Headworx

Only 10 months ago I complained on the hotel check-in process being so easy to automate, yet still run by humans . The change is coming. A few days ago I was driving home for Christmas after having a couple of wonderful powder skiing days in the Alps. As the drive takes quite a while - ten hours to be exact - I usually stop half way for an overnight rest. And as there is a new highway bypassing Vienna on the North, this time I decided to look for a new hotel, close to the S33. I opened the Booking.COM application on my Android phone. I do like the Booking.COM app for one particular reason. It shows a map you can zoom and pan, and as you scroll the map, it keeps bringing new hotels to offer. Good-bye text "by address" search. Welcome to the visual experience. Point a finger on the map and pick a hotel. It offered me a cheap Clever Hotel exactly at the point I wanted. Only later I realized the hotel is fully automatic. Booking.COM sends you two numbers - confirmation and ...

When I first discussed the aspect of power consumption by software back in 2006 ( http://headworx.slupik.com/2006/10/software-power.html ), it seemed quite weird to many readers. fast forward five years of mobile / wireless explosion and we all now talk about how much power this or that function consumes. The main reason behind the Apple's decision to reject Adobe Flash was power consumption. It was bogging down CPUs, which in turn were drawing juice from batteries at a full rate. MacBook Air with Flash installed lives barely half the advertised time. But it is not only Flash. There are many subsystems in a mobile device, contributing to the overall power consumption. The last weekend I went skiing with a group of friends. We had a lot of fun with the Map-To-Snow iPhone application. Unfortunately it was eating through the iPhone battery in about five hours. So at the end of the day we were unable to reclaim prizes, by simply being unable to present collected pins on the iPho...

Connection sharing times are over. Yes, true, I can use the the [Tethering & portable hotspot] option in my Android phone. Which I actually use from time to time when I want to do something on my Android tablet, and there is no public / open WiFi around. I have 3G modem in the tablet, but there is no SIM card inside. Same with my laptop. The 3G option is present there, but the SIM card slot is empty. I also have a portable WiFi hotspot , in use only when we travel in a group of friends or family to places where WiFi is not available. And finally my car is now connected too. There is a SIM card inside. I realize, with five personal 3G devises and two SIM cards on contract, I am a little bit ahead of the crowd. But over the years I have learned many times the crowd follows. Not exactly following me, but rather accepting and adopting the trends I just discover a little bit earlier. Yes, people will be carrying many 3G/4G devices with them. They already do. May be not five or si...

A week ago I announced the availability of the Android Car Infotaiment System . Of course this system is connected, meaning it can use a lot of real - time information available on the Internet, on line. I have to admit I always tried to imagine this, but despite that, the real life experience has been  very surprising. A few snapshots worth sharing: Entering the navigation target. Usually, I mean before, I had to know the exact address to enter into the navigation system. Country, City, Zip code, street and number. Typing typing and typing. It is different now with Android. Launch the "Navigation" APP and speak. Just speak to it. And the beauty is, you actually do not have to speak the address. A company name or a hotel name and a city is enough. Beacause the process is two - step. First it sends the sound wave to Google to be translated to text, and then (all behind the scene) this text is fed into the search engine, looking for an address. You don't even have hav...