Archive for June, 2006
Drones to keep peace in Los Angeles
In Los Angeles, a test of 5 pounds-heavy unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV aka drones) is under process. Equipped with a GPS & a camere, they can fly at speeds up to 30 miles (48 kilometers) per hour for 70 minutes and cost between 25,000 and 30,000 dollars. AFP summarizes that :
Police say the drone, called the SkySeer, will be able to accomplish tasks too dangerous for officers and free up helicopters for other missions. “This technology could be used to find missing children, search for lost hikers, or survey a fire zone,” said Commander Sid Heal, head of the Technology Exploration Project of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. “The ideal outcome for us is when this technology becomes instrumental in saving lives.”
The SkySeer would also be a helpful tool to nab burglary suspects on rooftops and to chase down suspects fleeing on foot. The plane collapses and can fit into a shoulder pack smaller than a golf bag. Its portability and ease of assembly could be a big advantage for law enforcement. “It’s basically a high-tech kite that field officers could set up in a matter of minutes,” said Heal.
Read the charateristics of the product and the press kit from skyseer’s website, it’s impressive! I’m curious about which RF technology it’s using for being radio-commanded.
Building a start-up in 16 steps
Check this great article by Om Malik & Micheal V. Copeland explaining every step you need to create a greeat start-up ! It’s definitely a must-read for an entrepreneur … I guess I would have maybe changed a few things if I had to do it again ! It is focused on web 2.0 start-ups but I guess it also applies to regular start-ups 
Phase One Establish a Company :
Step 1. Stress-Test Your Big Idea
Step 2. Build Your Founding Team
Step 3. Draft a Business Plan
Step 4. Play the Name Game
Step 5. Incorporate Thyself
Phase Two Prototype the Product : $$$ Required: $100K to $500K
Step 1. Stake Out Intellectual Property
Step 2. Create an Advisory Board
Step 3. Build Your Prototype
Phase Three Develop the Beta Product : $$$ Required: $500K to $1M
Step 1. Start Staffing Up
Step 2. Assemble Your Back Office
Step 3. Launch Your Beta Test
Step 4. Revisit the Business Plan
Phase Four Launch the Product : $$$ Required: $1M to $3M
Step 1. Build a New Board of Directors
Step 2. Develop the Sales and Marketing Plan
Step 3. Open an Office
Step 4. Hit the Market
Tricastmedia videos
Check out those demo videos made by Tricastmedia to demonstrate their high level mobile development tools. I showed a few screenshots earlier, but the video is even nicer. Too bad though that it looks so square… you always need a good designer to have technology look even better ! Or maybe it’s simply a limitation of their rendering engine …
It looks like they have done a great job around text-input anyway, I guess they re-coded everything in order to enable the user to remain inside their UI and avoid the OS bad-looking input boxes.
Anyway I’d love to see the code of this demo !
Technorati Tags: mobile, tricastmedia, omega, ui
BBQ with some French start-ups
I was last thursday at the annual Telecom Paris barbecue that gathers all the former & new entrepreneurs around a very nice and casual barbecue. This year was great, great organization (thanks Stéphanie), great people and great projects (NetVibes, Aptiwan, DDM, Tiki, ClicPostal, Presensia) !
I took a few pictures :
Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, start-up, Telecom, paris
Linux : a trendy OS for mobile
I just read on Wireless Watch Japan that :
Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics, and Vodafone have just announced their intent to establish the world’s first global, open Linux-based software platform for mobile devices. A world-class Linux-based platform aims to provide key benefits for the mobile industry including lower development costs, increased flexibility, and a richer mobile ecosystem - all of which contribute to the group’s ultimate objective of creating compelling, differentiated and enhanced consumer experiences.
So i had to go a bit deeper and found an excellent paper on linuxdevices.com where we can see that definetly Linux is going up !
Adoption trend in mobile market is impressive : analyst firm Venture Development Corporation (VDC) reports that in 2005, Linux-based OS software garnered 25 percent of new 32- and 64-bit design wins, with 29 percent of developers planning to use Linux in their next project. Gartner reports that in the fast growing smartphone segment (85 percent/year), Linux started out 2005 in good stead at 13.7 percent, and by Q2 enjoyed an even stronger 25 percent share — far ahead of Windows Mobile, Palm OS, or RIM (but behind Symbian OS).
Meanwhile it is striking that in the embedded world Linux is already leading the game with over 25% Market Share.
Despite the overall upsurge in Linux adoption in intelligent devices, important barriers remain, especially in key vertical markets and applications. In the mobile/wireless space, companies like Motorola, NEC, and Panasonic have leveraged their considerable domain expertise and demonstrated the viability of building high-end phones with Linux and other FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) components. However, these manufacturers as well as other companies just entering the space require a more optimized mobile platform and a more streamlined development process for using Linux in mobile handsets. They also want to deploy Linux on mid-tier and low-end devices that lack dedicated GPRS or EVDO interfaces and other expensive support chips.
Keep an eye on the pinguin, as it’s deeply moving the ecosystem and the value chain !
Technorati Tags: mobile, symbian, japan, linux, os, embedded, market, analysis
RFID is top priority for Hitachi
Reuters just published that :
Hitachi Ltd., Japan’s largest electronics conglomerate, said on Wednesday it plans to launch full-scale wireless tag operations, targeting a 16 percent share of the $3.5 billion domestic market in the next four years. Hitachi, which first developed an IC tag in 2001, has forecast 9.7 trillion yen in consolidated sales in the year to March 2007.
