A million programmable neurons: IBM closer to human brain-like computer

 Tech2 08 Aug 2014 , 14:02

IBM unveiled a “brain-like” computer chip on Thursday that is the size of a postage stamp and capable of processing massive amounts of data while handling inputs from many different sources, the company said.

The announcement comes one month after IBM unveiled a $3 billion investment over the next five years in chip research and development to find a game-changing breakthrough that can help revive its slumping hardware unit.

Unlike most chips, which operate on pre written paths, IBM’s version processes data in realtime and is capable of dealing with ambiguity, the company said. It runs on the energy equivalent of a hearing aid.

Built on Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co Ltd’s 28nm process technology, the chip only consumes 70mW of energy.

A product of almost a decade of research, the chip aims to bridge the divide between existing computers and the brain’s high cognitive power and low energy use. “After years of collaboration with IBM, we are now a step closer to building a computer similar to our brain,” said Professor Rajit Manohar at Cornell Tech, where the chip was designed.

The chip contains one million programmable neurons and could allow a thermometer to scan and smell chemical signals and deliver a diagnosis, or help a search and rescue robot to identify people in need during a disaster, the company said.

IBM hopes it can integrate multi-sensory processing into mobile devices and says the chip can handle future advances in memory, 3G integration, logic and sensor technologies.

Reuters

Jobs, pain and theworld of IT

Young graduates writing the test during a campus placement programme. File photo: R. Ashok


Anjusrivas :the Hindu ;29 Dec2013

This process of maintaining a standing army of unpaid graduates has become characteristic of the IT industry over the last three years

There is an excellent book, really a long essay, by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith called ‘The Economics of Innocent Fraud’. He points out how we, as a society, have come to substitute the term ‘market economy’ in place of the term ‘capitalism’.

In this case, ‘market economy’s a more favourable and gentler term. It comes with an implication that economic power lies with consumers rather than the owners of capital or with the managerial class, who have taken over the work of the owners. It is this substitution that Galbraith points to as an example of innocent fraud.

The trouble with innocent fraud is that it always comes with a foundation of truth. It is essentially more of a white lie than a black one.

What we tell ourselves about the Indian IT industry — that it has created wealth in a completely transparent fashion in contrast to the rest of India Inc., that its genie-in-the-bottle was a Bollywood-like Silicon Valley tale, and that for India to grow, its IT industry must grow — is an innocent fraud.

It was Amartya Sen, in a JFK-esque speech at Nasscom’s annual conference in 2007, who first knocked on the doors of this innocent fraud. “Given what the country has done for Indian IT,” he said, “is it (not) silly to ask what specially can the IT industry do for India (other than what happens automatically without any deliberate pursuit of non-business ends)?” Dr. Sen, however, did not take his train of thought much further than gently chiding the industry, and pointing out that it could contribute outside just the IT sector. In the six years since Dr. Sen’s speech, it has become much easier to see through the innocent fraud surrounding the IT industry; in fact you have to make an effort to not see through it.

Largest protest

On March 4, 2013, fresh engineering graduates hired by IT firm HCL Technologies staged what was perhaps the largest protest in the history of India’s IT industry. Their demands were simple: they wanted the company convert the letter of offers that had been handed out into actual jobs. The students had been issued the letters of intent nearly two years before the protest, in September 2011. Not only were they not being paid, many of them were also pressured and forced to turn down other job offers as HCL dangled the hook of promising them a join date.

As of October 1, 2013, a number of students were still reportedly waiting to be scooped up; others have been turned away after two years, with the company now saying they aren’t technically qualified to become HCL employees.

This process of maintaining a standing army of unpaid graduates has become characteristic of the IT industry over the last three years. It offers IT companies a set of talking points when they pitch to clients; the bigger pool of waiting engineers one has, the quicker you can scale up and down.

On April 11, 2013, CBC News published an expose, detailing how IT firm iGATE tightly controlled the lives of Indian employees that had been sent overseas to work on onsite projects.

“They [iGATE] have a rotation policy, and they make sure you don’t get settled here,” said one of the ex-iGATE employees. “You are always threatened that any time you will be sent back to India.” One of the workers also said, at one point, that he and his family was forced to get on a plane to India with little notice, right after his wife had given birth.

