Headworx

Entrepreneurship, in one form or another, has been my bloodstream almost forever. It is a way of life. Fueled by desire to create, and not really by the need to earn money. Really, spawning lasting creations that are meaningful to other people, is my ultimate goal and reward. Yesterday. Yesterday I was repairing my mother's car finding the battery was completely dead. I took my son to a local automotive parts shop to buy a new one. The shop has been there as long as I remember, with the helpful owner always at the desk. We paid and he printed the invoice. He is still using the point of sale software I wrote 20 years ago. He has been running his entire business for 20 years using the software I created with my own hands back in 1993. And he is still one of tens of thousands using this software. Just try naming any software (an "app" as we call them...) today that will be meaningful and used on a daily basis in 2033. With all due respect I do not see a candidate. I pr

In July 2011 we started as a software company. But being in the area called today the Internet of Things, we've been increasingly more and more involved in hardware. Initially doing only reference designs and prototypes, now we are becoming a regular hardware vendor: in 2014 we plan to roll out several hardware devices. Hardware is difficult. As Ben Kaufman (Quirky) says: "The thing standing in your way is not money, it’s the whole process". I can only confirm this experience. In 2013 we've worked with several engineering companies helping us with hardware design and the manufacturing process but all cases the process has been painful, expensive, and ineffective. I've been in software business for 25 years and I've been observing the evolution of tools and methodologies. It's been the fastest evolution I've witnessed. The frameworks for software design, implementation, testing, deployment are simply incredible today. And so are the processes and

As a customer, I've never fully appreciated the industrial design. I mean personally, as a buyer, not as a seller. The soul of an engineer inside me has always wanted function first and foremost. Leaving the form irrelevant. Fortunately Adam, my co-founder, is exactly at the opposite end of the scale. To the extent he finds it difficult to fully embrace our current F&Home system, just because it is ugly. Well, may be not that ugly but not very attractive looking physical form. So I have hard time pushing him the "eat our own dog food" mantra, especially when I see his wry face looking at what we have on the table today. I say fortunately, because I do understand the industrial design matters a lot. We have fantastic team of design / partners working with us on the next generation design. It is hard to imagine a better company for the task. But I have to admit, I was a bit surprised last week, during a joint workshop, when I learned a flat, table-top form factor w

Just as we've decided our users would never need the reset button , our competition comes with an alternative approach - they think reboot is used very often and put it on a remote control (see the photo). Intel calculates a family of four will move from having 10 connected devices in 2012 to 25 in 2017 to 50 in 2022 ( link ). I wonder what a family of four will use as a provisioning and management platform for 50 connected devices. Or will they employ a full time sysadmin? Two years ago I predicted autonomous planes would be put to service by courier companies before self driving cars hit the road. I meant UPS, FedEx, DHL. Certainly I underestimated Amazon who has just announced the Prime Air service . Anyone thinking WiFi is the right choice for Home Automation must be nuts. Last week I've spent three days trying to set up a set of Belkin WeMo sensor + wall plug. No success. I tried four different access points, iOS, Android. They just don't connect to any of my

I'm fresh from a short Winter break - a quick jump to the alpine slopes for a snowboarding session. There and back more than 2000 kilometers on the road in my friend's new Subaru Forester. The all-new Forester is IMHO the most perfect machine on wheels, especially the DIT turbo engine coupled with the CVT gear-less gearbox is a wonderful combination. It is the first auto transmission I've driven, which has virtually with no lag. And in the center of this wonderful package sits the all-new Harman Kardon multimedia console, which is - simply speaking - awful. The Forester is MY2013 and so is the console. But the GUI on it looks like an old 2003 passive-matrix no name phone. Poor resolution (in the retina days this one seems to be 240x160) and completely crappy graphics with no particular navigation logic. A button here and a button there, having nothing in common with today's standard set by the leading phone/tablet operating systems. And I'm not even touching thi

I have never expected another significant dose of grist to my mill when I've recently learned about the ULE Alliance standing behind the new ULE (Ultra-Low Energy) home automation standard. Why do we need yet another standard is not clear for me, but the ULE Alliance Members certainly have a different opinion. May be they thought they were too big to join other alliances and have formed their own? There are technical reasons ULE may succeed. The #1 is the dedicated radio band. "The band is just of us, nobody will interfere" claim the Promoters and Contributors. "With ULE we have the range to cover an entire house without repeaters" say the engineers, which for sure is a benefit. Meshing and hopping networks are the nightmare of smart home implementations (they fail too often and they respond too slow). But reading the Technical Specification document I see almost nothing about the application layer standard . Meaning there are no such things as ULE Light

