world.”
Google was rumored in talks about participation in Unity in September 2007, although at that stage it was believed the cable would go to Australia.
The round was $65 million in cash and $20 million in debt, on top of almost $30 million they raised in three prior rounds. Investors included Hubert Burda Media, GLG Partners, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, Hercules Technology Growth Capital, Accel, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Information Capital. The valuation, as expected, was in the half billion dollar range.
The company, according to their original offering document, which is embedded below, is not yet profitable. They lost around $3.7 million on $21 million in revenue in 2007. 2008 projected revenues are $150 million and $40 million in profit.
Glam operates a number of small sites geared towards women. Glam.com is the main anchor with the largest reach among these properties, but other owned sites appear to be pure SEO plays like free-beauty-tips.com and celebrity-hairstyles.org. They also sell advertisements for other sites, which make up the vast bulk of its page views. We have criticized them in the past for claiming to be the largest womens site on the Internet, and the fastest growing site in the U.S., based on traffic coming from sites they sell ads for.
As an ad network Glam may find its margins squeezed as competition increases. Still, they control a lot of page views. Comscore reports that worldwide uniques across all sites that Glam sells advertising for had nearly 47 million unique visitors and 1.1 billion page views. That’s 4x the unique visitors and 11x the page views from a year ago.
Social voting outfit Mixx has taken $2 million Series B in a round led by existing investor InterSouth Partners.
Mixx offers a category based social voting service that competes with sites such as Digg, Reddit and Propeller. McLean, Virginia based Mixx was launched in September 2007 with talent including former executives from Yahoo!, AOL, USA TODAY and The Associated Press. The company has regularlylaunched new features in an attempt to stand out in a market place with strongly entrenched loyalties to existing players.
Mixx added the LA Times to its investor group in December. Total funding to date is $3.5 million.
YouTube disappeared from the internet for between 1-2 hours today, according to reader reports and others.
The outage started at around 11:30am PST and came back some time later.
The interesting side of the outage is an allegation from OpenDNS that Pakistan Telecom hijacked YouTube’s IP address space resulting in a worldwide outage. They note that the issue was subsequently rectified by PCCW, but it raises the question: is it really that easy to take one of the largest destinations online down?
There is no official word from YouTube as yet on the cause of the outage.
Granted, most of us here in America would turn our noses up at receiving in-home broadband via satellite — after all, cable and DSL seem to be treating most of us quite alright — but Japan is hoping to provide access to more regions in Asia-Pacific with its recently launched Kizuna. The experimental satellite is not yet intended for commercial use, but if all goes well, it will enable data transmissions “of up to 1.2 gigabytes per second” at a low cost across Japan and 19 other locales in Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, we’ve no idea when it will escape the bondage of testing and actually be put to good use, but at least Japan’s well on its way to actually establishing that wireless island, eh?
