It was such an exciting week at Demo that it is hard to summarize. There are many reviews of the conference on the web and you can find some of them at Kaboodle (one of the companies that debuted at Demo). There were sixty-eight companies showing off their latest and greatest — the Demo site has the full list with links to the companies, so if you want to know what is hot take a look here and click the + sign next to Demo 2006 at the top right of the page.
The product least expected but perhaps most enjoyed by the 700+ attendees was the MooBella virtual ice cream vending machine. After attendees made touch-panel choices from up to 96 combinations of flavors and mix-ins, the machine mixed and instantly froze fresh ingredients to produce a delicious scoop of ice cream within 45 seconds. The only drawback I could see was that there was no chocolate. Apparently, that flavor (favorite of 20% of the market) poses special challenges due to the viscosity of cocoa powder.
There were a number of themes that emerged at DEMO. Collaboration was one. Chris Shipley said that 2006 will be the year of collaboration. Demos included virtual meeting platforms, tools that in effect allow people to act as librarians and share their findings with others, and tools for collaborative software development. Another theme was vertical search. Google and Yahoo! are great but highly specialized searches offer much better results. Examples shown included shopping, entertainment, software code, healthcare, and politics.
Mobile applications are still somewhat limited by tiny screens but innovative new ideas were shown that make cell phones more useful than ever. One company showed a phone being used as a personal trainer during exercise. It kept track of your pace and location and plotted results on the screen. Another small device was shown that allows complete control over the phone, music, and every aspect of things going on in the house.
Security solutions were shown to protect our identity, protect our networks, stop spam and viruses at the door, and diagnose Internet traffic and catch malware before it gets to our systems. Biometric technologies were shown to allow secure payment and authentication. I look forward to some of these technologies being used in healthcare.
Through two FutureScan panels I attempted to help the audience see the future of security and computational biology. On the security panel we discussed the general state of Internet security (not healthy) but more importantly some of the research that may lead to a healthier net. To me the most promising thing is PKI. I have written much about this here. The computational biology panel was mind-blowing for most of us. Systems biology models, redesigning proteins, and learning about our genetic history will affect all of our lives. There was a great deal of interest in The Genographic Project. (A dozen DNA kits were given to the audience — you can get your own here). If you are interested in learning more about the human genome, the panelists recommended Genome by Matt Ridley. I am reading it now. We were all extremely fortunate to have had some of the world’s leading experts share their thoughts on the panels. You can find links to all the panelists here.
The most asked question between Demo attendees at breaks and meals is "See anything interesting?". Chris Shipley, Executive Producer of the DEMO Conferences, introduced sixty-eight companies — there was definitely something for everybody. I was not able to visit all the companies or hear all of their pitches, but at the end of this story I will mention eleven companies that I found most interesting — "My Top Ten Picks"
Posted by John Patrick on Jan 28, 2006 in
Internet Technology,
Mobile,
WiFi 
Two important developments in the first month of the year are enabling the web to move a few steps closer to ubiquity. Most mobile phones do not have a web browser — or if they do have one it likely does not work very well. Generally, the mobile browsing speed has been slow and the displays hard to read because the pages were designed for a PC browser. Those shortcomings have changed dramatically with the introduction of Opera Mini.
The Oslo, Norway based Opera Software has announced the worldwide release of Opera Mini, a full Web browser that runs on almost every mobile phone, including low-end handsets — in other words you don’t need a $500 "Personal Digital Assistant" to get a great browser. This is quite a breakthrough. Trials of Opera Mini in the Nordics and in Germany during the fall of 2005 resulted in a user base of more than one million people. You can get more information and download instructions at the Opera Mini site. For most users, it is as simple as downloading a new ringtone.
Opera Mini was designed with mobile users in mind. "Mini" compresses Web pages by up to 80% and reformats them using an Opera developed technology called Small-Screen Rendering. SSR makes web pages fast loading and easy to read. It can also save money if you are paying your carrier for data "by the byte". On the Mini homepage you will see the familiar Google search box. Mini also has a customizable bookmark list to make it easy to save and surf your favorite sites. If your mobile phone supports EV-DO or WiFi you will find that surfing the web on a handheld device is a very nice experience. Opera Mini is available in English, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Finnish. Get the full story at opera.com.
