CES Day 1 (for realz!)

Today was amazing and busy.  I began with 7am meetings and customers meetings starting at 7:30.  I won’t go into any of these (for obvious reasons); however since I have an exhibitor badge, I got onto the show floor at 9am (it opened at 10am) to do my 1st pass rapid pass to scout out where I want to go to the rest of the week.  I went thru the South Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center (last year this was the Connected Home and 3D Printing Space), this year it was crowed with a lot of my favorites, but it was different.  There was a whole section on Gaming, with a Gigantic Oculus display. I hope to get some time to check it out on Thursday.  Parrot (the drone and quadracopter company) was there and had what appears to be a new flagship consumer quadrocopter, along with a new Connected Plant device).  The IEEE display included our friends from Emotiv with a racing game using their headset (given they were still in setup mode as a did may quick run I hope again to see them later this week).  Last year I really enjoyed the Robotic window cleaner, they were there but with a much smaller booth, and (spoiler) there was a new company that won  the innovation award for a window cleaning robot.

Qualcomm had a mini-booth in South Hall showing off robots and quadracopters, but their main booth was in central hall.   Next to the robot qualcomm booth, I saw a company called Vedams that was the only one that I saw promoting their AllSeen Alliance membership (this was a big surprise, I do expect to see more later this week).  Drones, drones, and more drones were all in the South Hall.  I hope to be able to spend some time there and understand the differences between the various models and companies.   There was Zano, Ghost, Parrot, and many others.

The Smart watch was all over the halls.  So many, and so many just looked the same.  The number that looked like what the Apple Watch may look like was also high.  I am hoping that we will see what happened with the smart phone, many try and then Apple sets a new standards which forces the entire industry to mature.  Time will tell.

I’ve seen the telepresence robots for years, but this year Beam had a GIANT one, that looked like it had a 40 inch TV on the top of it. 🙂

Connected Home did make some presence in the South Hall including WeMo, but the real Connected Home content was in the Sands Conference center (more to come on that).

By the time I left the South Hall the show floor was officially open and I quickly zoomed thru the central hall to look at Intel and Qualcomm’s booths.  Intel had some interesting spider robots, but they were being controlled by a person with a tablet.  They also showed partner work on a head up display with eye tracking in the vehicle (using the same JLR car I think we used at Innovate – it sure looked the same, need to check the infotainment screen later).  Intel was also going NUTS on wearables… and their sensing displays. Qualcomm had a bunch of Auto content and was using Internet of Everything (everywhere).  They showed a google glass type device  (ODG R-6S using the Snapdragon 805 processor).  It was also the first space where I saw Glasses Free 3D display on a 4k TV.  They showed off a bunch of gaming displays with some great graphics and processing using tablets sending the games to the TVs.

I then quickly ran to the North hall for a quick run thru to check out the connected Auto displays.  I somewhat missed Chrysler display, will have to check it out later.  So, the biggest thing was that it appears that most of the car manufactures are supporting both CarPlay and Android’s Car protocol, with some also supporting their own third protocol.  Pioneer showed their Apple CarPlay demonstrator in a a Smart Car. They also showed a cool rear view mirror that also showed social and other content.  Very cool!

Denso had a much smaller display than last year, the part I enjoyed was a very small EV that they built for the Japan market.  It doesn’t use keys, but instead of using a smart phone app, they are using a NFC enabled credit card like device, that allows you to tap on the dash and then drive off.   They then monitor where the vehicle is so they can move them closer to the next person who wants it… it was called the Picomobi and sits one person.  Seemed cool but the execution and adoption is very light so far.  They continue their Home to Car connection idea.. with integrations between the thermostat and your car, so as you get close to home it will change the thermostat to an appropriate setting.  They have systems for home energy efficiencies.

Toyota’s booth was all about their hydrogen fuel cell vehicle.  Toyota has announced that they are opening up their patents for license in order to drive adoption of this technology.  I saw a great article pitting Toyota and Tesla against each other based on their recent announcements.  The Mirai (Toyota’s vehicle) does look pretty cool.

Volkswagen was showing gesture based controls in the vehicle, along with a lot of cell phone integration with the vehicle.  My personal opinion is that gesture may not be the way to go, but I didn’t get a good chance to see it in action, so perhaps it won’t be as wild as I imagine it.  Volkswagen was one of the companies that showed three different supported platforms for infotainment – CarPlay, Android Auto, and MirrorLink.

Audi’s booth was just as insanely full as last year.  I did not get to see their self driving car that I heard about on twitter.  Maybe later this week.  Their RS-7 did look nice…

Ford showed off three things Sync-3, using Voice-Activted Technology.. This seems much more natural to me then what I can imagine with a gesture system.  They also had two great looking vehicles – the latest Mustang, and a their new F150. The coolest thing I saw; however, was an engine cutaway that actually showed the circuit boards inside of the engine.  For some reason I knew this existed mentally, but not in actuality.  The heat and oils I figured would break down a board.  But here’s a cool picture!

