Category: The Rack

The Rack

Android Christmas Shopping Season Starts Now

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On Friday, our friends at Yixin Industry International Group (Shenzhen, China) emailed us with news on a new tablet computer. I guess it won’t be a surprise if I report that their MID YX-7100 product is a 7” iPad clone powered by a Rockchip 2808 processor and running Android 2.1.

I was curious. I took a look at the Yixin website, and this consumer-oriented electronics company has good marketing instincts—better than some well known US laptop makers. I’m impressed with their line of liquid USB flash drives, especially the beer models.

I studied the YX-7100 specs a little more closely, and discovered they’re offering the YX-7100 in white and pink, in addition to basic black. Nice touch!Continue reading

Archaic Telecom, The Rack

Microsoft’s Solution to Cyber Attacks: PC Health Certificates

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Quarantine officers on our flight

If you haven’t already, please read Seymour Hersh’s insightful and non-alarmist New Yorker article on cyber security in the context of the recent Stuxnet virus and China’s growing hack capabilities.

The Hersh piece contains a very simple solution to safeguard our nation’s IT against government or mere freelance hackers: mandatory encryption of all commercial and civil Internet communications.

While this broad approach is attractive in principle, cost and inconvenience make this less than desirable. And there’s also opposition from the same government intelligence agencies responsible for protecting us against cyber attacks in the first place: they wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop as easily.

Though perhaps not the most credible candidate, Microsoft has offered its own proposal, an idea that has proved useful in managing infectious diseases: PC health certificates.Continue reading

The Rack

India to Develop OS

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Infosys’s HQ in Bangalore

The Economic Times reports that India’s Defense Research and Development Organization— is this the equivalent of the US’s DARPA?—has set up software centers in Delhi and Bangalore with a charter to develop a highly-secure operating system. The effort would involve partnerships with software companies in both these cities, as well as Hyderabad.

Dr V K Saraswat, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister, said that DRDO’s project has the goal to protect data from cyber attacks, and the only way to do that is with a “home-grown  system, a complete architecture” this is controlled by India.Continue reading

The Rack

Technoverse Blog to Cruz Reader: Basta!

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Trying to find a WiFi signal

I am back from my Italian adventure, enjoying every minute of walking down narrow Roman alleys, biking past Umbrian fields, and eating and drinking the riches of the campagna. I was undecided about bringing along the 7” Cruz Reader until the very last minute when my instinctual urges to check for emails won out.  I had a fully charged tablet when I left the US.

When I arrived at the hotel in Rome, Velocity Micro’s tablet didn’t have enough oomph to power on.  I began to notice a pattern. I would charge the slab for a few hours, use it for a bit, then go out and have my vacation. The next morning I would discover that the Reader had an uncanny ability to leak its charge overnight.  As they say in Italian: basta! (enough).Continue reading

The Rack

Cruz Reader:Tablet Lite

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I was hoping to enter the Android-age this week courtesy of Velocity Micro’s $199 Cruz Reader. The Reader arrived yesterday on my porch sometime during a late afternoon editorial meeting. I excitedly opened up the UPS cardboard to be teased by the words “Unlimited Possibilities” printed on the Cruz’s product packaging.

I haven’t purchased that much gadgetry in recent years, but I do recall that my cell phone  came with a fairly thick operating manual. The Cruz Reader takes a more minimalist approach, providing you with a single-page folded booklet. I couldn’t find much more on-line, so I assumed this is a completely intuitive device that will guide my fingers in doing the work.

After booting up and then adjusting the touch calibration setting, I found that I couldn’t get the Cruz Reader to respond. I thought I had paper-weighted this thing. My fingers told me to reboot this mini-tablet by pressing the silvery on-off button on the side. I learned later that I was actually just putting it into a kind of sleep mode.Continue reading

The Rack

Samsung Tab: Good Reviews (with disclosures)

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While you were asleep this morning, Samsung officially launched Tab, its 7″ Android 2.2 tablet at the IFA show in Berlin.  There’s lots of coverage from the likes of Endgadget, PC World, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, etc.  Some are calling it a larger version of the Samsung Galaxy S, which to my mind is a compliment.

Last month, Dr. Smartphone and I went to Samsung’s retail store in New York City to visit with the Galaxy smartphone.  We both came away feeling this was the device to give Apple’s iPhone a smartphone inferiority complex. We were completely blown to pieces by its fluid video playback of Avatar.  It also seems to me that the Tab will  be breathing down iPad’s virtual neck over the next few years—1024×600, 1GHz Cortex A8,  HD replay, and many of the same Hub apps as the Galaxy.  Supporting both  2.5G GSM and 3G HSPA, Tab will be released in Europe first, and then ultimately the United States.

