What are some of CES 2013's ShowStoppers?
Consumer Electronics Show is a big crazy event. There is a lot of new technology that might or might not see the light of day a couple of years down the road, and a whole lot more stuff that is rather hum-drum. Walking through millions of square feed of convention seeing thousands of cheap speakers and iPhone cases and over sized TVs can be a numbing waste of time.
That is why I like the side event, Showstoppers, which puts together a pretty good lineup of interesting tech products. While nothing jumped out as much this year as last, these are a few that piqued my interest as having some potential, or were simply interesting.
Microsoft Research shows off IllumiRoom at CES
Microsoft may have pulled out of the Consumer Electronics Show in 2013 and going forward, but not stayed away. CEO Steve Ballmer still managed to find his way on stage for the big pre-show keynote and now the Research arm of the company has arrived in Las Vegas as well.
Eric Rudder, Microsoft’s Chief Technology Strategy Officer, made his way into the Samsung keynote earlier today to show off IllumiRoom.
Get ready for the Google ToiletSense algorithm
This may seem like a distraction from my theme of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, but please stick with me for a moment as we consider the fate of Blake Krikorian, who is best known for the Slingbox and now seems to be selling his current company, the awkwardly named Id8 Group R2 Studios. I think Krikorian’s career arc and our fascination with it give some insight into the whole tech-vs-Hollywood theme, showing how aimless and confused are some of these big technology companies.
The post I read that got me thinking in this direction came from Kara Swisher at allthingsd.com, which is part of the Wall Street Journal. Krikorian is reportedly selling his home automation startup to Amazon or Apple or Google or maybe Microsoft -- in other words the usual suspects. Amazon may be now out of contention because Krikorian just resigned from the Amazon board. But in any case, Swisher says, they all want Krikorian because "he is considered one of tech’s most savvy execs with regard to video and media distribution". Yeah, right.
The world’s first digital bottle top
There have been some great technical innovations in recent years. The iPod, the iPhone, Wi-Fi, TiVo, Kinect… the list goes on and on. But surely they all pale into insignificance compared to the mighty, life-changing invention that is the digital bottle top.
Yes, it’s a real thing. Created by British cider brand Strongbow and marketing agency Work Club, the StartCap is a bottle top with built-in RFID. When you pop the top, exposing the tag, a signal is sent to a reader somewhere in the room (at a bar or club) causing some kind of action to occur.
A few very smart people can make the difference
A couple weeks from now we’re going to start serializing my 1992 book Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date. It’s the book that was the basis for my 1996 documentary TV series Triumph of the Nerds and ultimately led to this column starting on pbs.org in 1997.
What goes around comes around.
DARPA adopts Android-based battlefield helmet cameras
DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as it is technically known, has a history of turning seemingly crazy ideas into reality. Now this branch of the Defense Department pursues a new camera/sensor system designed to aid soldiers' vision on the battlefield.
The agency describes it this way: "As missions shift, however, and warfighters are required to work in smaller teams and access more remote locations, it is technology that must adapt if it is to remain useful. Desirable features for many new man-portable systems include small size, light weight, minimal power consumption, low cost, ease of use, multi-functionality and, to the extent possible, network friendliness".
Star Trek replicator is closer to reality than you think
In video "Can Nanotechnology Create Utopia?" physicist Michio Kaku talks about the upsides, downsides, insides and outsides of having a replicator like on Star Trek to make anything we’d ever need or want. It’s a compelling vision and he’s right that its implications go far beyond the economic to include cultural, social, even psychological. Kaku says it’s possible to make such a device and suggests we’ll have it in 100 years.
I say we’ll have it in 20.
Highlight app and the 'it's too radical to be normal' problem
Great ideas usually take time to germinate into a model that is truly feasible. People are notoriously slow in grasping new paradigms, preferring to flirt with a comfortable present that is more often than not, entirely worthy and sufficient. This consumer mindset is an issue that faces aspiring and radical technology entrepreneurs, it is not sufficient to simply have the chops to think and execute the new ideas, but the right timing is nearly as crucial. To possess the patience and sense to release a radical idea into the wild only when the market is ripe is a factor that can determine make or break.
People discovery is a concept that has floated around the mobile app industry for quite some time. Apps like Badoo, which was founded in 2006 by a Russian entrepreneur and currently has a user base upwards of 150 million, operates around a fundamentally location-based model, by allowing users to see and interact with like-minded people around their specific region. Scores of other location-based apps, such as Banjo and Sonar, have managed to find relative success in their respective niches as location tag aggregators over various social networks and as friend-finding systems.
NASA sends HTC/Google Nexus One...into space
Launched with Android 2.1 Eclair in January 2010 the HTC-built Google Nexus One is more than two years old, but that is not stopping NASA from re-launching the smartphone... into space this time around.
