Blogs

After upgrading from iPhone 3Gs to iPhone 4 and spending a few weeks using it I share some forward looking considerations on what the new display technology means to the mobile computing market.
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To be honest with you I personally did not think it was necessary for me to upgrade from an iPhone 3Gs to an iPhone4. Sure there are some differences that may make it more useful but when you narrow down the facts, the only reason to buy it from a user point of view is the ability to do video calls. Anything else that a normal Joe needs can be done with a 3Gs model upgraded to iOS4. So why did I upgrade? Because my job though me a long time ago that there is no substitute for firsthand experience. I am glad I continued to listen to that wisdom.

There is no question that mobility is becoming a large part of our lives. That is why it was very exciting to attend the MobileBeat 2010 conference in San Francisco and learn all about what industry leaders think about the future of the industry.

Major highlights from the keynotes included HP's emphasis on flexible displays. HP CTO Phil McKinney indicated that they plan to include these displays, which require little power, to mobile and non-mobile HP devices.

AT&T 's CTO John Donovan gave quite an inspiring talk, stating that "mobilization shortens distance from intent to action". He also said "Nobody wants to search, they want to find" - and mobility enables this.  One of his predictions was that in the near future, video streaming will be consuming 90% of mobile bandwidth. When he was asked ...

On May 18th I attended the VLAB event at Stanford University titled The Business of the Brain. During the reception prior to the event I had a chance to talk with Jamie Hyneman, host of Mythbusters and a serial entrepreneur. We did not have a chance to speak long but I did engage him on the topic of how to design a system (prototype) to validate an hypothesis, or in his case, a myth. Obviously we are operating in parallel universes in that I build software prototypes and not physical devices. Still I wanted to hear his approach and compare methodologies.

If you think I am mixing apples and oranges you will be surprised to know that this is not the first time that someone pokes around in other industries for a better methodology.

Introduction and Why

I reviewed few business card scanner apps, a scan app (for scan benchmarking) and a LBS based digital business card exchanger called Bump ©. The goal of this comparison is to quickly asses the state of the art for this class of products for this device and to identify common pitfall and shortcomings.

The How

I kept this simple, take a couple of rather ordinary business cards and try to scan them both in office light and in day light (outdoors that is). If the outcome was something I could use, than it was a success. Anything else was a failure, for example, partial read, incomplete names etc.

Introduction and Why

I reviewed few business card scanner apps, a scan app (for scan benchmarking) and a LBS based digital business card exchanger called Bump ©. The goal of this comparison is to quickly asses the state of the art for this class of products for this device and to identify common pitfall and shortcomings.

The How

I kept this simple, take a couple of rather ordinary business cards and try to scan them both in office light and in day light (outdoors that is). If the outcome was something I could use, than it was a success. Anything else was a failure, for example, partial read, incomplete names etc.

The predictable pathways of information are changing: the physical world itself is becoming a type of information system. In what's called the Internet of Things, sensors and actuators embedded in physical objects--from roadways to pacemakers--are linked through wired and wireless networks, often using the same Internet Protocol (IP) that connects the Internet. These networks churn out huge volumes of data that flow to computers for analysis. When objects can both sense the environment and communicate, they become tools for understanding complexity and responding to it swiftly. What's revolutionary in all this is that these physical information systems are now beginning to be deployed.

by Berna Erol, Director of Web Business Research, RII

 Title says it all, our Whiteboard Share iPhone app has exceeded 10,000 users in just 3 weeks after it was released and became the #1 iPhone Business app in the Japan App Store! What's the story, why did we put together this app in the first place, where are we going with this? Please read on.

How many times did you have a whiteboard discussion and think “How are we going to get this off the whiteboard?” Of course there are options: You can take a picture of it with a camera, connect it to your computer, email it to your co-workers.

When I started as an intern at Ricoh I was provided with a Sun/350 computer and color monitor which cost more than my annual salary. Now Amazon rents far more powerful computers on the cloud for pennies an hour. Many companies have already moved their computing needs from the desktop into the 'server room' but now the computation is being migrated completely offsite. Today students believe that a desktop computer is for playing games, while work gets done on laptops and mobile devices. Setting up a data center is more expensive than renting services. Not only are the computers leaving the offices, computing itself has left the building. 

There were three main things people attending this conference were interested in doing: moving applications out of the server room and onto virtual machines in the cloud, doing large amounts of computation on data sets, and providing webservices without managing infrastructure.

This past Monday I attended the 2010 Cloud Connect Business Summit. This was my first attendance at Cloud Connect and I purposefully choose to attend only the business summit. This is held on the first of four days. My goal was to learn the point of view of other players in this field and to evaluate and identify important trends that may very well have nothing to do with technology (i.e. barrier to adoption, business model issues etc.)

Where we were few years ago

Some panelists spent time recalling where we were a few years ago to show the progress that has been made in Cloud Computing.

There has been a lot of buzz before and after the formal introduction of the iPad. I am not going to repeat any of it here, I am just going to share my educated opinion as to why this device matters to you, me and everybody with a pulse. You simply may not know it yet.

The flop

The iPad is misunderestimated. It is misunderstood because the expectations were set too high by years of anticipation and when we realized this device does not walk on water, the bubble burst. It is underestimated for the same reason. Most of us missed the forest for the tree.