Headworx

It all started on November 7, 2000 with the publication of " How Digital Is Your Business? " by Adrian J. Slywotzky, David J. Morrison and Karl Weber. It was revolutionary then and is bread and butter now. Since then the digital business models have dwarfed the analog ones. But as humans are analog (have flesh, built of atoms), there will always be great analog businesses. The catch is, though, most of these analog businesses need digital faces. And the survival rate will be closely related to how good and quickly they adapt to the new digital normal. Some will share the fate with dinosaurs, for sure. Last week I was in San Francisco for a few days, moving on to Montreal. My Montreal flight was scheduled for Saturday morning and I was expecting a USPS package to arrive (according to their tracking info) on Friday by the end of the day. Anticipating things may go wrong on the last mile (they sometimes do), I decided to redirect the package to the SFO Post Office and inte...

Well designed apps make night and day difference compared to traditional services. I wrote about Gaia GPS , which is a niche, but experience changing in the category of exploring wilderness. This time the blog is very much down to earth and everyday use: Uber and Revolut . I took a taxi to the airport in Montreal. Yes, a regular taxi. It was a kind of an emotional move, to support local community. On the way I was wondering if the driver would accept a credit card (I realized I have not used cash for more than three months now...). There was no "Visa / Mastercard" marking anywhere. And not that long ago a taxi from the Frankfurt International Airport (the financial capital of Europe) required a cash payment. It turned out he had a terminal but something went wrong. When instructed to remove the card, I followed the prompt, and the terminal printed the card was removed prematurely. The driver complained and tore off the paper slip, exactly when the machine changed its min...

Although I feel like I'm repeating myself, it seems the concept of distributed lighting control is so new, that we need to talk about it over and over again. This whole concept builds on the strengths of Bluetooth mesh: addressable information and concurrent multicast (many-to-many) communications. And the whole idea can be implemented thanks to the Moore's Law: it is possible today to move the control logic and algorithms to the edge nodes. Making the central "control box" obsolete. In lighting control systems this approach is disruptive. It renders the whole category of products - legacy lighting controls - obsolete. A legacy lighting system consists of sensors (they may be standalone - room level, or integrated into fixtures - luminaire level). The second building block is the controller - a box (a computer) that collects information from the sensors, processes and sends control commands to drivers that in turn change the output, dimming the lights down or ...

4-engine jest airliners are disappearing from the skies. You have probably heard last year about the retirement of the United's ageing Boeing-747 fleet . Lufthansa have been retiring their fleet of A340s . Now the first Airbus A380 is going to be broken up for parts , as no airline wants it, even though it is only 11-years old. 2-engine design has clearly won, emerging as the preferred option, offering the best setup: price points, reliability and fuel efficiency . A single engine has never been an option - you need redundancy in the air - engine shutdowns are not that rare (e.g., the Swiss 777 on Feb 1st, 2017 , the AF A380 on Sep 30th, 2017 , and the LOT 787 on March 28, 2018 ). But they are rare enough that having two engines provides the expected reliability, considering the failures are not correlated (today it appears they may be in the case of the RR-powered Dreamliner that has just had the ETOPS downgraded , but that is considered a temporary problem). Three engine ...

Machine systems that anticipate human expectations are the long lasting dream: a smart home that anticipates the inhabitants, an automatic gearbox that learns the driving style of a driver, a music service that streams music matching the mood of a listener. This concept, however, is far from reality. Smart homes are often irritating, cars with manual stick are still popular and people like to hand-pick music to listen. There are two reasons for that. First is the feedback - or the lack of it. Programming the behavior of a smart home is extremely tedious, unless you can do this on your own. I was doing that at my smart home several years ago. Ended up with hundreds of rules and exceptions based on very complex decision engine. For several months I was fine-tuning the rules based on careful observation of expectations and every day annoyances. I think it is fine now, but no way for that system to be converted into a mass market product. It is just too complex. Of course you may say...