Headworx

Entrepreneurship, in one form or another, has been my bloodstream almost forever. It is a way of life. Fueled by desire to create, and not really by the need to earn money. Really, spawning lasting creations that are meaningful to other people, is my ultimate goal and reward. Yesterday. Yesterday I was repairing my mother's car finding the battery was completely dead. I took my son to a local automotive parts shop to buy a new one. The shop has been there as long as I remember, with the helpful owner always at the desk. We paid and he printed the invoice. He is still using the point of sale software I wrote 20 years ago. He has been running his entire business for 20 years using the software I created with my own hands back in 1993. And he is still one of tens of thousands using this software. Just try naming any software (an "app" as we call them...) today that will be meaningful and used on a daily basis in 2033. With all due respect I do not see a candidate. I pr...

In July 2011 we started as a software company. But being in the area called today the Internet of Things, we've been increasingly more and more involved in hardware. Initially doing only reference designs and prototypes, now we are becoming a regular hardware vendor: in 2014 we plan to roll out several hardware devices. Hardware is difficult. As Ben Kaufman (Quirky) says: "The thing standing in your way is not money, it’s the whole process". I can only confirm this experience. In 2013 we've worked with several engineering companies helping us with hardware design and the manufacturing process but all cases the process has been painful, expensive, and ineffective. I've been in software business for 25 years and I've been observing the evolution of tools and methodologies. It's been the fastest evolution I've witnessed. The frameworks for software design, implementation, testing, deployment are simply incredible today. And so are the processes and ...

As a customer, I've never fully appreciated the industrial design. I mean personally, as a buyer, not as a seller. The soul of an engineer inside me has always wanted function first and foremost. Leaving the form irrelevant. Fortunately Adam, my co-founder, is exactly at the opposite end of the scale. To the extent he finds it difficult to fully embrace our current F&Home system, just because it is ugly. Well, may be not that ugly but not very attractive looking physical form. So I have hard time pushing him the "eat our own dog food" mantra, especially when I see his wry face looking at what we have on the table today. I say fortunately, because I do understand the industrial design matters a lot. We have fantastic team of design / partners working with us on the next generation design. It is hard to imagine a better company for the task. But I have to admit, I was a bit surprised last week, during a joint workshop, when I learned a flat, table-top form factor w...

Just as we've decided our users would never need the reset button , our competition comes with an alternative approach - they think reboot is used very often and put it on a remote control (see the photo). Intel calculates a family of four will move from having 10 connected devices in 2012 to 25 in 2017 to 50 in 2022 ( link ). I wonder what a family of four will use as a provisioning and management platform for 50 connected devices. Or will they employ a full time sysadmin? Two years ago I predicted autonomous planes would be put to service by courier companies before self driving cars hit the road. I meant UPS, FedEx, DHL. Certainly I underestimated Amazon who has just announced the Prime Air service . Anyone thinking WiFi is the right choice for Home Automation must be nuts. Last week I've spent three days trying to set up a set of Belkin WeMo sensor + wall plug. No success. I tried four different access points, iOS, Android. They just don't connect to any of my ...

I'm fresh from a short Winter break - a quick jump to the alpine slopes for a snowboarding session. There and back more than 2000 kilometers on the road in my friend's new Subaru Forester. The all-new Forester is IMHO the most perfect machine on wheels, especially the DIT turbo engine coupled with the CVT gear-less gearbox is a wonderful combination. It is the first auto transmission I've driven, which has virtually with no lag. And in the center of this wonderful package sits the all-new Harman Kardon multimedia console, which is - simply speaking - awful. The Forester is MY2013 and so is the console. But the GUI on it looks like an old 2003 passive-matrix no name phone. Poor resolution (in the retina days this one seems to be 240x160) and completely crappy graphics with no particular navigation logic. A button here and a button there, having nothing in common with today's standard set by the leading phone/tablet operating systems. And I'm not even touching thi...

I have never expected another significant dose of grist to my mill when I've recently learned about the ULE Alliance standing behind the new ULE (Ultra-Low Energy) home automation standard. Why do we need yet another standard is not clear for me, but the ULE Alliance Members certainly have a different opinion. May be they thought they were too big to join other alliances and have formed their own? There are technical reasons ULE may succeed. The #1 is the dedicated radio band. "The band is just of us, nobody will interfere" claim the Promoters and Contributors. "With ULE we have the range to cover an entire house without repeaters" say the engineers, which for sure is a benefit. Meshing and hopping networks are the nightmare of smart home implementations (they fail too often and they respond too slow). But reading the Technical Specification document I see almost nothing about the application layer standard . Meaning there are no such things as ULE Light...

The World has jumped on the IoT bandwagon. Everybody is on board: the big guys like Cisco and IBM, many small ones and most of the startups. Everybody is demonstrating the IoT tools, scenarios, applications. IoT is easy and flashy to demonstrate. But in the long run it is extremely difficult to reliably deliver on promise. Things and networks are breaking down on regular basis. Part of the reason is in the IoT each sensor / actuator node is optimized for cost (because ultimately there are millions or even billions of them). IoT is not like the big iron Internet backbone, where components are top grade and everything is redundant. Many IoT systems are exposed (by design) to harsh and changing environment. Take a parking sensor, embedded in tarmac. Cars are running over it. In Summer the Sun boils it, in Winter it is covered with snow and ice. It transmits data over already crowded, full of interference, radio band. The nodes in IoT networks are failing relatively often. Or stati...