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  • Google Shrinks Another Market (and I’m not talkin’ DNS)

    Brady Forest writes: Google has announced a free turn-by-turn navigation system for Android 2.0 phones such as the Droid.

    via Google Shrinks Another Market With Free Turn-By-Turn Navigation – O’Reilly Radar.

    And with that we enter a killer app for the cell phone market and the end of the market for single purpose personal navigation devices. Everyone is desperate to get a sample of the Motorola Droid phone to see how well the mix of features work on the phone. Consumer Reports has tried out a number of iPhone navigation apps to see how they measure up to the purpose built navigators. For people who don’t need specific features or generally aren’t connoisseurs of turn-by-turn directions, they are passable. But for anyone who bought early and often from Magellan, Garmin and TomTom the re-purposed iPhone Apps will come up short.

    It's big and heavy but it's got an OS that won't quitThe Motorola Droid however is trying to redefine the market by keeping most of the data in the cloud at Google Inc. datacenters and doing the necessary lookups as needed over the cell phone data network. This is the exact opposite of most personal navigation devices where all the mapping and point of interest data are kept on the device and manually updated through very huge, slow downloads of new data purchased online on an annual basis (at least for me). Depending on the results Consumer Reports gets, I’ll reserve judgment. This is not likely to shift the paradigm currently of personal navigation except that the devices are going to be necessarily even more multipurpose than Garmin has made them. And unwillingly made them at that. The Garmin Nuviphone was supposed to be a big deal. But it’s a poor substitute for a much cheaper phone and more feature filled navigation device. I think the inclusion of Google Maps and Google StreetView is the next big thing in navigation as the Lane assistance differentiated TomTom from Garmin about a year and a half ago. So radical incrementalism is the order of the day still in personal GPS devices. But with an open platform for developing navigation services, who knows what the future may hold. I’m hoping the current oligarchy between Garmin and TomTom starts to crumble and someone starts to eat away  at the low end or even the high end of the market. Something has got to give.

  • 7 Things You Should Know About Google Wave | EDUCAUSE

    Wave challenges us to reevaluate how communication is done, stored, and shared between two or more people.

    logo
    Google Wave

    via 7 Things You Should Know About Google Wave | EDUCAUSE.

    Point taken, since I watched the video of the demo done last spring I too have been smitten with the potential uses of Google Waves. First and foremost it is a communication medium. Second of all unlike email, there are no local, unsynced copies of the text/multimedia threads. Instead everything is central like an old style bulletin board, newsgroup or collaborative wiki. And like a  wiki revisions are kept and can be “Played Back” to see how things have evolved over time. For people recognizing the limits of emailing attachments to accomplish this goal of group editing, the benefits far outweigh the barriers to entry. I was hoping to get an invitation into Google Waves, but haven’t yet received one. Of course if I do get invited, the problem of the Fax Machine will crop up. I will need to find someone else who I know well enough to collaborate with in order to try it out. And hopefully there will be a ready and willing audience when I do finally get an invite.

    As far as how much better is Waves versus email, it depends very much on how you manage your communications already. Are you a telephone person or an email person or a face-to-face person. All these things affect how you will perceive the benefits of a persistent central store of all the blips and waves you participate in. I think Google could help explain things even to us mid-level technilogically capable folks who are still kind of bewildered by what went on in the Demos at Google Developer Day. But this PDF Educause has compiled will help considerably. The analogy I’m using now is the bulletin board/wiki/collaborative document example. Sometimes it’s just easier to understand something in comparison to something you already know/use/understand.

    a list of Google Waves with participant icons
    Waves can start to add up

    PS: Finally got an invite from Google Waves about two weeks ago and went hog wild inviting people to join in. If you want to include me in a Wave add me to your list as: carpetbomberz@googlewave.com. Early returns from sending invites and participating in some experimental Waves has shown the wild popularity dying down quite a bit. At one point we had 8 participants in one single Wave. Trying out some of the add-on tools was interesting too. But the universe of add-ons is pretty small at this point. Hopefully Google will get that third party development effort going in high gear. As far as the utility of the Google Waves, it is way too much like a super-charged glorified bulletin board. It doesn’t have any easy hooks in or out to other Social Media infrastructure. Someone has to make it seamless with Facebook/Twitter/Gmail either though RSS hooks or making the whole framework/interface embeddable or linkable in other websites. As always we’ll see how this goes. They need to keep a torrid pace of development like Facebook achieved from 2005-2007 improving and adding membership to the Google Wave Universe.

  • Layar is in the iPhone App Store! « Layar

    Layar now available on iPhone

    As reported in Wired.com for Thursday October 15 , 2009. Layar was originally developed in the Netherlands, and runs on Android based cell phones. The first cell phone manufacturer to pre-install it was Samsung who installed it on their Android based Galaxy sold in the Netherlands.