A dense network of immigration rules, work visas and intra-company transfers (which are doled out as ‘favours’ as going abroad are often seen as perks) ensure that Indian IT companies can quell Western protectionism fears while still maintaining profit margins. Employees are sent to Western countries, but still held tightly on a leash, and can be summoned back at any moment. Much to the contrary of Indian apologists, those sent to the U.S cannot switch jobs and are subjected to lesser pay (the infamous Brookings Institution study that claims otherwise has a number of flaws).

Labour laws

Infosys shelled out $34 million earlier this year in a settlement with the U.S Government, which alleged that it brought Indian programmers illegally into the U.S on visitor visas. Where, then, is the outrage over an industry, that has come to define India, shipping its employees into the U.S to work for sub-standard pay and on fudged visa documents?

In October this year, Karnataka started the process of yet again exempting the IT industry from the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders Act)—a set of labour laws that would require each company to define conditions of employment and details such as working hours, wages, grounds of termination and so on.

IT industry captains have, on cue, dismissed any push towards regulation as “retrograde” and an “archaic step”. The common consensus amongst business leaders is that regulation is best left to governing the manufacturing sector.

Labour laws, however, are the exact prescription the IT industry needs. Especially at a time when employees at mid-sized IT firms are often forced to work 14-hour days, when women BPO employees are paid less than their male counterparts, and when employees are terminated under less-than-clear grounds.

It is clear that the IT Industry has become more rigidly exploitative — as a natural consequence of lower wages, economic slowdown, a lack of jobs in the country, the outsourcing engine, not to mention human nature.

The roaring 1990s and the wealth it brought to India’s middle class went hand-in-hand with the growth of the IT industry, bringing about a sense of gratitude towards the sector that mostly continues to today. It is this attitude of gratitude that keeps us from seeing the real picture in the IT industry.

The technology entrepreneurship scene, which is still in its infancy, has started the shift towards a business model not based on a ‘race to the lowest wage’ premise. But why not aspire for more i.e for a better and more transparent IT industry?

5 Little Known Indians With Amazing Tech Inventions

SiliconIndia  |   Monday, 03 June 2013, 08:31 IST  

Bangalore: India was been a land of many inventions in the past. The number ‘0’, chess, first in medicine (Ayurvedha), first surgery (Sushruta), first to discover and make diamond ornaments, first to extract zinc and a lot many ‘firsts’. However for some reason, lately, Indians are growing more to be a service class population than an innovative one, and so there are not many big inventions to the name of India. And even if there are some real inventions achieved, they do not make it to main stream media, hence stick to their oblivion. Here is a small attempt to highlight some of the little known Indian inventors with amazing inventions.

#5 Ajay Bhatt

Invention: USB

Ajay V. Bhatt is an Indian-American computer architect who helped define and develop several widely used technologies, including USB (Universal Serial Bus), AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port), PCI Express, Platform Power management architecture and various chipset improvements.

Ajay Bhatt rose to global celebrity as the co-inventor of USB through an Intel 2009 TV advertisement, where he was portrayed by actor Sunil Narkar.

A few days back, The European Union honored him for leading a team at the US tech-giant Intel that developed the Universal Serial Bus (USB) technology, one of the most important advances in computing since the silicon chip.

The European Patent Office announced the winners of the European Inventor Award 2013, which honors outstanding inventors for their contribution to social, economic and technological progress. An industry standard today, USB not only allows users to more easily connect devices to a computer, it also streamlines work for hardware and software developers. It is found in billions of electronic devices all over the world, from webcams to cell phones and memory sticks

After completing his graduation in Vadodara, India, Bhatt completed his master's degree in New York. Bhatt joined Intel in 1990. He currently holds 31 US patents.

#4 Shiva Ayyadurai

Invention: Email

VA Shiva Ayyadurai was born 2 December 1963 in Mumbai, India. At age seven, he left with his family to live in the United States.  At the age of 14, he attended a special summer program at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University (NYU) to study computer programming, and it was the period, as he claims, led to invention of email.

It is quite heartening to mention that, Ayyadurai missed on the fame for some reason, even though he was just a 14 year old teenager when he invented email in 1978. He developed a full-scale emulation of the interoffice mail system, which he called "EMAIL" and copyrighted in 1982. That name's resemblance to the generic term "email" and the claims he later made for the program have led to controversy over Ayyadurai's place in the history of computer technology.

