Mobitrends

Thanks Sony Insider for this amazing video from CES – great memories!

It’s all over the Internet since yesterday evening, so I thought it was about time I’d add my 2 cents to the rumbling of blog posts.

LaCie is primarily known for its USB storage disks (somehow design-ish), Wua.la is a p2p cloud storage system using either crowd storage or real datacenters to provide users with an online drive solution (such as me.com).

Somehow it seems like LaCie is starting to realize that as fiber connections (100Mb + high uplink) become slowly available, the essence of “saving” data might slip from hard drives to online backup solutions thus endangering their market position. Indeed, LaCie only design the electronics PCB between the sata hard drive and the USB port and the plastic box, the drive itself is just bought to third parties, and while drives are still needed to backup data their local presence might become obsolete within the next 5 years.
From that prospective going into cloud storage might sound smart, but I must confess I’m a bit disappointed by the choice of Wua.la.

We have been benchmarking their technology back in the days at WaveStorm (where we enable access to connected devices in a P2P way from any point on the Internet), and I must say I do not buy the vision of home computers always-on sharing their drives to secure their own datas.

The whole assertion sounds wrong when home computers become laptops are not always-on and have limited drive spaces mostly filled by HD videos and high-res pictures. Moreover the Java interface was so bulky in term of ergonomics (form a Mac user prospective at least) that it’s really hard to assume anyone non-geek is ever going to understand it.
Hopefully LaCie will reorient the technology and the vision in something both cash-generating and end-user oriented completing their product line with integrated smart services… wait and see… Anyway it can’t really harm more LaCie’s stock (see below).

I’m a big fan of connected devices (and I should – my companies built a couple of those) so seeing MIT’s David Merril’s toys at this year’s TED was pretty exciting. I’m especially interested in the use cases they came up with and I could totally imagine having my little boy having fun learning about figures and spelling words with those little interactive devices, just the way I had fun with TI’s Speak and Spell in the 80s.
As you may have figured out there’s a lot of tech in there, I guess there must be about 23USD of parts within each “Siftable” which would put a retail price for a 10-pieces pack + the PC dongle at about 500USD… I guess we’ll have to wait a bit to see such things at Toys’r'us but this is exciting !

By concentrating you are able to change the intensity of your mind’s theta-wave and thus change the altitude of the ball… a button lets you move the ball left and right and by combining both controls you con complete the whole circuit.

Saw a demo, really not got convinced, the lady was trying to show how easy it is to join and leave a network group… like my parents will know what that is and why it’s good for… come on people try to be more end user focused, limit the number of clicks and make it simple!
Oh and by the way Windows 7 just fucked up Surface !