CTIA Central Hall

So each year I like to give out my own best booth award to the glamorous handset companies that go all out for CTIA. I think it usually comes down to LG and Samsung. Last year I liked the LG booth the best and although it was great this year, Samsung gets the award for the intriguing display pictured here. It is made up of individual cell phone images which constantly change.

The central hall was very busy in the afternoon and I enjoy going to the Asian country pavilions which each have several microwave component companies. They typically make some very good isolators, diplexers, duplexers and integrated assemblies. One that stood out was Admotech which makes components and was featuring their integrated front end WiMAX assembly.

I will be spending more time in this hall later since it is so large.

RF/Microwave Pavilion Opens at CTIA

The RF and Microwave Pavilion opened at CTIA today and the reception was strong. The Pavilion is located in the South hall toward the front on the main isle so traffic was good.

I visited all of the booths today in the pavilion and will have a complete wrap up in a few days after I return. But the most interesting product so far is the Peregrine UltraCMOS products. They are making products that are solving many of the high power, high linearity and fast switching times needed for multi-throw switches, digital attenuators and tunable circuits. Included is a photo of one of their patterned Si on Sapphire wafers. See the previous entry describing their release of new digital step attenuators and they have more products coming.

Another very interesting meeting I had was with Spirent who I was not very familiar with until today. They make testing solutions for real world testing of more types of wireless systems and announced that ETS-Lindgren now supports Spirent's UMTS Location Test System. This will allow wireless device manufacturers to quickly and easily add Spirent's A-GPS instrumentation to ETS-Lindgren's over the air wireless test solutions.

The Testing Solutions Pavilion is right beside the RF and microwave Pavilion so I was able to visit Anritsu and others there. Anritsu has some new USB power meters available that I will also describe in the wrap up after the show. The central hall has all of the large booths and country pavilions. I will have follow up on details about my visits to central hall next.

A Brand New Language on Google App Engine!

Posted by Alon Levi, App Engine Team

It's been almost a year since we've launched App Engine with support for Python, and what a year it's been! We've gotten fantastic feedback from developers, and we've released loads of new features! When we launched, we promised support for another runtime language, and indeed this has been among the most requested features from our developers since day one.

Well, we fed Google's new CADIE Strategic Decision Maker the App Engine issue tracker, our groups, and various blog posts around the internet to help select a new runtime language for App Engine. Today we're excited to officially announce support for FORTRAN 77!

If you're an enterprise customer and want to take advantage of Google App Engine, but have a large and cumbersome legacy system, we want to make it easy for you to port to the cloud. By providing a Fortran 77 runtime, along with a familiar, easy-to-use deployment mechanism, we hope to make this process efficient and straightforward.

Want to give it a try? Download our SDK and deploy your application by mailing punch cards to:

Google App Engine, C/O APPCFG

1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy

Mountain View, CA 94043

and we'll take care of the rest! We welcome your feedback on our newest addition to the App Engine family--you can discuss it on our Google Group!