In languages such as FORTRAN IV, it was conventional and a well-known fact that names of programs, variables and subroutines were typically written in upper case --- thus the convention of "EMAIL" to refer to the main subroutine name of the program V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai developed. By the source code submitted to the US Copyright Office and by the documents provided to the Smithsonian, email's intention and origin was to replicate electronically the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system. These are indisputable facts, as I have referred to in my earlier statement. Note by the Copyright Act of 1976, once a work is in publication it is protected. In 1978, "email" was first coined and used by Shiva to name his program.

#3 Vinod Dham

Invention: Intel Pentium Chip           

We are all well aware about the fact that Intel processors brought quite a revolution to computing world. The chips that made computers fast and efficient.  And the inventor of the chip is an Indian, Vinod Dham.  He is popularly known as the Father of the Pentium chip, for his contribution to the development of highly successful Pentium Processors from Intel. He is a mentor, advisor and investor; and sits on the boards of many companies including promising startups funded through his India based fund – Indo US Venture Partners, where he is the founding Managing Director.

After graduation in Electrical Engineering (with an emphasis in Electronics) from the prestigious Delhi College of Engineering (now known as Delhi Technological University) in 1971, he joined a Delhi-based semiconductor company called Continental Devices. In 1975, he left this job and joined University of Cincinnati, in Cincinnati, Ohio – USA, to pursue a master's degree in Electrical Engineering, where he specialized in Solid State Science. After completing his masters degree in 1977, he joined NCR Corporation at Dayton, Ohio, where he did cutting edge work in developing advanced Non-Volatile Memories. He then joined Intel, where he led the development of the world famous Pentium processor.

#2 Anadish Kumar Pal

Invention: Electromagnetically Controlled Fuel Efficient IC Engine

Anadish Kumar Pal is an Indian inventor, poet, and environmentalist. Anadish Pal has obtained nine United States patents, a significant patent issued in 2009 for an electromagnetically controlled, fuel-efficient internal combustion engine is titled, "Relaying piston multiuse valve-less electromagnetically controlled energy conversion devices". He was granted two more patents last year for a unique gas-operated reloading gun which is titled in the patent grant as "Magnetic gyro-projectile device with electronic combustion, turbogeneration and gyro stabilization" and for a railgun.

He was issued another significant patent in 2007 for a 3D computer mouse. He has also filed for several other US and Indian patent applications. His recent patent is for a high torque electric motor.

Pal is not a qualified designer or engineer. After dropping out of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1982, he took to prototyping in electronics, which was his hobby. He designed a DXing radio receiver when he was 14, which never worked; however, he designed his own circuit and made all the PCBs himself.

He did freelance projects for companies such as Maruti Udyog, Honda, the National Institute for the Visually Handicapped, Dehradun, and Duracell (now a part of Global Gillette). Afterwards, he turned his attention to inventions. His concept for a personal mobility vehicle (PMV) for the common man, a diwheel vehicle, is ready to go to the prototype development stage and Pal has been trying to get companies interested in it, so far with little success

#1 G. D. Naidu

Invention: Two-Seater Petrol Engine

Gopalaswamy Doraiswamy Naidu was an Indian inventor and engineer who is also referred to as the Edison of India.

He is credited with the manufacture of the first electric motor in India. His contributions were primarily industrial but also span the fields of electrical, mechanical, agricultural (Hybrid cultivation) and automobile engineering.  He had only primary education but excelled as a versatile genius.

As a young boy, Gopalswamy was inspired by the motor cycle which was driven by a British surveyor.  He worked as a waiter for three years and saved up to 400 rupees, and asked the surveyor to sell his bike, which he sold it to him to save himself from a persistent kid.

Ecstatic young Doraiswamy drove it and also learned everything by dismantling and assembling the motor cycle and later became a mechanic.

Naidu invented 'Rasant' razor, a small motor operated by dry cells, which was later developed at a factory in the German town called Heilbronn. Among his other inventions were super-thin shaving blades, a distance adjuster for film cameras, a fruit juice extractor, a tamper-proof vote-recording machine and a kerosene-run fan. In 1941, he announced that he had the ability to manufacture five-valve Radio sets in India at a mere Rs 70/- a set. In 1952, the two-seater petrol engine car (costing a mere Rs 2,000/-) rolled out. But production was stopped subsequently, because of the Government's refusal to grant the necessary license.

