Headworx

Everything comes to an end and so does the x86 architecture, probably taking down Intel with it. Arm has always been an alternative but coming from the low end, had never been considered a real threat to Intel-based desktops. Until Apple unveiled the first Mac based on the M1 processor in 2020. That was a shocker, as the Apple silicon - based machines could outpace the Intel - based ones, run the emulated x86 code, and particularly shine in performance-per-Watt.  Energy efficiency today rules everything. From buildings to transportation to computing. But we were reluctant to embrace energy efficient designs when it meant performance penalty. With the rise of Apple silicon, that penalty was no longer there. So essentially Windows remained the only market for Intel's x86 chips. Microsoft tried exploring alternative architectures, but the Windows RT launched in 2012 never gained much popularity - it was slow (due to slow processors) and had very limited compatibility (the x86 emulatio...

The recent global increase of energy prices has redefined our perspective. Suddenly many people started paying attention to what they do, how to conserve, and in general what energy means to our lives. It turns out everything depends on energy. Which of course is not that surprising, but we simply were not paying attention to this fact when energy was cheap. Of course there is a lot of lament in the media, but that is not relevant. Media needs crisis and lament to thrive. So just ignore it. The good news is the expensive energy will undoubtedly result in overall reduced consumption which will lead to reduced manufacturing and reduced energy use. The media will call this a recession, which of course has a negative bias. But does not have to be that negative at all. We cannot continue growing the economies infinitely based on the finite resources (the planet Earth). It is just not possible. So are we at the end of growth? Maybe. Or maybe not there yet. But definitely there has been some ...

Things always look clearer in perspective. And at the same time we typically do not see when something moves on continuously at what seems to be a very slow speed. Living in a city you basically wake up everyday and the city everyday is the same. No change, no progress. But move out for a bit longer and come back. Then the changes are clear. If there are changes. Since the pandemic eased out this Spring, I have returned to fairly frequent business travel. I know, I know, this is bad for the environment, but to my excuse the result of that travel is makin much more good for the environment - through the massive energy savings our software enables. So I feel absolved to some extent. And yes, the pandemic has done a loot of good for the environment too, by enabling videoconferencing as the primary means of doing business. But still some things work a lot better when you meet face to face. Especially conventions and trade shows when you meet new people. It is still hard to meet new people ...

One thing discovered during the pandemic is that I have been mostly wrong. Wrong about values, attitude, metrics. Thankfully the pandemic has allowed me to get (what I think now is) a proper perspective.  First - GDP is a flawed metric. GDP contraction does not actually have to be a bad thing. Consider bicycles and fast food meals (not mentioning any names but you know the usual suspects in this category). A bicycle is inherently bad for GDP and bad for economy. Cyclists do not buy gas (and thus do not contribute to GDP and tax revenue). They are healthier - do not contribute to health care revenue nor gyms. On the other hand there are more hamburgers consumed by people driving cars. Many of them have weight problems. So not only they buy hamburgers - they also buy body slimming diet supplements (contributing a lot to pharma revenues). And they are more likely to need health treatment, so the huge health industry benefits. Actually why don't governments provide fat-free burgers to...

Since it became obvious that COVID was not an internal China problem, there has been an ongoing debate on the shape of recovery. V-shaped - versus U-shaped - versus W-shaped - versus L-shaped . And this happened already! At least the stock markets have done it in a V-shaped style. Detaching themselves from the reality. There are many reasons for that, one is definitely the American stock recovery has been artificially driven by the FED-injected liquidity. The reality though is, and will be, very different. It seems very few are prepared for a long journey with the virus. People really started realizing this thing was serious when lockdowns were imposed. And the whole story behind the lockdowns was to flatten the curve . What most seem to have missed is the curve is not symmetrical. The more flat it is (yes, we managed to flatten it), the less steep the down slope becomes. And there may not be the down slop at all for several months to come... as the curve will transform itself ...

The recent announcement from Zach Supalla, the Founder and CEO of Particle, on discontinuing the Particle Mesh, an OpenThread-based mesh networking solution , and suggesting the customers to use Bluetooth or LoRa, must have hit many by surprise. Particle is discontinuing development of Particle Mesh, our OpenThread-based mesh networking solution, and will no longer be manufacturing the associated Xenon development board.  Particle (known previously as Spark ) is a very well respected brand in the IoT arena. Investors have recently poured into it $40M in Series C . Thread Group even calls them the most widely used IoT platform . And Thread marketing has managed to elevate their brand to the " best way to connect and control products in the home and buildings ". How come? I have to admit I have been living in the marketing shadow of Thread since the alliance was announced in 2014. They indeed have done the best marketing campaign, convincing the whole world should op...

