Headworx

G oogle has recently become a synonym of leading edge both in business and technology. And there has been a good reason to expect new development and ideas come from them. So I was really surprised when this new and exciting concept came from Alexa . A lexa, an Amazon.Com company, on December 12, 2005 made its search infrastructure available to developers. This is very significant move that changes the perception of what can be done with Internet search. So far we have been able to search within the already prepared index. With Alexa crawlers, we can build custom indexes with custom attributes. As an example Alexa shows an image search application that lets users specify image-specific attributes like camera make and model and aperture settings and other. These attributes are not usually available in image search indexes (like Google Images ). The applications for the web search platform are limited only by creativity of their creators. You could imagine programming the crawlers to g...

I bought my first digital camera relatively late. It was Minolta Dimage F100 in July 2002. At that time I did not believe electronic pictures could come close enough to analog film. But a few hours later, after I "developed" my first photos with HP Photosmart 100 printer, I understood the game was over and I would never use my film camera again. The quality of the 4 megapixel shot was stunning, with vivid colors and no visible grain. I even made a 30x40 print of the Seattle Motherboard (taken from the Bank Of America building) that still hangs on my wall. And more important - the flexibility of electonic photography, with instant preview, at home photo processing, ease of archiving killed the film. I have not bought a newspaper for several years now. Instead, my house is covered by WiFi and I've been experimenting with a variety of "electronic readers" for a long time. Laptops are a natural choice for their universality, but they never come close to the eas...

I t has been two weeks since the Teleputer landed in Kraków . I must admit I have not had much time to explore all of its features and conduct many in depth tests. On the other hand I've been using the JasJar just as an ordinary user. Checking and writing my emails, browsing the Web and playing some games. Speaking of games - judging by the popularity of the device among my family members, the Bubble Breaker itself (the one that comes with Windows Mobile 5) may justify the decision to purchase the Teleputer :) A s I wrote before, the JasJar comes with Skype Internet telephony client preloaded. I tried to play with Skype as soon as I configured the device, but the application simply would not run. Two things changed, however, over the weekend. First, I noticed there is a new firmware version posted on the i-Mate site . After downloading and installing the update, I was able to start Skype, but I simply did not have time to test it. Today I have noticed, Skype presented a new version...

I s this the killer application for 3G? Probably not, as for the foreseeable future the killer application for mobile phones will be voice... Anyway GLM, or Google Local for Mobile is something everybody should install on their handsets. Simply open your web browser on your phone. Then navigate to http://www.google.com/glm/ . Select your carrier then select your phone make and model and download / install. GLM is your beloved Google Local service at your fingertips whenever you need it. S o first of all, it is a mapping service. Type in an address in almost any form, and it will bring you a map showing the location you look for. Then it is a routing service. Select two addresses (GLM remembers your last entries, so you don't have to enter repeating places manually) and GLM plots a route between them, highlighting any points you should be aware of. You can zoom in, zoom out, pan the map and even... tadam... tadam... tadam... swithch to a satellite view (the screenshot on the right a...

L ooks like the i-mate JasJar review has attracted new visitors. Hey, you are all welcome, toy spotters and gadget gurus. N ow we not only have the majority of traffic from USA and Poland, but people coming from all over the world. Canada (yes! finally Canada!), UK, Italy, Spain, Australia, Sweden, Israel, New Zealand, Dennmark, Holland, Russia, Iceland (what a wonderful place!), South Africa, Yemen... A nd we can slice the United States to see individual states. With New Jersey leading, we have California occupying a second place and New York on third. No Washington in the first ten, looks like Redmond is busy developing Windows Mobile 6, or they blocked Google destinations on their firewalls... A ny webmasters here? Do you like these charts? Go and get them for free at http://www.google.com/analytics/ . I guarantee you will spend long nights slicing and dicing your visitors.

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 ...

I t has been approximately three weeks since Google announced their Analytics service. I connected Analytics probes to my blog page as soon as I got the message (I think this was a Reuters announcement on a stock - screening site). The probe itself is a tiny Javascript that lets Google gather traffic statistics on the page where it resides. And since the early days of the service I watched my fellow readers visiting my site. It is amazing how much information is available. First, I know where you come from. So far most of the audience is in the United States and in Poland (locations whre I have realtives and friends, who spread the word). But I also have visitors from Australia, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and Iceland. I still cannot understand why there are no visits from Canada (anybody has friends over there? - ask them to click here and we will see...). Then I know the ratio of new versus returning visitors. The trend is good so far, since the blog is gaining in popularity and n...