S.Ramadorai on the skilling challenges India faces

S. Ramadorai Photo: Rachit Goswami/www.indiatodayimages.com

B T : Chaitanya Kalbag and Shamni Pande       Edition: March 31, 2013


After a life spent powering TCS to its current position as the country's pre-eminent technology company, S. Ramadorai took over as Advisor to the Prime Minister in the National Council for Skill Development in February 2011. He spoke to Chaitanya Kalbag and Shamni Pande on the gigantic skilling challenge the country faces. Edited excerpts:

Q. It is two years snce you took charge. How are you tackling the skilling challenge?
A. The scale of the problem is huge. A combination of things has made it more complex. The notion that everybody should have a paper degree, whether it gets them a job or not, has sunk in so deeply that changing mindsets, making people realise that doing something with their hands is as important and can fetch a livelihood, (is difficult). This is what I call the whole advocacy issue. We are focusing a lot on advocacy.

After advocacy, you look at mobilisation. Mobilisation should be through discovering people's aptitudes rather than simply rounding up a bunch of kids and saying that from tomorrow you are doing vocational training whether you like it or not. 

Q. Are you saying there is an aspiration gap? People need something, but want something else?
A. Yes. It can only be changed with advocacy.

Q. Who is carrying out the advocacy?
A. All of us . All of you have to do so too.

Q. I think there is a feeling among young people that a proper job provides security such as provident fund, health insurance, etc, which jobs like welding do not.
A. Long-term benefits such as PF have to come into the vocational area as well. But to bring about a miracle where everything happens overnight (is not possible). We are trying to operate at the mindset level, we are trying to operate at a level where we introduce vocational skills in schools...all of these will take time.

Q. There seems to be a turf war over skilling. Could the effort get bogged down because of the different things different stakeholders and ministries want?
A. I think there are enough opportunities without getting into turf wars. And that is why I don't spend my time in Delhi. You have to be where the action is. Implementation is the only focus all of us must have. There are enough policies, enough opportunities, but implementation on ground is most difficult because it's like washing your own clothes. People hesitate to get into it, because it calls for rolling up your sleeves.

Q. What targets do you have?
A. The numbers are huge. Whether it is 300 or 500 million doesn't matter. The number during the 12th Plan and the 13th Plan - a 10-year period from 2012 to 2022 - is going to be critical. The number is based on the demographic profile of the country.

Q. But numbers show this skilling year's targets are not being met.
A. Yes. This year we will fall short of the target. But my worry would be more to ensure that people who go for vocational education and come out with training, get a job. It cannot be training for the sake of training. It has to be training with employment. 

Q. What has been done to formalise vocational education?
A. Pilot projects are running in Haryana, Assam.The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (in Mumbai is doing English language training in association with British Council…

Q. Any successes you can share?
A. You can go to the TCS office in Kolkata, where you can see the Udaan programme for Jammu & Kashmir. Youth from Kashmir have been trained and placed in BPO operations in the Kolkata office of TCS.

Q. How would you assess NSDC's performance?
A. NSDC has multiple responsibilities. One is to identify private sector partners. Then it takes a position by way of debt funding, or equity and debt funding. We assess how the partners are doing. It is not like funding is committed for the entire duration. It is based on performance. It has done a good job of selecting partners.

Q. But there are reports that NSDC will not be given further funding. Does this not jeopardise ongoing projects?
A. It is well funded enough for committing to the private partners it has identified. With the current credit situation squeeze in the country, there have been some cuts. It is a slight shift in the allocation probably, but it is not coming in the way of their performance.

Q. The prime minister has announced the setting up of a National Skill Development Authority. Will it not add to the complexity, with so many bodies already involved in skilling?
A. No. Once the NDSA is formed, the coordination of 17 ministries will come under this single authority. The NSDC will continue to work with the private sector. So these will be the only two agencies and the NSDA will also oversee the NSDC's functioning.

Q. What will your role be in the NSDA?
A. I have no idea, let the Authority get formed. I am focusing on my work.

No more typing: Google search to become like ‘Star trek’ computer

by FP Staff Mar 11, 2013

We’ve already started seeing Google voice search thanks to its various JellyBean devices, but this is just the beginning as far as the search engine giant is concerned.

