Innovations that herald a new tech era
By Kukil Bora, SiliconIndia   |   Friday, 05 November 2010, 12:43 IST   |    2 Comments
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Innovations that herald a new tech era
Bangalore: "Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things" and hence, innovative ideas are always critical for survival and growth today. Every other day we come across new technologies focusing on solving a variety of complexities. But very few of them we can tag as true innovations. Let's take a look at some of the important innovative technologies in key areas like computing systems, network security, software and wireless. Software: Simplifying the process of building 3D games, San Francisco-based Unity Technologies has brought out software with the help of which one can easily create 3D interactive content like games, training simulations and medical visualizations for various device including cell phones to game systems. The software has an editor that can take prefabricated components and combine them with other features to create full game environments. It has the best innovation award in the Software category of The Wall Street Journal 2010 Technology Innovation Awards. Wireless: Addressing two of the key problems - poor cellphone coverage inside a house and the growing congestion on cellular networks, Ubiquisys, a UK-based firm has introduced a small cellular base station for use indoors named Femtocells. The company's first femtocell to be sold at a wholesale price under $100 was G3-mini. The technology has won the best innovation award in the Wireless category of The Wall Street Journal 2010 Technology Innovation Awards. iSIM, developed by Motorola is another key innovation in the world of wireless technologies. Motorola's iSIM (Intelligent SIM) is based on a flexible wafer that can be attached to the subscriber's original SIM providing additional services that can be controlled via SIM tool kit (STK) allowing third party developers to build applications and services. Now, let's come to Pyxis Mobile's Application Studio. It is a platform that allows creating applications for mobile devices without coding. Companies can build apps with Pyxis Mobile without any hard coding, which enables to cut development time by as much as 80 percent. Computing Systems: U.S.-based Lightfleet has come up with a new way of connecting computer processors that uses beamed light instead of copper or fiber-optic wires. The key difference that this new technology from Lightfleet brings is that the traditional wired switches used to manage connections between microprocessors will be replaced by a device that will send a data-carrying beam of light to all the nodes at once. The technology has won the best innovation award in the Computing Systems category of The Wall Street Journal 2010 Technology Innovation Awards. Another U.S.-based firm named Marvell Semiconductor has introduced Plug Computer, a small and low-power networked home server, which is capable of delivering data and applications to a variety of devices. At a time when consumers expect always- on and always- connected computing, this innovation from Marvell can find traction among the users. Unlike other embedded devices in the home, it contains a gigahertz- class processor designed to offer PC- class performance. Network Security: No matter how important the Internet is for us, it is true that it has gradually turned out to be the 'sweet home' for viruses, worms, spyware, Trojan horses and many other malicious software. But there are new ways coming out every day with the focus of heading off these threats. Symantec's "reputation-based" technology is one of the most innovative ones in this category. In order to spot dangers that the traditional security products are unable to tap, this new technology examines the usage patterns of millions of computers. On the basis of data these patterns give about a particular program's characteristics like source, age and prevalence, the technology from Symantec assigns a "reputation rating" to each of the software that it examines. Since there are so many new malware variants constantly appearing, this new security solution can be effective to spot them. It has won the best innovation award in the Network Security category of The Wall Street Journal 2010 Technology Innovation Awards. With the increasing demand for cloud computing, cloud-based security solutions are also gaining momentum. Spain-based Panda Security has introduced a free, cloud-based antivirus solution with 50 percent less impact on PC performance compared to the industry average. It utilizes a thin-client agent and server architecture which processes and blocks malware more efficiently than locally installed signature-based products. SinglePoint is another key innovation by the U.S.-based cloud security company Symplified,that provides a cloud-native unified identity and access management platform allowing companies to extend and enforce IT security policies for access control, authentication, administration of users, and auditing to cloud applications.

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