Headworx

My ups and downs with the iPad Pro continue. The experience is far from smooth mainly because I'm having trouble getting adjusted to Apple's philosophy and the restrictions of iOS and iOS Apps. One of the reasons why I selected the Pro has been the screen. I knew it would be the best tablet screen money could buy and I wanted the best screen for portable photo viewing. Photos are also the reason I opted for the 128GB version - to have them loaded on the device and accessible all the time, especially on the road when Internet connections are neither fast nor stable. I was entirely surprised when I learned it was not possible to load photos on the iPad. Of course there are dozen or so apps dedicated to photos on an iPad. But none works offline with full resolution. They either require a cloud service available online when viewing or cache photos, but at reduced resolution. Suffice to say Apple's default way of transferring photos has not changed since the first photo capa...

Z-Wave has just announced an optional improvement patching the most severe security hole: the initial key exchange and initial device authentication. This move clearly shows Z-Wave wants to fight for survival and the chances are it will survive in residential implementations for some time. Mainly due to variety of products and backward compatibility. Which by the way makes the new security improvement weaker than it sounds. Yes my new, Z-Wave S2-enabled door lock may now be securely included in the network, but the moment I bring an older Z-Wave device, it may leak the network key during the inclusion process. This is the problem with security: making one door more secure does not increase the security of a house, as long as there are other doors and windows. And securing all of them is not possible, because, in Z-Wave's case, the products are not in-field upgradable. In-field software upgrade is the most wanted, the most praised and the least practiced IoT feature. Because ...

I'm writing this on a delayed UA99 flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles. The reason for the delay is the faulty A/C unit. The situation was nicely explained by the captain: "The Dreamliner is a fantastic plane but is fully computerized and sometimes computers report some errors and the usual way we deal with them is reboot. Sometimes it takes a couple of reboots and for some subsystems we are not allowed to reboot them once airborne. The unit is working fine now but we may have to turn off the entertainment system on the way, if the cabin temperature raises.". Yeah. Reboot. The new normal. The old joke of a developer fixing a broken car by getting out and getting in again is no longer a joke. Out / in has become the normal way to deal with things. From phones to planes. And chances are this system will soon cover door locks, lamps, kitchen white goods and other everyday equipment - thanks to the IoT. Only yesterday there was a discussion between on of our developmen...

I haven't bought an Apple product for years. The last one was the iPad 1, so you have it... it was a long time ago. The 64GB iPad 1 , 6 years back. I've been always thinking about larger display sizes... So here comes the iPad Pro A.D. 2015. It is a very mixed bag of feelings. Overall it is a great piece of hardware. The display is top-notch (although it would be even better if it was AMOLED not LCD, but hey...). It has a lot of horsepower too. Very snappy. It weighs the same as my 1st gen iPad. Which is reasonable. Many ask "what would I use the Pro for?". So here are my hints. It works very well as a secondary USB display when connected to my Windows-10 Lenovo Yoga. I love big screens and lots of screen real estate. The iPad pro helps here while traveling. It is my second monitor (thanks to the TwoMon App ). It is also the greatest reader for PDF and Microsoft Word documents, I've ever had. Successfully replacing my old Kindle DX that I will be retiring now....

It's been a long wait. My last Blackberry was the Torch in 2010 . I loved it and I loved every Blackberry before. I switched to Android for two reasons: I could not stand the philosophy of RIM playing against the users, ending up in frustrating user experience (more on this one here ) The selection and quality of Apps, compared with Android, was shrinking rapidly. But I was missing the Blackberry hardware ever since. And now it is back in an absolutely dream package. The Priv has the screen size identical to iPhone 6+, but in a smaller overall package. Yet it offers a physical keyboard. It is thinner than the LG-G3. The display is phenomenal. I had a Galaxy Note with AMOLED, then moved to LCD (LG-G3) and I'm so happy to have an AMOLED screen back again. I don't think anybody would go back from AMOLED to LCD and be happy. The LCD backlight is simply too aggressive on eyes and produces bleak colors. AMOLED is calm, almost matte, yet produces extremely vibrant color...

