The New York Times has just published a piece on a technology we’ve written about a few times before (here, here, and here).  They’re covering research into its possible uses in the data center, whereas we came across it in a consumer electronics context:

Problem: Stakeholders in the preservation of the broadcast/cable television paradigm (networks, cable companies) are much less inclined to deliver content via the internet to your television than they are to your computer’s web browser.  That’s a shame, because your computer is essentially a single user, lean-forward device – not great for television.  In fact, that’s what makes it nonthreatening enough to be accommodated.  It’s a business-driven issue rather than a technological one, and it’s what has crippled Apple TV, Google TV, Boxee, and any number of other set-top box contenders to date.  It could be a while before a stable and sustainable internet television business model gets hammered out.   In the meantime, how to get that web content over to the television where it belongs, without running an HDMI cable under  the carpet?

Solution:  Use an  Ultra Wide Band wireless solution, of course!  Getting an uncompressed audio and video stream over to the television would require a lot more bandwidth than what even the most up-to-date flavor of  802.11 wireless technology can handle, but luckily, ‘short fat pipe’  UWB technology capable of moving a very large amount of data a very short distance does exist, and in fact it’s been around for a few years now.  It was surprisingly difficult to find, but over a year ago we found a simple and inexpensive  WiMedia-based solution that we’ve happily been using ever since: it consists of only a small (dongle-sized) USB2 transmitter at the computer and another small dongle-sized HDMI receiver at the television.  Install the driver on your computer, put that website or iTunes video into full screen mode, and you’re good to go (until you have to get up off the couch to pause the video – but hey).

The product (bought for under 100 USD) has ended up being a highly effective workaround for the ‘browser-only’ internet television problem described above.   Funnily, though, it’s remained something of a well-kept secret in the consumer electronics space – and since I imagine our particular use case will disappear once true internet television does indeed arrive (whenever that is), this recent New York Time piece on whether the same ‘short fat pipe’ technology has an unexpected future moving large amounts of zeros and ones between servers in the data center caught our eye.

Quick hit: I lost my phone in a cab last night, and while the sweetest kid EVER found it and got it back to me, it made me think twice about my mobile contingency plan. I realized I had a few holes, so I wanted to share what I’ve already done, and how I’m patching the holes. All of these are Android-specific; I haven’t investigated iOS options for my iPad yet.

• Contacts. All of my contacts are through my Google Apps account for deannazandt.com, so we’re good there.Apps. I’ve rooted my phone, so I use Titanium Backup Pro to create regularly scheduled backups of the application and application data on my phone. The free version sends the backups to your SD card; I bought the Pro version so I could have those apps backed up to Dropbox, too.SMS & MMS. I use Backup to Gmail for this. It automatically sends your SMS, MMS and Call Log to your Google account, and files them in the Archive with appropriate labels.

  Photos. This was the big one for me: I have a lot of photos on my phone that aren’t shared on my social networks. I was mourning the potential loss of some precious Christmas photos, for example. I’m now trying out SugarSync to back these up to SugarSync’s cloud, and then to my laptop; I chose this one because many services wanted to use public social networks for the backup. That was too risky for me. Plus, it seems that SugarSync has good reviews on managing battery and scheduling, and you get 5GB of free space.

  Locator. Tara Hunt turned me on to Prey, which is a full suite of services for a lost phone. You can locate the lost device, send messages to it for the finder to tell them how to get in touch with you, and if they don’t comply, you can brick the device.

  Those were the biggies for me. What else am I missing?

It was reported recently that Sony Pictures is in final negotiations to bring Walter Isaacson’s soon-to-be-published (and much anticipated) Steve Jobs biography to the big screen.  To anyone who’s followed the consumer electronics market even casually, the irony is hard to miss: it’s hard to think of anywhere Steve Jobs (and his relentless focus on user experience) appears to have been less understood than at Sony.

Armed with concepts such as “Engineers remain the ‘movie stars’ of the electronics industry“, CEO Howard Stringer as led the company through recent years in which too many new Sony products were incompatible, user-unfriendly, and/or simply misguided.  The results?  Tremendous losses (3.1 billion US for the fiscal year ending March 2010), a decidedly unsafe-for-the-workplace Onion news clip that’s been viewed almost 5 million times on youtube alone (in fairness, Apple’s received the Onion treatment as well), and lastly, a near complete loss of brand value in regards to consumer electronics and innovation – this for the company that gave us the Walkman.

