Headworx

As some of you probably know I follow the developments at MicroVision, the company that develops tiny display systems based on unique technology of moving micro mirror, that reflects laser light. Last December MicroVision introduced its Pico Projector to the market in Europe. It sells for around $500 and is being offered, among others, by Vodafone Spain, as an accessory to Nokia N97. MicroVision's technology is interesting, because they use lasers as a source of light. Other pico projectors on the market use Texas Instruments DLP chips and LEDs. In the long run MicoVision's technology should provide very unique edge, not reachable by DLP - based competition. By that I mean direct on - retina image projection using tiny lasers built into some form of multimedia glasses. MicroVision has already had such system - the Witness - but it has been monochrome and has been projecting on a single eye only. So I saw the PicoP in action yesterday at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas...

Microvision has supposedly delivered today. The fruit is the long awaited IPM or Integrated Photonics Module. Making the long story short, IPM is a tiny multimedia projector. By using lasers as a source of light, it marks a very significant milestone on the road of image projection technology. First, it gets rid of Edison - style light bulb. We all know how inefficient light bulbs are in converting energy into light. Most of the energy supplied to a bulb is converted into heat. That is why image projectors draw a lot of power, get hot and noisy (they need fans to blow the heat out). Microvision IPM uses lasers. You probably have or at least have played with a pocket laser pointer. It runs for months on a set of tiny batteries and has a range of half a mile or more. Compare that to even the most powerful Maglite torch - they are big, heavy and can only dream to have a comparable range. Then using lasers you can get rid of another heavy and bulky part - optics. The IPM does not have a...

I wrote about the Microvision PicoProjector (PicoP) before . Now I am happy to report they are making a good progress. At CES (Consumer Electronic Show) 2008 in Las Vegas Microvision presented the SHOW Prototype , a working product to prove their technology really delivers. The device is about the size of a cigarette pack. This is still too much to be implanted inside a mobile phone, but there are many devices that would benefit having the PicoP built-in. Notebooks: many notebook users frequently conduct presentations (internal or external) in a group of a few people - be it coworkers or customers. The small meeting rooms usually have walls, but often lack projectors. Personally I would love to have the PicoP built-in my notebook. Yes, I would sacrifice 150 grams of weight to be able to "beam" a PowerPoint slide deck or an Excel Spreadsheet anywhere. Or to show the pictures just acquired from a digital camera to my family and friends. Spending half of my life with notebook co...

Recently I have been provoked to make a second approach to the Decade Of Decadency post. And while I firmly stand behind the general opinion expressed there (oh yeah... I would be delighted if we would return to the Moon on the 50th anniversary of the first landing...), there is another perspective we may look at. Vision and execution. Among the ten companies with the largest market capitalization we have Exxon Mobil leading the pack, followed by Microsoft. There are two other tech companies - Google and Apple, some more oil companies, a few banks and one retailer - Wal-Mart. The question of interest is obviously how this top-ten chart will look like ten years from now... Let us try to picture just the information technology related ones (I am still open for other discussions like energy or genetics...). Everybody agrees the star of Microsoft is fading. Yes Windows 7 is really a great operating system. But other areas are shaky... Mobile seems to be lost to Apple and Google. Gaming is...

The Mimo 710 USB monitor (see http://www.mimomonitors.com/ ) arrived a couple of days ago. I have to confess I was somehow skeptical on how it would actually work. Plenty of well advertised gadgets these days, but not all of them working as expected. The Mimo is different. Works flawlessly. Of course the main selling point was the single USB cable it uses for power and video signal. Using USB to carry video has been news to me... But it looks like a USB interface is quite capable of carrying video, at least with lower resolutions, like the 800x480. At the moment I am not sure of the final application for the Mimo in my environment. So far I have been using it to display a number of side tasks. I configured it to extend my Windows desktop, so I can basically grab any window and drag it over to the Mimo. It can play Media Player videos. It can be used to display real time performance of selected stocks (I have been using Google Finance in full screen browser for that). I can drag progres...

Mobile Internet occupies the headlines. No wonder. The 2001-2010 decade was ruled by desktop Internet, aka Web 2.0. Starting sometime around the year 2000, sitting at the desktop computer, we started our transition from humans to super-humans. Armed with a keyboard, a mouse and a screen, with fast broadband connectivity each one of us could win the "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" show. Courtesy of Google. Things are different in the Mobile Internet decade 2011-2020. Broadband is either already here or is coming. But to mobilize our super - humanity, we need to break free from screens and keyboards. Screens and keyboards form cages keeping us from the real mobile freedom. Any screen you take is both too large (when you have to carry it) or too small (when you look at it). Ditto keyboard. Both screens and keyboards are dead ends in the evolution of human - machine interfaces. Imagine a powerful, connected mobile computer. One you can communicate with freely, without having to ...

There were two important wireless announcements last week. Both might have drowned in a sea of color handset faces or the remains of iPhone hype. First to the scene was Qualcomm with the announcement of EV-DO rev. B roadmap. While this sounds cryptic, the message is really clear: next generation mobile phones will reach 9Mbps downstream transfer rate. At least twice as fast as most DSL lines we use today. This really means a lot of new multimedia applications. Mobile YouTube is the first that comes to mind, followed by on-demand music downloads. With 9Mbps speeds many existing business models will fail. The first will be metered data plans. With HSDPA at 1,8Mbps in most networks, you are already capable of reaching 3$ per second transmission rate. If that rate was to stay, you could even pay 15$ per second at 9Mbps. This model will fail. Mobile networks will be forced by competition and by regulators to settle on flat rates for both voice and data. They will earn their dollars on VASes...

D ecember 2nd, 2005, The Teleputer Has Landed in Kraków. I've been waiting for this moment. Good it happened friday afternoon, after office hours, since my day at work would have been wasted. George Gilder's vision materialized by HTC in form of an i-mate JasJar. "...small handheld device, that resembles a cellphone, and as a matter of fact incorporates a cellphone, (...) that also has a touchpad on it and effectively all your mp3 songs and also is a camcorder.... So the cellphone really becomes your computer." Although the JasJar's screen is not a Microvision (yet) and it's camcorder is not a Foveon (yet), this device fits the definition of Teleputer as close as possible. F irst, its small. Much smaller than I originally thought (see a comparison with an iPod on a picture below). Essentially it fits in a palm of your hand. Then it's powerful. 520MHz Intel/Arm PXA270 processor and 192MB of memory (64MB RAM and 128MB Flash). With an incredible clarity of ...

On October 15th, 2010 I delivered a talk at TEDxKrakow , sharing my vision of the future of mobile communications. The recorded video is available on YouTube , or here with subtitles, thanks to perfect work of volunteers supporting the TED conferences. And if some of you are interested in the slides too, you can go to the Slideshare page for the full content. Looking back at what I said, from a perspective of three months, I am convinced more than ever glasses will be the universal form factor of a communications device of the future. Why glasses? There are multiple reasons for that. Today, when using mobile Internet devices (and by mobile I mean smartphones and teleputers, not laptops with wireless usb modems!), we are constrained by input and output. Screens are too small and so are keyboards. There are two opposed needs. One is to make the device as small as possible to carry it everywhere. And this can be done pretty easily, as we continue to follow the Moore's Law of shrinki...