Hardware: Impulso a la industria de microchips en Argentina

El microchip, asunto de interés público

Argentina busca dar un salto tecnológico y diseñar los microchips que se utilizan en decodificadores, notebooks, televisores y otros productos electrónicos. El Ministerio de Industria ya comprometió a dos grandes empresas del sector para aportar al proyecto.

La intención es aprovechar el gran volumen de compras estatales para impulsar el uso de tecnología local.

 Por Javier Lewkowicz

El Gobierno evalúa montar una empresa dedicada al diseño de microprocesadores, que se utilizarían en los decodificadores de TV digital, notebooks del plan Conectar Igualdad, equipos de televisión, otros productos electrónicos y bienes de capital. El proyecto es de carácter público, aunque se les requirió a las empresas tecnológicas radicadas en Tierra del Fuego que aporten recursos. Dos de las firmas más grandes ya se comprometieron a hacerlo. La intención es aprovechar el importante volumen de las compras estatales de productos con tecnología para diseñar chips específicos que abaraten el costo final y acerquen el desarrollo tecnológico al tejido industrial nacional. Además, podría contribuir a sustituir ciertas importaciones que realiza Tierra del Fuego. No está definida todavía la inversión total que se requiere.

“Diseño de chips y productos acordes con las necesidades de Argentina Conectada –programa de expansión de la banda ancha y la TV digital en todo el país–, construcción en la Argentina de capacidades de diseño y desarrollo tecnológico en microelectrónica, sustituir importaciones en el sector de mayor déficit comercial y desarrollar proveedores nacionales con creciente nivel de integración nacional de componente e ingeniería.” Esos objetivos se propone un documento interno que circula entre el Ministerio de Industria, el INTI y la Universidad Nacional del Sur.

La idea del Gobierno es que en la Argentina se realice el diseño, previa adquisición de licencias, para que luego los chips se fabriquen en los países asiáticos, en particular Taiwan, que maneja una escala de producción muy importante. El microprocesador luego sería adquirido por las firmas tecnológicas de Tierra del Fuego para insertarlo en los productos electrónicos. La deslocalización del diseño es una metodología usual en la industria. Según datos del INTI, la fase de diseño representa dos terceras partes del costo de los microchips. “Es la célula básica de la industria electrónica”, indican. Los productos electrónicos a los cuales se podría proveer de chips son el decodificador de TV digital, las computadoras del plan Conectar Igualdad, tabletas digitales y televisores digitales smart, entre otros.

En el caso del decodificador, los equipos del Conectar Igualdad y otras compras públicas, la facilidad está dada por la escala de fabricación y por el tipo de negociación con las empresas de Tierra del Fuego, a las que se les acerca un importante negocio a cambio de la integración de chips. En los televisores digitales smart u otros productos de electrónica comercial, como los celulares, el esquema es más complicado porque las firmas electrónicas muchas veces adquieren el kit de partes completo desde Asia, sin que exista posibilidad –y muchas veces tampoco la disposición– de sustituir alguna de esas importaciones. A la vez, las empresas deberían validar el chip diseñado en forma local, negociación que dista de ser simple, aunque no imposible, indican en el Gobierno. La puesta en marcha del centro de diseño demoraría al menos un año y medio.

“Es interesante que Argentina desarrolle tecnología propia. Eso implica salarios más altos. Un buen modelo de desarrollo implica exportar salarios altos e importar salarios bajos”, indicó a Página/12 Alejandro Mayoral, titular de Afarte, la entidad que nuclea a las compañías que ensamblan productos electrónicos en Tierra del Fuego. La firma Brightstar, que fabrica para Samsung, LG, Motorola y BlackBerry, y Newsan, que trabaja con Lenovo, Sony y Panasonic, entre otras, aseguraron a la ministra de Industria, Débora Giorgi, que realizarán un aporte de capital para el proyecto. “Me parece bien que las empresas inviertan. Todos los modelos exitosos implican la participación del Estado, de las universidades y del sector privado”, completó Mayoral. En términos formales, se trataría de una empresa pública de diseño con participación privada a través de un fideicomiso, aunque sobre esos aspectos se está trabajando.

