How Light Will Make the Web 85,000 Times Faster-and Power Blazing Fast Computers

By Michael A Robinson
Defense and Technology Specialist
www.moneymorning.com

Since the dawn of the Internet, millions of users have dreamed of getting true high-speed connections.

Well, fasten your seat belts folks...

A new breakthrough promises to provide Web and other computer networks links that are 85,000 times faster than what we have today.

No, that's not a misprint. But it is so fast it's hard to get your mind around-especially for those of you who remember using phone lines to surf the web.

Back then it seemed you could take a break, paint your house, cut the grass and clean the kitchen -- and still get back to your computer before it finished downloading a photo.

Forget video. That sounded like a sci-fi fantasy.

Admittedly, it's gotten quite a bit faster since then. Over the past decade millions of users around the U.S. have joined the broadband revolution. It's now becoming standard to link to the Web at speeds of at least 10 megabits per second, or about 175 times faster than dial up.

But even at those speeds, the magnitude of the change I'm describing is hard to fathom. But I'll try.

Think of it this way: If dial up was a one-story home, then today's broadband would stand almost twice as tall as the Empire State Building.

Yet, to equal what I'm calling Ultimate Broadband--or 85,000 times faster than what we have now-- you'd have to string Empire State Buildings 1.3 times around the entire surface of the Earth!

Internet Speeds Beyond Belief

It works using twisted beams of infrared light.

Now you know why this innovation will be so crucial for the future of broadband communication and entertainment.

Having just upgraded my home theater, I can speak from personal experience. Super-fast connections are what's driving the next wave of home entertainment and data services.

And here's the thing: you won't need wires to take advantage of these incredible speeds.

In fact, a global team lead by the University of Southern California used wireless gear to prove the system works. They achieved speeds of 2.5 terabits (2.5 trillion) per second.

They beamed data over open space in a lab. The idea was to simulate the type of link that might occur between satellites in space.

Team members manipulated eight beams of light. They twisted each one into a spiral shape. Turns out twisted light beams are very powerful because they can encode huge amounts of data.

This, by far, exceeds anything we can get today with radio frequencies used for WiFi and cellular networks.

Next up: adapting the system for fiber optics like those often used to transmit data over the Web.

I believe we are still several years away from making light-based data links standard. But I do predict this breakthrough will help lead us to the Holy Grail of computers -- harnessing the speed of light.

To me the question isn't if we'll have optical networks-- but when.

Blazing Fast Computers

Here's the thing. The USC news came out the exact same day that a second research team reported a breakthrough using light to create super-fast computer chips.

This one deals with an arcane field known as quantum computing. It's complicated so I'll simplify it for you.

Today's chips depend on the use of electricity to move or store data.

Quantum systems go much deeper -- they rely on basic atomic-scale elements like photons. Think of these as tiny pieces of light that have neither mass nor electric charge.

But they do have speed. Lots of it, in fact.

Just ask the team from the University of California at Berkeley and the City College of New York who did the study. To encode data, they used light to control the spin of an atom's nucleus.

The result: chips several times faster than anything we can produce today.

Not only that, what they call "spintronics" would yield a huge increase in processing power -- it would allow you to have multiple data streams running at the same time.

It gets better. The research team said chips would no longer remain fixed after they're etched in the factory. Spintronics would allow us to rewrite them on the fly.

Need a faster computer? Just zap your chip with a beam of light and you're good to go.

So you can see that light-based computers and networks represent a radical new approach to the way we obtain and share a wide range of data.

It's one of the reasons why I say the future will be like nothing we've seen before.

Cheers,
Michael A. Robinson, Defense and Technology Specialist

Further Reading...

If you want to find a way to profit from the next generation of tech breakthroughs, Michael's Era of Radical Change newsletter is a great place to start.

And you can't beat the price. You can get it free by clicking here.

About the Author


Michael A. Robinson is one of the top financial analysts working today. His 30-year track record as a leading tech analyst has garnered him rave reviews. The first analyst to uncover the rare earth mineral crisis, he amassed cumulative gains of 990% for his readers in just 16 months. Today he is the editor of Radical Technology Profits. He also edits the Era of Radical Change e-letter that explores "what's next" in the tech investing world. Learn more about Michael on our contributors page.

View articles by Michael A. Robinson

Source: How Light Will Make the Web 85,000 Times Faster-and Power Blazing Fast Computers:

8 Reasons to Sell Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) and Dump Steve Ballmer

July 3, 2012
By Keith Fitzgerald
www.moneymorning.com

One day in 1983, my dad asked me a question over dinner after a long day at work.
He wanted to know what I knew about a little computer company called Microsoft. It was the brainchild of the son of one of his partners at Bogle & Gates, William H. Gates, Sr.

