Memoto use-case

Ever since I read about the Memoto lifelogging camera, I was wondering where it can be effectively used without intruding on privacy of others.  Google glass is already facing scrutiny even before its launch.  Same holds true for Memoto.  How would the world react if you walked around with a video camera in hand recording everything in view?  The difference now is that you are wearing a tiny camera masquerading as a pair of glasses or a necklace or a clip.

Today, we were visiting one of our friends and their month old baby.  We started talking about how they should capture every fleeting moment of the baby's childhood and how precious it is.  That is when it struck me that this is a perfect use-case for Memoto.  Clip a Memoto to the mother's dress and it takes a snap every 30 seconds.  With the mother spending a majority of her time with the newborn baby, chances are she will capture some really candid fleeting moments.  No more running for a camera when the baby smiles, no more running to get your smartphone when the baby takes the first step.  Memoto does it for you.  In fact, you could even hang a Memoto onto the crib to record everything that the baby does.

This use-case is perfect since it is private and you are not recording anyone else without their permission.  Once you have the images, you can determine what to do with them and how to use them.

Oh, just make sure you remember to take Memoto off when you to to the bathroom :)

iWear

There has been a lot of speculation on the iWatch that Apple is working on.  Analysts are comparing it to the other watches available and are peering deep into the watch industry for insights on the market, revenues and margins.  What everyone should realize is that the iWatch (or whatever Apple chooses to call it.  In fact, I would call it iWear) is just another wearable computing device.  I don’t consider it to be a watch.  I hope it is much more than a watch.

Let me talk a little bit about watches.

A watch, per Wikipedia, is a device that tells time.  It is a timepiece.  It is generally worn around the wrist or attached to a chain and carried in the pocket.  Traditionally, watches have been either manual or automatic (driven by kinetic movement).  These watches have slowly progressed from just telling the time to being a calendar and then being a stopwatch.  These additional behaviors are called 'complications'.  There are a few automatic watches that perform the function of an alarm clock too!   There are smart watches (not in the computer smart terms), which understand the variation of days in a month (yearly calendar watches) and there are those which can even compensate for the leap year (perpetual calendar watches).  There are watches for the blind.The video below shows a Patek Philippe watch with a chime!

These are mechanical marvels driven by just a flywheel that charges one or more springs either based on manual winding or the kinetic movement of the wearer’s hand (or the winding machine).

Then came the era of electronic quartz watches.  These were powered by small batteries and were completely electronic.  Quartz crystals, by their nature are very accurate leading to extremely accurate watches.  Additionally, the electronics afforded designers to add additional functionality into the watches.  These watches had lights to see at night, multiple time zones, stop clock, alarm, and other features.  And, there are the techy watches which need a degree in computer science to tell the time.  The quartz electronic watches were also fashionable since they were tiny and could be fashioned into any shape and size.

There have been several watchmakers who are trying to reinvent the timepiece.  Urwerk is a classic example making high end watches that beat the conventional wisdom.

The watch market is a thriving market.  There are people who buy one watch to tell time.  There is a segment of the market where watches are akin to jewelry.  They buy several; one for the office, one for sports, one for the evening party, one for the black tie event, etc.  There is another segment that just buys watches just to collect them.  I belong to this segment.  I guess we haven’t heard the Confucius saying ‘Man with one watch always knows what time it is.  Man with two, never sure.’  The watch market is huge.

I have always wondered about one thing.  Whenever I walk into a meeting, I look around to notice what watch everyone is wearing.  I am sure anyone who is interested in watches would do the same.  I have never, let me say it again, never been in a room (full of people) where I saw two people wearing the same brand/model of watch.  There have been some rare occasions where two people were wearing the same brand, but never the same model.  That itself shows you the market for the variety of watches.  The global watch market is about $60 billion a year with a margin of around 60%.  Everyone is looking into the watch market and wondering how Apple will disrupt it. 

If Apple is targeting the watch market, it is looking in the wrong direction.  Apple should be looking at something that is much more than the watch market.  In fact, when Apple releases their iWear, people should buy it, and still be buying/wearing watches. 