RFID is really in the way of becoming massive ! I remember a study from ABI research saying there will be 100 billion RFID sensors by 2010 !
Check Hitachi’s vision of ubiquitous system communication, it really is foresight !
Technorati Tags: rfid, hitachi, ubiquitous, analysts, sensor
RFID is top priority for Hitachi
Reuters just published that :
Hitachi Ltd., Japan’s largest electronics conglomerate, said on Wednesday it plans to launch full-scale wireless tag operations, targeting a 16 percent share of the $3.5 billion domestic market in the next four years. Hitachi, which first developed an IC tag in 2001, has forecast 9.7 trillion yen in consolidated sales in the year to March 2007.
RFID is really in the way of becoming massive ! I remember a study from ABI research saying there will be 100 billion RFID sensors by 2010 !
Check Hitachi’s vision of ubiquitous system communication, it really is foresight !
Technorati Tags: rfid, hitachi, ubiquitous, analysts, sensor
Mobifindit beta 1
Mobease has just released Mobifindit beta 1 for Symbian phones. It’s a nice tool that’s indexing your smartphone’s content (contacts, SMS/MMS, MP3, apps…) and enable you to access them by just dialing, for instance “66245825″ for “mobiluck”. As you type the digits the search will narrow until it converges towards the targeted content.
There is one key point for me, with over 700 active contacts stored in my N90 (been working a lot lately…) the basic contact manager from Nokia just cannot keep with that and findng a phone number in the database has just been extra-painfull lately !
Hope they will imporove in beta 2 support for N90 (screen resolution is different from regular Symbian handsets, so it’s always a hassle to have compliant apps on this one …)
You can download the beta 1 for free on mobease website.
Technorati Tags: mobile, symbian, mobease, mobifindit, google, desktop, search
Everypoint’s Yahoo! FiFa MatchCAST
I tried the Everypoint application and was kind of disappointed… Firstly, the UI looks bad. This isn’t rich media, on my Nokia N90 transitions are slow, it’s all right angles, monochromatic… Compared to Orange’s application based on BlueStreak Technology it just looks like it’s been made using a technology of the previous century!
Very few information is available in the application, no video, no interactive content…. no point !
I’m highly disappointed from Yahoo!, I expected a better commitment for something as awaited as FiFa world cup (although btw I don’t like professionnal soccer….).
I had a look on Everypoint’s technology and their so-called “Innovations” :
For Consumers :
- Better than real time – Instantaneous Information
A revolutionary patent-pending push technology ensuring Everypoint’s dynamic mobile applications are always fresh and up-to-date. < == doesn't work on me... I guess it's Java push deined in Midp2, it requires "Allways on data connection", not available in France...
- Exceptional Graphics
A proprietary graphics rendering engine that enables the development of applications with graphics capabilities unparalleled in the industry. < == hahaha ! Maybe with a designer....
- Delivered Efficiently
Our push technology does more then deliver information instantaneously, it does so at a fraction of the cost. We minimize the data moving across the network by only transmitting changes, allowing users to enjoy robust applications that transmit far less data then a single WAP session. < == First start up took like 30secs of data downloading ...
For Our Content Partners:
- Less Data
Less data means more usage by consumers < == not sure, consumers never know how much data they're using
- Updates on the fly
Add features to already published applications < == Cool
- Single jar file for all phones
One jar file, easy deployment for the majority of MIDP 2.0 phones < == making a delivery platforms isn't that hard, come on!
- Faster Development Cycles
The company’s proprietary application platform that enables the rapid development of highly advanced Java applications that are extraordinarily easy to use. < == Ok, not convinced, try again ?
So Mr EveryPoint if you feel like proving me I’m wrong (remember I dropped you an email 2 weeks ago on that regards), please feel free! I’d be glad to say that Yahoo! just didn’t take the best out of your software !
Update : Mutant’s musing Blog thinks the same….
Connecting machines
Connecting things together means providing a common language for at least two machines to let them exchange data. This looks pretty simple… but there is actually a real standard war out there!
First of all regarding the communication RF (RadioFrequence) standard, you can find for short-range connectivity:
- WiFi IEEE 802.11
- Bluetooth IEEE 802.15.1
- Zigbee IEEE 802.15.4
- UWB (Ultra Wide Band) IEEE 802.15.2
- And lots of proprietary RF standards used in RFID, and communication modules such as Coronis’
Depending on your use cases you might choose between energy consumption, throughput or ease of use … but what is for sure is that all those standards are totally non-compatible one to another.
If you also take into account that above the simple connectivity layer you should add some specific business logics and something to do with the data (sending, receiving, routing, processing) than you can easily imagine that tis is just a huge mess … Check for instance ObjectWEB which is a trial of standardisation of machine communication… it looks so high level (J2EE, Corba…) that it looks weird to apply that to tiny communication modules…
IMHO, connecting machines together should simply consist in pluging-in a module customizing some code and that’s it. And it should work using industry standards, and should be easily upgradable to follow those industry standards. Today’s standard is WiFi (ok, it’s poor, high energy consumption… but easy to deploy and it just work ! ) tomorrow’s will be UWB for home triple-quadruple-play, going out of the standardisation path would simply put in jeopardy the money invested in connectiong your machines.
Technorati Tags: wifi, uwb, bluetooth, zigbee, short, range, communication, module, mahines, objectweb
