Showing posts with label Shopping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shopping. Show all posts

Sunday, May 04, 2014

A Good Enough Camera For The Internet Of Things?


Lens-Free Camera Sees Things Differently

Good enough is good enough. When you are just trying to count the cars and the people, this would be great.

This is a remarkable jump from the camera that we use today. I wish a similar jump were possible for the phone battery. A 10,000 mAh battery would be nice.

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Friday, July 19, 2013

41 Megapixels Are Really About Zoom

Vintage cameras, not for sale
Vintage cameras, not for sale (Photo credit: Soumyadeep Paul)
A smartphone is a wonderful thing, except it has a lousy battery. A smartphone camera is a wonderful thing - I don't use a real camera anymore - but the zoom on it is ridiculously poor. The photo quality is fine with eight megapixels. Enter 41 megapixels. Are photos now going to be five times sharper? Maybe, maybe not. But I think what is more likely is photos of objects five times as far are going to be just as good. And I like that idea.
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Thursday, August 09, 2012

The Tech Silent Spring


I have been going through this list of NYC tech companies (Made In NYC) and if there is one pattern there it is that these tech companies take great pride in not having a phone number to call.

I am not sure that is a good thing.
Silent Spring Silent Spring is a book written by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin on September 27, 1962. The book is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement. .... Silent Spring facilitated the ban of the pesticide DDT in 1972 in the United States. ..... Silent Spring has been featured in many lists of the best nonfiction books of the twentieth century. ... Most recently, Silent Spring was named one of the 25 greatest science books of all time by the editors of Discover Magazine.
There are so many options to blog. There are so few options to podcast. I know of no easy one.

Things are too silent on the web. Voice's time will come. I see an opening.
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Monday, July 30, 2012

$8,500 Smart Chair: It Moves

The desk that keeps you standing I thought was pretty cool. Although a 40 minute workout goes a long way to help you out no matter what your chair. But this smart chair just keeps moving.

This $8,500 "Smart" Office Chair Never Stops Moving
chairs should instead encourage small but constant motions that are good for the body..... incorporates ergonomics and neuroscience to stimulate not just the body, but also the emotions. ...... custom-sized, carbon-fiber shells that wrap around each leg. They allow a generous range of movements—stretching, leaning, twisting—while supporting the spine ..... most LimbIC users prefer their feet to be suspended in air ..... They should feel weightless and bouncy, an effect achieved by stimulating different body points that send signals to the inner ear. The result: a feeling of happiness and increased creativity ..... extensively studied the limbic system, a part of the brain involved in emotions (including pleasure) and instinct .... customer feedback so far has been extremely positive ..... In concept, the chair acts as an extension of the body, adjusting subtly to the user’s movements, such as picking up the phone or using a mouse ..... You can even make dancing and skiing movement while seated .... “I could sit and concentrate for extended periods of time even with my acutely herniated disc,” one finance expert writes in a testimonial. “With other chairs, this used to be impossible.” .... “It doesn’t look comfortable. With a human in it, you recognize it as a chair, but without it you don’t.” ... “Most see it as an investment in their health and in themselves.”
The video is worth the watch.



I took particular note of this:
threw out traditional sitting rules such as the expectation that people should sit upright, with knees bent at a 90-degree angle. That science was developed in the 19th century
You mean the way I sit is fossil thinking?

Somebody put some thought into this new chair.


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Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Pinching Pennies

Warren Buffett speaking to a group of students...Image via WikipediaI came across this article earlier. You have to remember you are talking about a billionaire dude.

Forbes: You Can Get Richer Pinching Pennies Like Warren Buffett
Brown bag breakfast and lunch at work..... Don’t go food shopping when you’re hungry. ..... Cook meals instead of relying on takeout and ordering in. Eat at restaurants only on special occasions. ...... Scoop your own ice cream. ...... Carry a refillable water bottle instead of buying bottled water. ...... Wait for items you covet to go on sale—either in stores or online. (By then you may have decided you don’t them after all.) .... Avoid recreational shopping. Instead, make a list of what you really need. ..... Unless you need something immediately (and chances are you don’t), buy seasonal clothing once the season is already underway. Examples: bathing suits in July; winter coats and cashmere sweaters at after Christmas sales. ..... Leave your credit cards at home and pay in cash. ...... Take your date to a freebie. ..... Cook together; how you cope with kitchen mishaps could speak volumes about how you would weather life’s serious ups and downs. ..... Look for a partner whose money styles are compatible with your own. ....... To reduce the price of formula, nurse your baby for the first year, if possible. ...... Until children reach age 12, buy clothing on sale at the end of the season and put it away for the following year. (Once they become teenagers this doesn’t work anymore, since their growth rate can be dramatic and unpredictable.) ...... Check thrift shops for lightly used children’s clothing, especially sweaters, fleeces and outerwear. ..... Buy toys and children’s books at yard sales and rummage sales. ....... Buy furniture at auction. .... Hire painters and contractors during the winter. ...... Get plumbing repairs done during the summer if you live in a climate with seasonal differences. (Plumbers are busiest during the heating season.) ...... Pay down your mortgage (and other debt) ..... Don’t see a movie in the theater unless it has gotten great reviews or has so many special effects that it can only be thoroughly enjoyed on the big screen. Otherwise rent it. ...... Patronize your local library. ...... Find the swankest hotel in town, and look for a cheaper place next door. ..... Bring your own food and soft drinks instead of buying food on board planes; at airports; or relying on hotel minibars and room service.
But then there is another billionaire, Larry Ellison. The guy went ahead and bought a boat. That wrecked his first marriage. I guess there is no one way.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Paperless Post Iterations

Post-ItImage via WikipediaEvite Cries Y(h)elp! Copies Paperless Post Pixel By Pixel

Only now is Paperless Post thinking in terms of the freemium model, and I believe they have been profitable for a year now. That is curious. Most others start with the freemium model. They build the user base, and monetize later.