Speaking of WiFi, wireless access points — known as hotspots — are continuing to flourish — as predicted here for a number of years. The number of worldwide hotspots listed in JiWire‘s online directory has now surpassed 100,000. The growth since a year ago was 87 percent — from 53,779 hotspots in 93 countries, to 100,335 locations in 115 countries. In spite of the early start, America has only about a third of the hotspots. The top cities are Seoul, Tokyo, London, and Paris. The good news is the growing availability. In spite of lobbying by telecommunications companies to prevent cities from offering free WiFi, and despite predictions that WiFi could not "scale", the growth continues. With the introduction of the new Opera Mini browser, continued price-performance of mobile phones, and the spread of WiFi, we are getting close to the vision of a fast, always-on, everywhere, natural, easy, intelligent, and trusted Internet.
Other patrickWeb stories about WiFi
Other patrickWeb stories about Internet Technology
Today’s Wall Street Journal story, "Web Phones Go Unplugged", summed it up pretty well. There is a convergence taking place between cell phones and Internet phones. Utopia has not quite arrived but at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month there was a slew of new announcements surrounding Vonage, Skype, and various new handsets. The "ideal" phone is very close.
Imagine that your "cell phone" is on your belt or in your pocket. You are at home. When you make a call, the connection goes through your DSL or Cable Modem over the Internet and through one of the VoIP providers such as Vonage. When the phone "rings", you will hear a voice saying who is calling and if you look at the phone you will see a picture of the person and the person will have a unique "ring" associated with them so you can tell just from the ring. When you get in the car with your Bluetooth headset on, you will be using the same phone that you were using in the house except that phone calls will use the cellular network. When you arrive at the airport, the phone will pick up the free WiFi service being offered and you will once again be able to use Vonage or Skype for unlimited long distance calling.
Some would argue that the environment I have described is already here. There are in fact quite a few products and services available. However, there are a few wrinkles. A seamless 911 system is not quite there. There are still some places you might be that have no reliable signal of any kind. A power failure at home can cut you off from communications if you don’t have a good cellular signal or if your phone is dependent on a base station. Some telecommunications providers and airport operators are attempting to block free WiFi services. Finally, some of the devices have so many features that they are hard to adapt to for many people. In spite of the wrinkles, we are getting very close to the point where the Internet is pervasive in our lives for all forms of communications and interactions. I am sure we will see and hear much more about all this at the upcoming DEMO conference.
Other patrickWeb stories about Long Distance
Posted by John Patrick on Dec 15, 2004 in
Gadgets,
Mobile,
Motorcycles,
Music,
Personal Computing 
It was not exactly a sunny and warm day but, as long as the roads are dry, I like to go out for a motorcycle ride on Sunday afternoons. Winter riding is actually very nice and refreshing — as long as you have the electric vest and gloves plugged in. They really did the job today when the wind chill was in was single digit territory. Today’s ride was on the trike through lower Westchester County, New York and was especially enjoyable because I listened to some great music from the Harley-Davidson MP3 player. The music came from iTunes, hence the term "iTrike Riding". First I will review the motorcycling and digital technology involved and then discuss some of the issues and implications.
The trike started out as a Harley-Davidson Ultra Classic Electra Glide (model FLHTCUI for Harley afficianados) and was then converted to a trike by the nice folks at Baer Sport Center in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. I have been buying bikes from the Baers for quite a few years and I trust them completely. You definitely want somebody you trust to tear a brand new bike apart and convert it into a different vehicle. The conversion kits are made by Lehman Trikes, Inc., a Canadian company. They matched the H-D two tone paint scheme perfectly and the trike looks like it was made to be that way from the factory. Here are a few photos. Riding a trike is quite different from riding a regular motorcycle. It is actually more like driving it than riding it. You have to forcefully turn the handlebars in order to turn — as opposed to a very modest turning of the handlebars and leaning as on a two-wheeler. Turning on a motorcycle is actually a deep topic. If you are traveling at high speed and press on the inside of the left handlebar grip, the wheels turn to the right, as you turn to the left! Seems to defy common sense but it is actually true and the phenomenon is caused by precession. Like with a gyroscope, when you try to turn a rotating object (the front wheel), you produce a force at 90 degrees to the direction of rotation. If you are interested in this, take a look at the writeup in the Wikipedia.
The Harley-Davidson MP3 player is quite well designed. It has just four buttons: power/play/pause, repeat one/repeat all/random/normal, skip/search forward, and skip/search backwards. This is good for safety because it enables you to easily make a musical change without having to become distracted from riding the bike (or trike). The LCD shows the status and track number being played but there is really no reason to look at it while riding. The player came with a 64MB Secure Digital Card (SD card) which will hold roughly an hour of CD stereo MP3 music encoded at 128,000 bits per second. Fortunately, the cost of the SD cards has dropped significantly. I got a one gigabyte card from memorysuppliers.com for $99. The one gig card holds more than six hours of music — 356 tracks currently. I enjoy the random feature so there is a constant change of genre: opera, jazz, blues, rock, sacred, symphonic, baroque, country, etc.