The news about the Bluetooth roadmap for 2016 are officially out so we can discuss them in public now. I've covered the Mesh many times already and the next thrilling (and many even say shocking) feature is the range increase. It will be four times what it is today. Which translates to extra 12dBm link budget (every 6 dBm increase in link budget results in a doubling of the possible distance that is achievable). Today, which means Bluetooth LE 4.0 A.D. 2015, the Bluetooth Smart modules we've designed at Silvair reach about 2000ft / 700m LoS (line-of-Sight) module-to-module range (using small omnidirectional λ/4 antennas). Our official figure is 1500ft / 500m, which is still shocking to many. The link budget we have is 108dB. In the near future we will be offering a new Bluetooth Smart module that can go up to 118dB link budget. 1500ft/500m will become 5000ft/1500m - almost a mile. And this is still WITHOUT the 4x range increase that will come later in 2016. Assuming every...

It is official now: Bluetooth Smart has reinforced the leading position among low power wireless protocols: It will offer 4x the range. Which means more than a mile line-of-sight with omnidirectional antennas and even more with directional antennas. Suddenly Bluetooth enters the turf of long range WAN technologies, not to mention its ability to cover entire buildings with a single hop. It will offer 2x the data rate. Bluetooth is already one of the fastest radios. Not for large transmissions but for many tiny transmissions. Today you can easily have 100 sensor nodes each sending a message to a gateway every second with very low collision rate. That is about 10x more than any 802.15.4 radio can do . With the upcoming speed increase, it will double that number. The double data rate also means the radio duty cycle is cut by half. Which means battery life is doubled. Yes, we are looking into battery powered devices that last 10+ years on a single coin cell. It will form a peer-to-p...

The common wisdom is the 7 OSI layers define everything in the communications link to make the two ends interoperable and able to talk. At Silvair we've been especially stressing the importance of the application layer that seems to be forgotten by the proponents of WiFi and IPv6. But OSI does not cover one very important prerequisite. The onboarding / provisioning process, which can be considered the "Layer 0". It simply assumes devices are already on the same network. Somehow "magically". Unfortunately for real products there is no magic. Devices have to be brought on a network before they can engage the full 7 layers to start a dialog. The onboarding process is a yet another elephant in the IoT room . Some seem to notice it. Both Thread and HomeKit focus on the onboarding part, enforcing numeric code labels on products. Others, like AllJoyn, ignore it completely. AllJoyn has just introduced the new Security 2.0 , which is great but simply ignores the f...

Silvair is running a series of blog posts discussing pros and cons of various communication protocols for the IoT/Smart/Connected World. Some of them are fresh and growing and some are more mature (to put it mildly). We've been playing on this field for many years and our ultimate answer is: Hybrid / Snowflake The main misconception we see is the organizations try to push their solutions to cover everything end-to-end. It is like a taxi company would try to persuade you they could drive you across the ocean. While taxi is just best for the leg to local airport. And then a propeller plane to an international hub and then transatlantic jet. Nobody flies their kids to school in jets and nobody crosses oceans by cars. But as I speak to all those wireless standard bodies, I see they want to be solution s for everything. WiFi wants to connect light bulbs and Bluetooth wants to provide Internet access. Even the best low power mesh network will saturate when forced to carry the ag...

To all companies betting on WiFi for their IoT product and services strategy: I have a warning for you. Reconsider your radio. WiFi ain't gonna fly for you. Last week I attended the AllSeen Alliance Summit in Seattle. I'm pretty new to AllJoyn and still on a steep learning curve. The framework itself is very interesting and promising but it's heavy reliance on WiFi worries me a lot. There are many myths about WiFi and many known issues that nobody wants to talk about. E.g. I'm rearing from a keynote speaker AllJoyn is peer to peer and does not require a hub. Huh? So suddenly WiFi does not require an access point and devices will talk to each other? C'mon... don't lie! Then I attend a number of sessions diving deep into products and solutions. And no single demo works. Because "the environment in the hotel is too noisy". And instead of live demos we have playback slides. Aha. So do we expect the conditions to improve? Will we have less connect...

