The breakthrough that helped this antenna shrink in size was the filling of the antenna slot with a polymer instead of regular old air. The press release detailing the new antenna says it is ready for integration with active circuits and that the resulting antenna is 70 percent smaller and is almost two-thirds cheaper than a conventional cavity-backed slot antenna inside devices. Combine the new antenna with other millimeter-wave capable equipment and the IME researchers believe it would support speeds of up to 20 gigabits per second. At such high frequencies however, you’re looking at a wireless technology that won’t travel very far or through walls.

However, companies such as Samsung are researching the idea of using millimeter wave networks to boost wireless speeds, especially as spectrum at the lower frequency bands becomes more crowded. And while, it may seem ridiculous to imagine building out real networks in the upper gigahertz bands, our demands for mobile broadband seem infinite at the right capacity and price.

Thus research into better antennas may strike many as esoteric, but it’s essential so we can continue to take advantage of the airwaves around us for data transmissions. For example, this summer Intellectual Ventures spun out a new materials company called Kymeta that’s building a better antenna, while earlier this year Ethertronics said it had developed a new, flexible antenna that could adapt to the conditions around it.

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Every seven years, the European Union revises its budget and sets aside a certain amount for research and development. The next of these ‘frameworks’ will come into play from 2014-2020, and €8.1 billion ($9.9 billion) of the €10.8 billion R&D total went on offer on Monday.

But what sorts of research areas are getting this lovely moolah? In among the billions for ‘oceans of the future’ and healthcare research, there’s also €1.5 billion for ICT and a chunky €365 million for “technologies that will transform urban areas into sustainable ‘smart cities and communities’”.

As is usually the case with EU funding of this kind, the idea is to stimulate private sector investment too — for its €8.1 billion, the European Commission expects to see an extra €6 billion show up from private sources.

Here’s what research, innovation and science commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn had to say:

“Knowledge is the currency of the global economy. If Europe wants to continue to compete in the 21st century, we must support the research and innovation that will generate growth and jobs, now and in the future. The high level of competition for EU funding makes sure that taxpayers’ money goes to the best projects that tackle issues that concern all of us.”

The money for creating ‘smart cities’ is of particular interest. We’re talking greentech, smart meters, connected cars and other devices. We know this is a hot area because the private sector, in the form of Intel et al, is already deep into researching this stuff.

So are public funds necessary for this?

They will certainly help, but there’s more to it than that. For one thing, there’s an interesting debate to be had about the sort of things that tend to get funded through the venture capital system, where long-term (and uncertain) R&D may look less attractive than a quick-returning e-commerce app.

Also, I have no intention of getting political here (that way lies pain for mere tech journalists), but it’s clear that this all forms part of a continental stimulus strategy:

“There will be no solution to the crisis without growth,” an EC Q&A reads. “There is evidence to suggest that, in general, member states that traditionally invested more in R&D and education weathered the recent economic turmoil better. Investments in R&D and education increase the chances to smooth the adverse impact of the crisis while building a basis from which to bounce back quicker when recovery takes hold.”

Whatever the motivation, there’s a lot of cash up for grabs. By early next year, two ‘future emerging technologies’ projects will have been chosen, getting €100 million funding in their first year. The likely candidates for that slice will “go beyond traditional ICT research and link up with specialists in other fields like health-, material- and neuro-sciences and neuro-robotics”, says the EC.

Frankly, speaking as a geek, as long as someone’s funding that kind of research, I’m just happy to look forward to the results.

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Jony Ive is the driving force behind Apple's new product designs.

Apple has increased its research and development spending from $1.8 to $2.4 billion this year versus last, according to a filing made Wednesday by Apple to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). That’s a 33-percent increase, and makes the 2011 total more than half what it spent during the previous four years combined.

That’s a lot of money, but Apple’s year so far has been one of considerably earth-shaking transitions. The introduction of iCloud, its continued beta development and eventual release, can’t have come cheap, and it represents a paradigm shift in the focus of the company, something Steve Jobs conveyed on stage at WWDC in June. There’s also iOS 5 as a whole, which represents the biggest leap forward for iOS since it was first introduced.

Apple is also known to have its product pipeline planned out at least three years in advance. It’s quite possible that special attention was paid to Apple’s next big thing to follow the iPhone and iPad, especially because Jobs’ illness had progressed so much in the past year. Comments from his biography claim that he’d “finally cracked” a dedicated Apple television, which would definitely entail considerable R&D costs.