Part of the PhoneSat program designed to create "small, low-cost, and easy-to-buid nano-satellites", in 2013 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will launch Google's former Android flagship smartphone into space. According to HTC, NASA will not unbox the Google Nexus One and strap it on a rocket, as it was already put through thorough testing. The smartphone's first contact with space was in 2010, when it was attached to a rocket and launched to the edge of space, while also recording every step of the trip.
LinkedIn identifies the top-10 endangered office tools and trends
The office workplace is continually evolving. New technologies and trends -- like cloud computing and BYOD schemes -- are becoming more and more popular, but not every firm is willing to embrace the future, and many are stuck firmly in the past.
LinkedIn, the world’s largest social network for professionals, surveyed more than 7,000 members across the globe and asked them which of the current office tools and trends they expect to be extinct in five years’ time, combining the answers to produce the following top 10:
Aliens zapped my toaster, or why you should care about space weather
The launch of the iPhone 5, and the fuss that’s being made over it (wow, 2 million sales in 24 hours) shows once again how far IT is embedded in every part of our lives. How lost would we be without any of the electronic kit and systems we so depend on? Even your toaster likely has a microprocessor embedded in it. And all of that makes us very vulnerable in ways that were almost totally unknown to our grandfathers. It’s not the natural world that has changed. It’s us.
You may remember that a few weeks ago there were widely publicized warnings of a solar storm which, in the end, had limited effects. And no doubt this caused many people to think that solar storms are never what you might call a real and serious problem. But consider this: 153 years ago, beginning on August 28th 1859, a super space storm occurred of such proportions as to make Hurricane Katrina look like a minor inconvenience.
Apple is the new leader in technical stagnation
The golden years of Apple's outright dominance in technical innovation is fading, and quickly at that. The iPhone 5 just launched with a deservedly ho-hum and lackluster reception, with many people asking the obvious question: that's it? For a company riding the high waves of Wall Street for more than a few years now, with earnings going through the roof quarter upon quarter, is this the best that a larger-than-life tech giant can bring us?
Maybe the naysayers are right in that Apple is the leftover shell of a monolith once passed (post-Jobs.) Perhaps that internal drive to bring out the best in technology they release is starting to fizzle. I'd go as far as to argue that Apple never really has been as continually innovative as many people may believe. While Apple does have an easy ability in commanding the lead for sectors it enters, this doesn't necessarily mean the company if filled with technical Einsteins as so many supporters clamor to believe.
The Great Recession isn’t really over
First in a series. A couple of years ago, in an obvious moment of poor judgement, the Kauffman Foundation placed my personal rag on its list of the top 50 economics blogs in America. So from time to time I feel compelled to write about economic issues and the US Labor Day holiday provides a good excuse for doing so now. In a sense you could say I inherited this gig because my parents began their careers in the 1940s working for the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. This first of two columns looks at employment numbers in the current recovery while the second will try to explain why the economy has been so resistant to recovery and what can be done about it.
You’ll see many news stories in the next few days based on a study from the National Employment Law Project detailing how many and what kinds of jobs were lost in the Great Recession and what kinds have come back in the current recovery. Cutting to the chase we lost eight million jobs, have recovered four million of those, but, here’s the problem, the recovered jobs on average pay a lot less than did the jobs that were lost, which is why the US middle class is still hurting.
Microsoft codename 'Schnauzer Spittle' revealed
Call it life imitating art. One of my favorite pastimes is watching technology trends catch up with popular science fiction. Whether it's smartphones and tablets presaging Star Trek's ubiquitous communicators and PADDs or iRobots and Roombas hinting at our Star Wars maintenance droid-enabled future, I enjoy connecting the dots between various technology developments to see how they point the way towards a sci-fi inspired future.
Take this week, for example. Three seemingly unrelated stories -- Microsoft patenting "life streaming", Facebook tweaking the performance of its iOS app and the announcement of a Nokia-led alliance to promote more accurate indoor location services -- may together lay the foundation for myriad fantastical future applications.
JavaScript Video is your density, I mean, Destiny
Second in a series. Three quarters of the bits being schlepped over the Internet today are video bits, so video standards are more important than ever. To accommodate this huge load of video data we’ve developed compression technologies, special protocols like the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), we’ve pushed data to the edge of the network with Content Distribution Networks (originally Akamai but now many others).
All these Internet video technologies are in transition, too, with H.264 and HTML5 video in the ascendence while stalwarts like RealVideo and even Flash Video appear to be in decline. The latter is most significant because Adobe’s Flash has been -- thanks to YouTube -- the most ubiquitous video standard. Flash video was everywhere. But with Flash apparently leaving the ever-growing mobile space, will we ever see another truly ubiquitous web video standard? We already have and it is called ClipStream G2 JavaScript video.
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