The Time got ecstatic on the recent Tesla software update. Yes. Cars, like phones, are software products now. I remember back in 2008 I learned BMW's budget for a new car platform was 60% software and 40% hardware. Now the hardware must be even less. At least for the leaders who decided to push the envelope and cross the chasm between hardware and software products. Light bulbs today are software products too. Back in the old days there were just a handful of bulb makers. It was the heavy industry. Tungsten, glass and vacuum. The factories had to be big and expensive. Today's bulb hardware is like car's hardware: a couple of components: LEDs, drivers, optics, housing. The difference between an ordinary bulb and an extraordinary bulb is in software. It is the software that defines how a bulb can be dimmed. It is the software that determines what other bulbs or switches or sensors or phones it can connect to. It is the software that defines if a bulb can join a group ...

Most WiFi "things" have the following setup procedure: They start in an access point mode. You connect to the temporary access point and give it the network credentials to your home WiFi. The device reboots and uses the credentials to connect to the WiFi  network. The problem with that is in #2 you actually have no proof who you are giving the WiFi password to. It could be your bulb but it could be your neighbor or my rogue access point named "LIFX_WHITE_800". So you will give me your WiFi password, thinking you are giving it to the light bulb. There is no authentication. You have no way to make sure there is no man in the middle trying to steal your credentials. And once this happens you will want to change the WiFi password. And the consequence will be to re-provision the 50 or so orphaned WiFi devices. The WiFi security model does not work for IoT . This is serious.

While IoT has been the buzz of the last couple of years, we are yet to see mass market adoption of it in many product categories. Smart Homes being just one of many. At Silvair we've started working on smart homes many years ago and experienced the same kind of friction. Friction at end users struggling with complexity of setup and configuration. Friction at manufacturers, not sure which technology to bet on. Friction at distribution channels lacking clear brand leadership. We've identified the way to remove that friction. It was precisely in Q3'2013 when Google announced Android 4.3 would support Bluetooth Smart. It became clear at that time Bluetooth Smart was a perfect base to remove the IoT friction. But it was just the base. Albeit the best, one could imagine, with huge brand awareness and revolutionary fundamentals. We rolled our sleeves up and started working on technology known today as Silvair Mesh. A completely new networking software stack put on top of ex...

Device interoperability is absolutely expected by users. But they are not getting it. Why is it so hard to deliver? Because we've never done it. How does an electric plug look like? It depends on which country you live in.... It has a very simple function and there is no interoperability. Converters and adapters are needed. But computers connected to the Internet are interoperable. So why things can't be? Why don't things use WiFi, which is an interoperable protocol? These questions are based on false assumptions. Computers are not interoperable. WiFi is not interoperable. Humans using them are. My laptop cannot talk to your laptop. But I as a human can use an application (like Skype) to connect over WiFi and the Internet to your laptop that runs Skype and has you on the other side. Remove the humans and nothing works. We've never built a single interoperable system! Even the airline reservation systems are not interoperable. So often it happens a ticket iss...

Two weeks ago I made an experiment installing Ubuntu on a MacBook Air. Initially it went smoothly but ended up in a total fiasco. I mean - it worked, but the overall experience was very poor. The battery life dropped down to 2 hours (from around 6 with OS X). After digging around and installing some extra power saving tools and drivers I got it up to 4 hours. But it was unreliable. A couple of times the machine did not turn off after closing the lid. The effect - unexpectedly dead battery. The touch pad was also somehow impaired. Not sure what the problem exactly was, but simply the touchpad operation was not that smooth as on the original Apple software. And I am comparing apples to apples (pun intended), because on both systems the only application I run is Google Chrome. So yes, the Chrome experience on the OS X MacBook is much better then the Chrome experience on the same machine running Linux. I am back to OS X with relief. Which spells again: the devil is in the details. Thou...

