Bluetooth Watch Phone Companion

 

This Buzz post by Robert Scoble reminded me of more old stuff done around the same time as the Bluetooth Companion device.  This guy would connect to your phone over bluetooth & serve as a push to talk speakerphone, or provide limited calendar/txt access through an App(didnt call them Apps back then, more like a 'Conduit' Service) running on the phone. There was concern with these phone satellite terminal-like devices of cannibalizing phone sales. My argument was that somebody else could always build support for such devices, might as well have been us.

A lot of screen area would have been lost had there actually been a Tag Huer round face watch with an LCD(the analog watch face would have been a screen saver). What I did not know back then was that most folks would stop wearing watches when phones provided the time. 

Bluetooth/Wifi Display Client

 
Here is a Bluetooth 2G/3G display client concept from the early '00's. This thing would have been a keyboarded, large(er) screen, short range companion to the ultra thin Razr phone in your pocket. There was a chunky version that would run an emulator when you stuffed in one of those Gameboy Advance cartridges popular at the time. 

This old pager sized guy begs the question of how you might want to build something using the phone as Wifi/Bluetooth Hotspot concept today? I might take everything out of a laptop you possibly could, which would make it pretty much just the thickness of the display & keys(or these days, just ditch the keyboard altogether, iPad style). That leaves rendering/client hardware,  touchpad sensing, and your Bluetooth(or Wifi) 'X-win' link to your phone providing the local apps processing. If you were careful with the short range wireless display compression, you could probably build a cheap tablet style terminal that blows up whatever is running in your phone. The wireless display stuff Intel had on display @CES2010 could maybe work here, in the forward direction, I think they are missing the reverse link for control info going back to the phone. 

I'll probably try and do a video on this in the near future. 

Anthony

Brainstorming The Future #1 / QR-Codes

Brainstorming The Future #1: QR-Codes

Here is the first brainstorming netcast, where we start with a Google Buzz seed post on QR-Codes from Gina Tripani of Lifehacker.com and a host of other things and This Week In Google. From there, we follow the evolution of a new concept in QR-Codes through more posts from Danny Sullivan of Third Door Media, a regular on The Gillmor Gang and Matt Cutts of Google, who often appears with Gina on This Week In Google. I threw in my two cents with Adsense For Objects. Things wrap up with feedback on the QR-Infrared emitter signage concept from Nancy Rossi of Sign Diego, a manufacturer of industrial grade signs. My question to you is after watching the video, where do we go for QR-Codes part II?

Infrared QR-code concept thread:

• Gina Tripani's seed Buzz Post
• Danny Sullivan's sponsorship Buzz Post
• My response to Danny, Adsense For Objects
• Matt Cutts URL Shortener / QR-Code Buzz Post
• Nancy Rossi of Sign Diego

When will a MacBook look like the iPad?

 
 

On the CES show floor a couple months ago, walking the outer orbit of low to mid tier manufacturer booths, I saw mini laptop running Win98 for $88 in volume. Yeah, it was underpowered, it was too small(aimed for the education market), but was a reminder of how quickly the commoditization in PC's is accelerating. I'm sure 5 years from now, you will probably be able to buy a small laptop in a Liquor store, near the register next to the cigarettes and energy pill packs.

 

In phones, Apple surfs commoditization by collecting its share of revenue from Apps, which have a totally different profit profile than the hardware alone. I mean really, other folks do all the work to build these Apps(though Apple creates some and commissions them from others). The curation process at work in the iPhone/iPad Apps store must ask this question of everything at the gate; How high does this App elevate the platform above the commodity experience?

 

I believe that perfecting this curation aspect of their business model will also shape how Apple builds PC's. In an Apple curated-experience, App-subsidized hardware model, all software purchased for an iMac/MacBook will go through the Apps store for taxation. The hardware and UI itself could begin to mix & mash between the iPhone, iPad and iMac/MacBooks. I'd love to see the CPU power of a MacBook in an iPad form factor, with the best of the iPad/iPhone UI, while retaining the ability to run processor intensive Apps...er, I mean Applications, like Illustrator or Maya. 

 

Anthony

Adsense For Objects

http://www.google.com/buzz/113217924531763968801/JifkaSK9qqn/I-want-google-bing-to-sponsor-pony-league-teams-it

Danny Sullivan mentioned above how funny it would be to have the teams in his kids games sponsored by GOOG/MSFT. This got me thinking, what if Google Adsense could move Ad inventory onto something like a football/baseball uniform(in addition to Billboards & Posters). Would you just use a QR-Code to register when a sponsored media ad unit has been hit by a phone(when taking a picture)? The people who manufacture T-Shirts and Jerseys could be given the QR pattern when they silkscreen.

When parents upload their pic's to Flickr, visible QR codes could be decoded by the site in the background or your browser, or both to figure out what to do with it. Even a partially obscured or fuzzy code could be useful if the other metadata(location, time, comments) in the photo allows a good guess as to whats going on.

Anthony

Update on Wednesday, April 7, 2010 at 5:49PM by Anthony Blow

Matt Cutts has posted a very cool feature from Google's URL shorener that would make implementation of this QR concept much easier.: 

"Here's a new trick that hasn't been blogged yet! Google's url shortener at goo.gl can generate QR codes (which are 2D barcodes) just by appending ".qr" after the goo.gl url. So the urlhttp://goo.gl/727X does a redirect to http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ and the url http://goo.gl/727X.qrwill generate a QR code that also goes to http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ . Pretty cool, huh? Please share this trick widely. :)"

http://www.google.com/buzz/109412257237874861202/bSSWKdJcZf7/Heres-a-new-trick-that-hasnt-been-blogged-yet

Anthony

Update on Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 6:10PM by Anthony Blow

Matt had a really good seed for discussion in the Buzz thread later on, about making the QR with infrared, such that phones could see them and people could not. 

Update on Friday, April 16, 2010 at 11:18PM by Anthony Blow

Brainstorming The Future #1 now available for viewing. Follow the Buzz thread brainstorm for a new concept in QR-Codes.