With his provocative post , Karl S. Jónsson of Tridonic sparked a good discussion on the future role of a lighting grid in office buildings. Setting Bitcoins aside, The whole idea of fitting a ceiling with high performance (and high power / heat dissipating) computer nodes "just because" where are lights, there is power, does not have legs (as explained in the comment by Nicolai Eggert ). Ideas of hijacking a lighting grid to power highly dense computing network come fairly often, but I really doubt anyone would be doing that. Lets face it: the power at lighting sockets is not any cheaper than the power at a regular socket. Somebody has to pay the bill in the end. Dissipating heat at a ceiling is not what we want either. Heat goes up, so the hot nodes there will not be able to heat the rooms. There is already too much heat in the plenum space and nobody wants to increase the already high fire hazard there. But the fundamental observation that there is computing capacity...

The Smart Building conference in Amsterdam was worth attending. Essentially every speaker was reconfirming the smart buildings trends we've been aligned with and pushing at Silvair. Ger Baron (the CTO at the City of Amsterdam) nicely illustrated the evolution of networked systems: from centralized to decentralized and ultimately to distributed peer-to-peer mesh. Bruce Schneier was quoted saying "a luminaire is a connected computer that emits light" (I remember people laughing at me when I was telling them we had 70 developers writing software for light bulbs...). Larry Heisler noted the IoT had not taken off because things lacked interoperability. Music to my ears. One disappointing theme was, unfortunately, The Edge . The world's most famous, most intelligent, most sustainable (the list continues) building. Wonderful. But I herd the same stories back in 2016. So is The Edge still the only one? Why don't we have more smart buildings we could present, study,...

Smartphones continue grabbing the digital photography land. With an exception of some extreme / niche requirements (and yes, there are still many), it is very irrational today to have (or - especially - buy) a digital camera. As I said, there are many exceptions: I want to photograph a night sky (-> buy a full frame sensor camera); I want to have the best possible image quality (-> buy a full frame or even a medium format sensor camera); I want to use specialty lens: wide angle or telephoto (-> buy an interchangeable lens camera); I want my photographs to have a shallow depth of field (-> buy a large sensor camera). Etc. You can spot the common theme here: it is either a smartphone or a full frame camera (DSLR or mirror-less). Nothing in between (with very few but notable exceptions like the Sony RX-100V that still produces better photos than the latest iPhone and that includes the panorama mode and extremely fast autofocus). The digital photography business is being...

It seems we are on the verge of shifting manufacturing back from China. Labor cost won't matter anymore. A month ago I had a very interesting conversation with an owner of a factory in Germany. His factory is fully automated and the work is done by robots. One of the products they make are smart light bulbs for IKEA. He says his costs are lower compared to Chinese factories and quality is much higher (the failure rate of finished products is an order of magnitude lower). On another note Elon Musk says he can increase the speed of the Tesla production line in Fremont, California, from the current five centimeters per second to one meter per second. Assuming 6 meters per car, it is 5 million cars per year, per a single production line.  Almost what all Ford factories globally could do in 2016 ( 6.5M ). It seems with robots and automated assembly lines, there is no more issue of labor costs and scale. For some products (such as our own smart lighting), manufacturing is one co...

Bluetooth 5 has just been announced. The specification will be published within a few months, so still we can only talk about it to some level of details. But what we do know officially there will be a "double speed" option which essentially means the raw data rate will double from the current 1Mbps to 2Mbps. Bluetooth has also announced quadrupling the range. Doubling the data rate and increasing the range are usually contradictory to each other. Normally you increase the range by slowing the data rate and you are able to increase the rate when your link budget can accommodate it. So reading into the Bluetooth's announcement one feature becomes apparent: adaptive data rate. Bluetooth 5 is the first low power radio that can go faster or slower depending on the application requirements. Which is absolutely phenomenal and brings incredible flexibility to product designers and system architects. The double data rate will play a very important role in the increasingly d...

Judging just by a bunch of products around me right now I can clearly see their value, performance and rating is owed to software that powers them. Now, in the middle of the 2nd decade of the 3rd millennium we've crossed the pivotal point of software vs hardware. The trend started some time ago with personal computers and later was reinforced by mobile phones but today it is everywhere, opening a chasm between companies that manage to master software and the ones that don't. In automotive it is Tesla and Google vs Detroit and Japan. In personal computing it is Google vs Apple and Microsoft. In photography it seems to be Sony vs Nikon and Canon and even the recent winners like GoPro seem to be vulnerable to DJI taking the market of video enthusiasts with the Phantom drones and the Osmo . But software is difficult. More difficult than most people think. Take TV. Apple is very careful with the steps. Google is trying hard but failed already twice. Now the third time the Andro...

Today we're introducing Silvair . The complete environment for manufacturers. Empowering them to build cutting edge smart / connected products. Silvair is a product of our multi-year engagement with our customers. We've learned and realized the challenges they have. They used to make their products. Strong, solid, functional. Made of metal, glass, plastics. Then the new era has dawned. The era of software - defined, connected, smart products. Initially they thought the only ingredient they needed to add was sand - a small silicon chip. Then they realized the silicon was only the ingredient to start with. And they needed so much more. Almost all products today are software products. Take a car engine, the extreme example. What it is today is defined by software. The horse-power, the mile-per-gallon, how it starts, how it sounds, how it takes care of itself, how it operates. Remove the software and it is dead. A heap of dead metal. The same applies to almost every product c...