“El Estado es el gran comprador de tecnología en el país, desde la salud hasta la AFIP, pasando por la Anses y el sector energético. Existe una demanda enorme que no hay que desaprovechar. Lo difícil es salir a competir en el mercado global contra las grandes marcas. Pero esto es cazar en el zoológico”, grafica un miembro del equipo que trabaja en el proyecto. Tampoco escapa a la iniciativa la necesidad de mejorar la ecuación comercial del sector electrónico. Funcionarios no descartan que se pueda proveer de microprocesadores a maquinaria agrícola y autopartes.

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Polo Tecnológico: Singapur busca la aplicación matadora!

Singapore's Rising Tech Industry Draws Expat Innovators And Investors

by ANTHONY KUHN

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A reflection of the Marina Bay Esplanade in Singapore. The nation is increasingly seen as a corporate logistics hub and gateway to the region's emerging markets.

For the past six years in a row, the World Bank has rated the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore as the easiest place in the world to do business. Drawn in part by this reputation, money and talent are pouring into the island nation's growing technology sector.

One of Facebook's co-founders recently renounced his American citizenship and relocated to Singapore, where he has been investing in tech startups.

One of these firms is Perx, co-founded by former New Jersey resident Andrew Roth.

Anthony Kuhn/NPR

Andrew Roth is co-founder of Perx, a Singapore-based firm that uses smartphones as virtual loyalty cards.

At a coffee shop near his office, Roth demonstrates how the business works, by buying a couple of lattes. After paying for the coffee, the cashier shows Roth a printed symbol called a QR code. Roth uses his smartphone to scan the code. It's the digital equivalent of earning a stamp on a loyalty card, which, when full, can be redeemed for rewards.

"There are so many apps in the market right now ... that just kind of serve the consumer," Roth says. "And we took the approach with Perx to help the merchant first."

Roth says Singapore is an important test market for his company because it is the regional base for many multinationals. He plans to expand into Indonesia and other Southeast Asian markets in the future.

Since launching last year, Perx has added 60,000 registered users who have accumulated 250,000 digital stamps. Companies from Dunkin' Donuts to Procter & Gamble pay Perx a monthly fee to advertise and reward loyalty.

"We found a lot of research telling us that people really don't feel loyal to the company where they have a loyalty card," Roth says, adding that Perx aims to change that.

Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin has invested an undisclosed amount of money in Perx, and is set to join the startup's board of directors. Saverin declined to be interviewed.

Virginia Cha, a tech industry specialist at the National University of Singapore, says that both venture capitalists and Singapore's government have been plowing money into tech startups, setting the stage for technical innovation.

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"We've been seeing quite a few expat entrepreneurs coming to Singapore, setting up shop and raising funding here," she says. "So it's an easy environment to get started, especially since there's a lot of money now."

Cha cautions that ideas and products that work in Singapore — an island city of 5 million — will not necessarily work elsewhere.

But Cha herself is also an investor, betting on home-grown startups and cutting-edge technological applications.

"You need to have a killer app," she argues. "And so far the killer apps have come from the United States: Twitter, Facebook. We need a killer app that's created right here in Singapore."

Cha says investors like her are interested in more than just software. They're envisioning the future and betting that they can make it a reality.

For example, she points to a startup called Good For Us, which aims to inform consumers about the ethical implications of their purchases. Clive Wright, the chief business strategist for Good for Us, says his company uses data from environmental and human rights NGOs to rate corporations' ethics.

"How do I know if what I'm buying is produced and distributed in an ethical way?" he asks. "How do I know if the company that I'm dealing with actually deserves my money?"

