ARM makes more than just smartphone cores.

The Internet of things is coming, but in addition to ubiquitous broadband connecting devices wherever they are, we also need  low-power, cheap chips that are smart enough to collect information and then communicate it back to the web. ARM, the chip licensing company, has figured out one way to do this with a new microcontroller, one of those low-end chips that reside on devices from your microwave to your Bluetooth headset. ARM has added some higher-level math functionality to its microcontroller line with its Cortex-M4 chip. If we’re gonna connect everything to the web, that means even the tiny brains inside relatively dumb devices need a boost.

So ARM added some digital signal processing capabilities to the chip. Think of it as sending the silicon to school so it can learn algebra–after realizing that basic math doesn’t cut it anymore. Already NXP, Texas Instruments and ST Microelectronics have licensed the cores and expect products containing the chip to hit the market in 2011. Some areas we’ll see it are in smart appliances for “talking to” to the smart grid (GigaOM Pro sub. req’d), and as a way to add better audio quality to everything from headsets to Mp3 players without adding a lot of cost.

Like all ARM chips, the M4 was developed for low-power usage, which will be essential for building out a web-connected sensor network in places where electrical outlets don’t reach. Machine to machine connectivity isn’t just something the carriers are counting on for growth– it’s also a potential boon for the chip industry. ARM’s new chips will likely compete with stand-alone microcontrollers from companies such as Atmel or Renesas. The microcontroller market is a $15 billion industry, according to NXP, and adding the brainpower to enable this low-end silicon to reach out to the web is good for ARM and good for our connected future.

Under terms of the deal, Google will provide 0.0010 of a share of Google Class A Common Stock for each share of On2 common stock, as well as 15 cents a share in cash, bringing the total value of the deal to about $133 million. It will close after some six months of haggling since Google made an initial offer of $106.5 million in August 2009.

When the deal closes, Google will own all of On2′s video compression technology, which includes the VP6 and VP8 video codecs. At the time it was first announced, many believed that the deal could allow Google to circumvent On2 licensing fees or collect them from third parties like Adobe or Move Networks. The suggestion was also made that Google could use its control of the new VP8 to push it as the dominant codec for YouTube.

But YouTube has thrown its weight behind H.264 for encoding of its HD videos, as has much of the video industry. In fact, YouTube’s recently released HTML5 implementation is based on H.264 as opposed to the open-source Ogg Theora encoding format, which was formed out of On2′s VP3 codec. So it seems unlikely that Google plans to use its control of On2 to push others to adopt its codecs.

Google could adopt some of On2′s video encoding and transcoding technology into YouTube’s back end to speed the encoding of user-generated content that gets uploaded to the site. YouTube said last year that about 20 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute, so having a more robust encoding solution might help the company to speed the amount of time that lags between when a video is uploaded and when it becomes available on the site.

Google could also leverage some of On2′s wireless technology in its quest to increase adoption of video on Android mobile phones. As Om pointed out last August: “[On2] owns technologies for embedded video for mobile platforms (Hantro) and On2 TrueMobile System, a mobile video system designed to send video across the networks — including 2.5G, Edge, 3G and 4G networks — using On2’s VP7 technology.”

Google is expected to close on the On2 acquisition “on or about Feb. 19,” so it probably won’t be long before we find out what the company has in mind for On2′s technology.

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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor is the brains behind the Nexus One phone and will also star as the processor inside some small yet powerful computers called smartbooks, but rivals such as Texas Instruments, Nvidia and Marvell are gunning for those same design wins. And from a feature perspective, it looks like Qualcomm’s competitors may bring more to the party. Its current 1 GHz Snapdragon (a 1.5 GHz version with 1080p will be in later handsets) delivers 720p video, and has a 3-D graphics engine that’s less impressive than those from Marvell or Nvidia.

Yes, Qualcomm has won big so far. Nvidia launched an application processor at the 2008 Mobile World Congress, which was one sexy hunk of silicon. Later, it became the foundation of the Tegra chipset for mobile devices. After seeing what that could do, I predicted it would revolutionize computing and graphics consumption on the phone. So far, it’s in the Zune, but hasn’t taken off like I expected.

