Jonathan Takiff: The latest on getting connected

BEYOND SATURATION: In its core business, the mobile phone industry has gotten almost as big as it can. According to the cellular telecommunications association CTIA, wireless phone subscriptions last year reached 270 million - 84 percent of the entire U.S. population.
So how does a saturated industry raise revenues?
By pushing for wireless technology, using the mobile networks' data channels, to be integrated into a myriad of other consumer electronics products and services.
This was a major theme at last week's CTIA Wireless convention in Las Vegas.
GET A BUZZ ON: AT&T Mobility president Ralph de la Vega predicted that the time will soon come when shoppers will walk into the CE department of a Best Buy or Walmart "and there won't be a device . . . that will not be wirelessly enabled."
In his CTIA speech, Verizon Communications chairman/CEO Ivan Seidenberg likewise envisioned mobile connectivity in multiple products - from digital picture frames, digital cameras, portable game systems and music players (some of which already offer the more limited Wi-Fi Hot Spot connectivity) to wireless-equipped road sensors and vehicles.
Seidenberg noted that consumers now spend an average of 26 minutes a day on their cellphones, compared to an hour a day Web surfing at home and five hours watching TV. Just a "modest" shift of time spent on Verizon wireless-connected devices would generate "sizable" revenue growth, he said.
Here are some other products the wireless industry is zeroing in on as ready for prime time connectivity.
E-BOOKS: That "WhisperNet" wireless service Amazon has developed with (silent partner) Sprint/Nextel for the Kindle e-book has rivals panting.
WhisperNet enables "anytime, anywhere" ordering and instant downloads of books, magazines, newspapers and blogs from the Kindle store onto the sharp-screened portable, with purchases charged to an Amazon account. (Wireless network access fees are worked into device and download costs.)
"At least four or five" potential e-book makers and marketers are testing the delivery of content via Verizon and AT&T wireless networks, said execs at the CTIA gathering.
We're certain of at least two:
_ Sony has said it will add wireless connectivity to next-generation versions of its Reader Digital Books.
_ And News Corporation chief Rupert Murdoch says his company is investing in a mobile screen tablet designed for reading newspapers with a subscription or per-copy-fee structure.
"People are used to reading everything on the 'Net for free, and that's going to have to change," vowed the publisher.
SUBSIDIZED NETBOOKS: Been thinking about investing in one of those cute, ultra-portable "netbook" computers, maybe to replace that big clunker you've been lugging around? You might be interested in the deals AT&T just announced, for test market in Atlanta and Philadelphia. (Lucky us.)
Sign up at a company store for a wireless Data Connect plan - $40 a month for 200 MB; $60 for 5GB - and AT&T will sell you a 3G wireless- (and Wi-Fi- and WiMax-) enabled netbook for as little as $99.
That's for an Acer Aspire One with 8.9-inch screen, 160 GB harddrive, Windows XP and 3-cell battery. Other offers, likewise saving $250-$350 over comparable store-bought packages, are built around the Dell Mini 9 and Mini 12, the LG X110 and Lenovo X200.
Wireless service-subsidized netbooks are already popular in parts of Europe and Asia.
HEALTH TECH: Broadband-connected devices like Intel's Health Guide and GE's Quiet Care allow medical professionals to monitor patients' vital signs remotely.
Now, Intel and GE are partnering to enhance the technology, just in time to help (and profit from) all those boomers entering old age. Guaranteed wireless patient monitoring via mobile phone will loom high on the partnership's $250 million product development agenda.
VoIP TO GO: Mobile companies make lots more on out-of-network or plan-exceeding phone calls than on customers' Internet-based data usage. The latter travels on a whole 'nother ("packet based") network and carries no distant-destination penalties.
So it will be curious to see which wireless networks agree (quietly) to lease access to the upstart, pay-in-advance phone service Zer01 Mobile.
Introduced at the CTIA event, Zer01's $69.99 a month (unlimited U.S. calls and data) and $79.99 a month (unlimited calling to 40 countries) service plans use the cheaper data channels of mobile providers and voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) technology to make and receive calls.
You may have read that the world's biggest (400 million users) VoIP phone company Skype is wiggling its way onto mobile phones. But the deal comes with serious limitations in terms of availability and features.
Apple introduced a Skype app for the iPhone and iPod Touch at CTIA. However, calls are beamed through the Apple devices' Wi-Fi radio circuitry to an available hot spot. No calls are made on AT&T's cellular network.
FYI: Skype also is available on some portable devices using the Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android platforms. It's expected to show up as an app on some Blackberrys (the Bold and Curve) next month.
CABLE TV GOES WIRELESS? Why are Comcast and Time Warner Cable among the investors in the next-generation ("4G") of wireless broadband technology called WiMAX?
To hear tell from Time Warner Cable's Mike Roudl, it's largely about customer satisfaction and retention.
"The cable company owns the customer within the four perimeters of the walls of their house, but as soon as they open the door, you sort of get disassociated with your customer. We want to make it so when they walk out the door, down the driveway and then drive down the street, they don't have to turn off Time Warner Cable Services."
Oh, and TV on WiMAX mobile devices won't just be for passive viewing. 4G allows for two-way video schmoozing between subscribers.
Love your hair! Love the coat!
THE GAZILLION DOLLAR QUESTION: How much extra would you pay for wireless connectivity on every one of your consumer electronics devices?
Clearly, a per-use fee for, say, location tagging or sending an image from a camera to a digital picture frame makes more sense than a monthly subscription. A common bucket of purchased data minutes - "like a mobile phone family plan but good for a family of products" - may be the best way to win consumers' hearts, believes ABI Research analyst Kevin Burden