Despite having had its lunch so thoroughly eaten by Apple, though, Sony still doesn’t appear to quite get it: “If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US”, Stringer claimed in a 2009 interview.  The logic behind this spin almost works, if one ignores the fact that Apple itself is perhaps the poster child for closed ‘ walled garden’ system design (iTunes, anyone?).  No, a stubborn attachment to proprietary technologies such as ATRAC and the Memory Stick was not the primary cause behind the current sad state of affairs at Sony (although it almost surely contributed).  Instead, a more constructive place to look would be towards the products themselves – towards the utility, value, and user experience they offer.

As it turns out,  maybe engineers aren’t “the movie stars of the electronics industry”, maybe they’re just the engineers of the electronics industry – and if there is anyone deserving of being put on a pedestal, maybe it’s the consumer.

That’s perhaps at the core of Steve Jobs’ professional legacy.  As to regard for the consumer over at Sony, just the fact that Stringer is quoted above using the term ‘electronics industry’ rather than the more common (and accurate) term ‘consumer electronics industry’ is perhaps telling.

Here’s hoping that if he’s still at Sony in a few years when his Steve Jobs movie finally comes out, Sir Stringer watches it closely.

The announcements today (October 4th) coming from Cupertino’s giant didn’t make everyone smile -most did not get what they expected.  It was a tough first presentation for the new Apple CEO – the first in the era after Steve Jobs – and he really might have wondered if he had raised the bar high enough.

But why should he?  Apple continues to sell the current iPhone 4 briskly and is moving strongly into new markets like China.  So the company is focusing on more efficient and stable production conditions and the optimization of international sales.  And what could be more needed than a “World Phone”, a phone running all international mobile network standards and providing ultimate flexibility?  Not only for customers, but also for their retail chain.  Simply put, one model to be sold worldwide.  A producer’s dream coming true…

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There is a prejudice about the Chinese, that they will fake nearly anything.


I will start with a non-tech story a friend of mine from Shanghai told me: a colleague of his bought a Audi A6 in China for a really good price – a “lucky punch”, a bargain.  This made him happy.  A view months later there was a problem with the motor, and as the guy isn’t a great mechanic he took the car to the nearest Audi garage.  A day later the garage rang him up and asked him where he bought the car.  He told them he bought it in Shanghai, but not from an official Audi dealer.  The garage employee responded: “Hm… , well, OK, that maybe explains something, because actually your car is not a real Audi….”   Hard to believe?
I thought this was really priceless, that even German cars are now being faked (‘knocked off‘) in China.

Coming to another kind of fake:  five years ago I have been to one of the official tourist knock off markets in China that specialized in garments, handbags and watches.  I’ve since been told that this market was closed down due to the pressure from all the luxury brands on the Chinese (by the way, I have never seen a bigger Louis Vuitton store than in Shanghai) – so I really thought that the times of these markets were over.  Well, as it always happens in China: if something closes, it remains for this for some weeks and then it pops up in another side of the city…  and now, voilà, it’s not only cloths, shoes, and handbags – the new thing is, they even fake electronics nowadays.  Clearly, the iPhone is the #1 knock off you see everywhere.  And they even have a faked the software on it, the icons look pretty similar and it works more or less.   But if that’s  not enough, all forms of iPods of course, iPads (yes, 1 and 2) and Blackberry knock-offs are available too.   Sure, you’ll see all of our iconic Asian status symbols there!

But see yourself on the pictures (sorry I forgot to take one of the iPhone display showing the operating system).

When you live and work in the abstract world of zeros and ones, it’s nice every now and then to spend some time thinking about and looking at physical objects – so a few weeks ago, I went to the Berlin International Design Festival.  The venue for the festival was the now-closed Tempelhof airport’s terminal/hangar complex.

Speaking of physical objects – these massive buildings date from the 1930′s, and were intended by the 3rd Reich to serve as the showpiece gateway to their empire.  Happily, of course, that never came to pass – and after the war, this was the airport used for the Berlin Airlift.  In short, there’s a lot of history at Tempelhof, and I was happy to finally get to see the buildings from the inside.