W e have expected an iPod killer to come from one of the big three mobile handset players (Nokia, Motorola or Sony-Ericsson). Or may be from the strong far-east challengers (Samsung, LG or Sanyo). But it looks like HTC has come from behind. Again. I've been a proud owner of the i-Mate SP5m for two days now, and must say it is an awesome device. It is not perfect (yet), but it is likely the best mobile phone on Earth at the moment. It has got all the goodies you can dream of (like WiFi , Bluetooth, EDGE, 1.3 megapixel camera...), managed by easy to navigate, elegant and fast Windows Mobile 5.0 and an absolutely gorgeous 240x320 portrait screen. T here are several pioneering design details. W iFi. This is the first mobile phone I have had, to include WiFi along with some other connection options. SP5m has a dedicated Communications Manager button that lets you turn on and off selected transmitters (especially WiFi and Bluetooth). Windows OS takes care of intelligent least cost rout...

S ingularity, the term originally coined by Vernor Vinge , and made recently famous by Ray Kurzweil is spreading all over the world. Redmond is not behind. Microsoft Research has been working on a Singularity project for two years now. Somewhere in its background, singularity means breakthrough, and this - I suppose - was the reason why Microsoft chose the name for the new prototype operating system. The goal is to (finally) have a software you can depend on. Microsoft defines system as dependable when it behaves as expected by its creators, owners and users, noting that many systems do not fit this definition [:)] . S ingularity started with a question: what would a software platform look like, if it was designed from scratch, with the primary goal of dependability, instead of the more common goal of performance? This statement however casts a shadow of doubt, whether an architecture like that will ever be accepted by consumers. Of course, we hate software bugs and instabilities. Bu...

T his time I had a plan to write about something else than Google. I thought I explored its potential impact for a while. But just as I was starting to make up the title for today's entry, my good friend Glenn reminded me of the Epic 2014 story. Yes, I watched this movie before. But it was fairly long ago, at least before I got involved (both financially and emotionally) with Google. So I tuned in to the Epic 2014 home page and watched it again. What strikes me, is how close the movie authors are in their predictions to my own thoughts, on how the information flow chain will evolve (or evolves, should I say). The only difference is timing. Since I am sure 2014 will happen before 2010. Actually I can feel the story is happening now, with the headworx blog being one of the participants and contributors to the changes. E vents happen around the globe. Life, science, politics, technology, literature, music... How do we learn about them today? We read newspapers, watch television, lis...

A s you already know, I do not watch TV and do not buy newspapers. I get 100% of my information feeds from the Internet. It started to be like that a couple of years ago. The first enabler was a WiFi network covering my house and a Compaq Tablet PC as my electronic newspaper. I could sit in any room (yes, the bathroom included) with my tablet and navigate to any site and read. Local news, technology, stocks, email, bulletin boards, blogs... There is the power and freedom to choose exactly what I want. And then RSS technology came along. R SS has been occupying a pole position on a starting grid of technologies set to transform and revolutionize the Internet for several months now. But it needed an enabler. A good reader application that would help organize the news feeds from various sources. Actually hundreds of RSS readers and aggregators have emerged recently, but to be honest none of them took me by heart. I've been waiting for the One. A nd while waiting and waiting, I just h...

Telephony reduced distance. We have been able to speak to others far away. But really? Has the distance disappeared? Imagine the world without the Internet (I know it's hard, almost as hard as trying to explain the Internet twenty years ago). No emails. No bulletin boards. No web. So how did people communicate? They were fed with one way TV stream and they made phone calls. Telephony really reduced distance. And many made fortunes living in the supply chain that ultimately charged the consumer for reducing the distance. So distance did not disappear. It was exchanged for money. Fortunately, early on phone companies found out billing was more expensive than they were making on local calls. So the local calls started to be free. And they started to make money on so called long-distance services. But hey, how do you define long distance? A few microseconds at light speed? Or an opportunity to collect fee because there was no alternative for the service? With the advent of the Internet...

A few days ago Wired News reported the new development at Inmarsat . We are going to have a global hot spot. The new Broadband Global Area Network will operate at speeds up to 500kbps. Promised coverage is "88 percent of the globe's landmass". Even parts of the Arctic Ocean and Antarctica are covered, but unfortunately the poles will not get the signal (not enough market there, yet?). BGAN supports IP streaming, simultaneous voice calls, SMSes and ISDN. I think BGAN may soon be available as an option for cars, with flat, roof-mounted antenna and local LAN (WiFi) or PAN (Bluetooth) hotspot inside a car. Us, who love the satelite radio, would love BGAN connectivity in a car too...

