Canon is not working (or already passed) on the same stuff as Lytro? Samsung is not working (or already passed) on the same stuff as Nanosys? Cisco (or whoever) is not working (or already passed) on this type of stuff?
Anybody have examples of modern (within 10 years) stealthy startups/incubators that invented new hardware that revolutionized something?
Tivo (just outside your 10 year limit though)
Flip Video
Roomba
SpaceX
Telsa
I'd throw makerbot out there as revolutionary, but that's still a very young market. - not stealthy though.
Tesla motors?
Please tell me more about your magical energy-free signal propagation!
In all seriousness, Shannon's entropy limit only applies to a single variable, modulated at a certain frequency. The only reason we apply this limit to radio is because we treat each radio frequency in a given zone as a single variable. In fact, you're perfectly free to use directed antennas or interferometry to establish multiple communication variables on the same frequency.
Ah, and indeed, at 1:19, Perlman mentions each cell phone on a separate spatial domain.
Since they say it's a single cell phone antenna, I'm guessing we're looking at multiple towers and interferometry between them, possibly taking advantage of the intensity dropoff with distance and timing data for spatial discrimination.
Working in sensor networks we could really use one of these breakthrough technologies and in the past year or two I've heard at least three vendors give the exact same pitch but as of today there's no technical detail that gives me much hope.
This leads to the downstream bandwidth being much higher than the upstream, but given that video is going to drive mobile bandwidth growth that is ok.
Basically what's happening is that a training signal from each of the base station antennas is constantly being monitored by the mobile station, channel information gets calculated and sent back to the base station.
The base station uses the channel vectors for each of the mobile stations (updated frequently because this is spatial multiplexing and mobile stations... move) to compute the signals for the entire antenna array.
The odd seeming stuff about energy not being transferred has to do with using a sort of inverse spatial coding where you can aim signal nulls at mobile stations that don't want to receive particular signals.
Relevant patents: http://patents.com/us-20110044193.html http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sec...
Not to say they haven't made some astounding break-through, but I didn't get the impression that they revealed anything of substance. They claim to have some experimental radios working that are able to beat Shannon's law, but reveal no details around it.
