Convenience Computing

If you are blogging following my talk, you may be interested to hear that blogger has a new version in beta.

One of the best new features in this version are labels. These allow you to categorise your posts into groups. Say News, Tips, info etc. Making it easier for people to search your blog.

If you are lucky enough to get an invite to join the beta I would certainly give it a go.

If you would like to see labels in action take a look at my other blog mediacenterexpert.blogspot.com

Just to let you know I've been persuaded to start another blog The Media Center Expert. So if you have any questions about Windows Media Center Edition come on over for some cool hints and tips.

This has to be one of the most useful things to hit the web in a long time. Coming from the Music Genome Project - of that more later - is www.Pandora.com. This is basically your own radio station you can tailor to your own musical tastes.

It's incredibly easy to use you just key in an artist or song you really like and the service will create a neverending stream of music based similar to that artist or track. I used this recently at a birthday party for a 65 year old and it played constantly with very appropriate music for over 6 hours and never repeated a track.

The reason this works so well is that an incredibly dedicated bunch of people have sat down and listened and listened and listened to a huge raft of music and then rated the content based on its musical style, tempo, rhythm etc. They have done an amazing job.

Just goes to show that at the moment really convenient computing sometimes needs the human touch.

I was asked yesterday why this blog is called Convenience Computing. As some of you may know this blog is a public extracted version of my subscription blog that allows UK businesses to have access to information on up and coming technologies and items which may affect them for reasonable annual fee.

When I started that blog it came out of a talk I had given back in the early 90's about how convergent technologies would lead to much more convenient computing. These convenience computing devices would allow people to work on the move. Back then one of the devices I mentioned was a phone with built in email which could be received instantly wherever people are. That technology exists today in both Blackberry and more recently Microsoft's new push email technologies.

Anyway whilst I was espousing a whole lot of technologies which seem to have come to fruition I also stumbled across a phrase that hadn't been used before 'Convenience Computing' which was a lot easier for people to understand than some of the other terms out there at the time - for example pervasive computing.

So now you know why 'Convenience Computing.'

A very interesting run through of the history of the buzz marketing of the Origami device paltform

If you missed all the hype surrounding Microsoft's new Origami Ultra Mobile PC platform consider yourself lucky. In some ways it was the ultimate buzz marketing... drip feed small amounts of information to the market, create an excitement around the launch. The only issue was that some of the technology bloggers got carried away with wild speculation about the forthcoming features to such an extent that no matter what Microsoft finally released it was never going to meet the expectations.

Indeed once the devices were finally shown at ceBit they were met with a general cry of is that all. IS THAT ALL!

The problem here is that the Origami/UMPC platform is not overly innovative in itself but, and its a huge BUT, what it can be applied to could be highly innovative.

So what is it. Basically its a pc about the size of a large format paperback book. It has a touchscreen interface and, although it can have one, in the present releases no keyboard. There is however a very effective on screen keyboard. Its beauty is that it runs a full version of Windows XP. This means that any application written for a normal PC can run on it as long as it will fit the screen resolution.

As Bill Gates (Sir) is always telling us the Magic of Software allows for virtually anything. This is an open platform in a market space that has normally been closed meaning we should see a whole host of innovations:-

Car computer anyone? Reasonably low cost wall mounted home automation controller. Home Internet Browsing client. Easy to carry Survey collection client - indeed I can announce that Whittaker Moore Associates will be supporting the Origami platform with our myLeads product.

There are endless posibilites for this.

Of course being a version one device there are a few issues at present. Battery life is limited to two hours (but laptop fuel cells are just around the corner and will solve that) Price is higher than they will finally be (currently around 1000 us$ expect more like 500 in future)but that will change.

Origami its much more than just paper folding.

Apologies for the lack of posts lately. As some of you will know I've been in Finland for a week. One of the most amazing things about this trip was the experience of taking a walk on the frozen ocean. The locals take this completely for granted and it reminded me that even the most amazing things can become so familiar that you don't even think to mention them.

So take a look at what is around you in your business. Are you doing something no-one else is doing. Are you able to explain something no-one else can. Then even if it is so routine to you that you don't even normally notice it is amazing, please do tell us all about it.

I've spoken of the need for Blogs to have rss feeds so people can subscribe but not everyone has an rss feed reader. So how do you allow those people to subscribe. Well FeedBlitz allows them to receive an email of your posts whenever they are added.

Take a look at http://www.feedblitz.com and to see a feedblitz feed in action go to Arup's blog. See the post below for details.