Category Archives: Technology

Google Glass

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Google's new gizmo, Google Glass, looks really cool. If you want to be one of the first to get one you'll need to submit a 50-words or less essay , up to five pictures and a 15 second video that will help explain why you should be one of the cool kids. Oh, you'll also need to pony up $1,500. Guess who's gonna wait for version 2.0?

Here's an article written by a guy who got to test-drive Glass and came away impressed and convinced that it's not a matter of "if" but "when" we'll see Glass in consumers' hands:

But what’s it actually like to have Glass on? To use it when you’re walking around? Well, it’s kind of awesome.

Think of it this way — if you get a text message or have an incoming call when you’re walking down a busy street, there are something like two or three things you have to do before you can deal with that situation. Most of them involve you completely taking your attention off of your task at hand: walking down the street. With Glass, that information just appears to you, in your line of sight, ready for you to take action on. And taking that action is little more than touching the side of Glass or tilting your head up — nothing that would take you away from your main task of not running into people.

It’s a simple concept that feels powerful in practice.

The same is true for navigation. When I get out of trains in New York I am constantly jumping right into Google Maps to figure out where I’m headed. Even after more than a decade in the city, I seem to never be able to figure out which way to turn when I exit a subway station. You still have to grapple with asking for directions with Glass, but removing the barrier of being completely distracted by the device in your hand is significant, and actually receiving directions as you walk and even more significant. In the city, Glass make you feel more powerful, better equipped, and definitely less diverted…

Is it ready for everyone right now? Not really. Does the Glass team still have huge distance to cover in making the experience work just the way it should every time you use it? Definitely.

But I walked away convinced that this wasn’t just one of Google’s weird flights of fancy. The more I used Glass the more it made sense to me; the more I wanted it. If the team had told me I could sign up to have my current glasses augmented with Glass technology, I would have put pen to paper (and money in their hands) right then and there. And it’s that kind of stuff that will make the difference between this being a niche device for geeks and a product that everyone wants to experience.

After a few hours with Glass, I’ve decided that the question is no longer ‘if,’ but ‘when?’

Here's a video of the Glass experience:

Easy Way to Record a Meeting

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Today at our office (I work for a trade association) we hosted a board meeting and the secretary asked if we could record it so that she could reference the recording later in case she missed anything for her notes. We don't have a digital recorder in the office so our solution was the following:

  • Signed up for a free Google Voice account. 
  • Tied the Voice account to my office phone since you have to tie the Google Voice number to an existing number. 
  • From our conference room phone I called my office phone and had someone answer it and then press "4" to start the recording process. (Google Voice allows you to record any incoming call, but currently you can't record outbound calls which is why we called my office phone from the conference room and not vice versa).
  • The recording is automatically saved as an MP3 in your Google inbox which you can then share as a link you email to whomever you want, embed in a webpage/blog post or download to share offline. 
  • When the meeting was over I simply hung up the phone which ended the recording.
  • After the meeting was over I emailed the secretary the link to the recording and that was that.

Other uses I can picture for this setup:

  • Recording interviews with industry experts over the phone to share on our blog.
  • Recording our educational offerings to be archived or posted online for others to access.

All of this was unbelievably easy to do and the price was definitely right.

Reading, Writing, ‘Rithmetic…and Coding

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Last week I sent my mom a link to the registration page for TEDxWakeForestU (she's a Wake Forest alumnus) and she and I were discussing it during a visit this past weekend. Others in our group asked what TEDx was, so I tried to describe the TED concept and the TEDx extension of it, but really failed quite miserably. That's one reason I was ecstatic to stumble across this video from TEDxBeaconStreet; it provides a great example of the TEDx format that I can send my mom so she can share it. The other reason is that the presentation is about the intersection of technology and education – something my mom's passionate about and thus I'm guaranteed she'll find the presentation fascinating.

Hopefully you will too:

Pretty Picture -or- Even a Stopped Watch is Right Twice a Day

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A friend was searching online for pics of our town and stumbled across a picture from my flickr feed. She emailed for permission to use it on our church's website, and when I looked at it I couldn't fathom how I could have produced it. Just goes to show that the right camera in the wrong hands occassionally produces results:

Bright Snow Trees, Lewisville NC, White Christmas 2010

Taken in Lewisville, NC on Christmas Day, 2010.

Battle of the Unpopulars

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Who do you hate more: your municipal government or your phone/cable/internet company? The answer to that question probably depends on which one failed you or which one's bill you most recently grumbled about paying, but after reading about a battle in the NC legislature over the ability of municipalities to provide high speed internet, you might be surprised at how you feel about your local government. From "The Empire Lobbies Back":

After a city in North Carolina built a Fiber-to-the-Home network competing with Time Warner Cable, the cable giant successfully lobbied to take that decision away from other cities.