What Android TVs and the new iPads have in common? They don't know how to organize the users around them. The world was pretty simple with personal devices. My phone. My tablet. My laptop. My account. My phone shares the photos with my laptop, because both devices operate in a context of the same account. But the problem arises with devices that - by design - are shared. A TV set is a crown example. What user account should the Android TV sign with? And there is no obvious answer to that question. I ended up setting up a new account that I call the "Family Account". Both the TV and the Android TV players are signed to the Family account. This setup is not that bad. Each family member can share selected content with the Family account. Like photos. And then the TV set can go and run the DayDream screen saver displaying randomly the photos it has access to. At least in theory. The real life shows the idea is still not fully supported. Android TV screensaver can grab...

My adventure with digital photography started in 2002 when I realized the quality of images taken with my Minolta Dimage F100 beat an analog film. Since then I have been paying a lot of attention to ordering my catalogs, backing them up and preparing them for sharing as well as being able to display on variety of devices. As a matter of fact this comes down to my Definition-of-Done. Done is not when I press the shutter button. Done is when the photo is cataloged, geo-tagged, post-processed, stored in an ordered album, ranked and shared on line. Today, 13 years later, this process remains extremely painful and difficult. There seems to be only one photo post-processing app that stands out. The Adobe Lightroom. It is difficult to learn but after you master even the basics, everything else pales in comparison. There is also a huge ecosystem of Lightroom plugins that are not available otherwise. Some of them, like the Google Nik Dfine 2 are worth every cent ad then some. Unfortuna...

My recent encounters with Android TV materialized inside the Philips PUS7150 tv set have reinforced the point: software is a hard problem. Especially for hardware vendors. Via the Android TV operating system Google brings an enormous value to consumer electronic manufacturers. It almost solves their problem. Consumers today expect a TV would behave like a computer, only on a bigger screen. Rubber remote? No thank you... Limited number of apps running on the big screen? Why oh why? Context continuity? Why isn't it available? TV makers can either spend millions billions on developing their own OS or license one that is ready. They still want to make their product special and try hard adding something. For example Philips is adding their own MyRemote companion App. Which simply said is hopeless. Looks like put together by a bunch of kids during an afternoon hackaton session. Google's Android TV Remote Control app is not perfect either, but is usable. And BTW, Google still h...

Chasing features and updates is our everyday life. I have an Android tablet in my car and everyday when I commute to work, it keeps updating some apps or parts of the system. It connects via a free 3G data (Aero2) which works well but has throughput limited to 64Kbps. Sometimes I wonder if 64K for 1-2 hours a day is enough to keep the system up to date... While the frequent updates are accepted for personal devices (laptops, tablets, phones), they are a completely different challenge for IoT systems. For two reasons: The IoT networks are narrowband by nature. Some, like SigFox, run extremely limited data rates. Low data rates are perfectly fine to transport sensor data or simple control commands, but are way too slow to perform application updates on the nodes. Even 802.15.4 - based networks, running at 250kbps can easily saturate for long periods when doing over-the-air updates. Many IoT devices are supposed to run uninterrupted. Firmware upgrade almost always requires a reboot. ...

It looks looks like TV sets have won back the purity. Set-top boxes will be gone soon. They were, after all, a temporary solution. Set-tops were application platforms, with connectivity to multiple feed interfaces: satellite, cable, terrestrial. They had storage and above all were hosting service providers' applications. Televisions were just simple displays. But now televisions are more and more powerful computers, with multiple connectivity options and power to run a number of applications. STBs are not needed any longer. This is becoming clearly visible with the recent arrival of the Android TV operating system, embraced by lead TV manufacturers like Sony and Philips. When my Linux - based satellite tuner was dying and my TV just stopped working I visited a local electronics store where - to my surprise - I've found a number of new generation TV sets. They are all already 4K / UltraHD panels with "smart" functions, but what has hit me the most were two develo...

