Steve Blum's Blog
Around this time last year, we were worried about credit and debit card details being stolen from Target stores. Bad, but not bad enough it would seem to drive retailers into doing a thorough security overhaul. The past year has seen similar breaches at Home Depot — even bigger than Target — Staples and Bebe, to name just 3.
Wouldn’t it be nice if that were the worst of it? But no such luck.… More
A huge thank you to everyone who has clicked, complained, complimented or commented on this blog over the past year. I’ve enjoyed all the interactions and suggestions received. As I wrote last Christmas, the true reward for a writer is to be read, and this has been a rewarding year indeed.
It’s been two years of daily blogging, at least one post a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year.… More
It’s hard to bet against Elon Musk. He made a fortune as a founder of PayPal, but instead of fading into a life of one-hit wonder obscurity sitting on boards and listening to investment pitches, he doubled down by going weird: electric cars and rocket ships, old ideas with a long trail of broken genius. Each venture had “billionaire vanity project” written all over it. Now, both look likely to revolutionise transportation. We can only hope his Hyperloop daydreaming follows the same path.… More
Microsoft’s cloud platform – Azure – had a stormy week, but the silver lining is that the company isn’t shying away from the necessary pain involved in transforming itself from a shrink wrapped software hawker to a computing services provider.
The 11 hour outage was the result of a poorly done system update. At the risk of taking a cheap shot, that’s the kind of glitch that the Windows operating system – and its predecessors – have routinely experienced for more than 30 years.… More
Thinking in terms of long space voyages can be a useful product development exercise. The work Salutron did on physiological tracking technology for NASA’s Mars program has turned into a useful, inexpensive and adaptable range of wrist monitors.
If you’re sealing yourself into a tin can the size of a VW bus for a couple of years and leaving Earth, whatever you take with you has to be durable, simple and fit for purpose.… More
How about printing out your dinner? That’s what Natural Machines wants you to do with the Foodini, a 3D printer designed to handle food ingredients and turn out complex meals.
Assuming the Foodini works – which includes being easy to clean – it’s something that could find an eager market.… More
Finally, an electric utility is taking the plunge on home automation. Electric Ireland announced a deal with Nest, the Google-owned company which makes a networked thermostat that learns your habits and controls your home heating and cooling system accordingly.
New customers who sign up for a 2 year contract with Electric Ireland get a free Nest thermostat, including installation. Existing customers who extend for another 2 years pay €99 (about $123). the device goes for $249 in the U.S.… More
The one thing you can count on an electricity meter to have is, well, electricity. A steady source of (for all practical purposes) unlimited power makes engineering a wide area, low bit rate network easy, and gaining the benefits of real time control a straightforward, relatively low tech proposition.
Other utilities aren’t so lucky. On the whole, it’s not a great idea to pump 120 volts into a gas or water meter, even if it were cost effective.… More
Cord cutting is easy if you live in a signal rich environment. Or at least easier – anyone who has experienced the frustration of trying to make a mobile call from an interior room in a central business district hotel knows it isn’t a slam dunk. But once you move out into suburban and rural areas, reliable indoor phone and Internet service usually means keeping the wire. (And yes, I know, fixed wireless is a potential solution, but usually not – at least according to the FCC.… More
The Internet of Things gets a lot more relevant when it becomes the Internet of Your Things. Keys, phones and pets, for example. Stuff you need to find every so often. That’s the simple idea behind TrackR, a company founded by a couple of U.C. Santa Barbara students and funded on Indiegogo.
They make little coin-sized gizmos that you can attach to your stuff and link to your smart phone via Bluetooth 4.0.… More