Getting the music from the ThinkPad to the SD card was not as easy as it could have been. Most of my music tracks are mp3 and I created them by ripping CD’s that I had purchased over the years. The library contains roughly 5,000 tracks. The SD card for the Harley MP3 player will hold roughly 350 tracks. Which ones to pick? Enter iTunes. iTunes is remarkably simple music software. You can play the entire library in sequence or in shuffle mode (random). You can play randomly by album or randomly across the entire collection — the latter is my favorite option because it results in a constant variety of selections. iTunes also makes it very simple to create playlists. Some of the playlists are basic, like most recently played or those played most often. By using "smartlists", you can easily create much more sophisticated playlists. A smarlist might include randomly selected songs from your library that you have rated more than two stars out of five, have not been played for more than thirty days, are longer than 2 minutes and less than 7 minutes, exclude songs by Bon Jovi, and have an aggregate size for all songs in the smartlist less than one gigabyte. You could name the smartlist "Harley music". There is no limit to how many playlists and smartlists you can have. The lists are stored in an xml file along with information about each track of music in the library. Everything is organized and tagged. The track information includes artist, album, track number, track name, length, when last played, the rating you have given it, etc. and the playlist information includes a list of the track numbers from the library that are to be included. Brilliantly simple. Now how do I get the actual tracks of music associated with the Harley playlist onto the SD card? iTunes is designed to work with an iPod or iPod mini. It not only works, it is automatic. The playlists of your choice (and that will fit) are always kept up to date on you iPod. If you make some changes to your playlist, the next time you connect your iPod to your PC, those changes are made in the iPod. But for the Harley MP3 player, or any other player except an iPod, iTunes will not export the music. Enter Anapod from Red Chair Software. I knew there had to be a solution somewhere and I found it on ipodlounge.com. Anapod Explorer, "made by music lovers for music lovers" integrates your iPod into Windows using Explorer folders, right-click menus, and drag and drop. One right click and "copy to computer", and the music tracks were all transferred to the SD Card. Slip the card into the MP3 player and off I went for an iTrike ride with Mozart.
Aside from the proprietary/closed design of iTunes, the power and simplicity of it are awesome. Apple really does make music playing simple. What I find profound about iTunes and the iPod is the "My Rating" feature. It is time for a trip somewhere so you pack up your ThinkPad and iPod into the briefcase. You settle into your seat in the airplane, put on your noise-canceling headphones (I use Radio Shack Noise-Canceling Foldable Stereo Headphones Catalog #: 33-1218), and begin listening to one or more playlists that you have brought from iTunes. If you encounter a song that you don’t like, you press the center button of the iPod and five stars appear. You move your finger over the surface of the iPod to light up the number of stars you want to assign — this is "My Rating". When you return home or to a hotel, you place your iPod in the docking station. It automatically starts iTunes. If one of the parameters you have set for your playlist is "My Rating is not *", all of the songs on the iPod that you rated as a one-star are replaced with new songs from your library. Every time you go through this process, your playlist gets better. Says who? Says you. For years technologies have been available to make book or music suggestions to you based on sophisticated algorithms. "If you liked this song, then you will probably like the following songs". iTunes has taken this concept to a new level. The algorithm requires no higher math. It is you pushing a button. You in effect interject yourself into the media. No one knows better than you what you like or don’t like.
Finally, there is the issue of copying music. I copied mp3 music tracks from the iPod mini to the Harley-Davidson MP3 music player. Is that stealing? I don’t think so. I purchased the original CDs, ripped them into MP3 files which I play through a digital audio system in my home using iTunes. If I am on an airplane or train, I play them on the iPod mini, or if on the trike, play them on the H-D MP3 player. I consider this "fair use". I purchased the music, royalties were paid to the appropriate parties, and the music is used strictly for my own enjoyment (or for guests). I have heard speeches from music industry executives saying that it is not legal for me to do what I am doing. They want to grant permission, "protect" their music, charge extra fees for extra use. Ultimately, the resolution will be determined in court. Meanwhile, I have not bought a CD for years but I do buy music from the iTunes Music Store. So do many others. Apple Computer reported in July that iTunes had delivered 100 million downloads. Consumers pay Apple 99 cents per track. They buy only the tracks they like, unlike a CD where they have to pay $15+ to get a song they like plus a bunch of songs they don’t like. With iTunes you listen to 30 seconds of a song and if you like it, you click and pay for it with PayPal. If you don’t like it, you move on. The issue isn’t about "stealing". People are showing they are willing to pay for music and now there is finally a way to do so in an attractive way. Too bad for the music industry that it wasn’t one of them that figured this out.
