GADGET REVIEWS Just another GADGET NEWS

Commercial broadband infrastructure in the US is as poorly tended and updated as the nation’s bridges and highways. Unless you’re a high-frequency stock trader. Then, you get to ride in the fast lane.

“Ultra-fast cables are not built for use by the public,” writes Thomas McCabe, who wrote a recent profile of the technology behind high-frequency trading for Kurzweil AI. “Theyre designed by infrastructure companies specifically for HFT firms, who will pay high prices for bandwidth on the fastest cables.”

These companies are building new fiberoptic cables over land and under sea to connect major trading centers and shave milliseconds off trading times. Automated trades and super-fast infrastructure lets traders pull off a very simple kind of global arbitrage: buy shares on one exchange and sell them on another, using huge numbers and a momentary informational lag to turn penny differences on individual shares into millions of dollars in profit on a trade.

In the near future, the fundamental limit on high-frequency trading won’t the cables. It’s the fact that human beings (and their computers) still live in cities on dry land. At an even further extreme, it’s the fact that no information can travel faster than light.

When trading centers are as close as London and Paris, that’s not much of a problem. If they’re as remote as London and Sydney, it places limits on speed — and gives traders who are geographically closer a key advantage.

The solution is outlined by MIT’s Alex Wissner-Gross and the University of Hawaii’s Cameron Freer in a recent theoretical paper titled “Relativistic statistical arbitrage“: eliminate human beings altogether. Instead, put HFT computers in remote locations, like Antarctica or the middle of the Atlantic ocean, that minimize the absolute distance between exchanges.

“Historically, technologies for transportation and communication have resulted in the consolidation of financial mar- kets,” Wissner-Gross and Freer write, pointing to the elimination of regional stock markets with the rise of the telegraph. “We have described a type of arbitrage that is just beginning to become relevant, and for which the trend is, surprisingly, in the direction of decentralization.”

Indeed; once you eliminate the need for people to gather together, the effect of traditional economic geography on markets is as minimal as an algebra problem.

Image: Submarine Cable Map 2010. Credit: PriMetrica via Kurzweil AI.

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Don’t type when you can talk, says Google. The search giant has strengthened its existing voice command feature on Android and introduced a new application called Chrome-to-Phone, for syncing with Chrome browsers.

Voice Search, despite its name, now lets you do more than just search: It will let users send texts, compose e-mails, call businesses, navigate, jot notes, and set the alarm on their phone by just speaking into the device.

The voice commands, called “voice actions,” are part of Google’s effort to improve the user interface on Android and let consumers go beyond the traditional keyboard and touchscreen interface on their phones.

The Voice Search application is currently available only for phones running version 2.2 of the Android OS — which means HTC Evo, Droid X and Droid 2 users can get it on their phones immediately.

Google also launched a mobile sync app to link its Chrome browser to Android 2.2 devices. The tool, called Chrome-to-Phone, lets users on Google’s Chrome browser click an icon to send a web page or a map to their phone. The page or map is then almost immediately available on the phone.

“This is a low-latency, super-fast app for pushing data to the phone,” says Dave Burke, engineering manager for Google.

Google debuted its voice search application in the U.S. about two years ago when it introduced Android. Now one out of every four queries, or 25 percent of queries, on devices running Android 2.0 OS and higher comes through the voice interface, says Google.

The earlier version of the voice command allowed users to do just three things: web search, call a specific contact and navigate to an address.

The new voice search app goes beyond that. For instance, you can speak the name of a song or a band into the phone and the app will go online, find the music and show a list of apps such as Pandora and last.fm that can play the music you want.

For more details, check out Google’s list of voice commands available through the app.

But when it comes to the Chrome-to-Phone app, the service is more limited. It is currently available to only Chrome users, though some Firefox users are also using it. The sync feature is also only available for Android devices, though Google says it will work to bring the feature to iPhone users as an app.

Image: Screenshots of Voice Search courtesy Google.

Source:wired.com

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