Shipping hardware is oh so different. Yes it does matter if you want to distribute 1k or 100k "copies". Because unlike software / apps nowadays, adding bandwidth just is not so simple. We have products with radio modules. We have designed the module and our CM (Contract Manufacturer) is making them. They have to main parts inside: a radio protocol processor and a frontend. The latter is a combined PA (Power Amplifier) and LNA (Low Noise Amplifier). Both are used to extend the radio range. The PA boosts output, the LNA improves sensitivity. Unfortunately there are precise regulations setting limits on the maximum transmit power level. Unfortunately each frontend chip is different. They differ in input impedance, which translates to the signal level to be amplified. So in some units the amplified signal is less than the allowed maximum, and in some it exceeds the allowed level. To maximize the performance, we have to calibrate each unit (measure the output level and softw...

We've just had a very successful launch of the Seed Rapid Prototyping Kit . This is a direct response to the overwhelming success of our Seed Smart Module, unveiled just a few weeks earlier. So what exactly is the essence of Seed? In a nutshell, it is a software stack built on top of Bluetooth Smart (BLE). We have always considered Bluetooth Smart a great candidate for IoT and especially for Home Automation. The reasons I have explained already in a series of posts ( here , here and here ). But when we started the Bluetooth Smart project at Seed, we learned the hard way, this technology was very difficult to use it for what we wanted. Bluetooth Smart has been designed for tiny sensors (peripherals) communicating with smartphones (central devices). So building an activity tracker or a bathroom scale that talks to a smartphone application is easy. The sensor wakes up, calls the phone, exchanges data, goes to sleep. The problem with home automation is that we have the event s...

The Friday news about Google / Nest acquisition of Revolv spells one word to me: desperation. Nest is of course desperate for talent acquisition. Tim Enwall's team is certainly valuable to Nest. On the other hand Revolv must have been desperately looking for a much needed pivot. The overhyped, overpromised and underdelivered multi - protocol hub probably never recorded significant traction. It had not much to offer. No state machine, just a pass-through command translation between a few radio protocols (but notably no Bluetooth Smart!) has been not enough to generate wide adoption of the system. At Seed we almost tried the same but soon realized the market for smart home hubs has been very limited to date, and competition was mounting. Simply put: not enough smart devices out there yet, to create a significant market for hubs. A problem? Or an opportunity? Not many smart devices on the market is a problem for a hub company indeed. But is an enormous opportunity for those, who...

This week is shaping up to be the most important milestone for Seed Labs . The curtain goes up. There has been plenty of sweat and tears (of joy and sorrow), many ups and downs. But we are so happy, we are now ready to start talking about the company, the products, the strategy, the customers, the investors, the events (both past and planned), the roadmap. Flying under radars has had its advantages. Many. The most important have been no public commitments, giving this wonderful swiftness in freestyle pivots that are the core advantage startups have against the established players. But now, more than ever, we feel absolutely sure about both the direction and the approach. In our history we executed several pivots, with the latest two clearly defining now our position and heading. Business - wise we are a b2b software company. We empower manufacturers in making their products intelligent and connected. And technology - wise, we call 2014 the year of Bluetooth Smart in home automatio...

Seed Labs has now become official. After more than 5 years since the inception and almost 3 years after the original HomerSoft company was started, we start emerging from the hide. My LinkedIn followers may be a bit confused, since recently, embracing the failures, we've gone through several branding pivots. There was Sway, then there was ETC then Seed and now the Seed Labs. But hey, after all pivots are the privilege of startups. And BTW this is why startups are so effective: they can afford themselves to pivot as frequently as needed, validating the concepts quickly. Our business models pivoted too (this was mainly thanks to extremely valuable negotiations with investors: both private / seed and VCs) and - I am so happy to tell - after testing several alternatives, we have now firmly settled with what was my initial idea back in 2011: we are a software company. Our core product is software for the Internet of Things type applications. Starting with low level firmware imple...

Qualcomm is one of the companies I've always admired and keep following the company-related news. The headline of Steve Altman investing in MagnaCom attracted my attention on February 20th, 2014 . This date may seem insignificant, but I feel a tremor in the Force indicating it might have been big (but we just don't realize the importance of it yet). I had never heard of Steve Altman before, but On Feb 20th I read he had been tasked at Qualcomm with "building an intellectual property licensing business around a new mobile networking technology called CDMA". Obviously this move and execution has been for years behind the incredibly huge business success of Qualcomm. And then it dawned on me: we, at IOetc , should build an intellectual property licensing business! The IP portfolio we have created to date is impressive, considering we are still a startup operating submerged below the surface and invisible for radars. The technology we've developed is absolutel...