Singapore serves as the nerve center for the company's global operations. Wright's technology specialist, a Scottish expat named Ian Morrison, is developing the company's software in Vietnam.

"Singapore is very much a digital hub for the world," Morrison says. "We have access to the very best education, the very best technology, the very best infrastructure."

Morrison is just one of the company's remote employees linked to its nexus in Singapore.

"Ian is a classic example," Wright says. "He has a development team in Vietnam. So through him, we are virtually in Vietnam as a business. Jim is in Geneva, and through him, we are connected to the global NGOs."

In that sense, Wright says, Singapore increasingly resembles Geneva, a place where companies go to establish regional headquarters.

Besides being the easiest place in the world to do business, Wright points out — perhaps more importantly for tech startups — Singapore is also one of the easiest places to close a business that fails.

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Cómo Apple inventó el iPhone

“It Smelled Something Like Pizza”

New documents reveal how Apple really invented the iPhone.

By Farhad Manjoo

The original iPhone

Photograph by Tony Avelar/AFP.

Like many of Apple’s inventions, the iPhone began not with a vision, but with a problem. By 2005, the iPod had eclipsed the Mac as Apple’s largest source of revenue, but the music player that rescued Apple from the brink now faced a looming threat: The cellphone. Everyone carried a phone, and if phone companies figured out a way to make playing music easy and fun, “that could render the iPod unnecessary,” Steve Jobs once warned Apple’s board, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography.

Fortunately for Apple, most phones on the market sucked. Jobs and other Apple executives would grouse about their phones all the time. The simplest phones didn’t do much other than make calls, and the more functions you added to phones, the more complicated they were to use. In particular, phones “weren't any good as entertainment devices,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s longtime marketing chief, testified during the company’s patent trial with Samsung. Getting music and video on 2005-era phones was too difficult, and if you managed that, getting the device to actually play your stuff was a joyless trudge through numerous screens and menus.

That was because most phones were hobbled by a basic problem—they didn’t have a good method for input. Hard keys (like the ones on the BlackBerry) worked for typing, but they were terrible for navigation. In theory, phones with touchscreens could do a lot more, but in reality they were also a pain to use. Touchscreens of the era couldn’t detect finger presses—they needed a stylus, and the only way to use a stylus was with two hands (one to hold the phone and one to hold the stylus). Nobody wanted a music player that required two-handed operation.

This is the story of how Apple reinvented the phone. The general outlines of this tale have been told before, most thoroughly in Isaacson’s biography. But the Samsung case—which ended last month with a resounding victory for Apple—revealed a trove of details about the invention, the sort of details that Apple is ordinarily loath to make public. We got pictures of dozens of prototypes of the iPhone and iPad. We got internal email that explained how executives and designers solved key problems in the iPhone’s design. We got testimony from Apple’s top brass explaining why the iPhone was a gamble.

Put it all together and you get remarkable story about a device that, under the normal rules of business, should not have been invented. Given the popularity of the iPod and its centrality to Apple’s bottom line, Apple should have been the last company on the planet to try to build something whose explicit purpose was to kill music players. Yet Apple’s inner circle knew that one day, a phone maker would solve the interface problem, creating a universal device that could make calls, play music and videos, and do everything else, too—a device that would eat the iPod’s lunch. Apple’s only chance at staving off that future was to invent the iPod killer itself. More than this simple business calculation, though, Apple’s brass saw the phone as an opportunity for real innovation. “We wanted to build a phone for ourselves,” Scott Forstall, who heads the team that built the phone’s operating system, said at the trial. “We wanted to build a phone that we loved.”

The problem was how to do it. When Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, he showed off a picture of an iPod with a rotary-phone dialer instead of a click wheel. That was a joke, but it wasn’t far from Apple’s initial thoughts about phones. The click wheel—the brilliant interface that powered the iPod (which was invented for Apple by a firm called Synaptics)—was a simple, widely understood way to navigate through menus in order to play music. So why not use it to make calls, too?

