Remember the good ol’ days of VHS tape (if you can call them that)? Well, it seems those days are back. Before you start to laugh or roll your eyes, it should be said that there won’t be any large, blocky, plastic cassettes to insert into a player. Rather, scientists from the EPFL school in Switzerland are using the same nickel-iron material to make nonowires that can store bits of information magnetically. The interesting part is both the speed and the amount of memory that can be put on the chip. When a user decides to access that memory, it simply gets pushed around inside the tape using a spin polarized current which allows it to go several hundred miles per second. Of course, the real beauty of the design is that billions of these nanowires could be embedded on a chip providing a seriously large capacity hard drive that would also be shock proof at the same time.

Of course, the real question is if we will even see this technology in our lifetime. I can’t tell you how many times I hear about a cool new technology only to be completely deflated when I read at the end of the announcement that it won’t be available until sometime after the apocalypse. Thankfully, this isn’t the case with racetrack memory. Since the scientists who discovered the speed of racetrack memory have a great relationship with IBM, they are saying we could be seeing this as a market-ready product in 5-7 years. A technology that can make hard drives 100,000 times faster than current models in 5 years time? I suppose we can all live with that.

I’m sure you don’t need to be convinced of the huge potential this technology has for video editing. With read and write speeds being 100,000 times faster, we could have applications that open up instantaneously and video that renders twice as fast as what you could possibly get right now without an SSD. As video editors, I’m sure that’s something we can all tip our hats to.

In a bid to take up even more of the wireless radio spectrum, President Barack Obama has signed a presid

ential memorandum supporting the FCC’s release of  500 MHz of wireless spectrum for broadband services. It’s been no secret that the FCC has been trying to play catch up with Europe on broadband speed and technology. This new initiative paves the way for the FCC to sell spectrum that can potentially deliver wireless broadband speeds of up to 100 megabits a second to 100 million homes in the United States. It also makes it possible for the FCC to create a nationwide safety communication network, something they’ve been trying to accomplish ever since emergency workers across the country had trouble talking to one another during the September 11th attack.

The FCC is currently fast-tracking an exploration of the broadband spectrum that is still available and how quickly other parts of the spectrum will open up. As the wireless spectrum is limited and is in high demand, this freed up spectrum is expected to go for more than 10 billion dollars when the FCC sells it in the next 5 years. This is money that will go towards both the safety communication network infrastructure and to actually pay off the national debt.

Of course on the video side, the only real question is does this mean that we’ll have to buy new wireless microphones again? The 700 MHz frequency range has already been sold off so who’s to say that wireless microphone frequency holders might not want to sell off more? Plus with all of the other important uses for the other parts of the spectrum, there can be no doubt that the pressure will be high for wireless microphone frequency holders to sell out. On the plus side however, if that event does occur,  you should have no problem getting updated quickly on your new 100 megabit per second wireless connection.

Well this was a long time coming. When Internet speeds went from dial-up 56kbps to broadband in the late 90′s, content providers the world over realized the huge potential for delivering video, information, and rich applications to users. This led to a huge boom in internet activity only rivaled by the introduction of quick and easy to use internet on cell phones. However as with any heavy traffic situation, you eventually get jams and the internet is no exception.

With the vast number of users downloading large video and application files over the internet, speeds and bottle-necking became a huge issue. Additionally, even with the vast improvement of internet speeds (up to 20 megabits per second today), there were still long wait times while downloading large files – which has become increasingly more common as games and applications become more complex and as videos achieve higher and higher resolutions. The problem didn’t stop there however. Even if a person could theoretically achieve internet speeds at 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) or more, getting those speeds from a router to a computer wirelessly would be impossible with current technology. At the moment, the fastest consumer option for wireless transfer is Wireless USB technology which can transfer at speeds up to 480 Mbps; half of the theoretical 1 Gbps speed coming into your home. Read the rest of this entry »