The reviews were very positive, and I think the excitement is entirely warranted.  What struck me was that many of  the reviews disclosed the writer’s travel expenses had been paid for by the show’s organizers or Samsung themselves. This is clearly a consequence of the  FTC’s new guidelines on “material connections.”Continue reading

The Rack

Hey, $199 Cruz Reader Ships in September

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This is the summer of the Android tablet. With all the gadget sites tracking products from Archos, Sony, Asus, et al., I thought I’d remind you of  an inexpensive ($199) Android 2.0  color e-book reader that is also a media player and has a browser.   Velocity Micro is now taking orders for their Cruz Reader 7″ tablet, which it plans to ship in early September.  I just plunked down my money.  Continue reading

The Rack

Researchers Give Up Google and Discover Single Tasking

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You know it’s August when The New York Times makes front pages news out of five brain researchers taking a rafting trip in Glen Canyon, Utah. It was really a working vacation, as these high-powered scientists, accompanied by a Times’ reporter (great gig, Matt Richtell), pondered how our brain changes when disconnected from Google, email, and the whole darn Internet.

Leave it to brain scientists to discover that they feel different and better after three days of vacationing with nothing to do but row, chat, and drink Tecate beers in the evening.  Of course, this group’s idea of hanging around the camp fire involves light banter about  brain chemicals in the bloodstream, the neuroeconomic value of information, and a famous University of Michigan study showing that people are better learners after a walk in the woods than maneuvering a busy urban street.

Fortunately, Nick Carr was not on vacation and read the same article.Continue reading

The Rack

Borat-style Translation Now in Google Documents

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Last Tuesday, Google introduced a translation service to its cloud-based word processing software, Documents. I abandoned the Microsoft Word ship a long time ago—I think my last release was Word 2002 — and use Documents for all my text entry.  So this additional feature is a neat novelty that just makes my move from MS even sweeter.

Google has been offering the ability to translate Web pages into 53 different languages for some time. So I’m assuming some Google engineer finally got around to adding the right Web service hook into their office software.

Language translation has been  a long standing problem for computer science,  and Google has not solved this by any means.  There are still complexities with idiomatic expressions, verb moods ( subjunctive),  modal verbs, etc. that won’t be untangled with a series of rules coded in software.

So for kicks, I cut and pasted a small section of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables into my Document and then let Google have at it.  Conclusion: Star Trek’s Universal Translator has not yet been reached,  but Google Translate does a good job of making everything sound like Borat.

Results after the jump.Continue reading

The Rack

Dueling Headlines on Apple's Magic Trackpad

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Magic Trackpad: “Swipe me!”

For the record, I do most of my work on a MacBook Pro.  One reason I was able to break the spell cast by Dell and live happily ever after in Steve Jobs land is the Mac’s magical multi-touch trackpad. He/she  that masters it—and it doesn’t take much—will enjoy effortless web navigation, healthy wrists and knuckles, truly higher productivity, and never having to shlepp their mouse in endless circles on their desks.

So it is amusing to read the conflicting headlines on Apple’s announcement yesterday to introduce this Mac technology to PC users in the form of the Magic Trackpad.  Over at Silicon Alley, Dan Frommer lobbed this headline at the Apple gadget: “Hands On With The New Apple Magic Trackpad: It’s Weird But Could Be Useful.”  At TechCrunch, MC Siegler has, for my money, a  more insightful take:  “Apple’s Magic Trackpad Signals The End Of The Mouse Era.”

I realize writers don’t necessarily choose their headlines, but Frommer is pretty clear that he thinks the Trackpad is kind of a novelty — an incense candle for those that need to connect with their Mac spirituality.

He is wrong.Continue reading

Social Studies, The Rack

Freebase: Semantic Sandwich for Google

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There actually was some significant news last week in the technoverse, and it didn’t involve another episode from Mark Zuckerberg’s reality show: on July 16, Google purchased Metaweb, the semantic database company and the force behind the freewheeling Freebase.

No doubt, the semantic web has entered into your own knowledgebase during the last year.

