The Cloud Factories: North Jersey Data Center Industry Blurs Utility-Real Estate Boundaries

Why pay $600 or more a square foot at unglamorous addresses like Weehawken, Secaucus and Mahwah? The answer is still location, location, location — but of a very different sort.

Companies are paying top dollar to lease space there in buildings called data centers, the anonymous warrens where more and more of the world’s commerce is transacted, all of which has added up to a tremendous boon for the business of data centers themselves.

The centers provide huge banks of remote computer storage, and the enormous amounts of electrical power and ultrafast fiber optic links that they demand.

Prices are particularly steep in northern New Jersey because it is also where data centers house the digital guts of the New York Stock Exchange and other markets. Bankers and high-frequency traders are vying to have their computers, or servers, as close as possible to those markets. Shorter distances make for quicker trades, and microseconds can mean millions of dollars made or lost.

When the centers opened in the 1990s as quaintly termed “Internet hotels,” the tenants paid for space to plug in their servers with a proviso that electricity would be available. As computing power has soared, so has the need for power, turning that relationship on its head: electrical capacity is often the central element of lease agreements, and space is secondary.

A result, an examination shows, is that the industry has evolved from a purveyor of space to an energy broker — making tremendous profits by reselling access to electrical power, and in some cases raising questions of whether the industry has become a kind of wildcat power utility.

Even though a single data center can deliver enough electricity to power a medium-size town, regulators have granted the industry some of the financial benefits accorded the real estate business and imposed none of the restrictions placed on the profits of power companies.

Some of the biggest data center companies have won or are seeking Internal Revenue Service approval to organize themselves as real estate investment trusts, allowing them to eliminate most corporate taxes. At the same time, the companies have not drawn the scrutiny of utility regulators, who normally set prices for delivery of the power to residences and businesses.

While companies have widely different lease structures, with prices ranging from under $200 to more than $1,000 a square foot, the industry’s performance on Wall Street has been remarkable. Digital Realty Trust, the first major data center company to organize as a real estate trust, has delivered a return of more than 700 percent since its initial public offering in 2004, according to an analysis by Green Street Advisors.

The stock price of another leading company, Equinix, which owns one of the prime northern New Jersey complexes and is seeking to become a real estate trust, more than doubled last year to over $200.

“Their business has grown incredibly rapidly,” said John Stewart, a senior analyst at Green Street. “They arrived at the scene right as demand for data storage and growth of the Internet were exploding.”

Push for Leasing

While many businesses own their own data centers — from stacks of servers jammed into a back office to major stand-alone facilities — the growing sophistication, cost and power needs of the systems are driving companies into leased spaces at a breakneck pace.

The New York metro market now has the most rentable square footage in the nation, at 3.2 million square feet, according to a recent report by 451 Research, an industry consulting firm. It is followed by the Washington and Northern Virginia area, and then by San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

A major orthopedics practice in Atlanta illustrates how crucial these data centers have become.

With 21 clinics scattered around Atlanta, Resurgens Orthopaedics has some 900 employees, including 170 surgeons, therapists and other caregivers who treat everything from fractured spines to plantar fasciitis. But its technological engine sits in a roughly 250-square-foot cage within a gigantic building that was once a Sears distribution warehouse and is now a data center operated by Quality Technology Services.

App City: At Barclays Center, Heightening the Fan Experience

The people who run stadiums are clearly concerned about this, and have recently enlisted smartphones in their battle against the television. The new Barclays Center mobile app, released in February for the iPhone and Android, may be the most ambitious effort so far. (The developer, Apps for Venues, describes it as its “crown jewel.”)

I tried the app last Sunday at the Brooklyn arena, as the Nets suffered an ugly loss to the Memphis Grizzlies.

Some basic functions work anywhere, but the impressive features kick in only after you connect to the arena’s free Wi-Fi network — whose existence is a feat in and of itself.

Once you are inside, the app tries to improve the overall arena experience, including offering the first perquisite available exclusively to people sitting in the nosebleeds. Fans in certain sections in the upper deck can order and pay for food from their phones, then pick it up without waiting in the usual line.

Of course, Barclays is also interested in getting visitors into more expensive seats. The arena is considering adding a feature to future versions that would offer fans the chance to pay to move down a few rows after they arrive in the arena.

You can also stream live video of the game to your phone. Several camera angles give fans in distant seats intimate views of the court. You can also rewind up to 30 seconds to watch a replay.

Barclays is the first arena to offer this service, run by Cisco, which plans to start offering it elsewhere soon. When the feature worked, the video quality was impressive. But in many places in the arena I could not get it to load.

For now, only basketball games are streamed this way. The video features will eventually expand to concerts as well, but Barclays will have to sort out rights issues and which camera angles to use case by case.

