Headworx

The title says it... I am disappointed with the iPad. Well, actually it has been only four days since it arrived (I wanted it earlier but the volcano messed my plans). The bar of expectations has probably been raised too high. So what is up with the device? First it is very cool. Probably the coolest gadget on Earth. A little heavier than expected, but feels great in hand. Feels even better in the original case. The case itself is one of the smartest designs I have ever seen. It covers the screen. It folds back 180 degrees. It can be folded to raise the angle of the device sitting on your laps. Or it can be used as a table stand when you want the Pad to act as a photo frame. Cool :). The on-screen keyboard works better than expected. I am writing this column sitting on a train with the iPad on my lap. It is the best virtual touch keyboard I have ever used. The screen is very good. The touch interface works brilliantly. The battery life is awesome - full day on full brightness. So could...

I planned to attend the Emerging Communications eComm 2010 conference in San Francisco, starting tomorrow. Unfortunately I will not be there due to the #ashtag . All planes are grounded and flights canceled. Truly disappointing, as I was really looking forward to the eComm sessions loaded with unprecedentedly fresh ideas. Initially my flight was scheduled for Friday, April 16th. Initial connection from KRK to FRA departing at 11AM, then an hour and a half in FRA and the second leg to SFO. The day before I was returning home by car, late in the evening. Got a message about the volcano and the mess it produced... (BTW: Iceland should pay a huge pollution tax now...). But my flight was still showing green. Then the events started to flow: April 16th, 00:10:00Z. I get an SMS from Lufthansa staqting my flight had been canceled and suggesting contacting the Lufthansa Service Center in Germany by phone. I was asleep at that time. April 16th, 03:35:00Z. I wake up and check the clock on my Bla...

Days like today bring some more general reflections. Yesterday's tragic crash of presidential plane killed 96 people, among them the President of Poland. But the World never goes to a stand still. As time goes by, the human nature is to learn from mistakes and improve the collective knowledge, wisdom and experience to avoid such catastrophes in future. Punishments (as Jeffrey Satinover points out in The Quantum Brain ), together with rewards, are essential base-forming ingredients of the learning curve of our civilization. Speaking of the learning curve - the rate of air crash related fatalities has dropped tenfold over the last thirty years. This by itself is a proof we learn and draw conclusions. In the recent years there has been a far and wide reaching trend of implementing various computer systems aimed to improve flight safety. And the wisdom of the crowd is they are usually doing the opposite. Every now and then we read media reports of aviation accidents where computers ar...

The Web is abuzz on what iPad will be, will change or not... The early reviews are very positive. In my opinion there is one long reaching aspect we have not paid enough attention to... yet... Magazines. We have already had paperback books finding their new electronic homes in e-Readers around the world. Kindle was a great product. Was. Because its time has just passed. A typical "generation 1" e-Reader, represented by Kindle and other less successful platforms, was an almost 1:1 electronic equivalent of the black-and-white paper version. They were very good for static, monochrome text. Books were followed by newspapers, delivered daily in their electronic versions to Kindles. Amazon of course was trying to do the same with magazines, that, by definition, have much richer content, with glossy paper, color fonts and especially color pictures. And here is where the "generation 1" of e-Readers has come short. I tried a trial subscription to Time on my Kindle, but cance...

Back in 2008 I touched on the concept of two-way personal navigation systems . Most navigation devices / applications today are still one - way. They receive GPS signals from satellites, and based on that compute the current location, rendering it based on locally stored map data. usually the story ends at this point. Now consider what happens when all these millions GPS receivers can report their whereabouts on-line, real-time, to some servers in the Cloud. And calm down please you who cry "privacy violation" now. It is not about you personally. It is about statistics of the crowds. Just quantitative data. I do not care where exactly or how fast you drive. But knowing where and how fast how many people are moving (or standing still) means a lot. Simply means real time traffic data. Of course we have had such systems for years now. Variants of the TMC ( Traffic Message Channel , based on FM radio broadcast technology) are in service world-wide. But the are neither accurate, n...

Today I would like to attract your attention to the upcoming Emerging Communications 2010 conference. There are not many events I am so honestly positive about, but this one is special. The reason is it gathers many "out of the box" thinkers. It is put together by Lee S Dryburgh, the man I referred to in my post back in 2007 . When I met Lee at that time he was a speaker at another conference. Later on he started putting together the eComm series. I have to say I love his vision. I have been working with MNOs for many years now. Both with big and small ones. And I have to say I am terrified witnessing the lack of innovation they have. The bigger they are, the worse. Yes I know things are different in Asia. But Asia is a different story. At the same time Europe and North America offer just three basic services. Bell - style poor quality point - to - point audio calls, short text messages and dumb data transfer. And it has been like that for the last 15 years. Sounds like it i...

So the iPad can be preordered now. I somehow lost my initial enthusiasm, so my personal feeling is the preorders are not building as fast as expected. But this is just personal. In fact folks may be racing out since the gates opened last week... So why the loss of excitement? Well... honestly my feeling is the device is not 100% perfect. First thinking of buying the iPad at the very first possible moment, I started thinking about it is as of a purely Web tablet. Thus no need for local storage (especially not for the overpriced 64GB of flash). My iPad content will be in the Cloud. Or on my laptop. This is the second point. The iPad will never replace my laptop. It is designed to be a slave accessory. Synced via iTunes to the master. It has no I/O ports, so I will not be using it to collect my digital pictures directly from a camera either. So to carry the iPad with me on the road I would need to carry BOTH my notebook and the iPad, which would be an utterly stupid setup (I try travel li...