Mobitrends

As I was leaving SFR Player presentation this morning, something caught my eye in SFR’s flagship store : a small little weird mechanical insect. The Hexbug has ingenious sensors letting him sense chocks and change direction accordingly – baby loved it ! 14.99 and more fun than an expensive Rolly or Pleo. Gotta try it on the cat now…

Just stumbled upon this old screenshot of what we had been developing at WaveStorm in 2007, still feels very actual when you think about Google PowerMeter initiatives.

I’m doing daily (if not more) conf’calla through skype, and since I moved to PC I must confess the quality of those drastically dropped (why-tf did Dell put the microphone next to the fan !?). Just bought this gizmo and the sound is stunning, it’s very compact (and the USB chord folds nicely in the back cover) and the sound both in output and input is diamond-clear just like the big well-known Polycom squid.

@yazzgoth showed me the Livescribe pen a couple of weeks ago, and I must confess it’s really an amazing toy. To keep it short this smart pen understands your handwriting, stores it and syncs it with the sounds he also records, recognizes it and lets you process it on the go. The most amazing demo is the language translation where you write a word and hit a function button on a hot corner of your page and the pen start saying the same word in chinese or any other language you choose.
Now apparently we’ll get even more cool apps to fill this thing making it even more appealing. I’ll try to be strong and not to buy one (since my handwriting is the worse…).

The whole first month from the pre-launch and early sneak peeks seeds to the gadget blogs all the way through to the Peak of Excitement, Gadget geeks will be strong advocates for your new device and will create buzz and product awareness.
Gadget Geeks have an underlying strong brand fidelity that especially impact the decisions he takes when reaching the “Plateau of Reluctance” but until they get there, they will be open to using about anything else that promises more.

Google just announced a new project called “PowerMeter” to monitor electricity usage within your household. This sounds really familiar to me since at WaveStorm we’ve been working on a similar project with an energy company. The app shows as a widget in both iGoogle and on mobile web optimized for Android.

Google PowerMeter receives information from utility smart meters and in-home energy management devices and visualizes this information for you on iGoogle (your personalized Google homepage). Google PowerMeter is free to both utilities and consumers.

To get the usage data, Google aims at partnering with providers of devices to meter and send the information to Google’s servers first one being the TED 5000 starting at 200USD. The device connects to the router through BPL.

I’m a geek – I love gadgets, thus I know I can be partial in my way of understanding the digital revolution and especially on my view of the pace with which it’ll impact the world. That being said, I still believe that wireless cameras are just the nicest thoughts ever in the Digital Camera space. I recently bought an Eye-Fi card and connected it to my personal online backup service and have enjoyed such a piece of mind to see the pictures I’ve been taking seamlessly end-up both on my online vault and in my iPhoto library that I can’t help to think that this is the kind of thing my dad needs. Of course initial set-up was a bit geeky but once automatic connection to open networks are working this experience has been as seamless as you could have expected and really give a good piece of mind. Not to mention that once pic are online it’s so easy to share them and publish them to any place you like and a few features like geotagging through WiFi triangulation are very nice additions.

When I showed that yesterday, they told me “c’mon you’re a geek”, which is true but today, Samsung unveiled their ST1000 what they are calling the world’s “first multi-wireless compact camera” in the 12.2 MP ST1000. In addition to it’s 3.5″ touch screen LCD, the ST1000 features WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS geotagging built-in.
With the Wi-Fi technology, users can email photos direct from their camera and upload their photos or videos to selected popular social networking websites including Facebook, Picasa, YouTube, without needing to connect to a PC. The ST1000 is also DLNA compliant (Digital Living Network Alliance), allowing users to wirelessly connect the camera to other DLNA compliant devices, such as HDTVs, digital picture frames, media servers or gaming systems in their networked home to view and share their precious moments.
When I see that kind of new devices popping, I can’t help to think that every source of content creation has to be bound to the cloud to provide a save, share and play experience.