There was a point at which I felt a little silly fiddling with the video feed on my phone, considering how close I was to what was actually happening. But for me (and, from the looks of it, many of those seated near me), watching sports already involves checking Twitter and elsewhere for a stream of mini-analysis, so that fight has been lost.

One weak area is ticketing. The app lets users browse for tickets, but when it comes to buying them it simply sends you to the Ticketmaster Web site. Nor can you use your phone as a digital ticket yet, a step that 13 Major League Baseball teams, including the Mets, will offer this season through Apple’s Passbook app. Barclays says it is talking to Ticketmaster about paperless ticketing.

In the meantime, Barclays has already addressed one of the inevitable problems that will face fans who order food and stream video on their phones. There are kiosks throughout the arena where you can recharge your phone while watching the action on flat-screen televisions.

Unboxed: N.Y.U. Center Develops a ‘Science of Cities’

THE notion of a “science of cities” seems contradictory. Science is a realm of grand theory and precise measurement, while cities are messy agglomerations of people and human foible. But science is precisely the ambition of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. Founded last year, the center has been getting under way in recent weeks, moving into new office space and firing off its first project proposal to the National Science Foundation.

The center’s director is Steven E. Koonin, a Brooklyn native and graduate of Stuyvesant High School, who came to N.Y.U. after a stint in the Obama administration as the under secretary for science in the Department of Energy. He is both a theoretical physicist and science policy expert. The center shouldn’t lack for intellectual rigor.

The initiative at N.Y.U. is part of a broader trend: the global drive to apply modern sensor, computing and data-sifting technologies to urban environments, in what has become known as “smart city” technology. The goals are big gains in efficiency and quality of life by using digital technology to better manage traffic and curb the consumption of water and electricity, for example. By some estimates, water and electricity use can be cut by 30 to 50 percent over the course of a decade.

Cities from Stockholm to Singapore are deep into smart city projects. The market looms as big, lucrative business for technology companies. “The Smart City movement,” according to a report this month from IDC, a technology research firm, “is emerging and growing as a significant force of innovation and investment at all levels of government.” The N.Y.U. center’s partners include technology companies like I.B.M., Cisco Systems and Xerox, as well as universities and the New York City government.

City governments, like other institutions, have collected data for years to try to become more efficient. There have been some notable achievements, like CompStat, the New York Police Department’s system for identifying crime patterns, introduced in the mid-1990s and later widely adopted elsewhere.

What is different today, says Dr. Koonin, is that digital technologies — sensors, wireless communication, storage and clever software algorithms — are advancing so rapidly that it is becoming possible to see and measure activities in an urban environment as never before.

“We can build an observatory to be able to see the pulse of the city in detail and as a whole,” Dr. Koonin explains.

Dr. Koonin’s digital “observatory” of urban life raises questions about privacy. He is keenly aware of that issue, and vows that the center is engaged in science rather than surveillance. For example, individuals’ names or tax identification numbers would be stripped from personal records.

The collected data, he says, will be the raw material for modeling outcomes — say, the steps required to reduce electricity consumption in a high-rise office building or in an individual apartment. Those modeled predictions, he adds, can guide policy or inform citizens.

“I’d like to create SimCity for real,” Dr. Koonin says, referring to the classic computer simulation game.

To help, Dr. Koonin is forging partnerships with government laboratories to tap their expertise in building complex computer simulations, like climate models for weather prediction.

The path to SimCity will come step by step, through tackling specific projects. The first one is a program to monitor and analyze noise. The largest single cause of complaints to New York’s 311 phone and online service is noise. It is a quality-of-life issue, Dr. Koonin says, and one related to health, especially when noise disrupts sleep.

The 10-member project team includes music professors, computer scientists and graduate students. The group will use the city’s 311 data, but also plans to employ wireless sensors — tiny ones outside windows, noise meters on traffic lights and street corners, perhaps a smartphone app for crowdsourced data gathering. To inform policy choices, data on noise limits for vehicles and muffler costs might be added to the street-level noise readings. Then, computer simulations could predict the likely effect of enforcement steps, charges or incentives to buy properly working mufflers for vehicles without them.

The project, Dr. Koonin says, might also pull in data on traffic flows, garbage pickup times and building classifications. For example, he says, a 2 a.m. garbage pickup could be routed to a neighborhood with little residential housing.

Huawei to Open Research Center in Finland

PARIS — Huawei Technologies, a Chinese maker of telecommunications equipment, said on Monday that it planned to open a research and development center in Helsinki next year, accelerating its investments in Europe, where its business is expanding rapidly.

The move illustrates a trans-Atlantic difference in attitudes toward Huawei. The company has been largely shut out of the United States market for network gear because of Congressional concerns about possible security threats — fears the company insists are unfounded.