Last year Texas Instruments talked up its OMAP 4 chipset, which seemed to exceed Tegra in terms of graphics performance (1080p, supports up to a 20-megapixel camera, etc), and actually had me giddy with excitement. This year at MWC it launched with TI talking up the chip’s ability to enable gesture recognition on handsets. Also today Marvell, which has really made a big push into application processors for mobile devices in the last year or so, launched its own 1 GHz chip capable of delivering 1080p HD video and hosting real-time, graphic-intensive applications.

Not to be outdone, ST Ericsson, another top wireless chipmaker, announced at the MWC show a dual-core smartphone chip that can deliver 1.2 Ghz on each core. That’s about what my laptop offered five years ago, and seems like far more performance than any phone needs, until you take into consideration that the phone form factor is just one of many mobile connected form factors and that ST Ericsson has also created a chip for mobile devices that allows for HDMI out of the phone.

We predicted such a port in our phone of the not-too-distant-future, but ST Ericsson has the silicon to make it happen. That means with an HDMI cable your phone becomes a DVD player for any content downloaded from the web. One hopes that online stores can get their act together when it comes to selling HD versions of video on mobile devices.

But the question still remains, in a world offering silicon that enables HDMI content to be stored and processed on a handset, or gesture recognition thanks to a high-end camera and a powerful processors, can Qualcomm compete? For the last two years I’ve waited for Qualcomm to be dethroned, but I’m still waiting. Maybe 2010 is the year.

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For example, keynote speakers this year include a U.S. cable company talking about its wireless deployment; Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe, presumably defending Flash; and Google’s Eric Schmidt taking about the search engine’s plans to rule the mobile world and the usual array of operator and handset executives.

So what can we expect from the show? Here’s a list of the big topics and what they means for the end user who just wants to surf the web anywhere he or she is:

• Better, faster, cheaper chips for mobile devices. Qualcomm, Marvell, Texas Instruments and a range of other silicon vendors will announce everything from applications processors that can deliver enough power for true HD video to silicon that integrates multiple radios on a chip. For the average Joe this means devices coming out in the next two years will pack more of a visual punch and surf the web at lighting speeds on whatever network is available. I think we’re also going to see more ways to extend our mobile devices, such as pico projectors and chips to enable wireless transfer of content off the phone, but that’s going to still be an early adopter technology in 2010.
• New software and gear from deep-packet inspection companies. Wi-Fi offload was all the buzz last year as mobile data use from iPhones and other smartphones threatened to swamp operators’ networks. Wi-Fi offload is still hot, but it’s not going to be the star — policy management is. For normal people this means that pricing for your mobile bits is going to change. Carriers will have the tools from Bridgewater Systems, Sandvine, Camiant and others to parse your mobile habits into the type of application you’re using (VoIP, downloading video, streaming, etc.) and the time of day, and start billing you differently based on those factors.
• Phones lose their luster as they gain functionality. This is a phone show, even if Nokia, the largest phone maker isn’t bringing a new one to the party, but while plenty of them will launch, the excitement will be around smartbooks, tablets and a host of other devices that incorporate mobile broadband, but maybe not voice. However, the phones that are launching will likely be faster and cooler than the current hunk of metal and plastic in your pocket, with better screens, app stores and features that make it easier than ever to start surfing the web. Plus, those features will start moving down market into cheaper phones thanks to new chips and software.
• New network operators change the market. Your wireless provider no longer has to be a phone company. Cable providers are getting into the game with mobile broadband offerings that in some cases beat out the wireless ones. For example, Bend Broadband in Oregon has the nation’s faster wireless network, even if it’s not used for vocie. And later this spring Cox, a U.S. cable provider, will launch its own wireless network aimed at offering subscribers mobile broadband rather than mobile voice. The impact of these players could be profound. Faster speeds (and maybe that policy software that can help guarantee levels of service) could make VoIP a real alternative to actual voice handsets. Or consumers might pick up a cheap prepaid mobile phone for voice and carry around an iPod touch-like device on the cable network for web inquiries.

