The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘device’

Here’s a fun diversion for your Thursday: the “Ben” 本 NanoNote laptop palmtop miniature computer netbook smartbook thingie! Described as a “full copyleft hardware” device, this thing isn’t going to win any performance competitions — it runs OpenWRT, which you normally find on hacked Linksys routers — but it does represent an interesting option in the realm of traditionally expensive small computing devices. There’s tons of info on the Qi Hardware wiki . The CPU is an Ingenic Jz4740 Multimedia Application Processor running at a whopping 336 MHz

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The NanoNote $99 open hardware computer thingie

We last blogged about EMIEW2 , a two-legged robot made by Hitachi, in July 2008 . The main selling point was (and still is) an array of 14 microphones integrated into his head, enabling him to identify three different human voices simultaneously .

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EMIEW2: Hitachi updates its cute humanoid robot

It has been a long time coming, but the notorious JBL MS-8 is almost here.

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The JBL MS-8 in-car DSP finally gets an official release date and price

There’s a lot of talk today about how the Nexus One’s initial roll-out has been a flop. And while the numbers aren’t official, things do look pretty grim for the first Android device Google is attempting to sell itself. But Google is wasting no time answering its critics — indirectly — with the launch of a version of the device that will work on AT&T’s 3G network.

To be clear, this isn’t Google teaming up with AT&T on the device. Instead, it’s simply a second version of the Nexus One that works with AT&T’s 3G frequency, which is different than that of T-Mobile’s (the current Nexus One U.S. carrier). The original Nexus One does actually already work on AT&T, but only for 2G connections, so this new version will obviously be significantly faster.

With the new 3G frequency, the new Nexus One will also work in Canada with Rogers Wireless. And, as Google notes, “And like the first version of the Nexus One, it can be used with most GSM operators globally.”

Certainly, giving consumers more choices is always a good thing, but it seems that Google’s attempt to sell the phone itself is really the problem here. While it makes sense that phones, like most other goods (digital cameras, for example), should be an easy sell online, there’s also some thought that the Nexus One isn’t selling well because customers are so used to walking into a store and playing with a phone for a bit before buying it.  If that’s the case, the AT&T addition isn’t likely to help sales.

The right play here would be for Google to offer shoppers a full list of plan options for both T-Mobile and AT&T and let them decide which carrier to pick. Unfortunately, that won’t be happening here, because again, this new Nexus One is only being sold as an unlocked phone that can work on AT&T if you get a SIM card on your own (something which most consumers will never do in the U.S.).

Eventually, if Google can offer that list of options from all the carriers (including the CDMA ones like Verizon, which, yes, will require another version of the Nexus One), that could be enough to drive customers online to buy the phone (and has always been the Nexus One’s promise, in my opinion). This move today, won’t be. Also, with all the bitching about AT&T’s network by iPhone owners (though, again, it has been great at SXSW), why on Earth would anyone want to buy a smartphone to use on the network unless they absolutely had to (as they do with the iPhone)?

[photo: flickr/katybate]

After trying to find a way to remotely control their DSLRs, the clever hackers at HDRLabs couldn’t really find anything that would do what they wanted. So what did they do? Built a control of their own, using a Nintendo DS

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Control your Canon DSLR with a Nintendo DS

The wording in the headline may not be, you know, exactly what HTC said – but it might as well be. After the folks over at Crave UK woke up to a broken screen — which they swear isn’t their fault, as the device had just been sitting on a desk charging — full of inky purple rage on their Nexus One , they shot a call over to HTC support.

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HTC: Don’t put the Nexus One in your hipster jeans

Pico-projectors are just so cute and cuddly. Amazon just so happens to be shipping the pico-sized MPro150 now for only $380. What do you get for that price, you ask

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3M’s MPro150 pico-projector is now shipping from Amazon

What do a trucker, an Israeli entrepreneur, Al Gore and Richard Branson all have in common? Proof that the real goldmines are old, neglected industries.

The name of that proof is GreenRoad. While so many entrepreneurs bang their heads against a Web and social media advertising brick wall, GreenRoad has applied common technology to an industry technology has largely passed by and—voilà—they’ve got a business that’s growing and saving lives, money and the environment.

