geek stuff

Form defines function for wearable smart phone peripherals

10 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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Good for a casual look.

The Fitbit Flex shipped this week. I previewed it at CES. It’s a jelly bean-sized device that snaps into a wristband and monitors your movement. The data is uploaded to a smart phone or computer, and you can mine some information about your health and fitness.

It’s a smart phone peripheral. If you’re tracking, say, sleep patterns, sensors inside of a phone would not be optimal. You might sleep with your phone next to you, but you won’t have it on you.… More

The Electric Blackberry Acid Test

5 May 2013 by Steve Blum
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“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

I was wrong to say that Blackberry CEO Thorsten Heins doesn’t seem to be the sort of CEO that might dabble in hallucinogens. First he claimed victory over Apple in the smart phone wars, and last week followed up with a declaration that tablets are dead.

We need Hunter S. Thompson. Now. He broke the ibogaine story in the 1972 presidential race and would quickly find any ambient pharmaceuticals floating through the Blackberry corporate ecosystem.… More

New M2M radio specs could challenge mobile networks

13 April 2013 by Steve Blum
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Wide area of possibilities.

Two new low power standards for wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) communications have been released in the past couple of weeks. The Zigbee Alliance and the Weightless special interest group have published specifications for wide area networking standards that address the low power, low bit rate needs of many M2M applications. Both are initially targeting the smart grid sector, which is growing rapidly as electricity providers deploy tools to intelligently manage power distribution systems in real time.… More

Civinomics launches platform for cooler, smarter conversations about hot button issues

12 April 2013 by Steve Blum
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Civil discussion about community issues is the goal of a start-up launched last night in Santa Cruz, California. Civinomics is a platform for online workshops and in-person polling, aimed at engaging a wider segment of the public in conversations about local issues and ideas. Where ever those might be.

“It represents the evolution of social media into civic media,” said Chris Neklason, the company’s product management guru and the co-founder of Cruzio, an independent ISP and the host of the ribbon cutting event.… More

Facebook is first brand into the mobile skin game

5 April 2013 by Steve Blum
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Sometimes innovation only needs to be skin deep.

Facebook Home is a new kind of threat to Android and a new kind of opportunity for mobile entrepreneurs. It’s middleware that’s downloaded onto select – for now – smartphones and acts as the top skin of the user interface. Instead, for example, of seeing the standard lock screen, users see their Facebook feed, constantly updated.

Android apps are still there, if you dig down. But if you just go with the flow all you see is what Facebook pushes to you.… More

Friends, coders, countrymen, build me an app

17 March 2013 by Steve Blum
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Fifty-two hours, five teams, five working apps.

Five Android app development teams faced off this weekend in the second annual Ideas of March competition at Cal State Monterey Bay. On Friday afternoon, young coders from around Monterey County formed teams and heard pitches from local businesses and community groups. They picked one and spent the next 52 hours building apps that fit the need.

This afternoon, they presented their work to a panel of judges, myself included.… More

Here's looking at you, Samsung

5 March 2013 by Steve Blum
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Bogie knew how to do it.

You’ll soon be able to control your smart phone with just a glance. Samsung will introduce eye tracking capability in the latest version of its flagship Galaxy S-IV phone next week, according to rumors circulating today.

It’ll be bigger and faster too – a five inch screen and laptop class CPU power – but that’s nothing new.

New interfaces that just work, though, are much rarer and lead to revolutionary products.… More

Creativity and technology meet in Salinas

2 March 2013 by Steve Blum
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Robotics from the Naval Postgraduate School, rocketry with NASA’s Science, Engineering, Math and Aerospace Academy, hacking at Coder Dojo Salinas. Plus video production, acting, web design, a planetarium show and more. Those were the afternoon attractions today at the Creative Tech Expo at Hartnell College in Salinas.

A few hundred kids, mostly digital technology and business students from Monterey County high schools, spent their Saturday working their way through a couple dozen exhibits set up by local companies, clubs, schools and non-profits.… More

The business case for Mars

1 March 2013 by Steve Blum
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At least we have each other. And a deodorant sponsor.

Dennis Tito wants to send a middle-aged married couple to Mars and back. No landing, just once around the Red Planet and home. He’s a multimillionaire who began his career as a genuine rocket scientist then applied his math skills to investing, where he made his fortune. He spent some of it becoming the first space tourist in 2001, and he plans to spend even more on a privately funded Mars mission.… More

Tizen ready to replace Samsung's Bada OS

23 February 2013 by Steve Blum
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Doesn’t take long to browse the Bada store.

Bada is Samsung’s in-house operating system for low cost smartphones, but its days might be numbered. Tizen 2.0 has been released to developers, with a consumer version likely to be available on phones in the fall.

This Linux-based, open source operating system is also backed by Samsung, along with other major technology players. And that’s the key difference. The burden is distributed across many companies and individual developers who, for one reason or another, invest their time in developing Tizen source code and writing apps to run on it.… More