While in the past Apple has been praised for doing a lot of innovating for relatively little money, a heavy infusion of R&D money at this critical juncture in the company’s history is probably a good sign. Apple needs to wow customers to keep up investor confidence, and money invested in coming up with amazing products is a good way to do that. Also, Apple has a huge pile of cash reserves, so it definitely won’t miss the additional money.

Apple also experienced considerable growth in the area of its global workforce. Apple now employs 63,300 people worldwide, up 28 percent from last year. A lot of those new hires come on the retail side, which accounts for about half of its total employee head count. Apple has planned to open as many as 40 new stores by the end of the year.

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The spending, Tucci said, is part of a plan to keep EMC from becoming part of IT history as cloud computing and big data sweep over the landscape. He pointed to the minicomputer companies that he watched rise and fall during the ’70s and ’80s  in his native Boston as examples of companies that didn’t adapt. His job as CEO is to understand, possibly embrace, industry disruptions and focus on their opportunities for EMC.

“What I have noticed [is] that the companies that have done well are the companies that have played an offensive game,” Tucci told the crowd. “The companies that tended to get gobbled up in these changes and lost their way are companies that played a lot of defense to protect their current position and didn’t play enough offense.”

As anyone who watches EMC knows, the company has been very aggressive already in the big data space by purchasing Greenplum and Isilon, and since then, getting involved with Hadoop. Owning roughly 80 percent of VMware, EMC also has a very strong position in the cloud computing space.

You can watch Tucci’s lecture here. Or, if you don’t have 48 minutes to do so, Amazon’s James Hamilton, who was in attendance, gives a thorough rundown of Tucci’s main points and statistics on his Perspectives blog.

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Large telecoms operators can be quite cumbersome when it comes to rolling out new services and innovations, and the same most likely applies to Vodafone.

That hasn’t kept it from making tens of billions of dollars in revenues over the years. But longer term, new technology innovations — and the players that implement them fastest — could threaten that bottom line. That is the primary driver for a company like Vodafone putting itself in the middle of what is currently the heart of technology innovation, Silicon Valley.

Vodafone will be wooing startups from across the board — including those working on content delivery and data analytics, back end services like billing, and network and device architecture — with the promise of added technical expertise, financial assistance, logistical support, facilities, events. Up to 24 companies can fit into the office and test space set up in Xone.

Ans the operator has lined up some impressive features at the center, including a “fully functional replica of Vodafone’s global networks,” 2G and 3G networks, and an IP network. Vodafone’s connection to Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) — it owns 45 percent — also will give companies access to Verizon’s R&D facilities, including its LTE network. It also notes on the Xone site that some companies may even become the target for strategic investments by way of Vodafone Ventures.

Will all these incentives, plus the possibility of rolling out products to 382 million Vodafone customers worldwide, be enough to attract top talent? It won’t be the first European telco to reach out west for R&D: both Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) and France Telecom (NYSE: FTE) have done this over the years.

Even if startups flock to Xone, Vodafone will ultimately have to face another key issue: figuring out how to implement all these new things quickly and without too much pain for the parts of its business that still work well.

A startup that can figure out how to do that might have the most valuable of technology of all.

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But long before there was a Y Combinator or a 500 Startups, there was SRI International: the old school, non-profit research and development organization that’s had a hand in the creation of everything from Disneyland to the Internet. Started by Stanford University in 1946 as a way to drum up enterprise in the sleepy Bay Area, SRI is best known for churning out a smorgasbord of inventions like Technicolor (for which it won an Academy Award in 1959), to the first computer mouse, created there in 1968.

The 2,400-employee organization celebrates its 65th birthday this year. Today, the federal government is the organization’s bread and butter, accounting for 70 percent of the $500 million in revenue from sponsored research SRI brings in annually. The Department of Defense is the company’s biggest client by far.

But while research contracts keep the electricity turned on and the robots powered up, the revenue doesn’t provide for extras like an endowment fund. Nor does it allow for the type of financial compensation a team of top-shelf scientists, business development specialists and executives could make in private industry.

That’s what SRI Ventures and the in-house incubator is for.

Over the last 20 years, SRI has been spinning off major bio-tech, Internet technology and advanced material companies created by its own researchers, who then must decide if they will stay at SRI and keep creating or head for the new venture and an opportunity for riches.

The Menlo Park, Calif.-headquartered company has created more than 50 spin-off ventures based on breakthrough technologies developed within its laboratories. Three of the ventures — Intuitive Surgical, Nuance Communications  and Orchid Cellmark — are now public companies with a total market-cap value of more than $20 billion.

More recently, a government contract to develop an intuitive, automated personal assistant program for military personnel resulted in a huge deal with Apple: Last April, SRI sold online personal assistant app Suri to Apple for an undisclosed sum that “made us very happy, very very happy,” said Norman Winarsky, VP at SRI Ventures.