The festival took up two full hangars, and was full of interesting and well-designed objects – the perfect tonic for the day-to-day digitally obsessed.  One particular exhibit that stood out was the Akkuschrauber Rennon 2011 Cordless Drill Race as presented by the Hildesheim College for Applied Science and Art: 16 teams of design students from universities across Germany and Switzerland were tasked with designing, building, and racing lightweight 1-person vehicles, each powered by identical Bosch Akku-Bohrschrauber PSR 18 LI-2 cordless electric hand drills.

The exhibit worked for me on several levels:

• First off, it was just plain fun – I’ve still got enough of the ‘little boy’ left in me that the sight of a modern, cutting-edge vehicle powered by a hand drill protruding out from its side just brings a smile to my face, I’ll admit it.
• Beyond the initial cleverness of the premise, it was clear that from a pure design and engineering perspective, the work was uniformly strong – and that the approaches taken by the competing teams were remarkably varied.
• Then there was the green technology angle: the project provided a great opportunity for the student teams to work with lightweight materials, and since, after all, it was a race, the emphasis was on performance and efficiency.
• On perhaps a somewhat more cynical level, the program served as an affordable yet effective marketing device, both for the schools involved and for corporate sponsor Bosch.

In short,  a win-win-win situation – and a good model for other industry/academia collaborations, I might add.

Here are a few of the Akkuschrauber Rennon entries on display:

P.S. And here, by the way, are a few of the other cool objects from the festival that caught my eye…

a couch…                                                                     an extension cord…

build your own pen…                                                     resistor-LED art…

The Problem: Video content owners are comfortable making their programming available over the internet only if the delivery device is a computer hitting a website (i.e. hulu.com or the thedailyshow.com).  More compelling platforms such as tablets (and, um, televisions) are denied access to this premium content – precisely because they are more compelling platforms  (and would be too disruptive to incumbent business models).  For example, note hulu’s cat-and-mouse maneuvering to fend off access by boxee television software for almost two years now – or Viacom’s threats to sue various cable providers over their new internet-based on-demand mobile device apps.

The Solution (for now, at least): If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.  Until internet television really ‘happens’, the best solution (for me and many others) is to get video and audio from the computer over to the television, so I can appear to the internet to be someone sitting in front of their computer – when in fact I’m a guy sitting on his couch in front of his television.  This way, I have access to all that web-only content (take that, hulu!).

It does involve solving the technical problem of getting audio and video (in at least 720p resolution) over to the television, though.  That’s a lot of data to move, and an HDMI cable running across the floor is not an option – what’s required instead is a  ‘short fat pipe’ capable of moving a lot of data over a short distance wirelessly.  I’ve written about the various options available (and what I’ve been using for the past few months) here.

Is my solution a bit clunky?  Sure – I have to go to the computer, enter full-screen mode, and then control the video transport from there.  But the fact remains that until the business-side issues preventing true internet television get resolved, the web will continue to offer a richer video selection than dedicated systems such as Apple TV or Google TV – and for all its lack of elegance, my low-cost solution makes that problem just go away.

In fact, it has been working so well for me, I wonder if there’s a business opportunity being missed…

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I need to get a global phone from Verizon before I go to Berlin this summer, and found out last night that they approved an early upgrade for me.  I’m likely going to purchase it today, so that I can get going with setting it up and unlocking the SIM, but I need to decide which one to get.

It’s between the HTC Incredible 2, and the Motorola Droid 2 Global.

Help me decide!   Here are my thoughts:

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I have been traveling for nearly seven weeks now, on a tight and tough schedule.

Started my journey in Thailand in Bangkok . Made my way to Cambodia (Sihanoukville, Phnom Penh, Siem Reap), Hong Kong, Shanghai, Borneo Island , Malaysia, and now I am writing from Boracay Island in the Philippines.  A lovely, maybe a little too commercialized spot (they even have a Starbucks on the waterfront), but with a stunning beach. (Just awarded the #2 best beach worldwide on Tripadvisor).

All in, I intentionally wanted to get away from the Interweb and being online all the time.  But it wasn’t meant to be – at least not while in Asia .

Welcome to the world of Wifi, smartphones and Facebook supreme!

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Try sitting at a restaurant and not follow the over-the-bar TV. Try taking your office building elevator and not focus on the in-car monitor. Even at my local barber shop, a sizable flat screen TV is constantly running, with videos routinely cutting into if not suppressing actual conversation.

Add to that screens at home, at work, inside stores and your favorite local bodega. Frankly, I probably encountered plenty more digital screen today if only I hadn’t been busy, well, looking at another screen.

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