In 2005, Tony Fadell, the engineer who’s credited with inventing the first iPod, got hold of a high-end desk phone made by Samsung and Bang & Olufsen that you navigated using a set of numerical keys placed around a rotating wheel. A Samsung cell phone, the X810, used a similar rotating wheel for input. Fadell didn’t seem to like the idea. “Weird way to hold the cellphone,” he wrote in an email to others at Apple. But Jobs thought it could work. “This may be our answer—we could put the number pad around our clickwheel,” he wrote. (Samsung pointed to this thread as evidence for its claim that Apple’s designs were inspired by other companies, including Samsung itself.)

Around the same time, Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, had been investigating a technology that he thought could do wonderful things someday—a touch display that could understand taps from multiple fingers at once. (Note that Apple did not invent multitouch interfaces; it was one of several companies investigating the technology at the time.) According to Isaacson’s biography, the company’s initial plan was to the use the new touch system to build a tablet computer. Apple’s tablet project began in 2003—seven years before the iPad went on sale—but as it progressed, it dawned on executives that multitouch might work on phones. At one meeting in 2004, Jobs and his team looked a prototype tablet that displayed a list of contacts. “You could tap on the contact and it would slide over and show you the information,” Forstall testified. “It was just amazing.”

Jobs himself was particularly taken by two features that Bas Ording, a talented user-interface designer, had built into the tablet prototype. One was “inertial scrolling”—when you flick at a list of items on the screen, the list moves as a function of how fast you swipe, and then it comes to rest slowly, as if being affected by real-world inertia. Another was the “rubber-band effect,” which causes a list to bounce against the edge of the screen when there were no more items to display. When Jobs saw the prototype, he thought, “My god, we can build a phone out of this,” he told the D Conference in 2010.

The company decided to abandon the click-wheel idea and try to build a multitouch phone. Jobs knew it was a risk—could Apple get typing to work on a touchscreen?—but the payoff could be huge: If the phone’s only interface was a touchscreen, it would be endlessly flexible—you could use it not just for talking and music but for anything else, including lots of third-party applications. In other words, a touchscreen phone wouldn’t be a phone but “really a computer in your pocket in some ways,” as Forstall said in court.

Apple is known for secrecy, but Jobs wanted the iPhone kept under tighter wraps than usual. The project was given a codename—“Project Purple”—and, as Forstall testified, Jobs didn’t let the iPhone team recruit anyone from outside the company to work on the device. Instead, Forstall had to make a strange pitch to superstar engineers in different parts of the company: “We're starting a new project,” he’d tell them. “It's so secret I can't even tell you what that project is. I can't tell you who you will work for.... What I can tell you is that if you accept this project … you will work nights, you will work weekends, probably for a number of years.”

The iPhone team took over an entire building at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters. "Very much like a dorm, people were there all the time,” Forstall said in court. “It smelled something like pizza, and in fact on the front door of the Purple Dorm we put a sign up that said 'Fight Club'—because the first rule of that project was to not talk about it outside those doors." (Thanks to The Verge for transcribing Forstall’s testimony.)

The iPhone team broke down into two separate but closely integrated groups—the guys who were doing the hardware and the guys who were doing the software. (I can’t find any evidence that there were any women working on the phone.) The software team’s main job was figuring out a way to make a completely novel interface feel intuitive and natural. One way they did this was by creating finger “gestures” that allowed you to get around the phone very quickly. Some of these, like pinch-to-zoom, had been used in multitouch projects in the past (you can see some in Minority Report) but others were Apple’s fresh ideas. For instance, Forstall used a prototype iPhone as one of his main computers, and as he used it, he found that constantly pinching to zoom in on the screen became tedious. In a flash, he thought, why not have the phone figure out how to zoom with a just a double-tap on the screen? This was a difficult gesture to implement—the phone had to “understand the structure” of the document it was zooming in on, he explained—but once engineers got tap-to-zoom to work, Forstall found the phone to be much easier to use. “It allowed me to browse the Web much more fluently,” he said.