The point I am trying to make is that Apple should not be getting into the watch business.  The watch industry will thrive by itself, and there are many disruptors around.  All phones have a timepiece functionality built into them.  The phone industry has had incredible penetration in the past decade.  Did it affect the watch industry?  Nope.  People still wear watches.  Quartz watches came and kicked the traditional mechanical watch’s butt.  But, I still buy mechanical (manual winding as well as automatic) watches!  My computer has a very accurate clock.  My cell phone has an incredible clock which automatically adjusts to the timezone I am in.  Still, I wear my automatic wristwatch which loses about a few secs a week (which, by the way, is pretty bad).  Why do I still wear it?  It is a part of my attire.  One reason may be that I love the mechanical marvels (automatic watches) and want one ticking away on my wrist.  I have not seen people ditch watches in droves since they are carrying their cellphones with them. 

Apple should be getting into the wearable computer industry.  We do ‘wear’ our cellphones, but there is a huge difference between carrying a device and wearing one close to your body, close to millions if not billions of interface points (skin cells, veins, etc.) to a human body.  This affords incredible opportunities in various areas of which telling time is the least important one. 

With a computer strapped onto my wrist, the device can be:

• a health monitor (heart rate, temperature, etc.)
• a pedometer
• an alarm
• a safety monitor
• a tracker
• a phone
• a camera
• a music player
• a video player
• a device to inject medicine based on a schedule
• a GPS
• an internet browser
• a calendar
• a timepiece

You get the drift.  It can be anything.  As long as you are wearing a computer on your body, there is no limit to what it can do.  That is where Apple should be heading.  Apple should build an ecosystem around this wearable computing device in the same way it built an ecosystem around iPod with its iTunes store.  This will afford incredible opportunities for smart entrepreneurs to innovate and bring great applications to life.

I am excited for Apple and am ready to pounce on this opportunity.

Enterprise startups are sexy

“The door to the consumer is through the enterprise, and not vice versa.”

This is what RIM co-CEO Jim Balisille said in 2007 when RIM was flying high.  This was the comment made when Apple released its iPhone to the consumer market.  That was then, and this is now.  RIM is struggling to stay alive, and corporate America has embraced the iPhone.

With technological advances, mobile computing, cloud computing, connectivity, BYOD phenom and a host of other factors, there has been a major shift in how new technology is being introduced into the enterprise.  Here is a very insightful article on this issue.  If that was interesting, read the full interview with Marc Andreessen here.

Designed to Annoy

After writing about Design for Assembly, Design for Usability, Design for Accessibility, I thought of writing about a design that I found very annoying.  

I recently rented a Toyota Yaris.  It is a sub-compact car and hence has a small windshield.  What struck me was the design of the windshield wiper.  The Toyota designers used a single 4-bar mechanism to incorporate the windshield wiper.  The design is so bad and the wiper arms are so huge that it obstructs the view of the driver more than the passenger.  Not that anything should obstruct the view of the passenger riding along with the driver.  This is what the driver sees while driving in the rain.

For a tiny windshield, there was no need to use such high gauge sheet to create the arms.  At the very least, the pivot could have been on the passenger side so that the driver saw just the swing of the arm.  Or, have a single arm pivoted in the center and not use a 4-bar mechanism at all.  There are so many ways to make this design unobtrusive and much more streamlined so that it doesn't distract the driver.  Sure, at high speed, it is barely visible, but at lower speeds, it is glaringly visible.  A few moments after I started driving the car, this was the first thing that I noticed.  It is so annoying that I had to take a pic and write about it!

This got me thinking about what constitutes good design.  Here is what I came up with, in no particular order:

• A good design should be innovative
• A good design should be intuitive
• A good design should be simple
• A good design should be aesthetically pleasing (especially consumer products)
• A good design should be unobtrusive.  The user shouldn't even know it exists, unless one of its purpose is to make itself known
• A good design should be minimalistic
• A good design should be functional and useful
• A good design should be green (environmentally friendly)
• A good design should be durable

Designs that live by these principles will always be classic and admirable designs.  And this wiper design barely follows any of these principles.

RIP Rosetta Stone?

Microsoft Research has done it again.  Check out this video on how their research software recognizes spoken English and transcribes it.  And then, translates it into Mandarin text arranged in the correct order.  In the end, the software translates his spoken English into spoken Mandarin in his own voice and tone! 

All in real time!  Amazing.


Incorporate this into your cell phones and all you need to know is one language to be a global citizen!

Gamification in life

Amazing talk by Carnegie Mellon University professor of Entertainment and Technology, Jesse Schell.

BYOD dilemma

 Of late, I have been seeing a lot of personal devices at work.  People are bringing their own mobile devices to work in order to enhance their productivity.  This phenomenon has been termed BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).  The tech-savvy, always-on and super-connected people are the first ones to BYOD.  