In other words, it’s gonna be big.

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Image courtesy of Flickr user andy_c

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com

Over the weekend the rumors of a Google Phone were confirmed in the guise of the whimsically named Nexus One. It’s an unbranded HTC-made carrier-unlocked handset running Android 2.0, and it looks lovely. And already articles have popped-up examining its various (rumored) features and, naturally, pondering when we can buy one for ourselves.

Why is the first thought we have when we see a new mobile phone whether we should consider switching?

Admit it — when you look at a friend’s mobile phone you automatically run through a series of questions in the back of your mind. My standard set include “Does it look good?” and “Does it have a nice UI?” (Of course, certain conditions, if met, automatically remove the phone from consideration; such as “Oh, it’s a clamshell…” and “What are those hard nobbly plasticky things? Keys, you say?”)

We do the same with desktop computers. In an airport lounge or coffee shop I feel a certain sort of infallible pride when cracking open my MacBook. After all, everyone knows those are great machines, right? Yet I still look at the other machines around me and run through my mental checklist. It’s crazy how insecure I am, how much I need to be sure my laptop doesn’t suck.

Operating Systems, too, get the same appraisal. We can’t help it. Every new release of Mac OS X gets compared with the latest version of Windows. There’s every good reason to do this if you regularly use both platforms. If you only Tweet, update Facebook or watch hilarious kittens on YouTube, what does it matter that the paltform you don’t own and don’t need just got an upgrade?

Of course, Geeks will always do this comparison of technologies — it’s in our DNA, we can’t help ourselves. But there’s a problem; our technophilic tendencies leak over into the world of the Normals.

Is Y the New X?

We use our iPhones and Kindles to scan the tech press and follow geek–lists on Twitter, while Normals, on the other hand, read dead-tree newspapers and don’t know what Twitter is. But look at the so-called “Technology” columns in those newspapers (you know, where sidebars helpfully explain the meaning of words like “touchscreen” and “3G”) and you’ll notice that they’re forever comparing gadgets, computers, OS’s and websites. Trust me, no daily newspaper “technology” columnist genuinely believes their readers care about the differences between Twitter and BrightKite. Less so the differences between Snow Leopard and Windows 7. Strangely, that doesn’t stop them writing about it.

They’re just reading select blogs in the tech community and writing their own carbon copy equivalents of what they find there. It’s to be expected, for here in Geektown technology comparions are part of the landscape. But we are taking it too far. Particularly in asking that assinine question, “Is Y the new X?”

The Nexus One is generating a lot of (quite unnecessary) buzz and if you haven’t already stumbled upon the YX question, you very soon will — “Is the Nexus the real iPhone killer?”

I say it’s nonsense. In time we’ll see detailed teardowns of the Nexus, and while geeks will compare its screen and processor to other handsets, mainstream media hacks will salivate over the possibility that here, finally, at last! we have a phone to beat the iPhone. It’s a silly pursuit.

The Nexus One. A handsome phone, but not an iPhone Killer. (Image by Engadget)

It took almost three years, but manufacturers are fast catching-up to the iPhone. Bewildering, however, the press coverage of smartphones — driven to hysteria in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone — is almost entirely focused on finding an iPhone killer. It’s the same false-dichotomy we would ridicule if, say, Nissan’s next family five-door were hailed as “the Ford killer.” Ridiculous, right? After all, they’re both essentially just cars. Strip away the optional GPS and gravity-defying cup-holders and they both have the same basic innards. This is true of the latest smartphones. They’re basically the same. True, smartphones used to be terrible, but that’s only because manufacturers were committed to cheap and easy business models and customers didn’t know they could demand something better. Apple decided to do something about that. It was a one-time shift in the mobile industry that will not happen again. The only phone that’s going to replace the iPhone is — predictably enough — the next iPhone. I can’t believe intelligent, insightful journalists and editors keep missing that point.