The company which is known for its hugely ambitious projects (Read cars that drive themselves and Google glass), has nothing less than a space-age level vision for the future of its search engine.

“The destiny of search is to become that ‘Star Trek’ computer and that’s what we are building. You can walk up to a computer and say, hey, computer..” said Google’s Search Head Amit Singhal at the ongoing South by South West (SXSW) Interactive, reported ABC News.

For those of you not familiar with the Star Trek computer, here’s a quick clip of it in action:

The revelation by Google is however, not new. John Giannandrea, Director of Engineering at Google, is the man tasked with making the Star Trek computer come to life, and is responsible for ‘The Knowledge graph’ which attempts to provide results for search queries like “Leonard Nimoy” using answers like an image, life blurb, birthday, height, notable works, and related people reported The Verge.

In an interview with the website he said that ‘voice easily accessible’ search was the future and dismissed theories that search tools were making people stupider. “Captain Kirk is a smart guy, even if he has to ask the computer for things every five minutes. If the information is that easy to access, then really, what’s the difference

Is BlackBerry Z10 worth buying?

B T :Nidhi Singal  : February 25, 2013  | 14:08 IST

BlackBerry Z10
Price: Rs 43,490
Specs: BlackBerry OS 10; 4.2 inch capacitive display; 1.5GHz dual core processor; 2GB RAM; Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, NFC; 8MP camera; 1800 mAh battery.

Nidhi Singal

Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry launched its Z10 handset in India on Monday. The Z10 is the flagship device running on the company's new BB10 operating system, which was announced later last month. While it is too early to say whether the new operating system will help the company beat competition, we will tell you if it is worth upgrading to the Z10. Here is our first experience with the Z10.

Design and Built: The Z10 is an all-touch smartphone. This isn't BlackBerry's first attempt to come up with an all-touch device, but the company has failed miserably in the past. Learning from its mistakes, BlackBerry has finally managed to come up with a fine piece of hardware with intuitive touch input. The rectangular slab with the 4.2 inch display has been done in black and resembles a lot to the iPhone 5 industrial design. The front looks neat as the touch display isn't accompanied with any hardware button (no home key or navigation pad). With minimal controls on the sides, the textured back panel has the camera lens on the top along with the BlackBerry logo in the centre (with NFC chip embedded). 

User Interface: The BlackBerry 10 operating system is a complete departure from the existing BB mobile platform. Based on the QNX platform, it shares some of the gestures we had experienced earlier on the BlackBerry PlayBook. Utilising the touch input to the optimum level, BlackBerry has eliminated the need of having hard buttons like the trackpad. Navigating through the smartphone is simple as there are just a handful of gestures I had to get used too. The screen can be activated and unlocked by swiping upwards from the bottom of the glass panel. When using any app, the same gesture minimises the app and brings you back to the home screen. The minimised apps continue to run in the background and are placed on the 'Active Frames' page. This page can only handle up to eight latest running apps. All the communication, be it text messages, incoming emails, social networking updates, calls and voice mails, everything gets updated under the BlackBerry Hub. And this can be accessed by a single swipe on the thumb. When on home screen, swiping from left to right gives access to the BlackBerry Hub. But when using an app, swiping from bottom towards the right in from of a semi-circle reveals the notifications. Swiping from top to bottom shows options including settings, rotation lock, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, alarm and notification settings. The new operating system looks refreshed but existing users will take some time to get used to it.
 
Typing: Technically, typing should have been a part of the user interface but the flawless typing experience on the Z10 deserves a special mention. Typing over the touch screen has never been BlackBerry's forte. With the earlier devices, I ended up typing wrong alphabets by default. But not anymore as the onscreen keyboard on the Z10 is impressive. I could not only type quickly but the keyboard also picked up my writing style along with the words and phrases I used often. Then, in due course of time, it started suggesting me the words that I could instantly flick up instead of typing the complete words.

Camera: BlackBerry has not just worked on the overall looks of the platform but has done some great amount of hard work on the camera software as well. The most notable feature on the camera interface is the TimeShift mode. This is a kind of burst shooting mode as it captures a number of shots in less than a second. Then, I browsed through the different shots and selected the best one. The eight mega pixel rear camera is good as it captures decent images during daylight and the flash works well during low light conditions, but it can't be stated as the best camera phone around.

