Just discovered that WaveStorm is being sold by Mattel since 2001 ! Gotta bid for it

Technorati Tags: mattel, wavestorm

I’m really mad at what I’ve just been reading on neteco – The AFMM (the mobile marketing association in France) has launched the 2D barcode in France for third parties based on Abaxia’s solution. As usual I’m really disappointed to see that those guys can’t let a tool live by itself and grow the market – they have to put their hands on it and try to kill it by making it so hard to use.
The full point of 2D barcodes is to have people use their mobile to access online mobile informations easily. It’s really like every object in a store has its barcode and i can click on it and get infos on that very object, like traceability of the meat I buy at Carrefour or latest single preview from this artist or whatever… That use has been developed in Japan for years! It was mass market in 2003 when I used to live there. And here the only point of that mobile ecosystem is to try and make money out of it and use a technology that probably will not work with our neighbor’s.
QR-Codes have been used in Japan for years and is OPEN. Readers are available on every platform. Creating a QR-Code is free, there are even opensource scripts to generate them and they can contain up to over a thousand of characters.
OK, the operator is not the one managing the bindings between a code and a URL – but why should the content provider have to deal with the operator – do I ask ICANN when I create a URL on my blog ?
Instead of promoting the use of mobile Internet by letting everyone play with those codes and spread them, just as always in France they will remain in the hands of a few big agencies remaining an “elite” usage.
I’m a strong believer in any helping technology that helps users jump from an environment to another, web to mobile, rl to mobile, web to sl … but trying to monetize/control those behaviors seem totally counter-productive to me.

Technorati Tags: barcodes, 2D

Gizmodo team just reported that WowWee well be building with Disney a full set of robots based on Disney’s licences. It’s really the robotics year, amazing how everybody gets exctatic when robots are being mentioned. As such i’m pretty proud of WaveStorm’s work on Meccano Spykee’s I still think that our Spykee is just unique with cool features at a fairly low price point.

Technorati Tags: spykee, wavestorm, robot

GPS, Wifi, android and look at what you can get :

Technorati Tags: FPS, mobile, android

I always wondered why such 3D googles never took off while 3d gaming an VR worlds clearly are on the hype. Well, I bought those state of the art goggles for 400USD from Vuzix to give a try to what is seen as the best VR goggles around.
And the result is : they truly really suck big time. The screen looks smaller than my MacBook’s I really can’t see anything immersive there. Getting it to work with a game is really a nightmare, copy files from here to there user “Direct X proxies” … blahblah making it a geek only device and finally when you have it up and running the 3d effect is deceptive and far below what I expected.
Truly disappointing experience…

Technorati Tags: 3d, Goggles

It’s called Symbio and is hidden on Thomson’s website. Apparently it is retailed in france at Darty Fnac and Boulanger and provides VoIP phone support with cordless DECT capabilities and conencts to an Internet Radio agregator by Thomson – more useful than a LiveRadio!
Update – it’s retailed 142€ at Darty – pretty low price actually !

Technorati Tags: phone, radio

Vollee just posted this video giving a preview of Vollee Second Life client – I really can’t wait to try it on my own device!

Technorati Tags: mobile, Second Life

I was invited yesterday evening at an event organized by the Swiss ambassador in Paris. The event was taking advantage of a roadshow announcing the upcoming Euro 2008 soccer competition that will be held in Switzerland (and a bit in Austria) to come up with the most impressive panel I’ve ever seen in my life on the theme “Innovation : the key to tomorrow’s competititvity” (OK I’m still young, but hey it beat Loic’s web2 where we had Sarkozy and Shimon Peres).
An introductory speech by Pascal Couchepin, Swiss’s president followed by a panel with Bertrand Piccard, Nestle’s president, Jean Louis Beffa (St Gobain), Logitech’s co-founder and EPFL’s president and a specially moving presentation by Bertrand Piccard with a strong tagline: “Innovation happens when we identify a common idea taken for granted for ages and we show that it can be beaten”.
Another major concern they all had was how it’s really importent to be able to find alternatives to petrol as an energy to be able to keep relatively low energy price without destroying the planet ecosystem and while still enabling its economical growth.
Really interesting exchange between all these successful industry captains full of insight and vision about the place of science and research in their industry’s development and stimulating – gives some perspective to my work at WaveStorm.

Technorati Tags: euro2008, innovation

Linksys initiated the path to an open broadband router with their WRT54G product line which was really popular amongst developers and geeks with its expansions through cool third parties firmwares. Now that Linksys have abandoned the linux kernel for thei main product line in favor of vxworks (smaller mom footprint – reduced costs), newcomers are trying to jump in that market and benefit from the developer base to promote their own hardware – in a few days Martin, Fon’s CEO, has announced that la Fonera 2, its broadband router with USB port, will be launched along with a community site to promote third party applications, same today at Netgear with MyOpenRouter dedicated to promote the development of software expansions to their routers.
Nothing new here only nicely marketed initiatives and some mixed feelings for me – somehow this is great, devices are opening up and leverage on an extended community to provide features that matter, but on the other side as an embedded hardware&software company, I can only regret that hardware companies feel that providing a minimal set of functions for their product to sell is enough – and that the opensource community will provide the real killer apps which will make their product a success. Just like if hardware is tangible and software isn’t. Hardware companies are ready to spend >300k€ for a nice plastic design but not for the software that can really add value to their product (and they often are less reluctant to pay for design than for good hardware too…).

Technorati Tags: embedded

I gave an overview of WaveStorm with a special focus on the RiiMOTE platform at broadband thursday a few days ago – presentation is available on WaveStorm website for those interested!

Technorati Tags: riimote