For every smartphone owner on the planet I’d wager there are a dozen more people with a dumb “feature” phone. Those people will never go out of their way to buy smartphones, but as the latest technology becomes cheaper, smaller and easier to manufacture, it will find its way into all handsets. One day, all phones will be smart. And most people will get there never caring which handset came first, was better than some other handset, or was considered a “killer.”

It doesn’t matter if it’s Mac vs. Windows, Bing vs. Google or iPhone vs. Android. Breathless reports along the lines of “X is here, and Y should be worried…” are almost always just white noise.

The Nexus One is a non-story. I wonder how long it will take everyone else to realize that.

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The Solution Center will serve as a go-to place for developers to get information on development tools, as well as resources and services optimized specifically for Android on the ARM platform. The end result should be better devices that are able to get to market quickly. And because ARM is so prevalent in other consumer gadgets scattered around the home, it’s possible that the alliance will help bring Android to more devices.

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Of course, the easiest way to put a new spin on an old idea is to tailor it for a specific audience — which the the guys and gals from sketch comedy team Loading Ready Run nail with the Escapist News Network by focusing exclusively on video game news and culture. Hosted by Graham Stark and Kathleen DeVere, ENN‘s one-liners and punchlines can be a little dense for those outside the video game world, but even a casual gamer can appreciate a story on the gaming site Popcap that references the “enslavement of the human race via the highly addictive drug Bejeweled [Popcap's insanely popular puzzle game].”

In fairness, Escapist News Network‘s deadpan approach and dual anchor set-up is closer in style to Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update segment, which predates Stewart’s entire career by at least a decade. But by combining real news and actual jokes, as well as correspondent segments that emulate the Stephen Colbert school of interviewing, the show still manages to live up to the Daily Show legacy, and also do it proud with sharp production values and its own unique voice.

Closer to the Stewart model is the self-styled Walter Cronkite for YouTube, Bri Holt of Newsish. Closer to a vlog than a full newscast, Holt (who graduated from UCSD in 2008 with a degree in political science and film) uses his platform to discuss hard news issues like the economics of Medicare and deregulation, albeit with a frustrated, “why is the world so dumb” tone that’s easy to engage with.

While episodes could be more tightly edited and condensed, Newsish has slowly found its audience thanks to videos mocking, for example, a recent letter Rep. Michelle Bachmann read to the House of Representatives on the subject of alleged sex clinics in schools. The Newsish YouTube channel has close to 1,500 subscribers, and episodes average in the 1,000-10,000 range.

And these are only two recent examples of the format, which has also been explored by shows like Political Lunch, Your Geek News and The Young Turks. It’s a boom industry. Because what Stewart and The Daily Show have done is tear down the idea that because you sit at a news desk and stare into the camera, you’re supposed to give a quasi-impartial spin on the day’s events. It means that actual news programs anchored by impartial news anchors may become as archaic as cathode-ray tube TVs. But that’s just one of the side effects of the blogosphere, where opinion sometimes bears more weight than fact.

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However according to TI spokeswoman Lin Windle, the core TI market — comprised of students and teachers — is still buying calculators, in part because fears of cheating keep wireless-enabled devices out of classrooms and testing centers. “This iPhone app is a way to broaden — not shrink — the total market,” Windle said. “My husband is a realtor and at his office he has a BAII professional on his desk, but when he’s out in the field he needs something handy. We hope this appeals to a broader market.”

I personally would hate for anyone to pry my financial calculator out of my hands, and I treasure the memories of using my TI-85 graphing calculator to play Super Breakout while I was supposed to be learning algebra, so I’m pleased that calculators are getting a bit of a reprieve. Readers, what do you think? Will we ever give up our graphing, financial, or even plain-Jane standalone calculators?

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Since upgrading to iTunes 9, I’ve used Genius Mixes exclusively on both my computer and my portable devices. Contrast this to the two or three times I ever used a Genius playlist since their introduction in iTunes 8.

Get Your Mix On

First, in case you’re like me, it’s possible you need a little help in getting your Genius Mixes set up in the first place. The key is that once you upgrade your iTunes installation, there’s one more step to take before they appear. Go to your “Store” menus, and click on “Update Genius.” Once Apple (s aapl) delivers your results, your new Mixes will appear in the source menu in the left-hand side of the iTunes window, right under the Genius atom icon.