BBM Video: Catching up with the video calling feature (FaceTime) on the iPhone, BlackBerry has now added video calling to its BlackBerry Messenger. Making calls over the BBM is simple as an icon appears on the top of the contact (who is using the device on the BB10 operating system). During the call, I could access type messages and switch the camera mode. There is also an option of screen share that I could not test.

Web Browser: The BlackBerry 10 browser on the Z10 supports flash. The web browser was much faster than before and loaded heavy sites quickly. The recently opened tabs showed pages as thumbnails. Accessing links on email, Twitter or Facebook loaded a new tab on the browser.

Performance: The overall experience of using the Z10 was good. The smartphone comes with some handy apps such as EverNote, Docs To Go, Adobe Reader, Weather, and MovieMaker. While using the device for accessing emails and documents was easy, it also offered a good multimedia experience. I played some heavy graphic games and there wasn't any lag. Even the sound output was above my expectations. BlackBerry claims to have 70,000 apps on the App World but I still could not locate all the best and top apps found on the iOS and Android app stores including Whatsapp and Instagram. The 1800 mAh battery onboard is less than what we have on the latest all-touch flagship devices but it does manage to last a day on a single charge.

What's good: Refreshed operating system; keyboard; TimeShift in camera; touch interface, multitasking.

What's bad: Lack of popular apps.

Bag it or Junk it: A neat smartphone with a refreshing operating system but the expensive price tag does not make it a compelling option worth upgrading.

Bar code's co-inventor N. Joseph Woodland dies

This undated family photo taken in the 1950s shows bar code co-inventor N. Joseph Woodland. 
AP Photo/Courtesy the Woodland Famly

MargALIT FOX;New York Times News Service: The Hindu:Dec 14, 2012

N. Joseph Woodland died on Sunday

It was born on a beach six decades ago, the product of a pressing need, an intellectual spark and the sweep of a young man's fingers through the sand.

The result adorns almost every product of contemporary life, including groceries and wayward luggage. The man on the beach that day was a mechanical engineer-in-training named N. Joseph Woodland. With that transformative stroke of his fingers yielding a set of literal lines in the sand, Woodland, who died Sunday at 91, conceived the modern bar code.

Norman Joseph Woodland was born in Atlantic City, N.J., on Sept. 6, 1921. As a Boy Scout he learned Morse code, the spark that would ignite his invention.

Woodland studied at the Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia (it is now Drexel University), earning a bachelor's degree in 1947.

In 1948, a local supermarket executive visited the campus, where he implored a dean to develop an efficient means of encoding product data.

The dean demurred, but Bernard Silver, a fellow graduate student who overheard their conversation, was intrigued. He conscripted Woodland. An early idea of theirs, which involved printing product information in fluorescent ink and reading it with ultraviolet light, proved unworkable.

But Woodland quit graduate school to devote himself to the problem. He holed up at his grandparents' home in Miami Beach, where he spent the winter of 1948-49 in a chair in the sand, thinking. To represent information visually, he realized, he would need a code. The only code he knew was the one he had learned in the Boy Scouts.

What would happen, Woodland wondered one day, if Morse code were adapted graphically?

''What I'm going to tell you sounds like a fairy tale," Woodland told Smithsonian magazine in 1999. "I poked my four fingers into the sand and for whatever reason I didn't know I pulled my hand toward me and drew four lines. "Only seconds later," Woodland continued, "I took my four fingers they were still in the sand and I swept them around into a full circle."

Woodland favoured the circular pattern for its omnidirectionality: a checkout clerk, he reasoned, could scan a product without regard for its orientation.

On Oct. 7, 1952, Woodland and Silver were awarded U.S. patent 2,612,994 for their invention a variegated bull's-eye of wide and narrow bands on which they had bestowed the unromantic name "Classifying Apparatus and Method."

But that method was expensive and unwieldy, and it languished for years. The two men eventually sold their patent to Philco for $15,000 all they ever made from their invention.

Over time, laser scanning technology and the advent of the microprocessor made the bar code viable. In the early 1970s, an IBM employee, George J. Laurer, designed the familiar black-and-white rectangle, based on the Woodland-Silver model and drawing on Woodland's considerable input.