"Not much," I replied.

But I did tell my dad that I loved using MS-DOS in the computer lab with my friends. I was a card-carrying member of the nerd herd back in the day, so I spent a lot of time there and knew Microsoft's fledgling PC-based software pretty well.

My grandmother Mimi, though, had a different point of view. You've heard me mention her before.

She's the one who was widowed at an early age and became a savvy global investor long before people ever thought to look at the bigger picture.

Mimi didn't care that the buzz was about the MS-DOS language or even about computers. Having grown up in the Depression, she believed that what people would do with the technology was far more valuable.

She said she had confidence that Sr.'s son, Bill Gates Jr., understood this -- which is why she invested heavily in the Microsoft IPO in 1986. Enough said.

Today, though, I think she'd voice an equally strong opinion about Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer. In fact, I think she'd fire him. Here's why...

8 Reasons Why Steve Ballmer Must Go

1. Ballmer took over Microsoft 12 years ago when the stock was about $60. Now it struggles to maintain $30. Microsoft has $58.16 billion in cash and this is the best Steve Ballmer can do?
   
2. Office and Windows are dying. Once the business world's de facto standard, both are being replaced by cheap, easy-to-operate software, much of which is actually free as well as compatible. This is a big problem considering that, according to the Wall Street Journal, roughly 85% of Microsoft's revenue is coming from just two products: Windows and Office.
   
3. The company isn't innovating fast enough or aggressively enough. What's more, it's attempting to compensate for its own shortcomings with increasingly ill-conceived acquisitions. For instance, Microsoft forked over $605 million for 18% of the Barnes and Noble Nook e-reader and still has no real ability to compete with Amazon's Kindle. It also couldn't seal the deal with Yahoo. Despite a sizable head start using Yahoo's core search technology, Bing has a mere 15% of the search market today. Ballmer waited nearly four years to respond to the iPad and his "Surface" tablet was ho-hum when it could have been jaw dropping. One more: Microsoft paid $8.5 billion in cash for Skype. Apparently the fact that Skype was not profitable didn't matter. Ballmer's track record suggests to me that he buys businesses that nobody else "must have."
   
4. Microsoft's Internet offerings remain wannabes and are highly priced at that. Take Yammer. Microsoft just paid $1.2 billion through the nose to acquire a company that was valued at $600 million last fall when it raised $85 million in a venture offering. Team Ballmer plans to integrate it into Office on the assumption that somehow the Microsoft marriage will endear the brand to customers anxious to socialize business. I think they're delusional. Most Microsoft users I know, including myself, are actively planning to move away from the legacy software we've used for years the first instant we can in favor of software we actually like to use!
5. Microsoft spent $26 billion on research over the last three years. Meanwhile, Apple spent $5.54 billion and managed to crank out products light years better than anything Microsoft has come up with. No question which group of shareholders is getting the most bang for the buck.
   
6. Windows 8 is a wreck. Versions I have played with are so unintuitive as to defy belief. There is neither a Control Panel nor a Start menu. It seems to me that very few people actually love their Windows anymore the way Apple users love their Mac OS.
   
7. Ballmer can't do a product launch without jumping around the stage like a Planet of the Apes extra according to Joel Hruska of ExtremeTech. No doubt an apt description if you've ever seen him do his thing-- albeit not a very flattering one. That's a problem. Ballmer doesn't appear to do anything without appearing sweaty and uncomposed. His competitors look calm, cool and collected. The late Steve Jobs wrote the book on creating real excitement for users, not just inwardly-focused developers who give birth to successive generations of questionable products. Who would you trust is the question posed at the end of this video. Not a tough call in my mind.
   
8. Spellbound nerds, once the company's backbone, appear to be an endangered species. If you want to see the future, look at what teens are using and writing. Apple now allows teens as young as 13 to participate in its developer's conference, where thousands of people learn about upcoming offerings (and help take the company to new heights).

A child of the Depression, Mimi knew how to cut to the chase. She was acutely aware of the need to identify companies that did too.

Those who weren't acting in the best interests of their shareholders and maximizing their investments had no place in her portfolio.

Nor mine...which is why I don't own Microsoft today and haven't for years.

Further Reading...

Mimi's sage advice has appeared in Keith's columns before. In this article, she reasoned that when an investment or a trend began making the rounds over drinks, it was time to move on. In fact, she used to call it the "country club" test.

