Archive for January, 2007
Talk @ L’Echangeur
I’ll be talking tomorrow (wednesday) at 8h30 at the E2 Club of L’Echangeur. I’ll make a presentation titled “WiFi Wimax, GSM, UWB… and all your “things” get connected”. I’ll also present a few ideas about wireless devices that I noticed at CES.
Off to china!
dim. 28.01.2007 11:42 Photo912
This is going to be hell of a week! Monday tuesday in mainland China, wednesday I’ll give a talk at l’echangeur about connected Things and the rest of the week is already full! Anyway I guess I’m enjoying that!
Technorati Tags: china
Fed up with Nabaztag
As I told you, i got 2 Nabaztags for my birthday last september. One for me one for my wife so that we could put it on our desks and do the paired-ear-moving thing. 6 months later, it’s time to draw some conclusions about this product :
- Firstly, design is really great! I love to have it on my desk !
- My Nabaztag cannot connect at my office as we don’t have any open or WEP secured networks… we switched to WPA & 802.1x only networks
There is no way for mobimini to access those… and no way to make any firmware upgrade ! Violet guys what are you thinking ! - We took some time to set-up the second rabbit… and now the nabaztag site just won’t recognize the MAC address !? That is when the site is working :(. And I sent a few mails to support… 3 weeks later still waiting for an answer!
- The configuration site just sux : when you send me a message it can take up to one hour to reach my rabbit ! The nabaztag server must be too overloaded
- Finally the only thing my rabbit used to do is say hourly time and do taï-chi.
I unplugged the rabbit.
Via Pico-ITX motherboard
I’ve always been amazed at tiny computers (must be why WaveStorm headed this way with a wireless specificity though) so I cannot fail to show you the preview of Via’s pico-ITX motherboard. It’s 10×7,2cm which is incredibly small for a multimedia board featuring a 1GHz C7 processor… that can run Vista! When I see that I can’t help dreaming about intelligent devices everywhere in my house managing either light, sound video or heat in every part of my house ;). It’s a bit expensive though, it’s expected to be released around 350$…
Check some mor pix and info on linuxdevices.
3M€ for NavX
Congratulations to Florent and Jean founders of Navx who just announced today the closing of a series A of 3M€ with Innoven Partners to speed up their service development in France and Europe.
Technorati Tags: navx
WiFI web-Radios
Everybody is getting excited about this new kind of connected devices : a radio.
Ok, at a first glance this doesn’t look very exciting, they all look like good old FM radio (too bad by the way), you can preset you favorite radio, change volume, the only difference is that instead of streaming from the eiffel tower (Paris, FM emitter is located there), you get the music from the Internet, and thus access more available programs (I used to listen to DI a lot… would have been handy at that time !). Many guys are working on that : the latest to announce it is Baracoda (and distributed by Orange). The radio can be customized online where you choose podcasts and radio channels.
Wifinetnews reported last month that mass production of such radio would lead to a total manufacturing cost of 15$ and should retail between 50$ and 60$.
I must confess I’m not excited at all by those products, I would add them in the “nice to have” section of my wishlist… but I must confess I’m always happy to see new connected devices on the market !
IPhone : good deal for Apple
Here is a cost evaluation of the iPhone’s internals from appleinsider… looks like apple has a very comfortable margin with this product ! thanks Minh for pointing out this study.
Moved into our new offices
Just came back from Las Vegas and popped into our new offices at 40, rue d’Oradour sur Glanes near porte de Versailles exhibition centre in the same building as the Tests Group (famous IT newspapers 01 Informatique…). Feel free to come and see us ;). We now have a fully featured meeting room featuring top coffee 
And I got an almost free upgrade of my desk (we had all the moving + furnitures for less than 1000€):
Technorati Tags: offices, oradour+sur+glannes
[CES] - Market Trends
As I was unable to get a good Internet connection, I’ll try to make one big post instead of a bunch of small ones (it will save me time and will be more interesting for you I guess … if you can read it all!).
CES is awesome, it’s really huge first of all: 4 halls on 2 different locations, thousands of exhibitors … Pretending that I haven’t miss a thing during this CES would be a lie : there are just too many things around ! Nevertheless it was possible to spot market trends in a pretty easy way as imagination is one of the best shared gift in this industry, everyone comes ouut with the same new stuff at the same time, and they tend to aggregate themselves one near another.
What was striking this year is the place taken by home automation. Contol4 was leading the way but there was half of a full hall dedicated to that. The industry is getting mad about that thanks to the appearance of those media centers and viiv platforms leading the way to the computerized house. But still installing home automation stuff remains a pain, the devices are not cross compatible and it’s pretty fun to see that devices are being created around a corporation (electrics, windows, heating…) instead of being created around one homogenous technology. 
Thus you end with thousands of suppliers each providing a small part of the puzzle, which remains a challenge for the poor end-user willing to try and look smart with his voice-controlled shower.
At WaveStorm we strongly believe that the DSL Operator could have a strong role in that field by providing a convergent bridge between devices in the home. We also believe that all those devices should be unwired to lower the TCO of this kind of solutions.
Along with that was a strong emergence of robots, either toys or working robots (cleaning up…). Amongst which of course Spyke was one of the most impressive. Also some nice flying toys like Wowee’s butterfly.
Talking about unwiring, this is certainly the second most interesting point of this convention. Very strong presence of the Zigbee alliance, Wimedia alliance and chipset manufacturers showing some really impressive stuff. I saw a private demo on Marvell booth of an 802.11n chipset acting as both a client to a gateway and an access point at the same time streaming media wirelessly within a BMW car with strong quality of service and signal synchronization features … awesome ! WiFi can now be called a mature technology to replace any wire… even with the most demanding constraints. And everyone in the industry has understood that and is starting to add wireless to its devices.
Most noticeable was Philips presenting its Wireless HDMI cable - available sept 2007 ~400$. It’s based on UWB, but the guy who explained to me that UWB could transport up to 10m uncompressed 1080p signal didn’t know that the frequencies & power available are more limited in Europe than in the US, so I’m not sure it will be available worldwide.
Integrating wireless isn’t that easy and what I’ve seen at this show was often a quite unclean and patchy way… which isn’t yet really convincing. Moreover none of them is foreseeing that wireless isn’t just about cutting wires, it’s about networking in a mobile environment, but nobody is adressing that issue.
The rest of the show was about who’s got the larger p….lasma screen, winner has a 120″ one (wouldn’t fit at home …), about putting video and sound system in your car and about Ipod accessories and photoframes. Check this VR Ipod Video googles by myvu for instance (300$) :
Technorati Tags: CES, home automation, Robotics, wifi, wireless
