geek stuff

Bell Labs goes looking for lost mojo

27 December 2013 by Steve Blum
, , ,

First we’ll invent Unix, then we’ll figure out what to do with it.

When Silicon Valley was just pear orchards and a junior university, and a google was an obscure bit of math trivia, the wellspring of geek creativity was a continent away. Bell Labs sprawled across several campuses in northern New Jersey, filled with scientists and engineers who were paid to come up with interesting ideas and novel technology. Not necessarily marketable products, although it was correctly assumed that profits would follow somehow.… More

Mobile payment innovators will benefit as banks run scared

26 December 2013 by Steve Blum
, , ,

Actually, it was invented in Russia.

Top of my list for the most influential people of 2013 in technology are the cyber thieves who stole the details of 40 million credit and debit cards from the Target chain of stores. Thanks to them, mobile payment and near field communications technology – e.g. chips in credit cards – might finally take off in the U.S. as fossilised payment processing companies are jolted into embracing entrepreneurial creativity. As I wrote last year…

“Mobile payments is like waiting for Godot,” said Omar Javaid, managing director of BBO Global, speaking at a recent What’s Hot (and What’s Not) in Mobility 2012 forum in Mountain View.

… More

Cyber security needs a breath of fresh thinking from pulp fiction

25 December 2013 by Steve Blum
,

Don’t take a space axe to a Q-beam fight.

“The bad guys are very good”, said Dan Schulman, a group president with American Express, as he talked about the biggest problem he faces in maintaining security for a global credit card company. He was speaking at the MobileCon tradeshow in San Jose earlier this year, but his words could have been lifted from the pages of vintage science fiction.

Edward E. Smith – Doc Smith – started writing what would become the Lensman series of novels in 1934.… More

Happy holidays

24 December 2013 by Steve Blum

A year full of blogging.

I set up this blog five years ago, after spending a long Saturday at the first Freelance Camp in Santa Cruz, in August 2008. Last year I decided it was time to get serious about it or move on to something else. To find out which, I set a goal of one post a day for the month of December 2012, figuring it would either burn me out on blogging or make it routine part of my business.… More

Kim gets gamed, because the Internet never forgets

21 December 2013 by Steve Blum
, , , ,

Supreme Leader, we have immutable faith in your shining mastery of Pong.

In Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, a teenage boy is trained to be a spy with a memory game. He’s given a brief glimpse of some items, and then has to describe what he remembers. Over the course of many rounds, his powers of observation and memory grow. It’s called Kim’s game.

But as North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is finding out, the Internet gives everyone a Kiplingesque memory.… More

Mom and pop store bashing earns patent trolls a whack from congress

7 December 2013 by Steve Blum
, , ,

Which way to the senate?

Patent trolls aren’t on the run yet, but life could get bleaker for them if a bill passed this week by a bipartisan majority – 325 to 91– in the U.S. house of representatives is approved by the senate. Called the Innovation Act, the legislation would make it harder for the predatory bar to weave dubious theories about why stockpiled patents apply to common, everyday products and business practices, and then try to intimidate small businesses into coughing up cash to avoid a court battle.… More

There's broadband meat behind the drone delivery sizzle

4 December 2013 by Steve Blum
, , , , , ,

Looks like someone ordered a barbeque.

Amazon’s PR people deserve a hearty round of applause. They dropped the perfect Cyber Monday story this Sunday evening when Jeff Bezos teased plans to build a fleet of drone helicopters that will deliver five pound packages in half an hour.

But assuming it has some remote connection to reality, the real news is what it implies about Amazon’s roadmap for expansion. Those drones are not supersonic. Even with zero time to process and pick an order, a half hour service radius of 50 kilometers would probably be an overly optimistic guess – Bezos talked about a 10 mile range.… More

HTML5 pace set by carrier dog days, not developer dog years

30 November 2013 by Steve Blum
, , , , , , ,

Puppies for a while longer.

The Firefox OS is built to run thin client HTML5 applications, which depend heavily on network connections to store data and offload processing. So far, the available applications are a promising mixed bag, at least judging by performance on the first readily available Firefox phone, the ZTE Open.

Both the Facebook and, particularly, the Twitter apps are consumer-ready, but most of the other available apps are little more than browser bookmarks that take you to a website.… More

Firefox OS performing as well as it can on ZTE Open SDK

29 November 2013 by Steve Blum
, , , , , , , ,

Twitter top pick on Firefox app store.

The Firefox mobile operating system is clearly a work in progress, but that said, it works well enough already. I’ve been using a ZTE Open Firefox phone for three months, and can do most of the things I need to do and, as time goes on and software is released, more of the things I’d like to do.

The OS performs better than Bada, which I used for about a year on a Samsung handset.… More

Tylt battery pack ready to stuff a well-heeled stocking

28 November 2013 by Steve Blum
, ,

Tylt Powerplant doubles up.

One of the bennies of going to events like Pepcom’s Holiday Spectacular is that people give you free stuff to review. I walked out with a Tylt Powerplant rechargeable battery pack, a simple device which turned out to perform pretty much as claimed.

About the size of a computer mouse, it stores enough juice to recharge a mobile phone, at least once and probably a couple of times depending on the size of your battery.… More