The city of Wilson’s decision and resulting network was recently examined in a case study by Todd O’Boyle and Christopher Mitchell titled Carolina’s Connected Community: Wilson Gives Greenlight to Fast Internet. The new report picks up with Wilson’s legacy: an intense multiyear lobbying campaign by Time Warner Cable, AT&T, CenturyLink, and others to bar communities from building their own networks. The report examines how millions of dollars bought restrictions that encourage cable and DSL monopolies rather than new choices for residents and businesses…

Big cable and DSL companies try year after year to create barriers to community­‐owned networks. They only have to succeed once; because of their lobbying might, they have near limitless power to stop future bills that would restore local authority. North Carolina’s residents and businesses are now stuck with higher prices and less opportunity for economic development due to these limitations on local authority.

The report, which details industries efforts over the years that eventually resulted in the 2011 legislation that effectively banned municipal netorks, can be found here – and yes it's fairly biased, but still raises some really good points. One excerpt:

Far from providing a "level playing field" the Act has stifled public investment in community broadband networks and no one anticipates a local government building a network as long as it remains in effect. This reality should trouble all in North Carolina, as it cannot be globally, or even regionally, competitive simply by relying on last-generation connections from Time Warner Cable, CenturyLink, or AT&T.

Cities near the border of North Carolina, including Danville, Virginia; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Bristol in both Tennessee and Virginia all offer gigabit services via municipal utilities. Chattanooga's minimum network spped of 50 Mbps both downstream and upstream dwarfs what is available from DSL or cable networks. Many east coast communities outside of the Carolinas have access to Verizon's fiber optic FiOS, which also dramatically outperforms cable and DSL services. Services from AT&T, Time Warner Cable, and CenturyLink cannot compare to the services offered on modern networks.

Sounds like we in the Carolinas are doomed to live in a digital backwater for the foreseeable future. Perhaps municipal networks aren't the answer, but in this era of intense competition between states/cities to recruit new businesses wouldn't it be nice if our municipalities had kick-butt networks in their economic development quivers? And if the private sector can't provide it do we really want our cities/towns hamstrung by the inability to provide it themselves?

Know What’s Below

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Perhaps the Russians need to institute a "Know What's Below" system so they can avoid little snafus like this one:

Yesterday, at approximately 7:22 p.m., local time, the Moscow's Mission Control experienced something you never want to happen when the mission you're controlling is playing out outside the planet: silence. Complete, utter silence. Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, had lost contact with its satellites — all of them. Which meant, as well, that it had lost contact with the International Space Station, and with the cosmonauts who call it home…

But the space-based silence, it turns out, was the result of a very terrestrial accident: While doing repair work on the Shchyolkovsky Highway outside of Moscow, a construction team severed a cable. And it turned out, unfortunately, to be the cable — the one linking Moscow's Mission Control to the nation's extraterrestrial vehicles and workers.  

And, yes, the one cable. One cable cut, and a country's ability to communicate with its space infrastructure is severed, as well. 

The Russians might want to also consider a system with inherent redundancy, built to withstand disruptions of any one node. That sounds familiar. Ah yes, that whacky thing called the internet.

Forget Being Outsourced, We’re Being Siliconsourced

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An interesting take on disappearing jobs:

…digital technologies are rapidly encroaching on skills that used to belong to humans alone. This phenomenon is both broad and deep, and has profound economic implications. Many of these implications are positive; digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices (sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic pie.

But digital innovation has also changed how the economic pie is distributed, and here the news is not good for the median worker. As technology races ahead, it can leave many people behind. Workers whose skills have been mastered by computers have less to offer the job market, and see their wages and prospects shrink. Entrepreneurial business models, new organizational structures and different institutions are needed to ensure that the average worker is not left behind by cutting-edge machines.

Found via Cone.

Carmageddon

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I think the fine folks who are planning for the two year shutdown of Business 40 in Winston-Salem for repairs might want to watch how the folks in California are preparing for their own Carmageddon this weekend.

Los Angeles, home of notorious traffic jams, is preparing for a potential doozy. People are calling this weekend’s closure of 10 miles of the 405 “Carmageddon.” What’s happening is 10 miles of the very busy highway will be shut down to traffic as part of a reconstruction project. The big question is whether the work will result in massive traffic jams or if the impact won’t be that great because it’s a weekend project.

We’re seeing some examples of social media in action in preparation for Carmageddon. KABC is teaming up with the traffic app company Waze to offer an app that is powered by the audience. It detects your speed as you drive and keep the app open. Utilizing that information, Waze generates a map showing traffic. After your ride you can report what you saw along the way (typing is disabled while you’re driving).