I am pretty sure that this symphony orchestra actually follows the conductor and not the first violin (backup conductor 
).
What do you get when you combine Second Life with some new hardware? Check the video below. I am still thinking of the possibilities….
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.
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.
If you talk about web 2.0 sites (applications) from the point of view of an IT business related professional, these are the applications that are most used : Email, Instant Messaging, Calendar, Tasks, some sort of Project Management, a Document Management System, maybe a CRM and a sales funnel and a Dashboard. in the web 2.0 space there are a lot of application providers some big one like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and some small ones like 37 Signals, Zimbra, 30 Boxes, Devshop. I am not talking here about the infrastructure providers like IBM, Oracle, Sun which allows all the “front end” applications to be developed and hosted.
From a small business point of view, the are some issues that are stopping a wider spread adoption of these apps:
- lack of offline access
- lack of privacy
- too little or too many features
- missing single sign on
- common interface
If you take a look at all these applications you will see that all these sites offer a limited free version, and then a feature complete paying version. After I looked at all these sites I noticed that most of them are asking anywhere between 2 to 4 $ per user per month for the services that they are offering.
Assuming Firefox 3 will help alleviate the issue of off line access I am sure there is a big opportunity for a company to offer all these services under a single sign on and a common interface with a pricing scheme like this:
- no matter what you are using your encrypted remote hard drive the storage should cost you around 0.5$ per GB per user per month.
- basic services which will be used by individuals and companies like Email, Contacts, Instant Messaging, Calendar, Tasks, Information Organizer (something like Google notebook and docs), Photos, should cost you 1$ per service per user per month.
- advanced services like Project Management, Document Management, Clients management, Sales Funnel should cost you 2$ per service per user per month.
- the client should be able to buy credit in 10-20$ increments and then should be able to use the credit however he wants it, enabling and disabling services, increasing and decreasing the storage space according to his needs.
You could have let’s say Email, Calendar and Instant Messaging with 4 GB storage space for 5$ per month without the lack of privacy or adverts in or around your email. I know I would pay these amounts for this kind of services if I would be sure my data is private and encrypted at all times.
Waiting for your comments
Long time since I last posted here. I didn’t felt like posting for a while.
Anyway, yesterday Google launched Google Apps Premier Edition .They want to give you complete freedom from the desktop (usually would be Microsoft desktop ) and move you completely on the web.
There are some trends which to me seems very interesting.
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Everybody is talking these days about how the new cars will be fuel cell based, will drive without any human help and basically will change the world. What they are doing here is very good for sure, because they go away from oil towards renewable energy sources but I am sure that if you want to really change the world you need to produce a paradigm shift of a bigger magnitude. Something similar or better then the Segway will do, but would help to be a little more successful
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Around 10 years ago, it was a big hype around satellite based mobile communications and internet access.
The big 3 names were Iridium , Globalstar and Teledesic. You can check the Wikipedia articles about what happened with them. Is less important what happened is more important what can be done to avoid the mistakes. Short story below:
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