MWC LA 2019 Lays out the Road Ahead for 5G

MWC LA 2019 Lays out the Road Ahead for 5G

August 2019 – The MWC LA Conference is once again bringing the latest technology and information on 5G, connected cars and everything wireless to the US.  The MWC LA conference is the North Amercian centered show of the industry leading cellular  MWC Barcelona conference in February. 

The Conference in LA shows off the new technologies for the ever ongoing advanced in cell phone and the associated wireless connectivity.  While the big title may be 5G, it also means connected cars, new experiences for entertainment and gaming, and security for all these connections..

For Entertainment, the long awaited higher performance for mobile games is on the way.  This will allow the cell phone and table platforms to have similar gaming graphics as console games offered just a short while back.  It also means that PC and console games can enjoy new wireless controllers and connectivity bringing a new gaming experience.

The 5G technology is also supposed to be the last piece of the puzzle to allow Virtual Reality to become the mainstream viewing environment for all gaming and content.  It has been hypothesized by several VR makers that while their sales targets have been behind for over a decade, with 5G deployment their sales will beat all expectations and replace TVs and cell phones as the primary screens in peoples lives.  This are pretty big shoes for 5G to fill.

The conference will also cover entertainment content which is about streaming media in a cellular and wireless environment.  These discussions pertain not only to being able to enjoy your favorite movie and live sports with a better quality of experience, but  also for being able to participate in high quality video conferences and intranet based video message delivery.

The conference has keynotes from many leaders including FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, Executives from Verizon, Intel, US Cellular, Ericsson, Nokia and Open Table.

The 3 day event is returning to the LA Convention Center October 22-24, 2019.

New Decade of Consumer Technology

New Decade of Consumer Technology

The first decade of the 21st century was known for introducing smartphones to the masses, as well as introducing the first smart TV. Ten years later starting in 2010, the world became socially connected thanks to companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Netflix.  We are now rapidly approaching a new period of consumer technology called the Data Age.

This “Data Age” comes to life under the shadow of the tremendous flow of data security and privacy concerns becoming the number one issue across the entire globe. Different countries are dealing with these complex issues with different solutions and with The European Union for example, implemented strict rules and regulations, last year, called GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). China, on other hand, has no government organized privacy and security regulations.

Both companies and individuals are at risk.  “With computing processing power increasing dramatically, even passwords that are 14 to 20 characters long will be readily crackable and largely ineffective for protecting high-value, high-risk assets and transactions by 2020”- warns Forrester, an American market research company that provides advice on existing and potential impact of technology to its clients and the public.

As risky as this  as can be, the world must stay connected because only this connectivity allows us to live in smart cities, in intelligent houses, drive connected cars and very soon be driven by autonomous vehicles.

This next generation of data connectivity will require wireless technology from 5G that can connect devices with the next generation fast speeds. Those in the race to bring the technology to marketplace and get a foot int the door for the business that goes with it include China Telecom, KDDI in Japan, SK telecom in South Korea, through Verizon and AT&T in the USA, Shaw and Rogers in Canada, to Ericsson all over Europe:  Vodafone and BT in United Kingdom, Deutsche Telecom in Germany, Orange in France and Telefonica in Spain. As 5G becomes a crucial component of technology development, the entire world needs to adapt to it.

In the last few years, home security cameras, thermostats, and connected lighting equipment have become more common in homes and sales continue to increase. Just imagine how the IoT (Internet of Things) environment is going to explode with the rollout of 5G.

For example, for smart home development into existing homes, consumers usually don’t buy all those devices from the same platforms or at the same time. This brings the challenge of how the consumer can connect all these different products, brands and platforms together as well as the devices that haven’t even been invented yet. The idea of a practical smart home is like bringing together different instruments to create a symphony orchestra that need to play in unison.   Following connectivity, the Smart Home’s Next Trend will be Interoperability and Intelligence.