If it hasn’t, quick go to Google: enter empire state building height in the search box. Notice that the numeric height “1250 ft. ( 380 m.)” is highlighted in the search results. Google knew to answer this query with an actual number, instead of merely returning text snippets in which those search keywords were found. This flavor of artificial intelligence comes courtesy of an analysis of the knowledge space.

In a way, Google comprehended that “empire state building” is a structure, which has an attribute or property known as height, which itself has a numeric value associated with it measured in distance units.

Impressive.Continue reading

@NYC, The Rack

Android: The Evil Side of Openness

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Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures (Foursquare), recently called Apple an evil company. The reason?  “They believe they know what is best for you and me. And I think that is evil.”

It’s a definition of evil I think most of us would not agree with. On the other side of Wilson’s argument, you’ll find a few light-weight thinkers such as Socrates (see Plato’s Republic).  So … doctors are evil because they claim to know what’s best for us. Add to the list accountants, plumbers, carpenters, and architects.

I think Wilson has a different gripe with Apple. Apple has successfully shown that the America consumer has an appetite for quality products, even though they’re based on walled-off hardware and software.  While passing Wilson’s test for goodness, Google’s open-source Android platform is not necessarily a path to quality and may actually do some evil.Continue reading

The Rack

Get Ready for the Cruz Reader

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First sighted back in April, the Cruz Reader from custom PC maker Velocity Micro is an inexpensive (under $200 MSRP) 7″ color Android-based ebook reader —browser included. It really is more than a book gadget, supporting full screen video (MP4), music (built-in headphone jack), and games. Velocity will also sell a sibling 7″ Cruz tablet.

Both are scheduled to ship next month. This may be the Android gadget I end up buying.

More specs below.Continue reading

The Rack

Phone in Your Blog Post With Twilio

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WordPress just announced an interesting—let’s say somewhere between quirky and neat— addition to their hosted blog site.  You can now phone in a blog post!  With help from  Twilio’s unified communications APIs, the WordPress.com software will deposit an audio file attachment to the post. Now roving reporters can literally call in their stories.  Continue reading

Archaic Telecom, The Rack

Twilio’s OpenVBX: Open Source Attendant

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I downloaded OpenVBX, Twilio’s bendable, programmable cloud-based unified communications platform, tried out a few call control flows, and then drifted off into a reverie about telecom start-ups before the dot.com crash.

When the CLECs and ASPs first came on the scene in the 90s, they were offering hosted personal attendants (or assistants)—which was the term used before “Google Voice-like”—that allowed subscribers to configure find-me/follow me schedules for cell, home, and office numbers,  set up voicemail notifications, and craft simple IVR menus. They would often  throw in  speech rec, and support virtual presence through local phone numbers.

Maybe $30 per month, with a cap on minutes. These personal auto attendants were  tasty telecom appetizers and considering what was available from incumbents at the time, practically disruptive.Continue reading

The Rack

Good News from Google: Renaming Folders

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Google may have accidentally-on-purpose scooped up data while (war)driving in Germany, and its new option to change the background on its home page is just plain silly, but they did do something right in the last few weeks.

I am a heavy user of Google products and an appreciator of the simplicity of its design philosophy, but with Google Reader they may have  moved the scalpel a little too close: until recently there was no way to rename a folder containing RSS feed subscriptions.  Once you created a folder, you were stuck with it—unless you wanted to start over with a new name and  forklift existing feed entries.

On the Official Google Reader Blog, the company announced on June 1 that users now have the ability to rename folders.

Often times, it’s the small things that make the difference.
Continue reading

The Rack

$75 Tablet From OLPC

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The One Laptop Per Child Foundation has teamed up with chip maker Marvell to produce an inexpensive tablet computer for the education market.

OLPC XO-3 concept

OLPC , founded by Dr. Nicholas Negroponte, has committed to distributing a new family of XO tablets that will have some very desirable features, even for non-school children: based on low watt version of  Marvell’s Armada processor , multi-lingual, multi-touch soft keyboard,   multi-OSes (Android, Ubuntu, Windows Mobile), and 1080p  video. Continue reading

The Rack

Shogo: Rhymes with iPad

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Shown off at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Freescale’s  7″ tablet prototype was supposed to inspire manufacturers and design houses to produce real products.  Realease took the bait and has followed up with an iPad clone it calls Shogo.

This Hong Kong product design company has come up with a Linux-based, iMX-37 powered, 10″ multi-touch capacitve screen… Oh, heck here’s the spec list, so I don’t have to string together more coordinating adjectives:Continue reading