Thanks to Alan Haberman, a supermarket executive who helped popularize the rectangular bar code , it was adopted as the industry standard in 1973. Today, in retail establishments worldwide, bar codes are scanned at the rate of more than 5 billion a day. They keep track of books in libraries, patients in hospitals and nearly anything else. All because a bright young man, his mind ablaze with dots and dashes, one day raked his fingers through the sand

How the Bar Code Took Over the World

Bloomberg Businessweek :Drake Bennett and Jim Aley on December 17, 2012

In 1948 a supermarket executive showed up at the Drexel Institute of Technology, in Philadelphia, with a request: He wanted the engineers there to design a technology that could encode information about his products. 

Two graduate students, Bernard Silver and N. Joseph Woodland, took him up on it. Woodland became obsessed and dropped out of school to concentrate on the problem. That winter he was sitting on Miami Beach, dragging his fingers in the sand, when he had his Eureka moment: a series of lines of different widths could be deciphered like elongated versions of the dots and dashes of Morse Code. In other words, a bar code.

This undated family photo taken in the 1950s shows bar code co-inventor N. Joseph Woodland. AP Photo/Courtesy the Woodland Famly

Woodland died last week, at a time when his technology has become so prevalent that it is almost invisible. Boxes of cereal, cans of soup, books, and magazines all have universal product codes. Anything you buy in a supermarket or department store does, too. The next time someone sends you a gift from Amazon.com (AMZN), take a look at the box that UPS (UPS) delivers. The sticker on it has multiple bar codes, all having to do with tracking the package as it makes its way through the bar-coded distribution system. You no longer just scan at the checkout, either. If you still shop for electronics atBest Buy (BBY) stores, chances are you’re “showrooming”—using one of the many smartphone apps that scan codes and check prices against those at other chains, both online and off.

The bar code was a feat of technology, for sure. But it wasn’t a sure thing: The proposed system started off as one option among many in a stand-off among competing interests. So what enabled the bar code to take over the world? How might today’s emerging technologies (we’re looking at you, mobile payments) achieve similar dominance?

Like other successful standards, the bar code had three essential ingredients, all of which are necessary—but not, on their own, sufficient:

A simplicity that overcomes habit. Until the late 1970s, every clerk in every supermarket in America tapped numbers onto a register keypad. The process was rife with errors; Many of us remember our parents poring over grocery receipts before leaving the store. Errors and all, it was the way retail functioned. Only a simple technology with obvious benefits could overcome that inertia. Bar codes are simple and iconic—people have even had them tattooed onto their bodies.

A governing body to knock heads and work out details. If every supermarket and potato-chip maker had chosen its own product-information technology, chaos would have ensued. Instead, a consortium of retailers and manufacturers got together and chose the UPC, an IBM (IBM) design that Woodland, who worked there, helped develop.

An extravagant, surprising, and often expensive effort to “seed the market.” The classic example here comes from the world of credit cards: The Fresno Drop of 1958. Back than, only the wealthy had credit cards. The middle class paid cash, or perhaps paid over time via an installment plan. As Joe Nocera recounts in his classic “A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class”, a manager at Bank of America (BAC), realizing that the only way people would use credit cards is if everyone they knew did, too, had cards sent to every home in Fresno—60,000 in all. For UPC, the seeding of the market was a bit more mundane: the rise of Wal-Mart (WMT), which used the codes to create its legendarily efficient distribution system.

Half a century after the Fresno Drop and Woodland’s epiphany on the beach, there’s a similar battle brewing over mobile payment technologies. Consumers spend trillions of dollars around the world with credit cards.Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL), banks, credit-card companies—everyone is scrambling to come up with ways to get a piece of that action.

One of the more interesting is Square, a startup in San Francisco launched by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Let’s see the ingredients. 
Simplicity? Check: It’s a small plastic square that plugs into an iPhone or iPad. A splashy move to dominate the market? Last month Square announced a deal to be in 7,000 Starbucks (SBUX) across the U.S. Strong consortium or governing body? A tangle of competing alliances is more like it. Two out of three, so far, for Square.

Bennett is a staff writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in New York.Aley is an editor for Bloomberg Businessweek.