Mimi was also mentioned in Keith's 2009 book entitled: Fiscal Hangover: How to Profit From the New Global Economy

About the Author
Keith Fitz-Gerald has been the Money Morning team Chief Investment Strategist since 2008. He’s a seasoned market analyst with decades of experience, and a highly accurate track record. Keith regularly travels the world in search of investment opportunities others don't yet see or understand. In addition to being editor of the Money Map Report, Keith runs The Geiger Index, a reliable, emotion-free guide to making big money and avoiding losses, and the Strike Force service, which aims to get in, target gains, and get out clean. Learn more about Keith on our contributors page.

Source: 8 Reasons Why Mimi Would Sell Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) and Dump Steve Ballmer:

Add this Internet Stock to your Portfolio for a potential 45% Profit.

By William Patalon III for Money Morning
www.moneymorning.com

Back on May 9, Internet bellwether Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) warned investors of a weaker-than-expected outlook for the current quarter - thanks to what CEO John Chambers described as a "cautious" spending environment for networking gear.

Cisco's shares were trashed - as were many other tech-sector stocks.

So I was more than a little surprised when Cisco later announced that a new company study says that Web traffic will quadruple in the next four years.

That's one hell of an about-face. But if it's true, it also represents one hell of a profit opportunity.

To sort this out - and get the real story for you - I went directly to our new tech-sector expert: Radical Technology Profits Editor Michael A. Robinson.

The bottom line is that Michael says Cisco's traffic estimate is accurate in terms of its magnitude. He's a bit less sanguine about its target date, however.

"You know Bill, there's an old investing adage that says to never have a date and a number in the same statement," Michael quipped. "Like so many futurists, Cisco is guilty of making an all-too-definitive statement. I have no doubt that the company is correct in the broadest sense in terms of the traffic increase it sees. We'll see about the timing."

Let me be right up front with you: I like Michael. Like me, he's an author and former journalist. And he's one of the sharpest tech analysts I've ever met.

As kind of a cross between tech prognosticator Ray Kurzweil and pioneering Internet analyst Mary Meeker, he's one of those rare folks who has the broad knowledge and vision of a futurist, but who can also cut to the chase by identifying money-making investment opportunities.

And this ramp-up in Internet traffic is just one of the lucrative possibilities he's already looking into.

"I use the term "Internet' much more loosely than most analysts," Michael said. "I look at it as "networked knowledge.' That opens it up to such things as intranets, cloud computing, machine-to-machine communications, and the "Internet of Things,' to name just a few. General Electric (NYSE: GE) recently announced it was investing $1 billion to develop the Industrial Internet. My view of the Internet includes some way-out stuff that looks well into the future."

By defining the Internet as more than just the World Wide Web, Michael is able to look at a plethora of investment plays, including:

• Cybersecurity.
• Drones.
• Robotics.
• Passive surveillance.
• Malware.
• The "pick-and-shovels" Internet backbone.
• Sensor-driven real-time communications.
• Wearable computers.
• Entertainment and gaming.
• Education.
• Mobile communications.
• E-commerce (including mobile commerce).
• And social networking.

Some of the details Michael provided for these categories (mass-produced robotic insects as a subset of robotics, for instance) are fascinating and remarkable.

Among the stocks he mentioned, there was one he specifically wanted me to pass along to you - Web.com Group Inc. (Nasdaq: WWWW).

The Jacksonville-based Web.com provides Internet services to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs, in business geek-speak). The services include domain-name registration, Website design, search-engine optimization (SEO), search-engine marketing, mobile products and even call-center services. As of December 2011, it had 3 million subscribers.

"I see two significant catalysts for Web.com," Michael told me. "First, the industry is moving to HTML5, a major rewrite of the actual software for the Web. That will generate interest in new Website designs that offer splashier graphics, but will still be easy for browsers to use. Second is the fact that the company has applied to become the exclusive registrar of the dot-web (.web) domain-name suffix. This could be huge because a lot folks can't get their domain names in a format that makes sense."

You also have to like the fact that this company is a survivor - not a Johnny-come-lately: It survived the dot-bomb implosion of the early 2000s and has made itself relevant as an ongoing business.

Wall Street is catching on: The consensus rating on the stock is a "Buy/Strong Buy" with a high target of $27 - up 45% from current levels.

You can expect to read more about this trend in future issues.

Good Investing,

William Patalon III, Executive Editor
Money Morning

With his 24/7 access to stock market gurus like Martin Hutchinson, Keith Fitz-Gerald, Shah Gilani, Dr. Kent Moors, and now Michael A. Robinson, Bill is able to provide Private Briefing subscribers with an inside look at some of their key recommendations. To learn more about Private Briefing, click here.

Source: With Internet Traffic Set to Zoom, Here's the Stock You Need to Buy Now: