One of the most important of the emerging GPS initiatives is the wireless E911 mandate requiring cellular carriers to link caller location to an emergency call. Although network-based solutions are being developed, most carriers will likely adopt handset-based GPS functionality. In addition, other GPS-based "people-tracking" devices are being developed that are as simple as a pendant tucked into a child's pocket or backpack.

GPS is used for a wide variety of applications by many different industries. Besides the military, end uses fall into nine primary categories: aviation, marine, people tracking, recreation, surveying/mapping, timing, communications, in-vehicle navigation, and vehicle/freight tracking; the latter three account for two-thirds of total revenue. Primary market drivers and major players are listed for each segment.
6:17:47 PM    comment   

The slides from an O'Reilly conference. Also see the FAQ. [source: Steve Chang]
6:03:46 PM    comment   

One of the most important of the emerging GPS initiatives is the wireless E911 mandate requiring cellular carriers to link caller location to an emergency call. Although network-based solutions are being developed, most carriers will likely adopt handset-based GPS functionality. In addition, other GPS-based "people-tracking" devices are being developed that are as simple as a pendant tucked into a child's pocket or backpack.

GPS is used for a wide variety of applications by many different industries. Besides the military, end uses fall into nine primary categories: aviation, marine, people tracking, recreation, surveying/mapping, timing, communications, in-vehicle navigation, and vehicle/freight tracking; the latter three account for two-thirds of total revenue. Primary market drivers and major players are listed for each segment.
5:54:18 PM    comment   

In a new white paper, "Telematics Paradigm Shift: Industry Strategies Mature as Business Model Realities Sink In," The Strategis Group predicts that growth in the automotive telematics market will be catalyzed as auto companies and wireless operators partner to introduce more sophisticated hands-free voice solutions into cars. Counter to a perceived lull in market demand, a new generation of emerging technologies offers opportunity for the mass penetration of telematics services.

"We have seen a 250 percent increase in our subscriber base this year alone, and anticipate ending the calendar year 2001 with almost two million subscribers," said Chet Huber, President of OnStar, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors and a leading telematics provider in the U.S. "We have developed quality services that drivers want and need in their vehicle on an easy-to use, flexible technology platform."

The Strategis Group believes that telematics will become a competitive differentiator of automobiles and will increasingly help sell cars to safety-conscious and connectivity-oriented car buyers. That said, automakers will continue to struggle to develop highly profitable businesses revolving around safety-based embedded systems alone, and the investment-intensive platforms for advanced customer relationship management and vehicle relationship management will continue to be slow to develop.

"Voice services have already emerged as a profitable application in the vehicle. The next logical step is to improve the quality and the level of integration of voice into mass-market vehicles," said Aldo Morri, a senior consultant with The Strategis Group. "Operators and auto OEMs are realizing that by utilizing up-and-coming technologies like Bluetooth and speech recognition, telematics is primed to reach the next level."
5:52:25 PM    comment   

MBC's services will be the first in the world to deliver high-quality music, video and data to mobile users through various kinds of mobile receiver terminals, including those in cars, ships, trains, handheld terminals, personal digital assistants (PDAs), cellular phones and home portables. A very small antenna will be sufficient to receive MBC broadcasting signals even inside office buildings and in vehicles moving at high speed. MBC will supplement its satellite service with terrestrial signal repeaters.
5:49:01 PM    comment   

The researchers say that the new device may help build the foundation for the development of sophisticated machines at a molecular scale, ultimately evolving to the development of nano-robots that might some day build new molecules, computer circuits or fight infectious diseases.
5:47:29 PM    comment   

The right kind of messaging software can do more than simply shuttle information from one point to another, says Rick Kuzyk. It can also save a business.
5:35:38 PM    comment   

THE WIRELESS STRATEGIES to stimulate the adoption of mobile data among enterprises that were hatched in the boardrooms of major telecommunications carriers in 2001 are likely to take hold in 2002.

Chief among those strategies will be a move by carriers like Sprint and VoiceStream -- and possibly AT&T Wireless -- to offer an alternative to their current 3G (third-generation) plans via low-cost, high-performance access to data over Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11b/a) solutions.
5:25:14 PM    comment   

My answer is that the physical connection between them is not necessary, and Jobs never implied that it was. He sees these as independent pieces that can be linked as demonstrated or linked wirelessly with 802.11. He has the same vision as Mira demonstrated, I'm certain. So why was the first announcement just of the new iMac? Who knows? Maybe he didn't have a wireless prototype ready, and this was just an example of "Fire and Motion". Maybe he is waiting for a more dramatic venue, or suspense to build. Maybe he can't get the handwriting input method to work well enough to make a public bet on it yet. But I am pretty confident that he's going the same way with this.

And I agree with Jobs that "the CRT is dead". The screens you carry around will be LCD and the big stationary screens will be DLP or Plasma. [Better Living Through Software]
5:17:29 PM    comment   

First, there is a reason that people get excited by products like Mira. Tablet computing fits the way that people want to experience many of their computing activities. Glenn is an author, and a pen-based tablet is probably inferior to a keyboard for entering large documents. But that's not the only way that people use computers. Here's an example; I often like to relax before bed by looking up and reading about research in some topic that interests me. With a PDF viewer and ClearType, my wireless laptop works quite well. However, I almost never use the keyboard during these browse/reading sessions, and it is kind of awkward having this clam-shaped thing with its fragile hinges in bed with me. An even better example is when my daughter wants to sit with me and play "Reader Rabbit." She's not so good at sitting wherever is most convenient to plug in a computer and CRT, so she prefers to use a laptop while sitting with me on the couch. But she also lacks the empathy to understand the stress she's putting on the computer when she continually tries to detach the screen (where all the action is) from the keyboard. For practically every children's sing-along and educational CD, a tablet device would be far superior. In fact, DVD players have a limited ability to select things the way a mouse on a PC does, and you can notice that many educational DVDs today look and behave very similar to the educational software available for PCs. The point is that the DVD player doesn't need a keyboard, it just needs a way to select regions of the screen, and quite a bit can be accomplished.

