Computerworld on Boingo: the article mentions Sprint PCS's interest and investment. (An alert reader emailed me several days ago that Sprint PCS invested in Sky Dayton's incubator firm eCompanies, not directly in Boingo, however.)

1:09:28 PM    comment   

Honda is manufacturing a little robot called ASIMO who walks just like a Japanese child. It's really incredible how sophisticated the biped motion is; I thought researchers had given up on two-legged robotics. Honda is apparently using these as receptionists, and I suppose the specter of a humanoid receptionist scuttling around on hands and knees is more than a little disturbing. Sony's dogs can talk, though, so maybe one day dogs will be more common as receptionists.

Well, gamespyarcade.com has reverse-engineered the Xbox network protocol and already has built the capability to play games like Halo against other players over the Internet. Tonight there are 350+ people online playing Halo. Now my crappy cable connection is really bugging me. After the Excite(at)Home debacle, I was getting just 128k. And even though the speeds have improved on downlink, the uplink speeds for cable Internet have never been that good, and slow uplink is not very nice for online Halo. Maybe it is time to switch back to DSL. [Better Living Through Software]
12:47:08 PM    comment   

Well, it looks like tablet devices are going to rule the next decade. One of the big ideas behind the TabletPC is the realization that a laptop and keyboard sort of hamper interpersonal communications. Meetings don't go as well when everyone's face is hidden behind a laptop screen and hands are busy typing. It is much easier to have a meeting (or convince your wife that you are paying attention to her) if you have a pen and pad of paper instead. And people with a strong visual modality (like Bill Gates) think better in pictures than in text. One of the TabletPC slogans sums this up as "think in ink".

The Mira device sounds pretty cool, though. Apparently someone realized that, if it is difficult to see your co-workers when behind a laptop, it is also difficult to watch TV. And someone else realized that a TabletPC could be stripped down to be lighter and less power-hungry by acting as a wireless multimedia terminal into your PC or Xbox. Of course, I've watched streaming media over my wireless iPaq, and I can control the lights and my stereo from my iPaq or laptop (or cellphone, even). But I had not even considered what it would mean to combine these together into a tablet. Combined with some other developments, this is an incredible landslide that has already begun. I am disappointed that I never realized how close it was, and I just hope that Sony has been sleeping too.

One major impediment has been the PC legacy's stranglehold of non-determinism. That is to say, PCs come in so many different combinations of hardware and configuration (literally billions of combinations) that it is impossible to test bits of software on every potential configuration. The result is a user experience that is not very predictable, and programmers write to the lowest common denominator of hardware. For example, why does it still take 5 minutes to boot my PC? If I hibernate the machine using the laptop's BIOS, I can resume within a matter of seconds, so it would obviously be possible to hibernate immediately after startup and use that image next time I want to restart, rather than force me through an entire reboot cycle. It's brain-dead simple; there is no excuse for machines not having nearly instant boot-up times. How about bugs? When something crashes only on my machine, but nobody else's, what do I do? Why is it that setting my video card to "no acceleration" sometimes stops programs from crashing? What the hell is that about? I'm not even a novice user, and I resent having to know about such a stupid thing as a "video card" and "acceleration" to watch a VCD. Customers (most of them) don't want to buy "RAM" and "Video Accelerators". They want to pay some money and get the experience of watching DVDs or hanging out with friends.

So I was holding my breath when I plugged in my Xbox the first time. Hook up to the TV, hit the power button ... it works! Go purchase the magic DVD key and stick it in the machine, pop in a movie ... it works! Pop in a music CD and select play ... OK, you get the idea. Everything just works, and that is absolutely the way it has to be. Nothing else is acceptable; even my biased self would have sent the thing back to the store if it made me work to get a movie running.

What a completely stunning contrast from the PC! And a glorious contrast it is. This is the experience that the Xbox must keep (and must improve). And the functionality can grow -- already it is quite simple for a user to rip songs from a music CD to the Xbox and have games like "Project Gotham Racing" use the songs as a soundtrack even when the CD is removed. It's easy to imagine a device like the Xbox eventually replacing a stereo system, and serving as a terminal server for a Mira device. And why not? My grandmothers should be able to walk anwhere in their houses, watch movies, play games, listen to music, browse the web, and even send me letters. I already do all of this today, with no wires, from my laptop, but I'm not evil enough to try to get my grandmothers to do it. Why isn't this something that a child can do, just as easy as using the Xbox? Why can't we give users all of those experiences without forcing them to put up with bizarre technological tortures? Finally, I think we can. If we keep the Xbox experience solid, and deliver strongly on the tablet devices, the future is going to be beautiful indeed. [Better Living Through Software]
12:35:24 PM    comment