While Huawei has faced difficulties in some European markets, like France, it has done better elsewhere. Huawei employs more than 7,000 people in the region, and it says that total could double in the next three to five years. Huawei already has a research center in Italy and is studying the possibility of opening one in Spain. It also recently announced a $2 billion investment in Britain.

The planned center in Helsinki, involving an investment of 70 million euros, or about $90 million, will work on smartphone development, including features like user interfaces and power management, the company said. When the center opens next year, it will employ 30 people, but this could grow to 100 over the next five years, the company said.

The announcement is a plus for the Finnish technology industry, which has been suffering from the woes at Nokia. The company was once the world’s biggest cellphone maker, but its market share has fallen sharply in recent years.

“The open and innovative environment in Finland,” Huawei said, “is an ideal place for Huawei to strengthen our global R.& D. capabilities for devices, creating opportunities for both Huawei and the Finnish telecommunications industry.”

Huawei has been known mostly for its network equipment, but the company is pushing to make a name for itself with its handsets.

Mobile devices accounted for 22 percent of its revenue last year, an increase of 37 percent. That compares with growth of 12 percent for the overall business.

U.S. Disavows Patent at Center of Apple-Samsung Dispute

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has decided that one of the smartphone patents at the center of the legal dispute between Apple and Samsung Electronics — which resulted in a jury award to Apple of $1.05 billion — should never have been granted.

The patent office decision is an initial ruling, in a document dated Oct. 15, and filed electronically on Monday, and probably will be challenged by Apple. It affects the patent for Apple’s “rubber-banding” or “bounce” feature, which makes the digital page bounce when a user pulls a finger from the top of the touch screen to the bottom.

If the patent office ruling withstands challenges by Apple, it could be used to roll back the $1.05 billion in damages in the California case and strengthen Samsung’s hand in settlement talks with Apple, said James E. Bessen, a lecturer at the Boston University School of Law. The patent office’s action, patent specialists say, shows that the office, and not only courts around the world, will be an important front in the smartphone patent wars. These legal clashes mainly pit Apple against companies that use Google’s Android software for smartphones, including Samsung, HTC and Motorola Mobility, which Google acquired last year.

The patent office ruling was first reported Tuesday by Florian Müeller, a patent analyst and blogger based in Germany.

The decision to invalidate the Apple patent was made under longstanding procedures for re-examining previously granted patents.

Under the America Invents Act, which was passed last year, the post-grant review process is being strengthened and applies to patent re-examination requests filed after Sept. 16.

Patent specialists say the new rules will make it more likely that courts will wait until the patent office has finished studying whether a patent should be invalidated. And the new law gives the director of the patent office the power to order that a patent be re-examined.

“The patent office now has the opportunity to actually take the lead rather than following the courts,” said Arti K. Rai, a professor at Duke University School of Law and a former external affairs administrator at the patent office. “This has the potential to be a really important way to try to curb the problems with existing patents.”

A major problem, according to patent specialists, is that the patent office grants patents too easily in the first place. That is particularly the case, they say, with certain kinds of patents, including those on software. Unlike pharmaceuticals, where a single clearly defined molecule can be the patented invention, software patents often describe digital concepts carried out in code. In software, the boundaries are less clear, and innovation tends to be step-by-step, building on years, sometimes decades of work.

Big technology companies, patent specialists say, have exploited the complexity and uncertainty of software to amass large portfolios of patents.

Frontline patent examiners, working under tight time pressure, they say, tend to be outmatched by wealthy companies when patents are filed. But post-grant review affords another, more painstaking look. “It gives the patent office the ability to focus on the patents that really matter,” said Colleen Chien, an assistant professor at the Santa Clara University Law School.

The patent office’s re-examination team issued its invalidation decision on patent 7,469,381. It was one of the six patents that formed the basis of the jury verdict against Samsung in a federal court in San Jose, Calif.

The patent is at the center of Apple’s intellectual property strategy in smartphones and tablets of patenting user-experience software. Upon review, the patent office determined that the idea and the bounce feature had been invented earlier, even if the pointing device was not a finger on a touch screen.

Before the California trial, Samsung had made a change to sidestep the Apple patent on its newest smartphones. The same finger stroke brings a blue glow at the bottom of the screen, not a bounce.

This week, Samsung filed a copy of the patent office’s initial invalidation ruling on the Apple patent with the judge in the California case, Judge Lucy Koh. Samsung has asked that Judge Koh overrule the jury. And the company is appealing the entire verdict.

The Android camp has filed other requests to re-examine Apple smartphone patents with the patent office.

In a statement, Allen Lo, Google’s deputy general counsel, said: “The patent office plays a critical role in ensuring that overly broad patents cannot be used to limit consumer choice. We appreciate the care the patent office has taken in re-examining dubious software claims."

Apple did not respond to an e-mail request for comment.

