Headworx

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...

Last week after a short chat with a customer I had to start research on a new subject. The thing came (as they usually do) during a short conversation in an elevator, but the subject itself seems to be interesting and innovative and potentially highly profitable. So what do you do when a bright product idea suddenly comes to your mind? I will tell you what I have done. First, I check if somebody else is working on something similar. There is no point in engaging in a new investment project when others are already ahead or the idea is already very popular and for some reason it is only me being unaware of something everybody talks about. Second, I check if there were any known failures of the approach I am about to start. Third, when the environment for the new idea seems reasonable, it is time to start brainstorming with others to find all the pros and cons and polish the concept further out. So how do you approach a task like that? Obviously not reading books or encyclopedia... Thing...

Today it is not going to be optimistic. I am tired. My WiFi works. The Squeezeboxes keep on pumping music from the Slimserver. And my laptop that was dying for several days feels fresh. But I am tired. Have spent last couple of days trying to put several things together, and yesterday at 2am I realized I upgraded almost everything I touched. Do we have a gadget or a piece of equipment that does not require upgrading? Possibly my Nixie clock, it keeps on going. And does not require new functionality and improved performance. No, I do not want a clock that runs faster. No, I am not worried it draws too much electricity. Last Friday I met our Admin working on a PC of one of our colleagues. He seemed frustrated, showing me 100% CPU utilization and a white screen of a machine that tried to upgrade itself. We have Windows Automatic Upgrades turned on via active directory policies. This seemed natural, the world is evil, Windows has holes, so at least have the mandatory patches installed aut...

The iPhone buzz is still around. It has been around for the last two years or so. I was a little shocked to hear David Yoffie from Harvard calculated the iPhone hype brought $400 million to Apple in publicity. "It's unprecedented", he said. Well... Apple knows how to build tension, utilize viral marketing and grow hype. All the modern marketing tools are mastered to perfection by Steve Jobs and his team. Hype, when properly used, is an extremely strong tool. But as the iPhone is partly behind us (we already know it is there and more or less what to expect), there are rumors emerging about the Google Phone (or gPhone if you like). The first ones surfaced two years ago when Google bought Android , including Andy Rubin , who had previous track record starting Danger and letting out the Sidekick. The Sidekick aimed at reshaping mobile Internet. And what is more important to Google now? After capturing our PCs and browsers, Google's next target has to be the mobile comm...

Squeezeboxes were covered here several times. But they are worth another story, as I have just installed a second one. And it is a fantastic synchronized experience. Multiroom audio distribution has been my favorite hobby for years. But it has never been fully solved, until recently. My first multiroom system was set up in 1993. It was all about the idea of having one centralized music source and being able to play it in every room in a house and being able to control it from every room in a house. So I gathered a couple of Sony 300-CD carousel changers (fortunately it was possible to cascade a couple of them), a good multi-input / multi-output sound processing preamplifier (TA-E200oESD, a masterpiece at that time, with full digital signal path inside) and a bunch of power amplifiers, one for each room. Then the house was wired with long (and very expensive) high quality speaker cables. With this setup I was able to have speakers in (almost) every room playing the music stored on sev...