The World has jumped on the IoT bandwagon. Everybody is on board: the big guys like Cisco and IBM, many small ones and most of the startups. Everybody is demonstrating the IoT tools, scenarios, applications. IoT is easy and flashy to demonstrate. But in the long run it is extremely difficult to reliably deliver on promise. Things and networks are breaking down on regular basis. Part of the reason is in the IoT each sensor / actuator node is optimized for cost (because ultimately there are millions or even billions of them). IoT is not like the big iron Internet backbone, where components are top grade and everything is redundant. Many IoT systems are exposed (by design) to harsh and changing environment. Take a parking sensor, embedded in tarmac. Cars are running over it. In Summer the Sun boils it, in Winter it is covered with snow and ice. It transmits data over already crowded, full of interference, radio band. The nodes in IoT networks are failing relatively often. Or stati

In IoT everybody is discussing Z-Wave versus ZigBee versus 6LoWPAN versus... many other transport protocols. The discussion is not relevant. It leads us nowhere, especially with protocols like the 6LoWPAN, which by the way is the likely winner that will change nothing. Why? Because even if every grain of sand on the Planet is connected (thanks to 6LoWPAN) and has an IPv6 address, it will still be disconnected. Why? Because even if it can speak and listen when connected, it will not know the communications language. Things have been different in the Internet of Humans (the one we use a lot today). The Internet, as we know it, has been a transport protocol. The content has been human - readable and present in languages humans can understand. In the Internet of Things, we have no language. Connected things can transmit and receive signals but with very few exceptions they do not understand each other. Because there is no language, or unified application - level protocol. So fa

It's been more than three years since I posted the Follow Me blog entry. Back in 2010 multi-device life was not as widespread as it is today. And things were not that obvious. Today they are: everybody expects synchronized context across all connected devices. And in most areas the context is becoming synchronized, thanks to the cloud systems standing behind the device families. From my own experience I can mostly speak about Android, which seems to be leading the pack. Unboxing a new Android device and getting it in sync is just a matter of providing the Google account credentials. Then everything happens in the background: apps are installed, passwords synchronized, even the saved WiFi networks. How natural it is to walk into a hotel you visited a year ago (with different device) and being automatically connected to the WiFi network using credentials stored back then. Not to mention such obvious things like the contact list (yes we needed the OTT providers like Google and Appl

I am half way through the Brad Stone's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon . Don't know the remaining half (yet!), but already this book is getting my personal book of the year 2013 award. It is a wonderful story driven by what Stone calls Jeffism: "We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent.". I have never heard anybody declaring publicly what is so close to my own entrepreneur's heart. Here is the full paragraph quoted:  “If you want to get to the truth about what makes us different, it’s this,” Bezos says, veering into a familiar Jeffism: “We are genuinely customer-centric, we are genuinely long-term oriented and we genuinely like to invent. Most companies are not those things. They are focused on the competitor, rather than the customer. They want to work on things that will pay dividends in two or three years, and if they don’t work in two or three years they will move on to so

It looks like we have passe the "app" hype. Started by Apple in 2008 it lasted more or less to 2012. And now apps are commodity. Yes there will be hits like the Angry Birds and there is a strong foundation of apps most of us use daily, but apps are no longer sexy. Apps in 2013 have become a commodity. In 2013 the new phenomenon called the Internet of Things (IoT) has started dwarfing the app cycle. What is now IoT has begun as M2M (Machine-to-Machine communications) several years ago. And now in the IoT of 2013 a new trend has been created: every thing needs an app. Whatever appears on Engadget and is not a phone or a laptop or a tablet, has its own app. From music systems to bicycles to shoes, they all start coming app-enabled. And the manufacturers start slowly to realize the user experience of the accompanying app is becoming equally, or even more important, compared to the "thing" itself. The reason is, for many things, it is the app the users interact wit

This week I've spent a lot of time discussing the hardware options for our next generation home automation controller. It all looks fine on paper. We will include this and that radio module and this and that port and so on. But as the options are (almost) set in stone now, digging down deeper into the electronics and layout of the radio modules, I realized there is one significant risk coming, which we have to add to our equations. The risk is called LTE, or LTE 800 in particular. The frequency arrangements for the 800 MHz band (covered by the ECC Decision 2010/267/EU) assume Frequency Division Duplex operation with the downlink (a tower to a modem) located in the lower 791-821 MHz band and the uplink (a modem to a tower) located in the upper 832-862 MHz band. The uplink LTE 800 band is awfully close to the 863-870 MHz band assigned to various Short Range Devices, including many home automation standards in Europe (Z-Wave, 6LoWPAN, EnOcean). There has already been reports pub