Epilogue: The music I have purchased at the iTunes Music Store is not in MP3 format. Apple uses a format called AAC. It is very good quality but can only be played on the iPod. My smarlist for the Harley MP3 player excludes any music I have purchased from Apple. So much for power to the people.
Hobbies page
Motorcycles homepage
Motorcycle inventory
Motorcycle log
Motorcycle pictures in the photo gallery
Motorcycle riding: how it got started
Motorcycling in the Winter
The Art of the Motorcycle: Guggenheim Trip
Riding the iTrike
Posted by John Patrick on Nov 7, 2004 in
Mobile The Sony Ericsson P910a is a joy so far.
The 910a is a mobile phone and also a personal digital assistant (PDA). I actually think of it as my mobile office. It not only can receive email, it automatically checks for new email on whatever schedule you specify. It is "push email" ready. That is a fancy term that means it can use the BlackBerry service. In other words, it can be a BlackBerry without you having a BlackBerry. Nothing wrong with the BlackBerry — they are great — but I have always preferred more computer-like devices. The feature of the P910a I find most innovative is the "flip" lid. On the outside it has the normal keys you would expect on a mobile phone. Flip it down, and it has a full QWERTY keyboard on the reverse side. As you would expect it has a digital and video VGA camera. The 320×208 color screen is dazzling with a sharp and bright 262K colors. All in all, Sony Ericsson has done a really good job of integrating the best of everything.
The list of features is long:
Picture editor,
Sound recorder,
Picture gallery,
Picture Phonebook,
Picture wallpaper,
Backlit display,
email,
SMS long (Text Messaging),
MMS (Multimedia Messaging),
Video streaming (for watching the news),
Handwriting recognition,
Predictive text input,
MP3 Audio,
MPEG4 Video,
Java™,
Bluetooth™ wireless technology, Infrared port,
GPRS for
High Speed Data,
USB support,
Vibrating Alert,
Touchscreen, the innovative
Jog Dial,
Voice control,
Calculator, Contacts,
Calendar,
Tasks,
Speaker phone,
and Alarm clock just to name a few. And of course it has great web surfing with the Opera browser. The Opera browser is really what drove me to the P900 and now the P910a. I was not enthusiastic about using the web with a mobile phone for quite a few years, primarily because the browsers that mobile operators provided were really crude, to put it mildly. The Opera mobile browser is an Internet standards-based browser. You have to try it to believe it (on the desktop too).
The Memory Stick Duo™ allows you to store pictures, movies, music, and files of any type. You can use the P910a to create and review spreadsheets, read pdf files, and of course store email and web pages. Having a good-sized storage medium makes all of this very practical. The unit comes with 32 megabytes but you can add much more at attractive prices. I got a half-gigabyte memory stick from
memorysuppliers.com They had a very good price and a good web site.
The most important factor of all about the P910a was the availability of the 850MHz GSM Network — in addition to
GSM 1800 and
GSM 1900. The P900 had 900/1800/1900, which is great in Europe but very poor in the U.S. I have seen a huge improvement in signal strength since switching to the 910a. The really neat thing about GSM phones is that you can change without even talking to the operator. In my case, this is a big plus because AT&T Wireless is very hard to reach and once you connect with them they often do not know too much about anything technical. With a GSM phone, you just take the SIM card out of the old phone, put it in the new phone, and you are finished. Turn it on and it works.
Posted by John Patrick on Sep 22, 2004 in
Mobile The Opera browser has become even more popular since all the bad press about how insecure Internet Explorer is. If the Opera desktop browser is red hot, the Opera Mobile browser is white hot. Earlier this week, Opera Software announced its one millionth download of Opera Mobile from www.opera.com. This is in addition to the many more copies that have been downloaded from business partner and other download sites around the world. Opera is revolutionizing the Web browsing experience on mobile phones. I have to admit that prior to using Opera I was not a fan of surfing the web on the Handspring Treo 600 . After getting the Sony Ericsson P900, which comes with Opera pre-loaded, my attitude changed completely. I showed the browser to a number of people at DemoMobile, and to a person, they were quite impressed.
