The Open-Source way to Standardization

The benefits of a standardisation process are to ensure lower system costs, by increasing inter-operability. However as it has always been seen, standards are usually based on proprietary technology which brings into the whole case of counter-suits, royalty payments etc. All this in turn on increases the cost of technology. Patents were meant to prevent the copying of ideas, rather than becoming a source of income for companies which are good at suing others, and definitely not a means to promote monopoly of a select few.

The alternative to reducing the cost of technology is to use open-source as a means to creation of standards, which help in inter-operability. The core which is open-source can allow inter-operability, and additional features will be the innovation which companies can add over the core. As long as the core is relatively free to use, and based on an open-source model, you can have inter-operability and standardisation of technology, while promising that ugly patent litigation will not rear its head at a later stage. The open-source way for standardisation has only been explored in the software domain primarily, but perhaps it is time to explore its applicability to other technology areas like wireless communications.

Leader! - India growing towards being the largest wireless market!

India has become the fifth country to have a base of 100 million mobile phone subscribers. Only China, US, Japan and Russia have a larger mobile phone subscriber base. Officials pointed out that just two years ago, India's telephone subscriber base - both landlines and mobile phones - was only 75 million with a tele-density of a mere 7.08 percent. Thanks to the unprecedented growth in mobile telephony in the country, the tele-density has ballooned to 13.54 percent, with a total phone base of 150 million. Of the 100 million mobile phone users - 75.3 million use the Global Standard for Mobile telephony, better known as GSM, while 25.3 million use the code division multiple access technology (CDMA).

Is VoIP and Broadband Wireless going to be the next flood in communications to hit the country?

Design Concept: Paper Cellphone

(Source:YankoDesign)

Travelers often buy international pay phone cards when the are abroad. But the phone cards can't be bought anytime anywhere. And it is a problem that families, friends or even travel partners can't communicate with each other at anytime and they only can contact one way.

"Paper says" offer international roam service for communication and it can make users avoid the risk to break or lose the mobile phone they rent from local stores. "Paper says" is a mobile phone which can be recycled. Its price is low and it can be bought anywhere. It doesn't matter if it is dirtied or lost. Even overseas travelers can communicate anytime anywhere and don't consider the location of booths. It can be bought easily in every country's state-owned organization such as airport and museums, and privately owned institutions.

The design characters are easy-handling, simple, convenient and recyclable. The characters agree with the purpose of Tetra Pak. Tetra Pak has been taken effect for many years and is suitable for consumers' cognition and experience. The appearance design takes the pillow-style in Tetra Pak system as the basic frame. Its interior component is distributable and recyclable and its flat-style fits the space for stores to sell and is suitable for users to carry.

Due to the paper folding character, you just tear the paper along the dotted line and the paper's back you tore is the device for dialing. Use paper's character of lightness and thinness and combine with the LED, the dialing device is pervious to light. Combine with the character of paper and the image easy-carrying. "Paper says" satisfies the need to communication for travelers around the world and accomplishes the goal to communicate anytime anywhere.

Designer: Chia-Liang Hsu, Yi-Ting Chen, Jun-Lin Fu, Chih-Chieh Lee, Chun Chia Hsu, Allen Huang

Patents (Making money from litigation!)

See this: (source: CNET News)

Net2Phone, which filed its lawsuit last week in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, alleges that Skype infringed on its patent, No. 6,108,704. The Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) patent was issued to Net2Phone in August 2000.

Net2Phone's lawsuit comes as the VoIP industry has seen a flood of new entrants from small start-ups to large, established Internet service providers.

Net2Phone alleges that Skype, a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay, violated its "point-to-point Internet Protocol" patent. The patent calls for the exchange of IP addresses between processing units in order to establish a direct communications link between the devices via the Internet.

Skype uses a peer-to-peer technology to operate its VoIP service, whereas companies such as Vonage and AT&T largely use a system that is centrally managed to transfer calls to a traditional phone network.

Do you not think that this is a really stupid patent? It calls for exchange of IP addresses in order to establish direct communictaion links... if you wish to send a packet directly to someone else, you will want to know its IP address, otherwise you will need an intermediate link which knows the IP address. This is the obvious logic which any college kid given a standard programming assignment to tackle such a problem will come up with! Where is the innovation?