Researchers Develop New Way to See Single RNA Molecules in Living Cells

Techniques scientists currently use to image these transporters of genetic information within cells have several drawbacks, including the need for synthetic RNA or a large number of fluorescent molecules. The fluorescent probes developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology circumvent these issues.

"The probes we designed shine bright, are small and easy to assemble, bind rapidly to their targets, and can be imaged for hours. These characteristics make them a great choice for studying the movement and location of RNA inside a single cell and the interaction between RNA and binding proteins," said Philip Santangelo, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

Details of the probe production process and RNA imaging strategy were published online in the journal Nature Methods on April 6. In addition to Santangelo, Georgia Tech graduate student Aaron Lifland, Emory University associate professor Gary Bassell and Vanderbilt University professor James Crowe Jr. also contributed to this research. This research was funded by new faculty support from Georgia Tech.

In the study, the probes - produced by attaching a few small fluorescent molecules called fluorophores to a modified nucleic acid sequence and combining the sequences with a protein - exhibited single-molecule sensitivity and allowed the researchers to target and follow native RNA and non-engineered viral RNA in living cells.

"The great thing about these probes is that they recognize RNA sequences and bind to them using the same base pairing most people are familiar with in regards to DNA," explained Santangelo. "By adding only a few probes that would bind to a region of RNA, we gained the ability to distinguish a targeted RNA molecule from a single unbound probe because the former lit up two or three times brighter."

For their experiments, the team used a bacterial toxin to transport the probes into living cells - a delivery technique that when combined with the high affinity of the probes for their targets, required significantly fewer probes than existing techniques. The toxin created several tiny holes in the cell membrane that allowed the probes to enter the cell's cytoplasm.

The researchers tested the sensitivity of conventional fluorescence microscopy to image individual probes inside a cell. Previous studies showed that these techniques were able to image an accumulation of probes inside a cell, but the current study demonstrated that individual probes without cellular targets could be observed homogenously distributed in the cytoplasm with no localization or aggregation.

With single-molecule sensitivity accomplished, the researchers investigated whether they could visualize individual RNA molecules using the probes. To do this, they simultaneously delivered probes designed to target a human messenger RNA (mRNA) sequence region and a probe designed with no target in the human genome. They were able to image unbound probes of both types as well as individual RNA molecules that had attached to the former probes.

The imaging technique also allowed the researchers to observe a process called dynamic RNA-protein co-localization, which is the joining of RNA molecules and RNA binding proteins in a single cell.

"We observed substantial transient interactions between proteins and viral RNA molecules that I don't think had ever been seen before with non-engineered RNA," noted Santangelo. "We saw one of the proteins move into a viral RNA granule and reside within it for over a minute before it was released, and we also saw another protein that appeared to dock with a viral RNA granule."

Santangelo is currently trying to improve the probes by making them smaller and brighter, while also using them to investigate viral pathogenesis and other biological phenomena.

"We are excited to use this imaging strategy to study how single viral RNAs travel from the nucleus of a cell to a virus assembly site, how mRNAs are regulated by location and time, and RNA trafficking in neurons," added Santangelo.