Despite all this progress in technology and paying so much attention to ease of use, there are always difficult choices. Such prime example is the process called device provisioning. Say we have a new smart lamp that we want to bring into the smart home network and associate with switches and occupancy sensors. For the devices (switches / censors / lamps) to communicate securely, they must know a shared secret, which usually is a key they use to encrypt and decrypt wireless messages. So how do we get the key to the device in a first place, before it has any key? Chicken and egg problem? Not really, it has been solved by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman 40 years ago. The solution is called Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange and allows two parties agree on a shared secret while talking over an insecure channel. There is a great presentation explaining the problem (and solution) on YouTube: https://youtu.be/YEBfamv-_do . There is however one type of attack the D-H is susceptible to. The...

WiFi is considered secure today. Meaning the WPA2 protocol does not have any obvious open holes and cannot be easily hacked. This is enough for human - operated computers, including laptops, tablets and smartphones. But enter the IoT space and the static nature of WPA2 and the entire concept of an access-point - based infrastructure falls apart. Imagine you have a reasonable number of 50 smart devices on your home WiFi network. There are various sensors (temperature, ambient light, motion) and every day devices like door locks, light bulbs, webcams, switches etc. Provisioning them on your WiFi network was quite an effort. Yes bringing WiFi IoT devices online is not easy and every vendor has their own method of doing this, usually via a custom smartphone App. And then you want to change your router. For whatever reason. Changing your Internet provider or just upgrading to the latest and greatest. Or imagine you just want to change the WiFi password because you have given it to too m...

After a really long and thorough preparation, the Namibia / Botswana / Zimbabwe trip went way over the initial expectations. Over three weeks we covered almost 4000 miles, more than 80% of that was gravel and off road. There are close to 2000 photos, which I'm trying to reduce down to about 300 before publishing. I could go for hours telling what worked (many things) and what didn't (almost nothing...), but here is the list of the indisputable winners: The Hankook DynaPro MT tyres. They carried our HiLux Dakar through the entire distance with no single puncture (although we had two spares). This is a phenomenal track record and those of you who do some off road trips know how important it is to have absolutely dependable tires. The Tracks4Africa maps, both paper ones and the electronic edition loaded on the Garmin GPS platform. It is just unbelievable how precise and dependable they are. Nobody should even think of self driving there without these maps. The Delorme inRea...

I have just had a couple of novice interactions with GoPro. It is one of the worst UX I have ever had. Tiny LCD, a set of ambiguous buttons, the battery losing power, especially when WiFi is enabled. It is hard to understand and explain a product like that is having such a market success. But being successful does not mean you couldn't be even more successful or at least generate less frustration for users. Of course using a phone a a remote keyboard and display via a wireless connection is obvious. They even try this over WiFi, but wifi brings at least three problems here: It draws a lot of power and impacts the already very poor battery life It has to be turned on and off and it is not obvious how to do it The discovery process and securing the channel is not that straightforward either It all could be solved easily by implementing a Bluetooth Smart radio on GoPro. It could be always on, not affecting the battery. It could be automatically detected and create a secure c...

Security of software - based systems is very high. It may sound weird because we keep on hearing about malware and hacks and holes. But a typical software - based system is far more secure today than typical hardware, be it a door lock or a padlock or even car's ignition system. Opening a locked door to a house or an apartment poses no problem to a professional thief. But there is one fundamental difference which makes software based systems such attractive targets. A software attack is scalable. When you find a way to break it, you may bring a huge number of systems down. It is yet another scenario where bits scale and atoms do not. Breaking into thousand houses requires a significant effort from the attacker, even if opening a single door is easy. In software, when you find a way to break in, usually breaking into million systems requires the same effort as breaking into a single one. This is what makes software - based systems so vulnerable. Not because the defenses are we...

