Headworx

Alma is the grocery store I like the most. The pity is it is not close to where I live and it is almost always crowded... So I do not shop there too often. You may imagine my delight when I have recently learned they opened an Internet grocery store - the Alma24 . Yesterday I went to check how it works and I am very happy... It took me less than 15 minutes to register and complete the first order. The service is very well engineered, searching and browsing the product catalog is smooth, there are obvious options of adding to cart or adding to shopping lists, converting cart to a shopping list or loading a prepared shopping list to the cart. At the end of the process you select the delivery time by picking one of the available one hour time slots. Somebody must have spent a lot of time and effort working on the user experience, as you do not have to re-confirm anything until you finalize the order. So now, as it is very likely that I will move my grocery shopping experience to the Web,...

The first, experimental Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ unit arrived just before the weekend. I say experimental, as in the longer run I plan to base a significant part of my home computer / entertainment network on these devices. I have picked the ReadyNAS for several reasons. Basically it is a storage server or even simpler a hard disk with Ethernet interface. There are many units like that on the market. The Infrant is special for several reasons, most of them seem important to me: It has redundancy built-in. Up to 4 SATA drives (my initial unit has just two with two empty expansion slots) in various RAID setups. Hard drives do fail. So if you think of storing a significant amount of data, the drive setup should be redundant. In my configuration the Infrant box will have 4x500GB drives, resulting in a 1,5TB capacity with redundancy (4th drive). 500GB drives seem to sin in a capacity/price sweetspot and typical home should do fine now with 1,5TB. Later when larger drives become cheaper the sto...

I have just returned from the NMS Communications Connect conference taking place in Madrid, Spain. They did a very good job selecting the speakers and panelists. There were many, including Brough Turner, the CTO of NMS who confirmed my earlier musings of voice (quality) being the killer application of a next generation telephone network. Brough said - and I do agree - better voice could be more pervasive than anything else. Remember - at the moment our conversations utilize the same bandwidth they used to 100 years ago. Finally the industry starts to understand? Good, better late than never... Community services, Facebook included, and user generated content in general, were the hot topic as well, when the participants finally seem to agree with the Telecosm law of separation of content from conduit. I could hear "we need more content innovation" and while "consumers are smart, not dumb as most of the carriers used to think", the "locked-in users turn into a...

Last week when I wrote about the Momento Connected Photo Frame , I said in the last paragraph " What we really need now are cameras able to upload photos to Picasa with a press of a button. ". Wishes do come true (more on that later...). Here comes the Nikon Coolpix S51C, a compact point and shoot camera, with built-in WiFi. According to Nikon's press release, the S51C can upload images to Flickr. Really exciting! My Momento frame, ordered a week ago, is still somewhere in transit, I hope to get it tomorrow... And after reading the Nikon's specs on the S51C, I was almost ready to buy one. What a nice couple they would be: snap a photo with the camera, press a button and off it goes instantly to Flickr, where it is immediately pulled from by several photo frames scattered around my family. Imagine myself being in Australia, taking a picture of Ayers Rock and my Mom having it displayed automatically on her photo frame in a matter of seconds. No computers in between. No ...