 It is interesting to see people carrying tablets to meetings, but is it really helping them be more productive?  There is the other question of 'need' versus 'want'.  Today it is a 'want', but tomorrow it is going to turn into a 'need', just as we saw with the mobile phones.  This phenomenon is affecting how IT manages the networks and the additional personal devices on them.

Many CIOs are fighting to keep the personal devices away, while some are embracing the phenomenon and helping drive organizational productivity and effectiveness.  As the BYOD trend accelerates, CIOs should think of 'how' to support and enable them effectively (with corporate security as well as employee privacy in mind) rather than 'whether' to allow them in the first place. 

Let's take a step back in time to an era when Internet was becoming popular.  Majority of what you could find on the Internet was not very useful.  It was either personal opinion or entertainment.  At that time, most companies banned the use of Internet by employees at work since they felt that it was a productivity killer.  But, then, as the Internet matured and became an information super highway, and the material on the Internet became more useful, corporations opened up the gates since everyone saw the benefits.  Nowadays, one cannot live without the Internet.  All the user manuals are on the Internet.  All the company SEC filings (like 10k) are on the Internet.  All trade publications are online.  There is no need to walk to the library anymore.

Coming closer to when the iPhone was introduced, the same cycle repeated.  Everything that was initially available on the iPhone was for entertainment and consumption.  So, naturally, corporate thought that it would be a time sink to provide employees with an iPhone.  As the Eco-system matured for smart phones, everyone realized the value it can bring to the table: employees checking and responding to emails from anywhere, sales people checking their accounts and closing sales on their phone, looking for information on the Internet, accessing and viewing documents from anywhere and so on.  Now, we are at a point where not having a smart phone is seen as counter-productive.

The same cycle is repeating again with tablets.  When the iPad was introduced, it was seen as a device for entertainment and consumption.  As more tablets are entering the market, companies are developing productivity applications and coming up with all kinds of innovative ways of using them. 
Whether IT wants it or not, tablets are here to stay and their presence will only grow in the workplace. 

So, what can the CIO do about this new phenomenon?

People extensively use smartphones at work.  Some are employer provided and others are personal (BYOD).  People use them to access work related information some of which could be confidential and secure data.  I still see that many companies do not have a well defined policy when it comes to usage of smart phones.  Companies define how they should be used and that they will be wiped if stolen/lost.  But, when it comes to firmware upgrades or OS upgrades, IT is nowhere in the picture.  When it comes to Apps, there are no set policies on what can/cannot be installed.  Everyone is aware of viruses and malware that are rampant on personal computers.  What people do not realize is that the same is becoming true for smart phones (recent report).  If your smart phone is infected (by an App you downloaded, or by some activity), the company data could be compromised.  There are no guidelines on protecting the smart phones.

The same holds good for tablets too.  When an employee brings a personal tablet to the workplace, they are breaching the security of the company.  The employee can access corporate data on the tablet, and they can also install any Apps that they desire.  This can cause serious issues for the IT department from the corporate security perspective. 

Majority of the personal devices are not secure.  Compare it to the company provided computers.  The corporate IT always makes sure that the latest patches to the OS are pushed to all the machines and they are up to date on the anti-virus.  This ensures that there is a commonality amongst all the computers.  IT recognizes the threats and secures the respective patches and applies them.  How many of us regularly apply patches to our mobile phones?  How many of us are even aware that new updates are available to the OS as well as the firmware for our personal mobile devices?  Not many.

The other big issue is the difficulty of keeping track of devices accessing the corporate network.  This can become a nightmare to the IT department.  Plethora of the mobile devices (and the ever changing landscape) also means that there is no standardization of the devices or the OS or the form factor or the applications running on them.  Jail broken devices could enter the fray.  

 One way to circumvent the security issue is to allow connections only through remote desktop.  Do not provide direct access or VPN to the company network.  Employees sign that their device is monitored by company and can be erased in case of misuse.  If you do not agree, do not bring your own device to work.

Benefits are not just the company saving on its costs, but increased employee engagement, organizational productivity and increased innovation.  Employee satisfaction will be high due to the ability to choose their own device, especially in these days of a glut of mobile devices.  Mobile devices are becoming more and more powerful and more enterprise applications are being offered on them.  It is paramount that the CIO and IT decision makers embrace this and capitalize on the opportunity, rather than shun it.  But first, they have to craft a solid policy around all this.