    It has now been ported over to the iPhone and will now compete head to head with an early entrant into the AR market, Bionic Eye. Layar had garnered some early mindshare on O’Reilly’s technology blog Radar where I first noticed it. Others had whispered about it early on the cutting edge tech blogs. But this was the first concrete example showing what it could do.

    Wired.com has been singing the praises of the cell phone Augmented Reality craze but somewhat later than O’Reilly tapped into it in early Summer. O’Reilly now has a correspondent fully engaged in covering things AR related: Christine Perey. And now let the battle begin Bionic Eye vs. Layar! But first consider the API’s which are already beginning to be examined by the folks over at Wired. One big complaint is the difficulty with which one can submit their own Point of Interest database that Layar can call up. Bionic Eye hasn’t really touted user generated POI content as much. It will take a while to see if it’s the consumers or the developers who determines the winner in the battle for Cellphone AR apps. Who knows? Maybe Google will enter the fray real soon now.

    Layar is in the iPhone App Store!

    We have waited a long time but it is finally there! Layar arrived in the App Store. It’s free and available globally. Below some screenshots of the App.

    via Layar is in the iPhone App Store! « Layar.

  • Bionic Eye

    For those following the announcement of the Apple iPhone 3GS and it’s API for Augmented Reality someone has finally put a killer app into the world for all to use. Finallly all the happiness and promise that is Augmented Reality is now availble on the Apple AppStore. The prototype called Nearest Subway is now called Bionic Eye as told by this article in Wired dot Com:

    Remember the amazing augmented reality application demo for the iPhone that we saw back in July? It was called Nearest Subway, and it overlaid floating representations of nearby New York subway stations onto the live video coming in through the camera of the iPhone 3GS. These appeared to be hanging in space, pinned in place by the 3GS’ compass and GPS.

    That application is now available to buy, for just $1. There have been a few changes – it’s now called Bionic Eye, for instance – but the jaw-dropping virtual signage is still there, and the subway stations have been joined by other points of interest, hotels, fast-food joints and, splendidly, Hooters.

    via Bionic Eye: Augmented iPhone Awesomeness in App Store | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

  • Lithium-Air Battery interest increasing

    PolyPlus aqeuous lithium air battery
    PolyPlus aqeuous lithium air battery

    Back on July 8th I posted an article talking about the benefits of a new battery technology I had read about on weblog called Technology Review (originally published on June 26th from MIT). It think it may have originally been linked to either Slashdot or The Register. The blog entry was essentially like a press release from a company in California named PolyPlus. They had just announced the project to create single use high energy density Lithium-Air batteries for the military (most likely for radio communications in the field). The key technology was a new way to wrap the lithium cathode in a waterproof seal while still exposing it to the surrounding air encapsulated in the battery. It seems now some other big monied interests have caught onto this new battery chemistry and are going to produce it as well, but maybe not as a single use battery but instead as a rechargeable battery.

    IBM is in the news touting the promise of the lithium-air technology as a potential technological nirvana for autmobile drive trains. Estimates are a 10X increase in energy density per kilogram of battery electrolyte material. If this can be achieved, watch out electric vehicles here we come.

    Lithium-ion batteries have the potential to deliver about 585 watt-hours of electricity per kilogram, while lithium-sulfur has a theoretical potential of about 2,600 watt-hours, and lithium-air batteries might reach targets well above 5,000 watt-hours.

    If they can be perfected, lithium-air batteries would be ideal for transportation applications, given their potential for high energy capacity and low weight. And, unlike zinc-air batteries, it should be possible to make them rechargeable.

    via Lithium-Air Batteries Seen as Hope for Electric Cars – NYTimes.com.

  • OS X 10.6 – 64bits? Meh.

    There is no doubt 64-bits is nice architectural change but it doesn’t mean you’re receiving all the benefits of the change. If Apple doesn’t quickly upgrade it’s vast stable of killer multimedia applications, it doesn’t really matter how good Snow Leopard is. Even after installing Snow Leopard it is hard for me to notice a significant difference. I would settle for some extra quickness or capability in iLife that wasn’t possible before Snow Leopard.

    Add to this the fact you need a full 64-bit clean environment to really guarantee you are in 64bit mode. The boot-up environment known as EFI was n ot 64-bit clean until after 2008. The Intel CPU wasn’t 64-bit clean until after 2007. Two strikes against me as I was an early adopter of the Intel Architecture and am relegated to good ol’ 32-bit compatibility mode. Unless I decide to upgrade of course, which isn’t going to happen because I have a sworn duty to first replace my wife’s old PC after Windows 7 is formally released. Once that purchase is done and out of the way, then I will consider getting a re-furbished post 2008 Mac Pro tower with a fully OpenCL compatible graphics card. There’s just so many considerations, you need to keep writing all of them down so you don’t lose track.