At the end of August 2013 I announced we were rolling the plane to the runway. It was a metaphor, of course, one that allowed me to depict the very important juncture our company was at. I wrote we had built the perfect engine and we attached it to a beautiful fuselage and we were about to start. And then after the V1 (the point of no return) I promised to make one more announcement. My plan was to say our plane had no wings. Referring to the old proverb about taking a leap and building the wings on the way down. But I won't say this anymore. The reason is, we still do not have wings, but our fuselage is in a vertical position. Yes, this is a rocket. The countdown has ended. And we have a liftoff! This week the new product and the new strategy has been announced internally and all I can say literally everybody on board is absolutely enthusiastic about it. I am tempted as hell to unveil it publicly, but I simply cannot. It is still too early. Probably the most difficult secr

A personal view of the CEO and co-founder. At WiHo.me we're enjoying a roller-coaster ride. I mean it is wild and full of energy and the turns and pivots are violent. An experience I really like. At the same time, as it seems there (finally) is a chance to make money in this business, I hear questions about what happens after. Asked both by some of our angel investors and some friends of mine. And raising my eyebrows... because I have no plans for the "after". I really do enjoy the ride. So the longer it lasts, the better. It is about the road, not the destination. What really gives me the fuel to burn are the everyday challenges, brain teasers and puzzles to be solved. This has been so engaging I can't imagine the "after". Honestly this was the primary reason behind starting the company. Back in 2009 I was retired, after two successful startups. It was so boring I could barely withstand this state of mind (doing nothing and being a highly paid consult

IP-based connectivity and IPv6 in particular is being praised as the unified future of the Internet Of Things. While it may be true in general, the devil, as always, is in the details. My automatic property gate has an IPv6 address. I can control it from any place on Earth. My driveway floodlights have IPv6 addresses too. They too can be controlled from anywhere. Because my controller, which is a smartphone, knows the addresses of both the gate and the floodlights. But remote control is not cutting edge at all. It is not even an automation, not to mention intelligence. Remote control is manual control. But what if I wanted to add some automation to the setup? Say, when my gate opens and it is dark outside, the floodlights should light up. Imagine the gate is smart. Meaning it knows the location and can compute the sunrise and sunset times. Let's assume the gate is even smarter: it can compute the "and", activating the lights when it is dark while it is opening. So

A week ago I met a long time friend of mine. We talked about my current business. I already sold him two of my previous companies. Sort of. But each time he was the driver and influenced the decision to buy. And we talked a lot. Because a lot has been happening in my current business. By the way I am no longer allowed to call my startup a startup - one of our angel investors wants to present us to the world as a mature company. Which we really are - I've added it up recently: 64 men-years of R&D. That is a lot! But a kid will always be a kid to her father. No matter how old they both are... Anyway. I was describing the landscape of the Internet of Things and low power connectivity and software stacks from tiny wireless processors that live their lives harvesting energy from light (photovoltaic), temperature differences (Peltier) or motion (tiny dynamos) to widely scalable servers in the Cloud. Then I described the myriads of applications we can define on our platform. Appli

We've had a number of smartwatch updates this week. The most anticipated was the Samsung Gear. And I'm scratching my head... what do they think at Samsung? Do we really want a fully fledged smartphone on a wrist? I'm really disappointed, the Gear is thick, heavy and barely lasts a day. And they even haven't thought about some clever charging options... just the brute force solution: carry two chargers and two cables. I'm keeping my Pebble . It is thin, perfectly visible in sunlight, and lasts a week on charge. What Pebble understands and Samsung doesn't is in a watch less is more. My verdict is the Gear will share the geeky niche with Sony . I've had Sony smartwatch and dying battery in the evening completely ruined the experience. We have to wait for Apple. They may show something unique, but judging by the iPhone 5, the battery life in the iWatch won't excel in this area. Which brings us to the unexpected contender in the smartwatch race: Qualc

