Headworx

Back in 2008 I touched on the concept of two-way personal navigation systems . Most navigation devices / applications today are still one - way. They receive GPS signals from satellites, and based on that compute the current location, rendering it based on locally stored map data. usually the story ends at this point. Now consider what happens when all these millions GPS receivers can report their whereabouts on-line, real-time, to some servers in the Cloud. And calm down please you who cry "privacy violation" now. It is not about you personally. It is about statistics of the crowds. Just quantitative data. I do not care where exactly or how fast you drive. But knowing where and how fast how many people are moving (or standing still) means a lot. Simply means real time traffic data. Of course we have had such systems for years now. Variants of the TMC ( Traffic Message Channel , based on FM radio broadcast technology) are in service world-wide. But the are neither accurate, n

Today I would like to attract your attention to the upcoming Emerging Communications 2010 conference. There are not many events I am so honestly positive about, but this one is special. The reason is it gathers many "out of the box" thinkers. It is put together by Lee S Dryburgh, the man I referred to in my post back in 2007 . When I met Lee at that time he was a speaker at another conference. Later on he started putting together the eComm series. I have to say I love his vision. I have been working with MNOs for many years now. Both with big and small ones. And I have to say I am terrified witnessing the lack of innovation they have. The bigger they are, the worse. Yes I know things are different in Asia. But Asia is a different story. At the same time Europe and North America offer just three basic services. Bell - style poor quality point - to - point audio calls, short text messages and dumb data transfer. And it has been like that for the last 15 years. Sounds like it i

So the iPad can be preordered now. I somehow lost my initial enthusiasm, so my personal feeling is the preorders are not building as fast as expected. But this is just personal. In fact folks may be racing out since the gates opened last week... So why the loss of excitement? Well... honestly my feeling is the device is not 100% perfect. First thinking of buying the iPad at the very first possible moment, I started thinking about it is as of a purely Web tablet. Thus no need for local storage (especially not for the overpriced 64GB of flash). My iPad content will be in the Cloud. Or on my laptop. This is the second point. The iPad will never replace my laptop. It is designed to be a slave accessory. Synced via iTunes to the master. It has no I/O ports, so I will not be using it to collect my digital pictures directly from a camera either. So to carry the iPad with me on the road I would need to carry BOTH my notebook and the iPad, which would be an utterly stupid setup (I try travel li

Following my recent Mobile World Congress 2010 recap , there is one subject I did not touch, that deserves a separate blog entry. Femtocells. I posted on femtocells back in November 2009 . The post was inspired by the upcoming book by George Gilder, that will be the American version of the original works of Henry Gau. Gau / Gilder vision is, as always, both ultimate and radical , heralding the inevitable failure of LTE and massive simplification of network topology, optimized for just one task: bidirectional video streaming. While Gau Telecosm is by no means the Vision for the perfect world, the reality is, as always, far more complicated. Personally I think we will get there, but the road will be much longer, as technology alone never wins in business environments. But there are clear signals we have already started the transition towards the world filled with femtocells. Strolling along the crowded stands inside the MWC exhibition halls I had absolutely no problem using my broadband