Headworx

Last week I was having wonderful winter skiing holidays in Tyrol Alps. Tech and gadget wise, it was again a connectivity nightmare. Having some experience in this area, related to traveling to Austria, I scheduled my previous blog post before my departure, to publish automatically Sunday evening. My other preparations (not counting sharpening the edges of my F2 Speedster snowboard) included tasks like pre-purchasing 10MB data package from Orange for my BlackBerry and searching the Internet for currently available prepaid data SIM cards in Austria. Austrian holiday apartment houses usually do not offer WiFi connectivity. How different it is when I travel to the USA and every budget hotel in any remote town has WiFi, most of them offering Internet as a complimentary service. But in European resorts very often we have no alternative, but use cellular connectivity. The coverage is usually not bad, but roaming costs kill. When we opt for a mobile data plan at home, it usually is between $15...

USB 3.0 starts appearing in products now. Storage is considered to be the mainstream scenario for the new standard. It clearly is, as most gear today is already equipped with 1Gbps networking ports. That includes laptops. And upgrading home network to 1Gbps is easy and inexpensive. With gigabit network, the raw speed of LAN interface is a double of the USB 2.0, most commonly used to connect external storage drives. On my network I am getting sustained file transfer speeds in the range of 30 to 40 megabytes per second. That feels fast. A CD worth of content can be moved in or out in less than 20 seconds. But only to the internal drive on my laptop. Not long ago I bought the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 750GB, 2.5 inch drive to use as portable external storage. It fits nicely in one of the USB / Serial ATA enclosures I have. And with my Lenovo laptop, it can be powered directly from a single USB port. By the way this is some kind of a miracle... Almost a terabyte of storage, that fits on...

Visiting the CES at Las Vegas and traveling a little bit around Utah and Arizona last week, I spent quite a bit of time with various embedded electronic devices - namely the Airbus entertainment system, the car audio aboard Jeep and Chrysler vehicles and the Garmin Nuvi personal GPS navigator. All of these systems fall short in terms of usability, ergonomics and overall user experience. The Airbus monitors, embedded in tightly squeezed cattle economy class seats are touch enabled. The user interface layer seems to be built on top of a customized Linux environment. Is slow and strikingly basic and lacks this highly polished look and feel we all know from our personal teleputers like iPhone or Android or Blackberry we carry with us every day. There is a stray mouse cursor not serving any purpose and system responsiveness is below expectations of most users. You have to press fingers firmly against the screen and wait a second o two for any reaction. The Garmin GUI is not bad in intuitive...

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...

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...