Driving is the third most deadly profession after deep sea fishing and working in a coal mine. Not only does driving more safely save lives but research shows it can also save 10% on annual fuel costs, and alleviate a good chunk of the $230 billion professional fleets spend on crashes each year. Enter GreenRoad: a system that helps professional drivers drive more safely and as a result save their company a lot of money.

The GreenRoad system looks simple from the outside: There’s a two-inch device on the dashboard that starts the day with a green light. If a driver brakes hard, swerves or turns recklessly, the light turns yellow. If the driver continues to drive erratically the light stays yellow. If it gets worse the light turns red. That’s it. But like a lot of apparently simple ideas, there’s a lot more going on under the hood.

GreenRoad was the brain-child of an Israeli entrepreneur who was run off the road one night by some wild kids. “If only their parents knew how they were driving…” he muttered to himself – and the work on the company began. It morphed over the years from a consumer product to one aimed at commercial fleets. While the device is made up from mostly off-the-shelf products like a GPS chip, accelerometer, a CPU, mashed up with Google maps and a dashboard-like management portal, it took a good three years of hardcore R&D to build.

While you want the system to work well enough that aggressive driving tactics are caught, avoiding false positives are a must if drivers are to trust GreenRoad and accept its results. The algorithms can crunch more than 120 different driving maneuvers and the map on the dashboard helps provide context, both for the driver, and for a supervisor looking at the results later. For instance, a lot of harsh right turns could be the result of a hairpin turn in the road, not carelessness on the part of the driver.

There’s also a good deal of psychology worked into the device. Drivers don’t want to feel spied on, so video and audio surveillance products haven’t been popular. It’s also not a good idea to have something distracting, which is why early models that had icons to describe the offending aggressive move were nixed for the three simple lights. The dashboard, too, helps pull natural competitive levers by showing your performance, relative to your peers. And don’t underestimate things as simple as starting each day with a green light: The key is holding drivers to a high enough standard, while letting them know they can succeed if they work at it and concentrate as well.

GreenRoad has raised less than $40 million to date from Richard Branson’s Virgin Green Fund, Balderton Capital in London, Benchmark and DAG Ventures. On Monday the company will be announcing another $10 million from Generation, a fund started by Al Gore and Goldman Sachs.

Sound like a lot of money? Consider how much the company saves. Fuel savings just from driving less aggressively can save a company some $300 per vehicle per year, and the costs saved from accidents are double that amount. That makes it a very easy ROI sale for a company’s CFO, environmental officer or safety officer.

Now consider how much GreenRoad makes. It has 80 customers so far, and more than one of those customers have installed the technology in 20,000 of their cars. The three-year license goes for $1,000 per car, which the fuel savings alone cover. That’s right: We’re talking about $20 million contracts. And there’s more where that came from. CEO Eric Weiss says there are 80 million professionally driven cars in the US and the EU. That puts GreenRoad in the middle of a $80 billion market. I haven’t seen many companies like these since the good old days of enterprise software. And GreenRoad doesn’t have a lot of competition.

Weiss himself came from the enterprise software and mobile space. At first he wasn’t sure about a tech company in such a weird, forgotten market, but pretty soon he got excited. “There are very few problems left of this size to solve,” he says. “Besides, the world doesn’t need another gadget for my phone or another ERP company.

And he’s right. GreenRoad proves what a lot of smart investors have been saying for a while now—the best tech deals are no longer in a much picked over “tech sector” per se; they’re in applying technology to old-world industries.

Back in August 2009 , we covered a cordless phone offered by Sharp Japan that could be connected to a portable 7-inch touch panel via infrared.

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Sharp Japan’s cordless phone system features integrated photo frame

Japan’s Sanken Electric has developed a new type of cold cathode fluorescent lamp ( CCFL ) backlight for LCD TVs that’s as power-efficient as LED backlights but is supposedly up to 60% cheaper to mass-produce. Approximately 90% of all LCD TVs currently on the market have CCFL backlights

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Better LCD TVs? New CCFL backlights to compete with LEDs