Headworx

Great products are usually really simple. Take a laptop power supply and two USB phone chargers and mix them together creating one simple package: a small universal travel charger. With three ports and no bulky cables. The Zolt addresses precisely my obsession in minimizing the travel gear, including the (specially handcrafted to cut down the weight of the power cord) Lenovo part. A laptop port and two high power USB ports, all intelligently balanced to prioritize phone charging is exactly what I need. The idea is so simple that it is hard to imagine why laptop manufacturers or leading aftermarket accessory brands like Kensington or Targus never introduced a similar concept. Including Apple who does crazy optimizations when it comes to devices being less bulky and wants you to carry three power supplies: one for a laptop, second for a phone and a third one for a watch. And the problem is not just the number of bricks to carry. It is also the number of power outlets available. Bein...

Almost every new gadget now carries the "Connected" label. Light bulbs, bathroom scales, toothbrushes, toning belts, door locks, you name them... And in most cases the only thing they are connected to is their companion smartphone app. You can read a scale in an app. You can turn lights with an app (a different one). You can manage your abs toning exercise program with an app (yet a different one). And so it goes. Consolidation efforts by Apple (HomeKit, HealthKit) and Google / Nest (Works with Nest) are not getting any meaningful traction. Hero multi-connectors emerge from time to time (Revolv promised to save the world two years ago, then was Wink and now Amazon Echo). Actually the Echo has the most chances, but it is still in the infancy when it comes to serving a wide range of products, albeit the pace of new partnership announcements is very promising. I've been repeating this for years but it is worth repeating. We need standards. Complete standards. Not just a ...

Google Drive has usually been considered a cloud file system. And actually it is a very clever document / data hub, enhanced with a number of built-in viewers and import options. And it keeps evolving rapidly. Just recently a new "Scan" option has been added to a mobile version of Drive: it takes a snap with a camera and converts it to an indexed PDF document. It is an extremely powerful feature that has just arrived "overnight" and probably many have not noticed (yet). A typical flow involving the scan function is: On a phone, launch the Drive and "+" to add a new item, choose "Scan", the camera will be activated. Take a snap of a hotel bill (or any paper document). A PDF version lands in the Drive instantly, optimized for contrast and clipped to your preferences. Go to a computer and search for "Hilton". The PDF will be located and brought up in a preview built-in the web app (no need to launch a PDF viewer or download the doc...

The amount of money spent globally on repeated tasks of parallel Android / iOS development is alarming. Every software, and soon every hardware company will be double spending on efforts of creating mobile applications for the two platforms. Thanks God Windows and Blackberry are gone. But should a good technology arrive, which allowed writing code once for both platforms, we could probably stop global warming by cutting the workforce by half. Or we could accelerate global progress by giving these smart people something useful to do, instead of repeating what their colleagues have been doing for the other platform. The more I think about this the more I cannot understand why this problem is not solved. It's been 8 years since the iPhone 1 and the first Android release. The hardware, the system paradigm, the connectivity model, the user experience on both is identical. Yet we still continue writing two apps every time instead of just one that compiles and runs on both platforms. ...