The reasons the Opera browser makes such a big difference are twofold. One is that it supports Internet standards including CSS. The other is SSR (Small-Screen Rendering), the technology that displays Web pages in a way that is entirely customized to best suit a handheld device’s screen size and resolution. The Opera browser is very popular in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Recent deals made with Motorola and Qualcomm and the announcement by Opera that it is porting to the Microsoft smartphone platform will make Opera much more available in North America.
Other
patrickWeb stories about Opera
Posted by John Patrick on Sep 12, 2004 in
Conferences,
Mobile 
DemoMobile 2004 brought a laser focus to the area of mobile computing this week in La Jolla (near San Diego and pronounced La Hoya, in case you are not familiar with it) . As I mentioned in DemoMobile – part 1, there have been skeptics over the years about mobile computing. Some have wondered whether the wireless Web is for real while others wondered if the operators would get their act together and offer some valuable services beyond voice. DemoMoblie brought together nearly forty products and services poised to have a positive impact in the mobile arena in the year to come. The demonstrators were supplemented by speakers and panelists from numerous companies who shared their point of view. There were signs of the vision coming true.
Pete Kelly from Opera Software showed everybody he could how the Opera browser offered dazzling performance and fidelity on the Sony Ericsson P900. Verizon, Vodaphone, Sprint and SK (Korea) talked about their plans to roll out advanced high speed networks to support mobile devices of all kinds. Our Pictures, Inc. showed solutions to send pictures from a cell phone to your mom’s TV set — literally. Mirra demonstrated a home server that automatically backsup, synchronizes, and versions all the PC’s in your home LAN. Aliph showed Jawbone, a headset that enables you to have a clear conversation from your mobile phone even if you are driving a car with the window down or standing next to somebody ten feet away who is using a weed whacker. Handmark showed a suite of applications that keeps your mobile phone up to date with news, weather, sports, stocks, and movie reviews. Yahoo, AOL, American Greetings, and Nokia Ventures discussed plans to make their content offerings relevant for mobile users. And on and on. It was a very exciting couple of days with technology executives, venture investors, journalists and analysts who had converged to preview, review, and discuss the many new ideas. As usual, the best part of the conference was the opportunity to network with many old and new friends.
Chris Shipley, executive producer for DemoMobile, kicked off the conference with a keynote talk about her view of where things are and where they are headed. This was followed by a number of talks, panels, and of course demos.
I enjoyed moderating two of the panels. There were a lot of comments from panelists about how important the operators/carriers are — at times I got the feeling it was the operators/carriers who are the customer of the mobile industry. The question I wish I had asked the final panel was about who the real customer is and what they want. If you believe that eventually you and I and our friends, family and colleagues around the world will prevail and get what we want then it is clear as a bell to me what that will be. We (the real customers) want all the content and applications to be accessible in any standards-compliant browser, for standards-compliant browsers to work on any phone, and for any phone to work with any network operator. This is what open Internet standards are all about. The glass is half full, not half empty. The grass roots will prevail in the end.
The DemoMobile weblog has a lot of comments from DemoMobile attendees. You may also want to visit Conferenza.com where veteran writer extraordinaire Shel Israel made a full report. If you drop Shel a note I suspect he would be willing to send you a copy.
Other
patrickWeb mobile-related stories
DemoMobile 2004 – part 1
Posted by John Patrick on Jun 30, 2004 in
Mobile 
My primary mobile phone for quite some time has been the Handspring Treo 600 with Sprint PCS as the service provider (operator). The Treo is a really terrific device with many great features. There are just two problems. First, Sprint PCS does not support GSM (the protocol used in most of the world) and since I travel quite a bit outside of America, I have had to travel often carrying two mobile phones. The second phone (a Motorola service has been provided by T-Mobile (owned by Deutsche Telecom), a major provider of GSM in America (and many other parts of the world). I have had T-Mobile service for a long time but, unfortunately, their coverage in the part of New England where I live is very poor. Having to manage two mobile phone accounts and two mobile phone numbers has been a pain for quite some time.
The second problem with the Sprint/Treo combination has been that the TREO, which operates on the Palm platform, does not support the Opera browser. Since I am an enthusiastic user and supporter of Opera (and member of the board of Opera Software ASA), I have been looking for a mobile phone and mobile operator with which I can use Opera. Needless to say, my colleagues at Opera Software were very sympathetic toward this objective and during my visit to Oslo, Norway for a board meeting in June, I acquired a Sony Ericsson P900. The P900 is quite an extraordinary device. In many ways it is similar to the Treo, but in other ways it is superior. The P900 uses the Symbian operating system. It is not Palm nor Windows, but it has some amazing features. (read more)