This monetization model was a result of the 1980 Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act (otherwise known as the Bayh–Dole Act), which gave universities and non-profits intellectual property rights for commercial applications resulted from government grants.

In 1993, the Sarnoff Corporation, (previously an SRI subsidiary and now fully part of SRI) began a ventures strategy. An iris recognition company called Sensar was the first official spin off company. Within two years, all of SRI had adopted the venture strategy.

Researchers who work on projects are encouraged to think about the commercial applications of their projects and to approach the SRI Ventures board with their ideas. The company incubates its spin-off ventures within its own facilities to provide seed money, work space, infrastructure support and business-development resources that include early access to white-shoe VC firms that have invested in multiple SRI enterprises and will weigh in early on the commercialization potential.

“We want to distinguish ourselves from academic institutions. We are not here to educate people,”  said  Winarsky. “It’s an unnatural act for an academic institution to bring together diverse solutions to market opportunities and integrate them into something that can be delivered into the marketplace, and for us its a natural act.”

When a venture spins off or a product is licensed, 66 percent of the funds go to an SRI endowment fund, which was an empty bank account 15 years ago. The remaining 34 percent goes to SRI staff. The biggest chunk goes to the team that worked on it, while  7 to 8 percent goes to senior staff “that suffered the five years of effort they had to put in” and 4 percent goes to all employees in a profit-sharing deal, Winarsky said. He credits this model with preserving SRI:

I personally believe SRI would have been hollowed by by Google, Apple and everybody else you can image for its great researchers. But as a result of having spinoff strategy for royalty and equity — by the way that’s vested so we keep the golden handcuffs on them for three to four years — by having spinoff strategy we can offer stock even though we are a company that’s non-profit and has no stock.  An employee has to decide: Do you want to stay here and do great research and keep your equity and royalty or do you want to leave and keep all your eggs in that basket?”

Materials research laboratory director Angel Sanjurji has been faced with that choice more times than most. A 30-year veteran at SRI, he’s been involved in at least five spinoff ventures to date. And while some of his co-workers have chosen to go the entrepreneurial route, Sanjurji says he will be staying put.

“Here you really have the freedom to do research and implement your own ideas. Basically, you’re only budgeted by your imagination,” he said. “I think at SRI, we have the best of the both worlds. You may not make as much money as you could on the outside, but at the same time, you are not taking that risk. And for me, at the end of the day, everyone that stays has the same driving force. They want to develop new things.”

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Before founding thinktank, Boyar led the consumer research department at Electronic Arts, the world’s largest video game publisher, managing efforts for the company’s entire line of offerings.

In the edited interview below, Boyar, a speaker at our upcoming conference, Mobilize 09, shares her views about the disappointing early days of wireless gaming, the impact the iPhone has had on the space and the future of mobile apps.

Colin Gibbs: Mobile gaming for years failed to live up to sky-high expectations, but now it seems to be getting legs, thanks largely to Apple’s iPhone and App Store. What’s your take on how the space has evolved in the last 12-18 months?

Robin Boyar: If you look at why gaming has been so moribund for the last couple of years it’s that it’s tough, from a consumer perspective, to find and download games. Most of the carriers have done a really terrible job in promoting games, so it’s not surprising (that the market stagnated).

Gibbs: How have the new handsets and app stores changed the game for developers? Have we seen a shift away from entrenched, cross-platform publishers to smaller shops?

Boyar: It’s sort of the new get-rich-quick scheme, which harkens back to the very early days of gaming when you could see a 15-year-old kid in your basement designing a best-selling game. The market has actually shifted in a way that it now rewards independent developers.

Gibbs: Why did the established publishers fail to gain much traction in the early days of mobile gaming?

Boyar: I think what happened is that very early on –- and I saw it first-hand at EA -– is that traditional publishers come from a console background. They mistakenly thought consumers wanted to play console games on a mobile phone. What they failed to recognize — where they should have leveraged consumer insights — is that most people when they’re playing on a phone want a short, quick, easy-to-play experience.

Gibbs: Do you see that changing anytime soon? Will features like Wi-Fi and location awareness help boost the popularity of more sophisticated games, or is mobile simply a casual, siloed gaming platform?

Boyar: I think that over time mobile gaming will become more complex; I think it will be able to leverage some of the feature sets that are becoming more and more popular on handsets. But I think we also have to recognize with mobile gaming that you do have to develop to the lowest common denominator. Smartphones are still only about 30 percent of U.S. handsets, but as that percentage increases, the types of games you will be seeing will be increasingly complex.