In his January 2015 blog , Scott Jenson writes: we just assume there won’t be many smart devices in our homes because it is so damn hard to put them there in the first place! With the two previous standards in place, it would be child’s play to add items to a home and it would quickly change this from a game of things to a game of swarms With my "live in the future and build what's missing" motto, I arrived at several hundred connected devices at home some time ago. And interesting problems emerge when you have 500 devices around. E.g. with the "industry standard" failure rate, I have several nodes on my network dead every day. For many reasons: depleted batteries, sensors being eaten by dogs, taken away by kids, flooded by rain after being pierced by birds (they especially like the swimming pool floating thermometer), etc. I also once had several radio controlled relays I built into some legacy products (coffee makers etc) and their power supplies died m...

Smarthome platforms (both the real ones and the fundraising mockups) keep springing like mushrooms and still (!) most of them are focused on using a phone or a similar touchscreen device to control the "smart" environment. Sorry, fancy remote control is not smart at all. It is just this: remote control. Smart is something more. Something much more. Much more difficult. Scott Jenson argues home automation is an EasyHard problem and I do agree. Even the simplest rules, like operating a water valve , are not that straightforward. Rules handling lights in a bedroom are much more complicated and require more sensors and also much more sophisticated engine processing them. I've been playing with this very issue for three years now in my home and the result is almost acceptable now. But before we get to the rules engines, we need to arrange the inputs signals for them. This means sensors, many of them. Motion, presence, gesture, temperature, humidity, air quality, ambie...

Something's been wrong with my credit card balance. I keep track of all my transactions and so does my Bank. But my balance was not matching the balance presented by the Bank. I took the effort to dig down to the details. Counting the beans carefully, I realized the Bank's system was making errors when adding up numbers. I nailed the problem down to a single screenshot and forwarded it to the Bank, together with all my account details. They emailed me back asking to contact their call center and promised to solve MY problem. My problem is I am overcharged 10 cents. Which I don't care about. Nobody would. But. Dear Mr. Bank. If somebody presents you a proof your system makes errors while adding numbers, well, then YOU have a problem. And don't try to help me. Help yourself! Run to nail the problem down and solve it.

I've been having many emotional ups and downs related to smart watches. I was pitching them just to realize they do not really bring any real value while adding the bulk of yet another charger to my travel gear. For the last 6 months or so I have been wearing the Moto360 which is by far the nicest smart watch ever (Apple included). But it has two serious drawbacks: has to be recharged everyday and the charging cradle is bulky. Yes the cradle is nice as a desk stand but I am spending more than half of my life now on a plane and carrying the bulky charging cradle has not been what I really want. I have also been carrying a Bluetooth headset in my carry on backpack. Namely the Plantronics Legend. Very nice headset in a clever recharging box. But when I saw the Huawei Talkband B2 I gladly traded in the Moto360 and the Plantronics for this simple Smart Watch. The Talkband is ingenious. It is a simple stylish smart watch with a touch screen. It also doubles as a Bluetooth headset...

What do you do with a broken light bulb? Throw it to a trash can of course. Yes this may include segregation and recycling. But generally it is a common procedure to replace a broken bulb. We've been doing this for 150 years. So what do you do with a broken smart light bulb? Are you aware it contains your network credentials? It can be removed from the trash can and passwords can be extracted from its memory. Then the passwords can be used to access your network. Of course there are many methods to protect against such attack but most of the IoT vendors today do not care. If your smart device happens to be a WiFi device, it can reveal your WiFi password too, as was the case with LifX . LifX uses integrated SoCs (System-om-Chips), which are processors with RAM and Flash memory together, but keeps the JTAG interface open. Which means it is possible to dump the memory and extract the keys. Other vendors offer wireless chips that do not have integrated storage. The Flash memo...