Five Great Game Center Games for Mac

When Mountain Lion released in July, it brought with it a host of welcome features for gamers. The new AirPlay mirroring Mac feature allows you to mirror your computer screen to your television at the press of a button. Just like that, you can be playing Diablo 3 on your 55" flatscreen, all without involving a single wire.

But Mountain Lion also brought Apple's social gaming hub Game Center to Mac, and it comes with all the leaderboards, achievements, and multiplayer modes of its iOS counterpart. While there still aren't a ton of Game Center games out now, a small handful of quality games let you to challenge your friends in real-time or asynchronously across platforms (iOS to Mac), or compare your highscores to your friends', regardless of where you were playing.

Here are five of our current favorite Game Center games for Mac.

Sky Gamblers: Air Supreme - $4.99

The first thing you'll notice about Sky Gamblers is that it's gorgeous. Shortly thereafter, you'll notice it's a ton of fun.

Sky Gamblers is one of those games just made to be mirrored from an iPad to your TV, where you can scream through the skies shooting down poor pilots. But if you're stuck at a desk, Sky Gamblers: Air Supreme for Mac is just as good, and the best part is you can quickly compete with a friend, in head to head multiplayer. It's tons of fun, and good for a quick dogfight between putting together Excel docs.

Conquist 2 Online Arena - $2.99

Conquist 2 is basically Risk, and that means it has a ton of competition in the App Store. There's an official Risk app, and about 46 million awesome Risk one-offs (like Strategery!) all competing for our time and affection.

But Conquist is also the first Risk one-off to be cross platform on Macs and iOS devices. While games like the aforementioned Sky Gamblers allows you to go head-to-head in awesome dogfights, Conquist's asynchronous gaming style means you can open the game intermittently throughout the day and play a few rounds. It's perfect for a slight reprieve from the workday grind.

Real Racing 2 - $12.99

Just about every gamer with an iOS device probably has a version of Real Racing, and for good reason - they're the best iOS racing games out there. We gave Firemint's excellent racer a 9 (read the review), even with a higher-than-most $9.99 price tag.

Real Racing 2 for Mac is our most expensive game on the list, but it's also fantastic and well worth the cash to race your iOS-wielding friends at anytime. This is a fantastically gorgeous game and looks even better on Retina Display Macbook Pros, for which it's been optimized. Better yet, it has Cross-platform save capabilities and USB controller support.

It might be expensive at $12.99 but it's well-worth the cash.

Two Towers - $.99

Two Towers is a bit different than everything else on the list - it's a very pretty, pretty complex card game, which allows you to challenge friends on iOS from your Mac. There's a lot to learn in Two Towers, but soon you'll be whipping through your 114 cards and almost 30 spells. You can practice up against the challenging AI before sending that Game Center challenge to your friends. Plus, it's $.99.

Anomaly - $4.99

Anomaly is the only game on our list that you doesn't allow you to challenge your iOS friends to a head-to-head match. But fortunately, the game is still an insanely fun tower defense game, the kind of game where the highest score actually matters. Plus the game is really, really attractive. Definitely worth your 5 bucks.

Do you have any favorite Game Center games? Leave your username in the replies and challenge your fellow IGNers.

Nic is the Editor of IGN Tech. He loves technology almost as much as The Great Gatsby, Super Hexagon, and Mysteries of Pittsburgh. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.

Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Saving Time with the Windows Mobility Center

Running a presentation or demonstration on a laptop is a way of life for many people, and Windows 7 includes a panel of the most-used settings all in one convenient place. The Windows Mobility Center screen includes controls for the computer’s audio volume, screen brightness, battery status, wireless antenna, external display and other settings adjusted frequently on traveling laptops. (Some versions of Windows 7 have fewer settings available.)

To open the Windows Mobility Center with a keyboard shortcut, just press the Windows logo key and the X key. You can also go to the Start menu, open Control Panel, select Mobile PC (or Hardware and Sound) and then click on Windows Mobility Center. Microsoft has more information on using the controls. A version of Windows Mobility Center is also available in Windows Vista.

Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Saving Time with the Windows Mobility Center

Running a presentation or demonstration on a laptop is a way of life for many people, and Windows 7 includes a panel of the most-used settings all in one convenient place. The Windows Mobility Center screen includes controls for the computer’s audio volume, screen brightness, battery status, wireless antenna, external display and other settings adjusted frequently on traveling laptops. (Some versions of Windows 7 have fewer settings available.)

To open the Windows Mobility Center with a keyboard shortcut, just press the Windows logo key and the X key. You can also go to the Start menu, open Control Panel, select Mobile PC (or Hardware and Sound) and then click on Windows Mobility Center. Microsoft has more information on using the controls. A version of Windows Mobility Center is also available in Windows Vista.