Mobitrends

Promise, next year I’ll be at CES again ( missed it 2 years in a row – this just can’t be happening anymore !). But I kept a pretty close look at the gadget show and selected a few stuff that put me in awe. I’m gonna skip the analysis side of the CES since the Internet is plagued already by gazillion of those explaining why 2011 is the year of tablets (which I disagree – imh a Tablet without apps is useless – I almost never use the browser of my iPad ).

The 50-cent headphones just rox. Firstly they are wireless using a dedicated tiny dongle to transmit the music , secondly the materials used to build them are splendid. They’ll probably replace my beats by dre when they reach EOL. www.sleekby50.com

The Nike+ sportswatch is super-nice. Although I’m not a fan of the Nike+ service, I do like the device made by tomtom for Nike.

I’ve been willing to put my hands on those Olympus micro-4/3 cameras for a while now and with the new Olympus E-PL2 that feeling even got stronger. This baby must take gorgeous underwater pictures with good housing and lights.

The latest Sony PJ camera series is pure awesomeness with its built-in pico-projector. It’s definitely useless but so cool!

The Razer switchblade may be the most interesting device I saw at CES. Super-small form-factor, OLED keyboard with keys customizable to match dedicated in-game actions and a good CPU/GPU mix letting you play PC games. I totally can see myself play WoW on this device !

The skype camera plugin for Sony Bravia TVs. The coolest video-conferencing setup I could have imagined. and at a slice of the price of those über expensive telepresence setups.

The Griffin CarTrip is a bluetooth device connected to the ODB-II port of your cart and running efficiency diagnostics giving you a performance dashboard of your car – all that for 89.9USD. Hope we’ll be able to change the settings of the car from the iPhone to put som boost in the engine (yes it’s possible). This is really one of the coolest hack-my-car app i’ve seen in a while. iTSX has been showing the same thing for iPad and apparently they do provide some modding capabilities. but at a hefty 350 USD price.

Samsung’s flexible and transparent displays are opening up possibilities for more awesome new types of devices hopefully for 2012.

It’s not really a CES gadget but the Ustream LiveU Mobile package used by Techcrunch to stream live the show is some amazing backpack. Stuffed with 6 wireless modems, it gave their firewire camera streaming capabilities throughout the whole show

The latest Microsoft Surface table “V 2.0″ is something quite amazing, slimmer, support up to 20 simultaneous touches, can scan pages laying on its surface and a price drop at 7,500USD makes it pretty desirable. I’m sure those devices will have a great future and change the way we interact with computers, but it’s still at least 5 years away from us.

The Liquid Image Xtreme Sport Cam goggles let you snap Full-HD videos underwater on-the-go. The setup is pretty impressive and let you go down 100m with them. Only drawback, it’s a just a gadget, there’s is no way you can actually take decent pics without proper aiming and the long-range videos can’t be enhanced by the 2 small lights on the sides… still pretty fun to see !

Last but not least, the iCade which started as an April’s fool prank on Thinkgeek apparently actually got real ! If you haven’t followed the story, it’s an  arcade cabinet where you can fin your iPad in and play old MAME-style games. Estimated retail price of about 99€.

Cars are getting connected, that’s a fact. The first step in that process was with the TomToms connecting though bluetooth to the network to access live information. Now smartphones are replacing PNDs (slowly) and are trying to leverage on their userbase to create user-generated contents of maps and road infos (status, cops…).

Coyote, a French company, is one of the pioneer in that area. They started with a dedicated device that simply used to bind a GPS chip with a database of fix and mobile radars but they evolved very quickly to dedicated connected devices where users have the ability to report the presence of new radars. Each device has a sim card and this is one of the only consumer cases for M2M I know of. They managed to build a community of “coyotes” which is now acts as a fairly strong bareer for any new entrant on the French market. On top of the devices they even added great Android and iPhone apps. At any given time when I’m driving on the motorways I can see a few hundreds coyotes around me. I tried some alternative services such as Waze but we are very far from such a density of users. Nevertheless, as usually for French companies which build great products, they spent so much time on their tiny local market that they will certainly fail at the internationalization stage…

Waze (Israel start-up who recently raised 10M) has gone international from day 1 and is very strong in the US and especially in the West coast where user reports are even used by TV-channels for their road traffic status. 2 weks ago, Blackberry also announced “Blackberry traffic” to let Blackberry users optimize their route. Android phones have had turn-by-turn navigation in the US for a year now and traffic infos are available as an overlay to Google Maps.

It’s fairly interesting to see how the Smartphones are slowly kicking out the PNDs and are adding a lot of social features on top of the simple map/direction. As a proof to that trend, the market of PNDs in Europe in Q1 2010 decreased by 17% YoY from 3.2 to 2.7 M units. That trend and the fact that offline maps are less and less relevant do actually ask a lot of questions regarding the value chain of the sector and seem to put guys like google in a fairly interesting position. Can’t wait for a car powered by Google : Android PND, apps, Google Navigation, always connected, social… They seem to be the closest to that vision today !

Pretty impressive sneak peek at Boeing’s upcoming new UAV. Those drones are really reshaping the landscape of aerial military. With no risk for pilot casualties, lower cost (at least a bit), greater autonomy, UAVs offer lots of new possibilites.

“The autonomous nature of this system is unique, so achieving this milestone speaks volumes about the technology and expertise of Boeing, the Phantom Works organization and the Phantom Ray team,” said Dave Koopersmith, vice president, Advanced Boeing Military Aircraft.

Phantom Ray is designed to support potential missions that may include intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; suppression of enemy air defenses; electronic attack; strike; and autonomous aerial refueling.