    Of course, Apple itself needs to deliver 64-bit versions of its own Logic Studio, Final Cut Studio, and Aperture, too. The company was previously outpaced by its third party developers in the move to PowerPC, and to a lesser extent, in the move to Intel Macs. Apple’s position as both a platform vendor and an application developer should help it to deliver practical, usable tools for its own developers.

    via AppleInsider | Inside Mac OS X Snow Leopard: 64-bits.

  • Acrossair on the iPhone

    It looks like the iPhone OS 3.1 is going to do nothing more the open up the video feed on the camera so that you can overlay data on top of that video. In essence, the Augmented Reality is using your iPhone’s video as a “desktop” picture and placing items on top of that. Acrossair’s iPhone App, Nearest Tube uses the OpenGL libraries to skew and distort that data as you point the camera in different directions, thus providing a little more of a 3D perspective than say something like Layar which I have talked about previously on this blog. Chetan Demani, one of the founders of Acrossair also points out going forward any company making AR type apps will need to utilize existing location information and pre-load all the data they want to display. So the nirvana of just-in-time downloads of location data to overlay on your iPhone video image is not here,… and may not be for a while. What will differentiate the software producers though is the relevancy, and accuracy of their location information. So there will be some room for competition for a quite some time.

    He went on to say that it’s pretty simple to do AR applications using the new 3.1 APIs, due out in September. ” It’s a pretty straightforward API. There’s no complexity in there. All it does is it just switches on the video feed at the background. That’s the only API that’s published. All we’re doing is using that video feed at the back. It just displays the video feed as if it’s a live camera feed.

    via Augmenting Reality with the iPhone – O’Reilly Broadcast.

  • If You’re Not Seeing Data, You’re Not Seeing | Wired.com

    Wired has an interesting survey of current state of the art in Augmented Reality. They are finally taking notice of this killer app for Smartphones. Let’s hope location data becomes useful worldwide. And let’s hope some enterprising iPhone developers create the Killer App for the iPhone as soon as humanly possible.  There needs to be a mashup with the iPhone video camera, Google Maps and Google Search. All done in a nice seamless iPhone App interface.

    Smartphone Augmented Reality - Simlar to Layar
    What if you could see data?

    Already, developers are creating augmented reality applications and games for a variety of smartphones, so your phone’s screen shows the real world overlaid with additional information such as the location of subway entrances, the price of houses, or Twitter messages that have been posted nearby.

    via If You’re Not Seeing Data, You’re Not Seeing | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

  • Toshiba Announces World’s Largest SD Card – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com

    SDXC is yet another memory format all manufacturers will have to adopt. Isn’t it frightening how much the removable memory market has fractured into mico-formats for memory cards. About a week ago I was playing with an Olympus voice recorder at work. It had it’s own funny shaped memory cards you had to buy from Olympus if you wanted to increase the storage size. One positive thing I will say though is this. SDHC at least has consolidated some of the mindshare around a commonly supported form factor for removable storage. Compact Flash once enjoyed a similar amount of support. But nowadays you cannot even find a laptop with CardBus slots anymore. Many add-ons for laptops are installed on internal PCIe busses now.

    I hope all the device manufacturers get onboard with the SDXC format only because of the limits on the FileSystem on these cards has needed to adapt to the vagaries of long form video shooting. I remember the painful days of 4GB file size limits for video. That took a long time to dissapate on the desktop computer. It’s high time it disappeared on digital video cameras as well.

    Toshiba says all three new cards will bring a maximum write speed of 35 megabytes per second and a read speed of 60 megabytes per second. For videophiles, the new SDXC format will enable video files to extend beyond the current limit of 4 gigabytes.

    via Toshiba Announces World’s Largest SD Card – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com.

  • AppleInsider | TomTom for Apple iPhone released in U.S. App Store for $99

    Apple Insider reports this morning that the TomTom GPS application has appeared in the U.S. AppStore. And if you decided to get the external antenna you can even use your iPod Touch as a GPS. That is way cool and way more useful than I had previously thought this was going to be. Kudos for TomTom to make the thing more widely available on the iPhone platform.

    The product works with the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, which include an integrated GPS receiver. It will reportedly also be compatible with the first-generation iPhone and the iPod touch once the separate combo hardware kit is made available. TomTom has not yet announced a price for the hardware package.

    via AppleInsider | TomTom for Apple iPhone released in U.S. App Store for $99.