Headworx

Setting goals, milestones and deadlines helps keeping the pace. I am very happy how our team works, but there is one aspect I really don't like: heroic pushing just before the finish line. Of course I appreciate the effort. But what I don't like is moving Heaven and Earth in the final days or even hours, especially as weeks or months prior to the checkpoint we were cool and relaxed. This is bad planning in part and bad management in part. And probably even bad leadership. Because the load should be even from the start and we should have kept pushing from the very beginning. One aspect only very few project managers I met executed well was a precise estimate of the critical path. This is especially difficult in projects that are geographically spread and when moving of physical parts is involved. Last year we had a very serious and hard to find bug in the A-series prototypes of circuit boards. We found the bug but could not fix it on our own, as it required special tools...

Browsing through the recent Apple iWatch speculation mockups, I feel like I have already seen one in real life: the Samsung Galaxy Gear Fit, which was described by my friend, a loyal long term Apple fan, as "more Apple than Samsung". I bought the Fit last week in Hongkong and have been enjoying it since then. It is almost perfect with two drawbacks. One silly and difficult to fix and the other one significant, but - I hope - one that will be fixed soon. The first thing that makes the Fit less then perfect is the charging concept. With a smart watch - It is obvious - you have not one, but two personal devices to charge during the night. Well, actually the Fit does not need to be charged every night. It lasts easily three days. But it still means it has to be recharged on the go from time to time. And you need a second charger to do this. How silly! The Fit requires a small cradle to connect a charger - which I can live with. But if it was me designing the watch, I'd ma...

Suspended in space and time on the 747-800 wings, I'm writing this blog on a way to Hongkong, where I'm meeting our hardware manufacturing partners. Boingo WiFi roaming works perfectly on the Lufthansa Flynet while flying over Himalayas. As we are airborne eastbound, Rafal, our new CEO has just landed in San Francisco with the mission to install the US presence. Ofer in Israel is reporting progress with sensor design. Wilson in Shenzhen prepares our new hardware for TUV tests while Andreas in Bray / Ireland works on AMR region specific hardware ID. At the same time Ken in New Jersey is finalizing three new patent applications and Maciek is training in Gdansk a new group of market warriors. This all is happening as Andrzej with the 40-strong core R&D team starts the day in Krakow, our HQ. I cannot name everybody here, but it is simply a-m-a-z-i-n-g. Girls and guys, this is just one but big THANK YOU to the entire team. I'm sure you realize: the product you co-create ...

I've been a proponent of using USB as a standard low voltage supply bus for almost 10 years now. And it has really happened. Today it is hard to find a newly designed electronics gadget that would not have the ability to be charged from USB socket. But just because all USB sockets look the same, it does not mean they have the same capabilities. Most of you are probably aware some chargers are capable of "fast" charging and some will take 10 hours or more. We are putting the final design touches to our new flagship consumer device and we've decided to add the fast charging feature to the two external USB ports we have. Initially I thought it required just boosting the power supply output to about 2.5 Amps per port. I was wrong. Digging deeper we found there has to be a special (passive) signalling implemented, something called USB DCP (Dedicated Charging Port). And there are two conflicting DCP standards: Apple and the rest of the world (nor really surprising, is...