I’m starting to build a drone just for the fun of it (at least for now) and the first parts are finally starting to arrive. It will be a quad-copter and I already got the GPS SiRF Star III, a xbee Pro set for telemetry a Futaba remote control and a few tools (multimeter, LiPo charger…).
Can’t wait for the mobo and the frame to arrive !

In case you didn’t notice I grew a special interest lately in UAVs and RCs. Maybe it’s just my frustrations as a child towards those pricey grown-up toys. Anyways I’ve been following for a while the activity on the DIY Drone site and got pretty amazed by what the team has accomplished in putting together an admirable platform for quadcopters.

The project is based on the OpenSource Arduino platform and is delivered as a fully open source project . The platform has an impressive feature list with extensive telemetry, autopilot and autostabilization features (check the full list of the features below!)

Today the project just got to the next stage as they released today their first full kit as pre-order. I spent hours last night trying to find all the part on various RC-dedicated websites and it was a huge pain, this announce could not come at a better time (just the day I bought a Futaba FF9 on ebay).

ArduCopter Platform Feature List:

• 6 Degree of Freedom IMU stabilized control
• Gyro stabilized flight mode enabling acrobatics (loops and barrel rolls)
• GPS for position hold
• Magnetometer for heading determination
• Barometer for altitude hold
• IR sensor integration for obstacle avoidance
• Sonar sensor for automated takeoff and landing capability
• Automated waypoint navigation
• Motor control using low cost standard PWM Electronics Speed Controllers (ESC’s)
• On board flight telemetery data storage
• Mounted camera stabilization capability
• Wireless command & telemetry for long distance communication
• Capability to fly in “+”, “x”, quad, hexa and octo configurations
• Battery level detection
• User configurable LED flight pattern
• Capability to use any R/C receiver
• ArduCopter Configuration and Ground Control Software
• Realtime graphs of flight data
• GUI for configuration of PID and other flight parameters
• On Screen Display (OSD) integration, (coming)
• Waypoint programming using Google Maps, (coming)
• Mixertable view to auto configure “+”, “x”, quad, hexa and octo configurations, (coming)
• Due this is a community product, features can change without any notice!

Joby Energy has introduced a pretty incredible concept of a drone flying up in high atmosphere and when reaching the right altitude using the power of those super powerful wind to take a circular spin and transform the wind power in electricity tethered back to the ground. As weird as it may seem it’s actually plausible in the sense that all the technologies required exist, but they are so early stage that it sounds really quite incredible that there would be even close to a working prototype. The only thing I actually believe is that they can actually fly this thing – provided they have a powerful enough radio and the licence to use it !

I love my old MB Pro, but for some reason whenever I connect it to AC and I put my Beats by Dre noise-canceling headphones, there would be a nasty hissing sound in my ears (which is perfectly unacceptable). Obviously, mac adapted do not connect the laptop to the ground, and a difference of potential between the battery powered headset and the AC powered laptop are the cause of this sound. Also touching the laptop stops the sound. If you’re experiencing this issue, I have an easy fix : take an ipod or micro-usb cable and stick it to something that’s at the ground (lik another laptop) and there you go : perfect shielding !

Any one motivated to actually build a “usb-to-ground” adapter ?

I’m looking a lot at drones recently and it’s really amazing to see where those babies are at know… check out this video below from University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab, it’s simply stunning. While I still do not buy the AR.Drone “entertainemnt” market position, I do think there are many other oportunities for those kind of devices.

While grocery shopping I stumbled upon this UFO : a 9,99€ underwater camera. Had to try it out….

The package claims it can go down up to 30ft which converts to about 10m. The small camera comes indeed with an underwater housing whih looks actually quite alright.

I was quite in awe when I found this camera – 9,99 retail translated in something like 3,5-4 euros FOB price and thus around 2,5 euros of Bill of Materials…. of course they took a few drastic simplification steps to get there : no TFT screen but instead a simple LCD display showing the number of pics left, the sensor is VGA quality, no battery and the plastics are as cheap as they could be. When I opened the housing the lock broke immediately …

Still, it’s quite amazing to see so cheap cameras in the market, they are more like toys than real underwater camera but I’ll definetly fel better with my son playing with this rather than taking pictures with my iPhone.

I’ve started running again 2 years ago, never been a rock star when it comes to running and never actually really got to learn how to run (and no it’s *not* straightforward).
In my case, using a heart monitor has been critical in getting to run up to 15km tracks. Indeed, the heartbeat tells you in which effort zone you are in and for instance I know that when i get above 176bpm I’m starting to burn out and need to relax a bit if I want to run much longer.
To evaluate the effort my requirements are then:

• heart rate
• distance / time
• elevation
• custom workouts
• social integration

I’ve had a Garmin Forerunner 301 for some time now and recently tried the Nike+ since I got my iPhone 4. Basically as a gadget geek I was counting on Nike+ to add to my running experience the “fun” and “social” and maybe replace the Garmin which had been doing a great job till now. Yes the Nike+ solution is way below my expectations. Whenever you do some speed workouts, alternating faster and slower pace, the distance measured by the podometer becomes totally irrelevant, the website (full Flash – kinda weird for an apple partner) is far from being ergonomic, I always have trouble navigating between my runs, the social aspects are limited to publishing to facebook or twitter and of course the soft on the mobile is not using any GPS at all thus no cool map to share online.

on the other side Garmin has released Garmin Connect based on Motionbased acquisition last year and while the service is far from funky it gives perfectly good stats and overview of the run to share.

Finally the fact that the Nike+ software is burnt in the Flash of the iPhone just makes it hard to update and breaks any hope of getting anything decent from this service. On the other side, iPhone has some other nice software such as runkeeper to try out which are taking advantage of the GPS to build nice track logs to share.