It is difficult to imagine the smart home without some type of digital assistance activated by voice and equipped with Artificial Intelligence. Three truths about voice/AI assistant are: 1.) Digital assistance is going into everything: devices, appliances and cars 2.) Support for digital assistance has become table stakes: services, brands, commerce 3.) Voice is quickly becoming the “go-to” interface – it allows you to keep doing what you are doing as well as have the digital assistant do something that normally requires your hands.

For example, Amazon Alexa has nearly 60,000 skills and 20,000+ compatible devices. The way how we interact with digital assistance shown the study done by Consumer Technology Association (CTA) in August 2018. US online adult study shows how people make a use of Amazon Alexa(in%):  Ask questions – 63, Check the weather – 58, Listen to music/radio/podcasts – 50, Set a timer or alarm – 45, Call someone – 32, Check the news/sports – 30, Send a message to someone – 25, Search for recipes/cooking information – 23, Check personal calendar – 22.

We also beginning to understand the limits of automation. AI intelligence and automation are really transform the way we access data, we use data. AI is helping us to understand the data.   The first generation of voice control required people to learn “command words” and “special phrases”.  With AI in the system, it can now understand conversation and what actions to do next.  For example, without AI and data analysis you would say “Alexa, turn up the thermostat by 2 degrees” now you can say “Alexa, I am cold”.  The system will recognize who “I” is and the context for the word “cold” based on what location you were talking from and the system can respond “would you like me to turn up the thermostat by 2 degrees”.

This direction of connectivity, interoperability, high speed data and analytics as well as “personalized models” is what is driving the next generation of Smart Home.  The “personalized models” are the core of the privacy concerns.  It means the computer has to both know that it is you, and more importantly know everything about you – what you eat, where you shop, what temperature you like the house, what shows you watch and what music you listen to, who you visit and talk to, what your schedule is, what your interests are,   To be able to be helpful, the computer has to know how to help.  By knowing how to help you be more comfortable, it means that all of that data has to be stored someplace, and hopefully used only for your benefit.  Governments, companies, and technology are all working together, finally, to try and insure the next decade is a beneficial Data Age to make your life better.

Interview with Deloitte’s Cyber Risk & Financial Services at RSA 2019

Interview with Deloitte’s Cyber Risk & Financial Services at RSA 2019

In this interview, recorded for Roadway Media at RSA 2019, Daniel Frank of Deloitte’s Cyber Risk and Financial Services team talks to Bright Blue Innovation’s Lidia Paulinska about GDPR, US privacy regulations and the integration of privacy requirements and practices into the existing security environment.  The discussion includes trends applicable to SMBs and enterprise clients.

Here is the link to the interview:

Interview with CEO of Cequence Security at RSA 2019

Interview with CEO of Cequence Security at RSA 2019

In this interview, recorded for Roadway Media at RSA 2019, Larry Link, President & CEO of Cequence talks to the Bright Blue Innovation’s Lidia Paulinska about the increased attack surface for security based on the direct to business & customer exposure from the use of external facing applications.  They discussed the need and solutions for administering and protecting the application space.

Here is the link to the interview:

Interview with CEO of DataLocker at RSA 2019

Interview with CEO of DataLocker at RSA 2019

In this interview, recorded for Roadway Media at RSA 2019, the CEO Jay Kim of Datalocker talks to Bright Blue Innovation’s Lidia Paulinska about the expanding need for secure removable storage media in the enterprise and SMB marketplace.

Here is the link to the interview:

Welcome to Omniverse – One Shared Unified World for Filmmakers

Welcome to Omniverse – One Shared Unified World for Filmmakers

At the GTC 2019 Keynote conference in San Jose this month, Nvidia’s CEO and founder Jensen Huang announced Omniverse, an open collaboration platform to simplify studio workflows for real-time graphics.

This has been in the works for nearly 25 years with the company, who have been long trying to make this happen throughout the years, worked closely with Pixar Animation Studios.  With Omniverse, the production pipeline in producing a full featured animated film now has become much simpler and more efficient in the process, as well as being a big money saver for the Hollywood animation studios.

Huang explained, “If you take a look at a major film and it cost something like $300M to 350M to produce that film and the vast majority of it is post production which is otherwise known as rendering and it might take something along the lines of that year and a half a year to year and a half.”

