The future of mobile phones

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Sep 182007

This morning during my RSS read ritual I stumbled upon 3 companies which on their own will make a difference. But if someone will put together the products that these companies offer will make a paradigm shift in the way we are using mobile phones.

Cubic Telecom offers a programmable SIM card. That SIM can be configured with different mobile numbers based on your location. If I go to UK I could use an UK number. If I stay in Romania I should use a romanian number. Also their SIM is able to detect the WIFI networks and automatically switch to the WIFI network for VOIP calls. This company is lowering the cost of the calls.

Yap is a company which provides speech to text and text to speech services on mobile phones. It seems that they support only the english language for the moment. They allow you to send / receive text messages and emails without using the keyboard.

Cognitive Code (the link points to a presentation of the company) offers SILVIA (Symbolically Isolated, Linguistically Variable, IntelligenceAlgorithms) platform which is a complete system for the development and deployment of intelligent applications to almost any platform, with a technological core that allows humans to interact with computers in completely natural and intuitive ways. The platform helps derive context and meaning from user inputs, via speech, text, or other methods, so you can communicate with the platform as if it were another person. This is their marketing talk :)

For the normal persons around: is a product which implements the concept Do What I Mean on any platform, including mobile phones. It has some basic AI stuff inside and as I see it now it seems it works.

I can only hope that the rumored Gphone when it will appear will have Yap and SILVIA on it or maybe will support it in a future software update.

Posted by Tudor at 6:06 am Tagged with: , ,

What If Apple would go into the ebooks business?

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Sep 062007

As I was watching the quicktime streaming of the latest Steve Jobs keynote (the one with the beat goes on) this morning, some thoughts came to my mind. For the record I am not affected by the reality distortion field, but I won’t focus now on the less than stellar business practices of Apple. This will come in a later post. I will focus only on the technology part of the keynote. So if you wish to follow my reasoning….

  • The new Ipods are all OSX based as it seems, but I will focus only on the Ipod Touch and the Iphone. These 2 devices have one of the biggest and best screens in the realm of mobile devices.
  • I remember, I think 5 years ago when Apple introduced OSX 10, they were bragging about PDF native support in the operating system.
  • There isn’t a good pdf renderer for mobile devices (ebook readers) yet.
  • Most of the ebooks are in pdf format.
  • Apple announced a partnership with Starbucks.
  • There is a Starbucks shop in every Barnes & Noble book store.
  • Steve managed to negotiate with movie studios and music companies to put their products in the Itunes store. Somehow I think is going to be easier to negotiate with the book companies.
  • The Itunes store can be easily extended to support PDFs with DRM (so Steve and the industry would be happy). But I would really like to see support for PDFs without DRM on the Ipods also
  • Apple can go after Amazon’s books business
  • Both devices supports software updates very nicely.
  • You do not need a computer anymore to buy from Itunes.

I think everything is in place for a new line of business for Apple. I wonder if the numbers are good enough for them to create a new ecosystem and to do for the books what they did for the music.

And if you guys really do this, please make sure that multitasking is working. I would really like to listen to music while I am reading my favorite book.

Posted by Tudor at 7:18 am Tagged with: , , ,

DRM is bad for your health

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Aug 302007

In the last 2 weeks 3 things happened which involved 3 different companies which should tell everybody that DRM infection is bad for you.
First Google closed his video store and then automatically your videos, which one may argue belongs to you after you payed for them, become unusable. Then Microsoft had issues with the activation servers for Vista and as a result 12000 users (according to Microsoft) had reduced functionality or locked systems. Think of the “activation” as DRM applied to software. And now today I read about Sony which is switching the online music store from ATRAC (the DRM infected sound format) to Windows Media in US (another DRM infected sound format). In their FAQ they suggest to the users that have music in ATRAC format bought from the store to burn an audio CD and then ripped the CD in MP3 format for the user to continue to enjoy the music that they already bought.

Somehow these companies are managing to campaign against DRM better than all the organizations that are fighting against DRM.

Posted by Tudor at 8:41 pm Tagged with: , ,

Because I am bored

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Aug 212007

Posted by Tudor at 8:29 am Tagged with:

Helping you trusting the technology

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Jul 082007

Posted by Tudor at 9:45 pm Tagged with: ,

Best software generated voice ever

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Jul 032007

Today when I was random browsing using stumble upon, I came over a website which advertise a very impressive software generated voice. Much better than the ATT voices which seems to be the standard and ten times better than the Microsoft voices. The fact that they have available a Romanian voice made the software a must for me. If you are not paying attention you could take the voice as a human voice, especially the English one. I can’t wait to download and purchase the software if is reasonable priced. Using this software you can actually listen to all the articles that you are downloading from the web. I wonder if the guys will have an API available and how easy will be to integrate this technology in other products.

Posted by Tudor at 6:48 pm Tagged with: ,

OpenOffice.org vs Firefox

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Jun 272007

The idea for this article came when I heard about OpenOffice extension mechanism and I start looking for extensions. I got almost nothing in my searches and I tried to explain to myself why there are so few extensions for OpenOffice. On the other hand you can find numerous Firefox extensions. Below are the facts and possible some conclusions.

Continue reading »

Posted by Tudor at 11:35 am Tagged with: , , ,

Not my usual kind of posts

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Jun 092007

Why the video above? Because I liked it and already more than 1.2 million people saw it. This is the kind of audience that most TV stations will die for.

Posted by Tudor at 3:07 pm Tagged with:

Google Gears and more

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Jun 062007

Last week Google launched Google Gears which allows offline access to online applications such as Google Reader. Most probably in the next months they will add offline support to all the other major services that they offer. And at that time Microsoft will start loosing revenues from the Windows Office combo which still is the milk cow for them.

Yesterday I noticed that Remember the Milk start offering offline access to their task management application using Google Gears toolkit. Most probably these guys will end up being aquired by Google and their software will be integrated in Google Calendar or will evolve into a competing solution for Basecamp software from 37signals.

The most interesting bit of information that I read yesterday was the fact that Google aquired PeakStream Inc, the guys which were starting to provide a middleware which leverage the power of GPUs, and multicore processors. Is clear that Google needs more computing power and more importantly needs more computing power per watt. On the other hand is somehow sad that the rest of the world won’t be able to use the Peakstream middleware anymore

Posted by Tudor at 11:59 am Tagged with: ,

Photosynth Second Take

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Jun 052007

Some time ago I played and wrote about Photosynth. Now a couple of days ago I watched a demo of the technology behind the software at TED 2007. You can see the demo on the TED site. The Microsoft employee mentioned there the code name for the technology “Sea Dragon”. Again another term that worth search it for on your favorite search engine.

It is amazing to see how easy they are playing with images which are big. And I mean BIG (tens of gigapixels, maybe even more). It is more amazing to see how easy and fast they are able to look (visual search) for all kind of visual features in the big image.

It is so easy to look for human faces in a video surveillance “tape” that is scary. Also the availability of video surveillance equipment especially in big cities is scaring. If you put these technologies together than makes sense for the conspiracy theorist in me to say that “they” and I do no mean Microsoft, were using this kind of technology for years most probably tens of years.

Posted by Tudor at 5:03 pm Tagged with: , ,
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