My parents surprised me with an iPad for my birthday, and since the device arrived last week I’ve been spending a lot of time putting it through its paces. I’ve posted my thoughts on the tablet itself, as well as some free and paid apps, on my personal site.
Archive for the 'Gadgets' Category
In September 2008, TechCrunch held its second annual TechCrunch50 event. The multi-day conference brings together early-stage startups to give demos of their products in front of a panel of tech investors and consultants. As I browsed through TechCrunch’s coverage of the event, one demo caught my eye in particular: the FitBit. I put the $99 device on my Christmas 2008 wish list, but production and shipment was delayed by almost a year and a half because of design issues. I just received my unit last month.
FitBit was a rare TechCrunch 50 demo in that it actually conceived a product made out bits and atoms. The company produces an extremely compact device called the FitBit Tracker. About the length of a match and the thickness of a pack of gum, the Tracker is little more than an accelerometer coupled with a Bluetooth antenna, a bit of memory, and an LED display. In other words, it’s a tricked out, wi-fi enabled pedometer.
But the value of FitBit lies not so much in the gadget itself as as in the data mining it enables. The driving concept is unofficially called “the Prius effect,” the idea that people will behave differently (better, hopefully) when they have more granular visibility into their behavior. For the Prius, it’s the in-dash monitor that shows how much gas is being saved by the hybrid system. For Google Powermeter, it’s the hour-by-hour online graph of home power consumption. When you can track your pace and realize the stakes, the competition you hold with yourself to become better grows fiercer.
Continue reading ‘FitBit: Bringing The Prius Effect to Personal Fitness’
Let me paint a picture for you that, despite the snark, is not an exaggeration:
At a conference I attended recently, a speaker made the legitimate and important point that technology–particularly broadband–should be included in our definition of “infrastructure.” In order to illustrate this point, and the potential economic boom that virtual commuting represents for rural communities, we watched a video…featuring a family that was unrecognizable to even the most tech savvy people in the room.
Look, it’s Dad on his Bluetooth headset in the kitchen. Mixing fruit salad as he talks to his colleagues in NY or Atlanta. It’s a snow day, but instead of sledding or starting a snowball fight, little Johnny and Susie are downloading their assignments from the web, listening to 7th grade history lectures on podcasts, and exercising on the treadmill. They’re even (gasp!) attending class in a virtual world reminiscent of Second Life. All the while Dad is locked in his office working remotely while Mom places inventory orders for her small business.
Here’s my issue. Nobody–and I mean nobody–loses sleep over the question of what their children will do if they can’t access their school work on a snow day. Likewise, though many of us imagine working primarily from a home office some day, that vision maintains some semblance of connection to our current lived experience: leaving the house, interacting offline with friends and peers, and (you guessed it) PLAYING OUTSIDE IN THE SNOW.
People see this sort of technologically-dominated futurecasting and become overwhelmed by the disconnect, seemingly caused (worsened?) by technology, between their lives and this vision! Because when the focal point is the shiny gadget and the slick interface, we’re not solving problems anymore.
Technology is more integrated into our lives now than we could have ever realistically imagined 20 years ago. Yet, instead of recognizing how current and emerging technologies can help us accomplish great things, we’re still wasting energy trying to figure out why our lives don’t resemble EPCOT and the Jetsons.
Continue reading ‘It’s Not About the Technology, and This Isn’t the Jetsons’
My birthday was last week, though I unfortunately had to spend the majority of the day taking an evil standardized test. How’s that for bad timing? My parents were gracious and awesome enough to offer me an Amazon Kindle for my birthday, which we’ve written about some before. Now, after about a week of fairly regular first-hand use, I’m ready to offer some more thoughts.
When I first turned it on and downloaded a free sample chapter, the thing that most struck me about the Kindle was that, man… this thing is slow. Every button press is followed by at least a one second pause — a considerable delay in today’s high tech world. For a device that promises to usher in the next evolution of reading, I was perplexed at first. Where’s the gee-whiz slickness, the instant page-turns, the animation? (Amazon’s explains the slight delays by pointing to the E-Ink display, which at its current stage of development requires a little longer to render).
Ironically enough, however, I’ve almost come to appreciate the delay. Just as the E-Ink display mimics the ocular experience of the printed book, so do these delays mimic the time required to turn a page. It’s a subtle reminder when you continue to the next page that it is just that — a new page. You don’t scroll to the next screen on the Kindle; the scoll wheel is only used to access the menu and other features. You have to take the time to hit a button and wait as the screen momentarily flashes dark, and then rekindles (ha) with the next segment of text. That brief second gives you a chance to process the page you just read, to look out the window for a moment, to readjust the device in your hands. Looking back at the past week, I’m not sure now that I’d want it any other way.
[Warning: Here be spoilers, mateys.]
The moment I heard that TechCrunch was sponsoring a pre-screening of Iron Man, I knew it was a must-see. Tropophilia-favorite blog Gizmodo lovingly titled its review of the film “126 Minutes of Gadget Porn“. I saw it on Saturday night, and I’m afraid that I too was filled with a deep technolust. What self-respecting geek wouldn’t want a suit of armor that enabled him to fly and kill bad guys? I mean, come on.
If you had trouble following some of the concepts I was talking about when I wrote about augmented reality a few months ago, you need look no further than the “heads-up display” inside Iron Man’s helmet. Check out this short clip from the movie. Imagine looking at anything, anywhere, and seeing computer-fed, real-time information layered on top of and around it. It’s coming – first to our vehicles, and later to our glasses. There’s too much other gadgety goodness to mention, but pay special attention to the technology around Stark’s home. All of it is believable to this geek’s eye. Well done, Industrial Light & Magic. Well done.
For the most part, Iron Man was able to avoid following a too-familiar formula in recreating the Marvel comic on the big screen. Robert Downey, Jr. was a brilliant choice for Tony Stark, both of them being somewhat cocky rich dudes who head down the road of reform after nearly getting themselves killed. I liked that even though he decides to consult his moral compass and do battle on the side of good, Stark loses neither his snarky sense of humor nor his arrogance. Sometimes his disregard for the opinions of everyone else becomes annoying, but mostly it helps to keep him from becoming the overly-dramatic “with great power comes great responsibility” stereotype that he could easily have become.
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