The hardware team, meanwhile, was trying to figure out what the phone would look like. In court, Christopher Stringer, one of the Apple’s veteran designers, explained that the company created the phone through a process of rigorous refinement. A group of about 15 designers would regularly assemble around a kitchen table set up in Apple’s design studio to review, in painfully fine detail, every idea for various parts of the iPhone’s design. Apple has an extensive array of systems to quickly create physical prototypes of digital designs, and the team would handle all of these prototypes and remark on how they felt. “We’re a pretty maniacal group of people,” Stringer explained, pointing out that they would sometimes review 50 different refinements of a single hardware button.

 Documents in the trial revealed some of the many iPhone designs that Apple considered. There were thin phones; fat ones; ones with rounded glass on the front and back; some with flat sides and a rounded top and bottom, and others with rounded sides and flat tops and bottoms; and even one with an octagonal shape. Apple also looked to other companies as inspiration. In 2006, design chief Jonathan Ive pulled aside one of his designers, Shin Nishibori, and asked, “If Sony were to make an iPhone, what would it be like? Would you make it for me?” according to Nishibori’s deposition. The result was a skinny phone that looks much like today’s iPhone, except it had volume buttons on the front, rather than the side, of the phone. (Samsung attempted to argue in court that this design proved Apple copied Sony, but the judge barred that argument, which was bogus anyway—the design didn’t look like any actual Sony phone, and was instead only Apple’s take on Sony’s design aesthetic.)

By the spring of 2006, about a year before the iPhone’s release, Ive and his team had settled on a design for the iPhone. Their winning prototype looked similar to Apple’s 2004-era iPod Mini—it was a metallic device with rounded sides, what designers referred to as “extruded” aluminum. You can see it in a 2006 photo unveiled in the trial—it’s the one left.

Two iPhone prototypes revealed during the Samsung trial. On the left is a version that was scrapped just months before the phone's release.

The phone on the right is another prototype, one that looks a lot more like the iPhone that Steve Jobs unveiled in January of 2007. Indeed, the phone on the right seems almost identical to the iPhone 4, which Apple launched in 2010. What happened? Why did Apple go from building the phone on the left to a version of the one on the right?

We can’t know for sure, but we have some clues. One reason Apple switched the design was that the rounded sides seemed superfluous. “I’m really worried that we’re making something that is going to look and be too wide,” Apple designer Richard Howarth argued in an email to Ive. Plus, Howarth argued, if Apple cut volume control buttons into the rounded sides, it would remove “the purity of the extrusion idea.”

There was a bigger problem with the extruded-metal phone: One morning Jobs came into the office and declared that he just didn’t love it. As Isaacson describes it, Jobs realized that the design squeezed the phone’s glass display into an aluminum frame—but because the display was the iPhone’s only interface, the design had to put the screen on center stage. Ive realized instantly that Jobs was right. “I remember feeling absolutely embarrassed that he had to make the observation,” he told Isaacson.

So, around the spring of 2006, a few months before the iPhone’s public debut, the team decided to start all over with something new. Looking through their old designs, they found a prototype they’d sketched a year earlier. This phone was a plain rectangle with rounded corners, a single button on its face, and a glass panel that covered the entire face of the phone. This was the iconic design that would become the iPhone.

Changing the design meant that Apple had to alter all of the phone’s internal components in just a few months’ time. The team would have to work nights and weekends in complete secrecy, and most of them would never, ever be able to take credit for what they helped accomplish. Of course, none of this is a surprise about Apple. In some ways, the trial only added fresh details to a story about maniacal precision and obsession that has long been clear. On the other hand, the story is a powerful reminder of something you tend to forget when you goof off on your iPhone: Nothing about it was obvious. Stuff that seems really small and intuitive about its design—things like inertial scrolling, the rubber-band effect, the simple idea of making the device a rectangle with rounded corners—only came about because Apple’s designers spent years thinking those things up and making them real. As designer Christopher Stringer said during the trial, “Our role is to imagine products that don’t exist and guide them to life.”