From last week's flying high on emotions today we're down to earth. Which - honestly - I really love. Since the devil is always in the details. We're on the last lap before releasing a major upgrade to our system. The stabilization phase, during which - obviously - we should not introduce any new functionality, just fix bugs. But there always is the temptation to squeeze in something extra. And it usually is a recipe for a disaster. But knowing all this, we needed one more evidence... This time it was the status page. You know, one that is displayed when you point your browser to the device's IP address. It was the requirement from the support team to have the serial numbers easily accessible. On his final day before the vacation the program manager entered a simple enhancement ticket in our Trac system: "Implement a status page". Thinking it could not be easier to complete, he left. The web developer prepared a template. It probably seemed too simp

Last week has been the most important in the history of our wiho.me startup. Not that we signed another distribution deal. Several are in place and more will come. But because the missing pieces of the puzzle finally "clicked" in my head. It all happened in Ireland, where we went (courtesy of Enterprise Ireland - thank you Bartek !) for two busy days to meet potential partner companies who may help us with the industrial design, and with development and organization of the entire supply chain of our hardware product. I've mentioned it here a couple of times: I have no hardware experience and the entire process from idea to the first million boxes distributed worldwide has been a big unknown. But now there is no fog anymore. For the first time I really believe we can build a billion dollar company. So here is how it feels. Fifteen months ago I told my 15-strong team we were on a path to the top (Quartz has a story on this). The goal was to be the number 1 worldwid

For the third year in a row we are investing in bringing the ultimate home automation solution to the market. There are a number of threads this project executes in parallel, but there is one feature I consider the most important. The software and hardware responsible for ruling and running all the control tasks in a smart home have to be unbreakable and unstoppable. I have to admit I am very happy with the current results. Generation 2 of our product / solution will hit the shelves in Poland in September. Up till now it has been evaluated and implemented by more than 800 professional installers, we've trained over the last 12 months. And myself, I do eat my own dog food. My house fully depends on my product. Yesterday I upgraded my home server to the new beta release, we are now stabilizing. The previous version of the software was installed 289 days ago. And it was running non stop till last Friday, when I stopped it for what is called a "scheduled maintenance".

The idea. The passion. The hard work. The sleepless nights. The product. The goal. They all define the startup. Every one aiming to conquer and change the world. We are 50% complete in 10% of time. Then 80% in 50% of time. Then 90%. And 95%. Problems start mounting. A year ago we thought we were ready. So we did 6 months ago. And today? A month away? I've met several stories like this one. Full of optimism. Underestimating the task. They all have one thing in common. Their development plan was built to be offensive. While the seasoned grown ups plan defensive. A good IT company should spend about 70% of development costs on Quality Assurance - QA. I have never seen such budget allocations in startups. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, when they compete for funding, they want to look attractive. Somehow a lot of greedy investors never learn a good product has to be expensive to build. Secondly, the inventors and entrepreneurs are often inexperienced and only the exp

Let's face it: passwords are the nightmare of the Internet era. They are out of owners' control and out of the industry control. They are the weakest link of the accelerated evolution of the information age. Everything requires passwords. Credit cards, phones, Bluetooth headsets, computers, bank accounts, social networks, cars, travel tickets, music services, smarthome appliances... The system is collapsing. On one hand there are sites and services requiring "strong" passwords (including lowercase, uppercase, digits, special characters and more than 12 in total) and at the same time there are sites who still do not allow for special characters and their passwords have to be 6 or 8 characters long. Users give up. They give up the security, storing the passwords in their GMail messages or Evernote notes. The Web services fall one by one prey to malicious hackers armed with continuously growing power of the hacking tools. By the way, thanks to GPU arrays, brute force

I've started reading the George Gilder's latest Knowledge and Power . George starts with his favorite metaphor of entropy and moves on to explore the concept of a learning curve and how it impacts the economy and competitive landscape in particular. I dawned on me George had just named what I was feeling and believing all the time. Where the advantage of an organization comes from. For a number of times I was naming the team, the culture, even the management as far more important than ideas and money. But Gilder has nailed it: the learning curve. The angle, trajectory and sustainability of the learning curve is the most important factor deciding who will win the race. If an organization learns faster, it will be the first to deliver better product with better quality and products that cost less or bring higher margins than the competition. What else do you need? The thinking follows the Steve Jobs' sentence I quote most often: " there's a tremendous amount of

A short retrospect on what worked on my vacation trip to Vietnam and Cambodia. I planned to travel light, taking only a carefully prepared set of gadgets. I took two Sigma DP Merrill cameras, the DP1M and the DP3M . I'm still in the process of working on the photos (the Sigma software is a pain), but I really, really love the results. I took three times as many photos with the DP3M and I think I will let the DP1M go. If somebody likes wide angle lens coupled with Hasselblad IQ (image quality) in a minimalistic and pocket friendly design, please drop me a note. Sigma Merrills require two support items: spare batteries (many of them, plan at least two per day) and a tripod. I took two tripods: the Gitzo GT1550T 6x Carbon (probably the lightest full size tripod on Earth) and the Manfrotto Pixi . Both served me extremely well. Both Sigmas I had in AST Ever Ready cases that proved to be very handy, stylish and protecting the cameras very well. So did the National Geographic NG