With Paperless post you get to send out invitations to important events in your life. The paper is gone, but the beauty is preserved, perhaps even enhanced.

And it is not just about digital. It is not just that you used to send paper versions, and now you send digital versions. The digital medium allows for the collection of data as to how the invitation card travels around as people open up the cards, RSVP and so on. That feedback loop was not possible with the paper incarnations of the cards.

Other than sending more and more beautiful cards to more and more people for more and more events what are some of the directions Paperless Post could go on to?

One obvious thing that emerges is that special social graph of people you invite to the special events in your life, people who show up for those special moments. Culling that social graph could lead Paperless Post into unforeseen directions. Amazon started out selling books. The Amazon Web Services was built for internal use, and now is a major Amazon offering.

Monday, April 25, 2011

Adaptive Text: The Book Deserves To Come Alive

A Picture of a eBookImage via Wikipedia
The Technium: What Books Will Become: a screen that we watch can watch us. The tiny eyes built into your tablet, the camera that faces you, can read your face. Prototype face tracking software can already recognize your mood, and whether you are paying attention, and more importantly where on the screen you are paying attention. It can map whether you are confused by a passage, or delighted, or bored. That means that the text could adapt to how it is perceived. Perhaps it expands into more detail, or shrinks during speed reading, or changes vocabulary when you struggle, or reacts in a hundred possible ways. There are numerous experiments playing with adaptive text. One will give you different summaries of characters and plot depending on how far you've read. ..... books with moving images. We don't have a word for these yet .... Text inside of moving images as well as images inside of text. .... This hybrid of movies and books will require a whole set of tools we don't have right now. Presently it is difficult to browse moving images, or to parse a movie, or to annotate a frame in a movie. Ideally we'd like to manipulate kinetic images with the same facility, ease and power that we manipulate text -- indexing it, referencing, cut and pasting, summarizing, quoting, linking, and paraphrasing the content. As we gain these tools (and skills) we'll make a class of highly visual books, ideal for training and education, which we can study, rewind, and study again. They will be books we can watch or TV we can read. ......... The current custodians of ebooks -- Amazon, Google and the publishers -- have agreed to cripple the liquidity of ebooks by preventing readers from cut-and-pasting text easily, or to copy large sections of a book, or to otherwise seriously manipulate the text. But eventually the text of ebooks will be liberated, and the true nature of books will blossom. ...... We can even filter the most popular highlights of all readers, and in this manner begin to read a book in a new way. I can also read the highlights of a particular friend, scholar or critic. ....... Reading becomes more social. We can share not just the titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them. Today, we can highlight a passage. Tomorrow we will be able to link passages. We can add a link from a phrase in the book we are reading to a contrasting phrase in another book we've read; from a word in a passage to an obscure dictionary, from a scene in a book to a similar scene in a movie. ........ Even a minor good work could accumulate a wiki-like set of critical comments tightly bound to the actual text. ....... dense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event ....... Wikipedia is the first networked book. ...... This deep rich hyperlinking will weave all networked books into one large meta-book, the universal library. Over the next century, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. ....... no work, no idea, stands alone, but that all good, true and beautiful things are networks, ecosystems of intertwingled parts, related entities and similar works ........ The complete universal library, all books in all languages, will soon be available on any screen. There will be many ways to access a book, but for most people most of the time, any particular book will essentially be free. (You'll pay a monthly fee for "all you can read.") Access is easy, but finding a book, or getting it attention will be hard, so the importance of the book's network will grow, because the network is what brings in readers. ...... A book is an attention unit. A fact is interesting, an idea is important, but only a story, a good argument, a well-crafted narrative is amazing, never to be forgotten. As Muriel Rukeyser said, "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." ...... In the long run (next 10-20 years) we won't pay for individual books any more than we'll pay for individual songs or movies.
Reducing price and enhancing quality is what businesses strive for. But the music and movie industries have been bummed out for years now because modern technology has managed to drive the price point to zero. That is like the price point attaining nirvana, no?

Saturday, December 18, 2010

130 Million Books


It is not an infinity. There are only so many books in the world. Google has come up with the magic number. It is almost 130 million.

Thursday, October 07, 2010

eBooks: Yet Another Technology Looking For Business Models

Bill and Melinda Gates during their visit to t...Image via Wikipedia
CNet: New study suggests e-book piracy is on the rise
It started with music. Movies and books will not be spared, are not being spared. It is a mindfood thing. The Internet is like this vast farm custom made for the production and consumption of mindfood in its various forms.

The first instinct of the industries has been to fight the technology. It is not true that people seem to have this unbeatable thirst to steal that which comes out during the night that is the internet. People like the convenience of the digital format. In digital formats these products - books, movies, music - take no space. Your device does not count, it is not music, it is not a book, it is no movie.

Just like the pharmaceutical industry does not have the same static price globally - it charges less in the poor countries and even gives it out for free in some - the textbook industry has to be the same way.

Maybe the price of that eBook is not $9.99. Maybe the price of that song is not 99 cents. Those prices have to go down. And they have to go even further down in the Global South.

And then the industry has to make peace with the fact that there will be some leakage. Like Bill Gates said a long time ago about China, "We want them to pay for our software, but if they are going to steal it anyway, we want them to steal our software." That has to be the spirit. Have you even been to a supermarket where some guy/gal is standing outside an eatery giving away free samples? It might be just one bite, but it is good business. I get the impression even free is a business model. When you are not raking in the cash, you are giving stuff away for free and you are building your brand.

Even when people don't give you cash, they give you mindshare. The whole advertising industry revolves around that mindshare. Don't complain when you get it.

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