Like the Joshua Quittner article quoted Steve Jobs as saying, this is the third wave of personal computing. First was all about using the computer as an individual productivity tool: spreadsheets, word processors, etc. Second wave was all about using computers to connect individuals to one another: e-mail, Internet, instant-messaging. This third wave is about digital entertainment. Now, I'll agree with Glenn that tablets don't really help much for "first wave" personal computing. But they are sure nice for "second wave", and a necessity for "third wave".

So if tablets are such a good idea, why have they failed? Well, saying that tablet computing won't work because it's failed in the past is like saying that Thomas Edison should never have continued working on new lightbulb designs after his first 999 designs failed. Edison, when asked about all of his failures, said something like "I didn't fail 10,000 times; I simply found 10,000 new ways not to make a lightbulb." In fact, Glenn points out one of the reasons that tablet computing hasn't yet caught on: price. Citing price as prohibitive in computing is a poor way to predict the future, though. We're chasing Moore's law, and nothing ever stays "too expensive". The hardware continues to drop in price, and more importantly, so does the bandwidth. An important fact about the Mira that Gates demonstrated is that it doesn't need a power-hungry CPU, hard drive, or other expensive peripherals. It is basically just an LCD screen with built-in WiFi that terminals to any commodity PC. That's pretty freekin' cheap, and less drain on the battery. The main thing making such a device possible is ubiquitous WiFi. And now that cheap WiFi is a reality, the only thing preventing Mira from crashing into the market in a big way is the fact that it has to be productized and manufactured.

Admittedly, home entertainment, web browsing, and situations where a powerful PC is available nearby are not the only situations that are important for the tablet market. If Tablet PCs hope to replace laptops in business use, they need to have good input techniques. This is where the handwriting recognition and "active ink" come in. Again, it's easy to dismiss this with "it's been tried, didn't work," but that's not exactly correct. In fact, for Chinese characters (which also comprise Japanese kanji), it is considerably faster to enter large amounts of text by pen than by keyboard - and this has been true for awhile, even using older handwriting recognition systems. Most Chinese still use pinyin on the keyboard, since that's the way that we tend to ship computers, but more ubiquitous tablet computing will likely tip the scales. And considering that more than half of the content on the web is expected to be Chinese by 2015, getting rid of the keyboard is going to make a whole lot of sense for a majority of the web's population (and that even if we didn't significantly improve the handwriting recognition by then). Now, on the other hand, no amount of improvements in handwriting recognition performance will make it more efficient for westerners to pen large documents rather than type. Writing using traditional pen and paper is still slower than typing, using low-fidelity alphabets like ours. This predicts that the keyboard will be around for a good deal longer, at least in the 25% of the world that uses alphabets. But it's not necessarily true that the speed offered by a keyboard is necessary for many of the things that people do. People do put up with Palm's "jot" and PocketPC's text-entry idiosyncracies. These are adequate for things like scheduling meetings and taking simple notes. To be sure, there are plenty of opportunities for research to improve these technologies beyond "adequate". But there are quite a few improvements to "ink" user interfaces that are just waiting to be implemented and don't even require hard research. So I think that "ink" is clearly usable in many useful scenarios today, which is something that couldn't be said the last few times that we tried tablet computing. And the situation with ink is only going to get better over the next five years.

Think about it. Why can't I study at www.hanyu.com.cn or www.koreantutor.com by using a tablet and a pen that sit in my lap? Both sites also do Karaoke, so why can't I have the songs and words play from a big screen hanging off my wall? Why is it that I can buy a plasma flat-screen TV that hangs off my wall, but I still have to use wires if I want to hook it up to my Xbox, computer, cable TV, and VCR? Why doesn't that sucker just have WiFi built-in? Why can't I play my Reader Rabbit CDs on the TV screen and use the DVD remote control to select the objects?

The answer? There is no good answer anymore. All of this stuff is feasible today using inexpensive technologies. These are the sorts of questions that every consumer is going to be asking, and there is no excuse to not be able to answer them. People want it and companies like Microsoft, Apple, Sony, Matsushita, and Moxy can build it. Build it we will, and everyone will buy it. Sure there will be mistakes and dead-ends along the way (remember beta vs. VHS, and TV+VCR combos) But this is already a juggernaut, in my opinion, and it's going to roll right through the objections of doubters like Glenn. If I'm worried about anything, it's that all of the other competitors will have everything locked down before Microsoft can get a piece of the market. It's going to be a major feeding frenzy, and there are some big, toothy Jackals already at the scene.

Changing topics, here is an article about "Perl in Bioinformatics". The idea of using a language like Perl to do bioinformatics seemed so crazy that I just had to check it out. Turns out to be an interesting article; he's not suggesting to rewrite all of those parallel data mining algorithms in Perl after all! [Better Living Through Software]
5:09:55 PM    comment