Headworx

I have recently found this interview with Tony Fadell . Very interesting to watch and learn how great tech stories such as the iPod, the iPhone and the Next started back in the past. The video is more than an hour but I highly recommend watching it. One quote I memorized (citing from memory now) has been this: anything world changing takes a decade; anything less may be a good business but does not change the world... Indeed. But a decade is typically much more than an average investor can bear. That is probably why it is so hard for startups to be in a world changing game. They can never sell such a long story (especially if it is a world changing story, so inherently hard to believe) to investors. On the other hand it is rather foolish if investors expect a world changing results (not just a "good business" in shorter period of time). Wonder what world changing startups is Tony now investing in....?

Satellite connectivity has always been exciting because of the whole globe coverage. But it was bulky and expensive. DeLorme (now part of Garmin) revolutionized this category now for the second time. The first time was in  2014 when they introduced the inReach and flexible two-way messaging plans that could be suspended when not used. That dealt with the "expensive" part. Typically it is a couple of weeks in a year when outdoor travelers need satellite communications. And the plan suspension does exactly that - you pay when you need the service. I have been a subscriber ever since. The second part - the "bulky" remained some sort of a problem. The inReach was not that bulky, but it was adding its almost 250 grams to the backpack. But with the launch of the inReach Mini the bulky part has completely gone. It is now 100 grams and barely bigger than a smartwatch. Garmin also paves the way of using Bluetooth to network devices around a person wearing them. The...

There was this old story in 2007 on a hackers running an FM transmitter that was injecting spoofed RDS-TMC messages fooling GPS navigation systems. Fast forward to 2018 and we have a similar device that injects spoofed satellite signals . Both attacks have roots in the lack of an authentication scheme in GPS. Authentication is often thought of as a less important security feature than encryption. And actually it is otherwise. This is probably because in analog (protein /  human) systems authentication is always implicit. When a person we know calls us, we not only look at the incoming call number. We recognize the voice and other contextual information around that call. Such as was she supposed to call me, was the subject of the conversation known / expected etc. Simple machines do not do such implicit secondary authentication checks. They rely on explicit authentication checks. And if the checks are not present,  the recipient probably has to blindly trust the message. W...

Reading various projects and proposals it still strikes me how wireless architects apply wired design paradigms. That of course leads to sub-par performance. One could say it is like attaching wings to locomotives and hoping they would fly. Wireless, and especially low power wireless, is different. Wireless is inherently lossy. There are a number of reasons to that. In wireless there is interference. The wireless medium is shared, and unlike wired (that is isolated), wireless messages transmitted concurrently on the same frequency collide. And there are many ways to deal with this: implement a multiple access scheme (TDMA, CDMA, CSMA to name the most common) or accepting the fact there will be collisions and designing for that. Multiple access schemes are expensive in many ways, including power (you need clocks or complex heavy math or run a receiver before transmitting). A system that does not implement any multiple access may be equally, or even more effective. But the design m...

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 ...