Sometimes a little slip of the tongue gives away a deeper truth. One of those happened on day two of Mobile World Congress when Michael O'Hara, CMO of the GSM Association, which represents mobile operators worldwide, introduced Simon Segars, the CEO of ARM. He referred to the company as A-R-M, spelling out the three letters. The semiconductors that make mobile possible are so far down the food chain that despite ARM processors being in essentially every handset in the world, the CMO of GSMA had not heard the name of the company enough to have internalized how it is pronounced. Of course Cadence is even further down the levels of consciousness. Security Simon used the example of the Hatton Garden heist a year ago as an example of how a typical security breach happens. The doors on the safe were of the best quality. The bars were solid and hard to cut. But the thieves found a disused elevator shaft and used a diamond tipped industrial drill to go through the concrete. Most breaches of security on electronic systems are like that: they don't break the cryptography, they find a way around the side. The challenge, Simon pointed out, is to get ahead of the curve and not just see things that are "obvious in retrospect" when it is too late. Otherwise we risk things that we do for security making us less secure. A few cameras around your home can help keep it more secure, but if thieves can hi-jack them to see when nobody is home, then not so much. A top priority for ARM is Trustzone, which allows keys to be stored in hardware and only trusted software to access them. His parting message was that everyone should try to break their own security. But not just by trying to break it yourself. The world is spread with security that was so good that the originator of the security couldn't break it him or herself. Hire a hacker. Anne Bouverot of Morpho showed some facial recognition technology used for biometric security. She used to be Director General of GSMA before taking the CEO job at Morpho, so I wonder if she can pronounce ARM correctly. She showed how the technology worked and how, by asking you to move your head, it could guarantee that it could not be spoofed by a photograph of you (they tried and the system correctly said it was a photo (actually it said there was recognition problem since they didn't want to let the user know that a flat photo had been detected). Virtual Reality One of the big things at this year's MWC has been virtual reality. At the Samsung event on Sunday night (that I didn't attend) they gave everyone a set of VR goggles. Samsung had a simulated roller-coaster ride that had a line halfway around the conference center to try out. In the interests of science, I stood in line for rather less time to try the "yellow submarine" of SK Telecom. The big different between VR and simple 3D vision is that when you move your head your field of vision moves. In the submarine, when there is a shark to your left, if you turn your head to look at it then it moves into the center of your vision just like in real life. This makes it a much more immersive experience. The seats in the submarine were also moving around but not in an especially synchronized way since some of us leaned one way and some the other given how the four passengers were on the moving platform back to back. Anyway, if you get a chance to try out some Occulus VR goggles then try it. For now the resolution is not quite good enough. As Zuckerberg had said the evening before, we really need two 4K video streams to make it feel less like you are looking at video screens a few inches in front of your eyeballs, and that will require 5G data rates. He felt it could be the killer app for 5G. I'm not so sure we are all going to be using VR as often as we look at video/TV/movies today, but who knows what young people will find normal. As the late Douglas Adams said, "Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." Qualcomm and Formula 1 The last "keynote" of the day had the president of Qualcomm giving an overview of where the company was trying to go. Then he brought out Lewis Hamilton, three-time Formula 1 (and current) champion, and Paddy Lowe who is the executive director of the winning team Mercedes AMG Petronas. At the other end of the stage was the winning car from last year. Lewis didn't really believe it since they have lots of mockup cars they use for events like that but he wandered over to take a look and confirmed that it was his actual car. "It's the one from Austin when you won the drivers championship." Conveniently, pre-season testing is going on in Barcelona in the same week as MWC so everyone was in town anyway. Lewis Hamilton said he had done 150 laps yesterday and was aching all over. "It's like going to the gym for the first time after a few months off." Paddy said how he (I don't know what team he was with) was the first to put CAN into a racecar, meaning that they could be the first with traction control. This is very important at the start since the car can accelerate right on the very limit of what the tires can take. But that is no longer enough. To optimize tires, they need to be at just the right temperature, to control how well they grip, and also how long they will last before they need changing (which takes about two seconds to change all four tires and dump a whole load of fuel into the car). The temperature is needed across the whole width of the tire and separately for all four tires. That means thermal imaging cameras. That is where Qualcomm actually comes in, since they know how to get large amounts of data over a radio interface in a way that the automotive industry, even the parts as advanced as Formula 1, do not. With the old telemetry, it would have taken 30 minutes to pull all the data out. The final question to Paddy was what would he like to see from a Formula 1 car in a regular street vehicle. He said the engine (or power system as they call it). It is a turbocharged engine with hybrid recovery of energy not just from regenerative braking but also through the turbocharger to recover more energy from the exhaust gases. This pus the efficiency up to 45% compared to 30% for a hybrid vehicle lika a Prius. So 50% better than a regular road car, giving a lot more performance for the same fuel/emissions. Lewis was asked the same question and answered a different one (he should be a politician). He pointed out that, "Only 22 people get to do this and I'd love for others to experience the thrill." He pointed out that unlike tennis or golf, where an amateur could have a similar experience, very few people get to experience a real race car.Image may be NSFW.
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