Gibbs: Is R&D in mobile limited to companies with big research budgets?

Boyar: Most of the companies I’ve spoken to who do mobile gaming don’t spend a lot of money on R&D. It’s a cost equation: If you’ve got $50,000 to $100,000 to build a game, you’re not going to spend much on R&D; you’re just going to build the game. If it works, great; if it doesn’t you’re just going to throw it out and try again.

Gibbs: Can you give me an example of R&D making a successful product at EA?

Boyar: Here’s a great example: Close to five years ago, some folks at Black Box (a Vancouver-based EA studio) came to me and said, “We want to build a Tony Hawk killer.” (Activision publishes games featuring the famed skateboarder.)  I sort of laughed at them and said, “Good luck with that,” but we looked at Tony Hawk, found that there was some opposition in the marketplace, some weaknesses in Tony Hawk. We also had a development team that had a great control mechanism, and we tested qualitatively and quantitatively, and the team did a lot of ethnographic research, going to skate parks and talking to skaters. Fast-forward: Six months later I met with a woman at Activision who’d done work on Tony Hawk and she was like, “How did you know those were our weaknesses?”

Gibbs: What in mobile particularly interests you? What’s ripe for innovation?

Boyar: I think what really is a robust market is the female audience. Women are actually playing mobile games slightly less than men, but women have just as many handsets as men. I think there’s a real opportunity for developers to come out and make content that’s more specific to women.

Gibbs: Are we over-thinking mobility? Is it just a natural extension of the web? Or have we under-thought it and failed to build apps that take into account the features and limitations of mobile phones?

Boyar: I think we’ve under-thought it, and a big part of the reason why is the bandwidth limitations. The vast majority of consumers are dealing with the equivalent of the Model T. Again, it all comes to building something for the lowest common denominator. And a lot of developers will bitch and moan about how different it is to work with telecoms. Carriers haven’t embraced (mobile gaming). Those folks in Kansas and wherever AT&T is centered these days, they’ve been very backward.

Gibbs: So how does the future look for mobile data?

Boyar: What you’re starting to see is that due to the penetration of cell phones, a lot of consumers are actually using them as this all-purpose device. In a lot of regards what you’re hearing is, “I don’t need to be tethered to my PC anymore because 80 percent of the stuff I need to do I can do through my phone.” It’s interesting to see that the future really is mobile.

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The resulting waveguide is a breakthrough in creating optical networks that allow optical signals to be processed directly — without changing them back to electrons. That cuts costs if the waveguide can be manufactured using a standard chipmaking material such as silicon, which it is with the hybrid technology used for this research. The hybrid chips are made using a typical CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) manufacturing process plus a deposition process that covers the waveguide with organic molecules. The combination results in chips that can offer all-optical processing that’s more than 3 times faster than previous speeds of 40 Gbps. This is highly geeky stuff, but when one considers that bandwidth — not processors — will be the platform from which future innovations will spring, it’s research we need.

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Returning to Snowl, hot on the heels of Mozilla Lab’s call for participation in exploring the future of the browser, and the experimental Weave service, comes Mozilla’s efforts to move messaging beyond email and to the types of communication now commonplace across social networks, blogs and services such as Twitter.

Mozilla’s Myk Melez describes Snowl as a browser extension that helps users ‘follow and participate in online discussions’ and track all your conversations across various networks, services, protocols and messaging types.

Snowl purportedly aggregates messages from email services, syndicated feeds, forums and social networks and seeks to rank or prioritize them in order of importance, by varying the interface used to browse them – alternating between a Google Reader style ‘river of news‘ and a more traditional email-like three pane view.

Now this all sounds very lovely, but it’s kinda ‘meh’ – all Snowl seems to do is chop up some message data into a different presentation, there doesn’t seem to be any intelligence in analyzing the patterns of communications to figure out what’s most important and relevant to the user and those they communicate with.

Everyday, I’m hammered with a couple hundred emails, as many Twitters, probably around 1500 RSS items, dozens of SMS and MMS messages, thousands of instant messages and social network notifications, and a handful of phone calls. Many of us need tools to make sense of this soup, tools that can cross reference emailers and callers with calendar entries and locations to figure out what’s important and what can be pushed aside.

Sadly, right now, Snowl isn’t helping bring together mobile, voice and internet messaging into anything useful that addresses the problem at hand. And it’s a tough problem, requiring many different technologies and interests to work well together and some real innovation in AI and user interfaces…I’m afraid a river of news and three-pane view doesn’t cut it Mozilla.

Snowway Jose!

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