Headworx

Recently I 've come across a company named Demand-Tec . They've caught my attention probably because in my so called "previous life" I dealt a lot with enterprise management software, and especially with business intelligence. While not as gadgetry - oriented as telecoms, enterprise management was still able to create several areas where I was able to free my imagination and play with some unconventional ideas that were eventually leading to some concrete business benefits for our customers. And what Demand-Tec does is exactly both unconventional and logical and lets them exploit the power of software to give serious business advantage to their customers. The idea is to use advanced business intelligence and modeling to set retail prices for products. Normally it works like that: a retailer takes the cost, adds his markup and comes up with the price put on a product sticker. Fixed markups do not require much of a [business] intelligence. And there is always a question...

Two weeks ago Interactive TV Today published an interview with Kenneth Lowe , VP of Business Development and Strategic Marketing at Sigma Designs. I wrote about Sigma a year ago , and for those of you who do not remember, Sigma Designs makes SOC ( System On Chip ) integrated circuits for next generation, high definition media players. Building their lead they managed to capture a significant piece of the market, from IP-TV set top boxes to Blue-Ray players, and have even secured a place inside the recently launched Apple TV . Going through the Ken Lowe interview I found an interesting paragraph: "when Microsoft moved from an all-software platform to a SoC-based platform using our silicon, it was a big paradigm shift. It required their software to adapt from a paradigm where everything runs on a big Pentium processor to a paradigm where a little software runs on a smaller processor and then a bunch of hardware subsystems perform each individual task." Smells like a paradigm sh...

I am back. Back to the mobile phone, after a PDA-phone adventure lasting for several months. As you may remember, I have written here a number of times about Windows Mobile phones by HTC. The first (not mentioned here) was the iMate SP3i, two years ago (before the blog was started). I was very happy with the SP3i. It was small, yet powerful, had a very good Windows Mobile "phone" user interface. I traded it half a year later for the SP5m, touted as the best music smartphone ever . Indeed the Sp5m with its dedicated music buttons, gorgeous screen and mini-SD storage was a great phone. Unfortunately I lost it... So being a fan of Windows Mobile machines, and lacking QWERTY keyboard (to be honest this was the only drawback of SP3i and SP5m phones) I decided to go with the HTC Wizard , soon upgraded to the HTC Hermes (known as TyTN ). Both Wizard and Hermes share the same slide-out QWERTY keyboard concept, while the TyTN has a more powerful processor and UMTS (W-CDMA) radio for ...

Scanning through RSS feeds from last week I found a good number of them referring to Apple TV hack . Apple TV (ATV) was officially released two weeks ago and it has been attracting attention of home brew developers since then. This is just a proof how attractive a platform like ATV can potentially be. Why? Because ATV is a very well designed home computer / media station. It has WiFi connectivity (a must at home). It has a high definition TV output (no yet another screen to mess with). It has local storage (factory mounted 40GB drive can be upgraded to 200GB and more). It has an USB port for potential expansion and a remote control (very important for home use). And it is very compact in form, has cleverly built-in power supply and no noisy fan. The pity of the original ATV design was its narrow scope - basically coming down to an iTunes media extender. Now it is very refreshing to see how opening the platform can put a new life in the ATV box, by means of independent software crea...