Slate

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Facebook y la amistad entre países

Facebook presentó un mapa que muestra la amistad entre países

La red social publicó un mapa que refleja el comportamiento de los habitantes en función de los vínculos que generan entre sí los usuarios en la plataforma

Con una atractiva animación que busca reflejar las relaciones que tienen las naciones entre sí, Facebook presentó un mapa interactivo construido junto con el estudio de diseño Stamen a partir de los vínculos internacionales que tiene cada país; mide las conexiones que tiene la red social entre los 900 millones de usuarios que utilizan la plataforma creada y liderada por Mark Zuckerberg.

Lo que hace el mapa es mostrar con qué países tienen más relación los usuarios de una determinada nación; en el caso de la Argentina, por ejemplo (ver imagen), la mayor parte de los vínculos de los usuarios argentinos de Facebook vienen de Uruguay, España, Chile, Paraguay y Perú.

Las corrientes inmigratorias son uno de los vínculos más identificables en esta visualización, como los movimientos que recibió Argentina en la últimos años provenientes de otros países de América latina. Otros se remotan a varias décadas atrás, como los vínculos que tiene Brasil con Japón, que posiciona a los habitantes del gigante sudamericano como la tercera comunidad extranjera más grande en tierras niponas, detrás de sus vecinos asiáticos geográficamente más cercanos, como Corea y China.

Otras relaciones son más extrañas de explicar, como el vínculo que tiene República Centroafricana, una de las naciones más pobres de África, con Kazajistán, o la de Ecuador con la República Democrática del Congo.

Uno de los motivos de este desarrollo de la red social parte desde la teoría de los seis grados de separación, basado en una investigación realizada por Stanley Milgram y que, con la llegada de Internet, volvió a cobrar vigencia con diversas experimentaciones basadas en la figura de Kevin Bacon , en donde cualquier actor puede estar en contacto en seis pasos o menos con el protagonista de Footloose .

No obstante, con su inmensa base de datos de usuarios, Facebook argumenta con este mapa interactivo que en esta representación las personas reflejan, a través de las relaciones internacionales de los países, que la teoría de los seis grados de separación en la red socialrequiere de menos pasos para estar en contacto con otra persona: apenas 4,7 saltos es el promedio mundial..

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Patentes: Apple versus Samsung

Apple ahora denunció a Samsung por otras 4 patentes

Entre los aparatos supuestamente plagiados están el nuevo Galaxy S III, el Galaxy Note y el Galaxy Note 10.1.

En busca de capitalizar una gran victoria legal sobre su rival Samsung Electronics Ltd, Apple Inc presentó en una corte federal una nueva demanda para determinar si otros cuatro productos de Samsung, incluyendo el reciente Galaxy S III, infringieron patentes de la firma estadounidense. 

El caso, que no debe confundirse con la reciente resolución a favor del gigante californiano, fue presentada por primera vez en febrero, dondeApple presentó ocho patentes utilizadas en 17 dispositivos Samsung.

Junto con el Galaxy S III y la versión utilizada por la compañía telefónica estadounidense Verizon, Apple añade a la lista de dispositivos ilícitos el Galaxy Note y el Galaxy Note 10.1, con lo suman un total de 21 dispositivos presuntamente plagiados.

Apple ya logró un fallo muy favorable en el juicio de patentes contra Samsung después de que el jurado encontrara a la compañía surcoreana culpable de plagio y le impusiera el pago de una indemnización de 1.000 millones de dólares.

Según la demanda de Apple, Samsung continúa "inundando el mercado con productos de imitación y "lanzando nuevos productos infractores, incluyendo su actual buque insignia, el Galaxy S III".

TN

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