Clicking on it should reveal 12 squares with album cover composite images that show artists representative of the content found in each mix. I say should because I’m not sure if iTunes will necessarily generate all 12 for smaller library sizes, but you should at least have a few to choose from so long as you have more than a couple artists in your collection.

My Mixes

Individual mixes are named so as to give you an idea of what genre of music they contain. For example, some of my mixes are as follows:

• Indie Mix — Based on: Death Cab For Cutie, Rilo Kiley, The Most Serene Republic, and others.
• Hip Hop Mix — Based on: Kanye West, Common, The Fugees, and others.
• Pop Mix — Based on: Ray LaMontagne, Rocky Votolato, Adele, and others.
• Punk Mix — Based on: Rancid, Rise Against, Brand New, and others.
• Country Mix — Based on Wilco, Neko Case, Lucinda Williams, and others.

Most of my mixes look like those above. Smart, clearly defined, and pretty much how I would’ve divvied up my library if I ever bothered to arrange tracks into genre groupings. A few seem like collections of assorted odds and ends Apple couldn’t quite fit into the other categories. All are admittedly interesting, and most importantly, useful ways of sub-dividing my music collection, though.

How Well Does it Work?

Playing through these mixes, I found that Apple has indeed improved their Genius engine, since the results were much more impressive than they’ve ever been using Genius playlists based on a single song. My collection is diverse enough that I don’t always want to just turn on iTunes DJ, but a Genius Mix sets the mood perfectly for parties, for work, for working out, or just for relaxing.

Apple still needs to make some improvements before I’m completely sold, though. As of right now, you can only view your mixes in Grid mode, and only the track currently playing is visible. To see what’s coming up next, you actually have to fast forward to the next song. While it’s kind of exciting not knowing what’s in store, I’d much rather be able to see a playlist like in iTunes DJ or in classic Genius mode.

I also don’t like how you have to specifically select the playlists in your Audio settings and sync your iPhone or iPod in order to get Genius Mixes on your device. Genius should be able to analyze the content you already have on your iPhone or iPod and create Genius Mixes specific to the device. Maybe this doesn’t affect people whose libraries match on both, but my computer-based music collections far exceed the capacities of my mobile devices.

Recommendations

As for Genius recommendations, I do find that they’re much better than they were when they were first introduced. Of course, Apple’s had a year to collect data from millions of users to make things better, so it would be more remarkable if there wasn’t any noticeable difference in the returned results. Also, Genius will always be a subjective thing, so it’s hard to determine the efficacy of results beyond just the size of the catalog of artists available.

How are you finding your experience with Genius Mixes? Is Apple’s recommendation and organization engine finally worthy of its moniker?

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These chips are rapidly becoming a commodity, and so it makes sense to cede the market to larger players like Qualcomm and MediaTek, but TI is still placing a huge bet that it can make up the lost revenue on sales of its applications processors, analog chips and digital signal processors. I summed up discussions I had with the company in March when Greg Delagi, head of TI’s wireless terminals business, argued that TI thinks smarter phones, with its ARM-based OMAP applications processors designed for mobile Internet devices and netbooks, will win. But it’s possible that instead of the high-end application processors that TI is building, vendors may elect to build consumer devices with highly integrated chips that the company won’t be able to churn out profitably.

As for analog, most such chipmakers like National Semiconductor, Analog Devices  and others are expected to do well since these chips are essential when it comes to converting the real world to the zeros and ones required by the digital world. Analog chips are like translators, and now that everything from my tire pressure to my TV channels are regulated by digital processors, those translators are needed everywhere.

Texas Instruments has made big leaps of faith in technology before, getting into the digital signal processing business in the late ’90s as the rise of broadband connectivity everywhere meant an increase in the number of packets a router needed to sort. DSPs are the chips that handle packet routing and other jobs that need a high level of mathmatical processing in a hurry. They are also in home networks and cell phones handling the influx of digital information.

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