“If you could even save one month on what is otherwise a one year long project, the amount of money you could possibly say is in the millions and so this is one of the reasons why this industry is such in a hurry to find ways to accelerate the rendering process and to accelerate the production process.”

Making animated films has always been labor intensive throughout the complete complex rendering pipeline; from the beginning of its concept, modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, lighting and finally, the rendering process itself.

“You have to render it make it look totally perfect…and then once you create the character, you have to composite a whole bunch of other characters in the scene and all the environments and all the special effects…are done in physics simulation it is so so complicated.”  Huang continued, “…a few shots may be assigned to a studio, a few shots would be assigned to another studio… as a result, multiple studios in multiple sites are all working on a movie at the same time.”

Omniverse includes portals — two-way tunnels — that maintain live connections between industry-standard applications such as Autodesk Maya, Adobe Photoshop and Epic Games’ Unreal Engine.

This new open collaboration platform streamlines 2D and 3D product pipelines across industries. Omniverse is built around the latest industry standards for design collaboration.

It supports Pixar’s Universal Scene Description technology for exchanging information about modeling, shading, animation, lighting, visual effects and rendering across multiple applications. It also supports NVIDIA’s Material Definition Language, which allows artists to exchange information about surface materials across multiple tools.

In addition to Pixar, there are presently more than 200 animation film studios around the world but you can now work with any film studio no matter which continent they are located in.

Astonishingly, graphic artists and designers will be able to view updates made in real time, as though they are in the same room sitting next to each other through NVIDIA’s Omniverse Viewer, which gives users a live look at work being done in a wide variety of tools.  No matter where the filmmakers or studios are, even if they are working with on remote laptops, Omniverse connects and unifies all the designers together from anywhere making it one identifiable project, instead of hundreds of small projects that studios have been so accustomed to throughout the years.

To top it off, the Omniverse Viewer delivers the highest quality photorealistic images in real time by taking advantage of rasterization as well as support for NVIDIA RTX RT Cores, CUDA cores and Tensor Core-enabled AI.

“With Omniverse, NVIDIA has created a product artists will be eager to put to work,” said Guido Quaroni, vice president of Software at Pixar. “When we open sourced USD, our goal was to make it easier to combine complex characters and environments into a single scene. Omniverse raises the bar, leveraging USD to enable scalable real-time collaborative workflows across some of the industry’s major software packages.”

With Omniverse, artists can see live updates made by other artists working in different applications. They can also see changes reflected in multiple tools at the same time.

As a result, artists now have the flexibility to use the best tool for the task at hand.

For example an artist using Maya with a portal to Omniverse can collaborate with another artist using UE4 and both will see live updates of each others’ changes in their application.

Whether it’s Epic Games, Adobe or Autodesk, or any other Pixar collaborator, they are all encouraged by the new platform, as it allows artists to collaborate regardless of the tool they use and without the need for time-consuming conversions.

“We love the idea of connecting tools from all vendors to enable collaborative workflows,” said Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic Games. “We adopted USD and MDL to streamline workflows where assets originate from many different applications, so it’s great to see NVIDIA extend that ecosystem to enable live connections with simultaneous updates.”

“Omniverse is an exciting concept that will enable artists around the world to collaborate on digital content creation,” said Sebastien Deguy, vice president of 3D and Immersive at Adobe. “We look forward to seeing its development and evolution.”

“We’re thrilled to explore the potential of NVIDIA Omniverse to give our customers access to immersive, interactive and collaborative experiences across industries,” said Amy Bunszel, senior vice president of Design and Creation Products at Autodesk. “We share their vision of better world modeling and simulation. By combining USD and RTX, Omniverse promises to accelerate the future of design and make.”

Huang professed at the Keynote address, “I can’t wait to see the first major motion movie made by Pixar, rendered completely on RTX”.  With Omniverse, it should be even more productive.

“To infinity and beyond!”

Here is a video demonstrating Omniverse at the Keynote, with CEO Jensen Huang.