Headworx

Living with multiple connected gadgets, it seems a natural way to move content from device to another. Like a photo taken with a phone, copied later to a tablet for better viewing experience. It also seems a natural way to use local connectivity for that. Like a connecting cable, or Bluetooth radio. But we do not do that too often. We push the content to the Moon and pull it back instead. For some reason, when I sit on a sofa somewhere in Europe, moving content from a device held in my right hand, to a device held in my left hand, is quicker via a server sitting somewhere in America., which obviously means the data has to travel twice via my weak last mile Internet connection and cross the Atlantic there and back. Just to cover a distance of half a meter. But somehow it is faster this way. The Internet - space - time must be really curved... There are several space-time-turners responsible for this phenomena. Probably the oldest one you know is email. It is way easier to send...

I stopped wearing my watch years ago. Exactly when I realized I had been carrying my cellphone with me all the time. And the cellphone was showing time. And it had a calendar. And an alarm clock. I check the time quite rarely. I mean, I do not pull the phone from my pocket just to check the time. Clocks are everywhere. On car's dashboard, in public buses and trams, at airports. But I do pull the phone from my pocket more often to check other things. Messages and notifications. I can predict the time quite accurately, but I find it hard to predict who has sent me the message that just vibrated in my pocket. So here comes the Watch 2.0 idea. I will describe it using the Apple building blocks. You have the iPhone in your pocket. It runs a number of apps. Email client. Twitter. Facebook. Calendar. Navigation. You are walking down the street. The phone vibrates. You stop, pull it out and see a new tweet. Or a calendar reminder. Or Navigation app telling you to turn left. You put the p...

I have a third smartphone and fourth tablet in a year. You call it experimenting. A quick summary. Phones: I started the 2011 with BlackBerry Torch than after miserable BlackBerry failures decided to switch to Android, and being a qwerty addict I opted for the Sony Xperia Pro . Tablets: a year ago I had the iPad1, then in June I fell in love ( here , here and here ) with the Honeycomb - based Samsung Galaxy 10.1, swapped in October to the Galaxy 8.9 (almost identical, but I liked the 8.9 more, because of the OLED display and even smaller weight). And eight days ago, on Saturday, I was packing for CES. I decided to take my Windows 7 laptop (the Thinkpad X220 I absolutely love and spent so much time selecting ). I simply cannot live on a tablet alone. Neither iPad nor Android tablets I have had in various configurations (including mechanical keyboards) give me the speed and flexibility of working on a real computer with keyboard, mouse, Windows, various hardware ports and a...

The economy is digital. The biggest companies on Earth are either making computers (in a broad sense, iPhone is included) or services those computers offer (or consume). Nothing today can exist without computers. But hey, wait a minute, we landed on the Moon 40 years ago without computers (what they had can hardly be regarded a computer by today's standard). The first plane crossed the Atlantic 85 years ago and commercial transatlantic plane service was operational soon after. In the offline world we do not have much more we had 10, 20, 30 or 50 years ago. Cars, jets, dishwashers, we even had mobile phones 20 years ago. So the world can run without those computers, and whatever valuations the IT industry is getting now must be an inflated bubble, right? Wrong! Nothing today exists without computers. Nothing. It is not only the Space Shuttles we use computers to design. Try to imagine any single product that did not involve computers when it was being designed or manufact...

Chasing each other in the race for domination, online services make it dead easy to set up new accounts. The problem is when, for whatever reason, we want to close the account. OK, it is again dead easy for paid services. You simply stop paying and after one or two reminders they close. But the story is different when the service is free by design. Like Facebook or Blogger. Or whatever community forum you contribute to. My lawyers always tell me. The most important clause in any agreement is the termination clause. I have learned this and try to apply whenever possible. But it not always is. Successful examples of me being a smart consumer: contract extensions for mobile phones or cable tv. The same day I sign the extension, I also write a termination letter, dated today + 12 months, or whatever the contract specifies. Why bother dealing with them twice? The ball is on their side and it is them who will have to worry to come back and say "hey, we want you back". This te...