Latency in the smart / connected world is what frustrates us the most. You click and nothing happens... for a while... The phone is coming out of the dormant state of the data connection... The occupancy sensor is trying to reach for the Cloud to determine whether it should turn on the lights... Or simply the uplink of the ADSL connection is saturated and the requests are buffered waiting for the green light. I visited this subject some time ago ... Lag can simply make it impossible to stabilize the circuit. If the reaction is too slow it may simply be wrong. Because when delayed, is is no longer the proper reaction to fast changing conditions. Exactly this was causing the robotic arms linked to the brain's motor cortex were failing. They reactions were too late. Re-linking the arms to the posterior parietal cortex allowed them to reduce the overall latency of the system to the level that guarantees timely reactions. We live in a software defined world. Which means it is fu...

The best User Interface is one that does not exist. Imagine not having to tell a software application what to do. Imagine not having to tell your hand to move a mouse to click a button that tells the software application what to do. Imagine the software captures your intentions. Directly. When computers are able to couple directly with our brains, capturing the intentions, we will enter the new era. Screenless, touchless , direct, men and machines, together. We are entering this era now: a new device was implanted in the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), a part of the brain that controls the intent to move, not the movement directly . The latency introduced by our muscles, finger movements, touch clicks and misses and the 150-years old QWERTY UI (specifically designed to throttle the speed of data entry) is several orders of magnitude higher than the latency of the global communication network. Imagine being able to exchange 10x, 100x or 1000x more information with other p...

We keep telling the World the Silvair products are software defined. What does this mean? Well, it means the products, without the software running inside of them, do not exist. This by the way has become the reality we live in. A car is a software product. Surprised? Try to remove the computer inside and you will end up with a dead pile of metal, glass, leather and plastics, you will even have have difficulty opening. Not to mention starting the engine. Software gives these products all the smart details we love and expect. Software defined products become simply smarter. We like them more. Staying with cars, Saab has always been my favorite example. Back in 1990s there were some lovely features in Saabs, among them the rear view mirrors that were lowering themselves when reverse was engaged. And the engine giving you extra thrust (exceeding the rated bhp) for 30 seconds, just enough to safely overtake. The same concept applies today to objects as simple as lights. Lights can tune ...

Among the formal announcements at the Bluetooth World Event has been our Silvair Mesh network. Mesh is the Smart Home Keyword in 2015 with the two most influential standard organizations (The Bluetooth SIG and the Thread Group) building their connected home vision around it. While capable of running on top of any radio transport, Silvair is different. It may even be a little counter intuitive for many network engineers. The Silvair Mesh is based on source addresses and is designed to form loosely coupled broadcaster - subscribers relationships. We do not want to have any central network coordinator / hub / server on the network. Everything is distributed. Messages are multicast. Devices are autonomous and decide what to do - nobody tells them. Let's take a light bulb as an example. The bulb can turn itself on or off, depending on various conditions. The simplest condition is a message from a switch. So the bulb listens to messages from a switch and whenever there is a ...

Dreams do come true! 5 years ago, when my sister was helping me creating the HoloLens vision, which I presented at TEDx Kraków back in October 2010 and later at eComm 2011 , we did not know how close or how far we were from the actual product. Now it looks like we were damn close! Of course it was a speculation then, but one that I backed with my own money. I enjoy putting my money where my mouth is. This makes the story so much more credible. So during my preparation for the TEDx talk I did a lot of research on the technologies necessary to build such product. One of them was laser microprojection. Doing the research I got in touch with Lemoptix , the Swiss - based laser microprojector startup. In a few months (June 2011) Lemoptix was raising a financing round I participated in. Then in March 2015 it was acquired by Intel . There is no public information on what exactly is inside the HoloLens, but considering the facts: The HoloLens is powered by an Intel processor and Intel ...