Our window to the world, TV, is dead. George has been telling us this for years. But it looks like not many of us have realized this has already happened and we have not noticed... I have a TV in my house. But I have not turned it on for 7 months now. I have 4 computers here as well. And a WiFi network connected to a DSL line. They all have their start pages set to Google Portal ( http://www.google.com/ig ). Our new windows to the world. We do not buy newspapers. Whenever we need an information or to communicate or to entertain or to learn or... we turn on one of the machines and fire up Internet Browser, that brings personalized view of the information world. OK, you say, but this is still computers, and we want a traditional screen with remote and 100 channels to choose from. Coming soon. So how does the TV of the (near) future looks like? Let us see... It is flat, thin (high definition LCD), has two remote controllers (one with cursor keys and numbers, the other one with alphanumer...

Wow, it looks like somebody shares my view on Sony PSP design! Datel has just announced a 4GB hard drive for the console . Using a clever design the hard drive goes around some limitations of original PSP. The sad thing is the MemoryStick interface that is used to connect the drive has a 4GB limit, so we are still far from being a real competition to the iPOD.

Teleputer , a great idea originally developed by George Gilder, is a converged device, bringing together functions of many gadgets we use today. Among these are personal computer, digital video camera, telephone, MP3 player and video player. The common wisdom is we still have a couple of years until the real teleputers arrive. But on the other hand there are several devices already on the market, that from the technology perspective could have been treated as teleputers. Could have been - only if the designers or product managers or marketing people did not make some mistakes. Yes, that is right, sometimes (I don't know why?), they just don't want to have a killer device. So for example let us look... ...how Sony blew it with PSP (PlayStation Portable). PSP seems to be a perfect teleputer candidate. There are several factors that fit the perfect teleputer design. Overall looks. Three years ago when I bought my first iPOD, I was shocked, how an electronic gadget can be designed...

Yesterday I was discussing various Google aspects with a friend of mine. And we came to a conclusion is would be relatively hard for Google to reach for internal information resources within enterprises. OK, so if it is not possible to pull data from enterprise file systems and databases, then let's get inside with our stuff. They have already done that with Google Search Appliance and Google Mini . But this is only search and index - like what Google used to be several years ago. And we try to look into the future. New services are popping up almost every day. And I still think they will do Office suite using web technologies, may be with the help of Sun Microsystems. So it is very likely a new breed of Google Appliances will soon emerge - something I'd call a Google Enterprise Server. So what is it like? Well... probably a nice looking rack box, several U high. Something you put on a shelf, plug into your LAN and power up. And then you access it from within a company networ...

During my recent trip to the US I saw the nano iPod for the first time. I was really shocked how thin and small and elegant it was. And then in the old copy of T3 I found this picture. So, dear Apple, when will we see the bottom half of the nano iPhon? I want one!

R ecently Google has made available a beta version of Google Secure Access. The service is not officially launched yet, but you can access it here and then at the bottom o the page there is a link to download the installer. When first I saw it, I was blown away by how simple and smart this move was. S o let's have a look at what this service delivers and what is the possible overall impact. First, you probably know WiFi, the synonym of very convenient way to access the network. WiFi however is also a synonym of lack of security. Since the inception WiFi struggled with several approaches to secure the transmission channel. From 40-bit WEP, that was insecure by design, through various improvements like 128-bit WEP, WiFi still has been looked at as very unsafe way to connect. So while sitting in a hotel lobby or an airport lounge and browsing the current online issue of The New York Times has been a popular scenario, not many of us trusted hot spot networks enough to log on to their ...

Better late than never, I have finally decided to post my thoughts on Google. Actually I have decided to open this blog because I've had a growing need to share my thoughts on this subject. There is no doubt this company will have a big impact on our lives. Inspiration What inspired me to act was Ray Kurzweil's keynote presentation at the recent Gilder-Forbes 2005 Telecosm conference . Ray's keynote was an introduction to his fantastic new book, The Singularity Is Near . There are two main lines of thinking in the book. One is the overall progress we experience is exponential. Second is all the atoms in the universe will soon have their representation in the information domain as bits. Everything is and will be pictured, designed, described, cataloged, measured. While that is indeed true, this is enormous amount of information. So where will it reside? On the Internet of course. And how will we manage this information? Or, to be precise, who will manage this information fo...