We're hiring and we've been doing many interviews with potential job applicants recently. Whenever possible I try to attend the interviews. The value for me is to have a grip on the state of the engineering talent we could potentially reach out for. After all in my opinion it is the team that defines what you can or cannot do. The strategy, the ideas, the money are relatively easy compared to assembling the team. At the interview I try to learn how a candidate thinks, how she or he approaches a problem. Not how the problem is solved. Among many skills I value creativity and problem solving the most. So I present some real design or implementation problems we have and see how they are approached. Personally I have one general rule I use when working on a solution. I assume we are never the first to face the particular problem. Meaning somebody must have already done something with it. And if so, I want to learn about the approach and the solution. So I start with Google sear

It has been several years since I called USB the Universal Supply Bus and I'm happy to see how much improvement is being done in this area. Innergie is the new player in this field and takes the market by storm thanks to the no-compromise approach. I report to be a very satisfied user of the dual - port 15W USB charger and the 3000mAh rechargeable emergency battery. Both share several common design goals: Output rating of 2.1A per port - meaning they will fast-charge the most power hungry tablets and smartphones (including the Galaxy Note II, the Google Nexus 10 and the iPads. Size / weight squeezed to the minimum  I happen to travel with several USB - powered devices all the time. It is always the Galaxy Note II and then a smartwatch ( the Pebble ), a backup battery (the Innergie), a backup wireless data server (the AirStash), a portable WiFi AP ( the Huawei hotspot ). Therefore a dual - port, high output USB charger is a must and it has greatly simplified my mobile setu

We have not revisited Otoy for a while. I am told they are doing extremely well. But still not much is visible to the outside world. Apart from the ORBX.js . The pure HTML5 / JavaScript 1080p60 codec. Decoding FullHD video in a browser is an impressive achievement and solves a variety of problems, especially for companies like Netflix or other video streaming services. But the Holy Grail of Cloud video processing has been online gaming, not video streaming. Which brings me to the question that matters: what is the lag of an online game rendered and encoded in the Cloud, and decoded on the client (in JavaScript)? ORBX.js may cope with 60fps, but nobody says how far behind those 60fps are? Online gaming is about fast reaction to the actions. If you could not dodge the bullet, it's not you, soldier, it's the lag . Lag is the nightmare of today's Internet. We have buffers at every level. And there is one thing buffers do perfectly: generate lag. While 4G/LTE may seem as

For the next three weeks I plan to be unplugged. I prepared four bog posts in advance, to keep to the established weekly schedule. Obviously the posts won't touch on the latest developments, but I do hope my faithful readers will find them interesting. In the ongoing preparations for holidays trip, I tested the camera backup solution I proposed several weeks ago in the Adopting Foveon post. Unfortunately it did not work well. I furnished my Sigma cameras with Lexar 64GB SD cards. Then I bought a Transcend 128GB USB memory stick. And several USB-OTG (On-The-Go) hubs / card readers. The first problem was formatting the cards. Every card larger than 32GB comes formatted with exFAT filesystem, which is not supported by stock Android. Fortunately Samsung adds exFAT drivers to their package, so the cards work when connected to my Galaxy Note (but do not when connected to the Nexus 10 Google tablet). Theoretically there is an option to reformat the card with FAT32, but I've read

Fifteen months ago I reported the Intel - based mobile phone presented at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress 2012 was the top news from the show . At least for me. But it somehow went unnoticed. Playing with the phone I was amazed by the speed it offered. I could not test the power drain and was expecting it to be much higher than the average of the ARM-based competitors crowd. Last week I read the test / teardown report by ABI Research . ABI tested the Lenovo K900, the 5.5 inch "phablet" powered by 2GHz Clover Trail + Z2580 Intel processor. This was the original Lenovo phablet design I mentioned back in 2012, but upgraded from Medfeld to Clover Trail+. And obviously the news is not the speed of the Intel processor, outperforming the rest. The news is the Intel chip won the race consuming only HALF the power the competitors did. And this is huge news. This simply means Intel can take the smartphone and tablet market by storm. Especially the most lucrative p