Hyundai was busy but not extremely.  My memories from last year, meant that I didn’t see anything new.

Mercedes-Benz!  My favorite car, had an amazing new AMG GTS 9  very sleek!  But the star of their display was their self driving vehicle (prototype– F015) with swizzle seats so that all four passengers could face each other and interact.I got one great picture, but someone had their stupid selfie stick in the way.  Note that the windows are tinted to look like metal.

At this point I had to zip over to the Sands for the afternoon. The Sands has connected home, connected health, 3d Printing, and the startup zone.  Right out side of the entrance with a company showing off their (yet another Google Glass like device) head-worn computer.  The ODG had both consumer and commercial versions.  Commercial model were about $5000 vs sub $1000 for the consumer model.  Pretty good specs, and interesting way of changing lens, etc.

Withings showed off their new Activité Pop activity tracking device.  While it didn’t do the pulse of my favorite WiThings Pulse, it has a cool analog display and supports sleep, steps and swimming! Pricing is listed at $150, and has an 8 month battery life.  I think this is a great way of looking at the fitness tracker and smart watch in a unique way.  I may have to get one when they become available.

An interesting booth was the Innovzen chair.  It looked a lot like a massage chair, but they went out of their way to say, no it is NOT a massage chair.  It is designed to reduce your stress and provide a sanctuary and get you to breath.  Not sure I can afford between $9,500 and $16,000 for a chair, but would be interesting to try it if I can get into it later this week.

A kickstarter from last year from Finsix – the Dart – was their with a big booth, but I still don’t have the charger I bought from them.   Cubic Robotics was an interesting booth, showing off what they did on Indigogo.  Obelab was a device that monitors brain function and tries to show abnormal brain function, depression, etc.  Oviku ULTI claimed to have the only un-pickable home door lock.

There was so much more and I will write up more.. but wanted to get this post up… (Updated with pictures)

IMG_0004.JPG

IMG_0047-0.JPG

IMG_0080-0.JPG

IMG_0007-0.JPG

IMG_0002.JPG

IMG_0063.JPG

IMG_0035-0.JPG

IMG_0074.JPG

IMG_0075.JPG

IMG_0050.JPG

IMG_0084-0.JPG

IMG_0095.JPG

IMG_0086-0.JPG

CES Day 0

Wow.. for a day of setup and a few quick meetings, I logged over 15,000 steps on my Withings Pulse device today.  I can honestly say that the excitement for what to see tomorrow is palatable.  IoT is everywhere!  As an exhibiter I am able to peak around on the various show floors, but this time I only went into the Sands Convention center space.  It includes Connected Home, Connected Health, and 3D Printing! I also know that I am going to spend significant amount of time in the North Hall at the main convention center which includes all the Connected Vehicle content.

Also got a ton of time working on our own demo, and ensuring that it’s multiple locations are all good for the rest of the week.

IMG_2529Here’s a quick peak of how the show floor looks like before it is a real show.. enjoy!

 

CES 2015 – Day -1

Finally in the room!
Finally in the room!

I am back at CES this year with my day job, but for the followers of this blog I will try and post an entry each day to talk about what I’ve seen.  Today I flew from RDU to Las Vegas via Atlanta, and after a 2 hour delay to get my luggage at the airport in Las Vegas, I finally made it to the hotel.

I ordered a quick room service, and got ready to crash.  A little secret (not so little and not a secret to anyone who knows me), I hate Las Vegas.  I don’t drink a lot, I don’t gamble, and I don’t smoke.  So this week will be dedicated to cool tech instead of the usual vices that people like about vegas.

Happy New Year – 2015

While I’ve not been as productive over the holidays as I had planned, I am looking forward to 2015.  As of today, I have taken a new day job, and will be talking about it more over the next month or so.  2014 was a crazy year of transitions, technology, and turmoil:  We’ve seen a bunch of security problems, hacks, leaks, and threats; We have seen new releases of Operating Systems, Wearables, and Applications; My podcast over at GamesAtWork.Biz finally hit episode 100 (about half a year late due to missing shows); and My participation in the local app development scene suffered due to work commitments.

This year I am hoping to increase the amount of time I spend on learning new technologies, the Apple Watch, Raspberry Pi, Internet of Things, and security. I am also hoping to get more time to hang out with other developers.. We shall see 🙂  Happy new year!!!

Friday coding

During my day job I am a product manager. This job does not encourage or provide time to write code. As I was getting ready to take some time off for the thanksgiving holiday, I worked to clear my calendar, clean my inbox and set a few actions in motion so I could really take some down time. Imagine my surprise when I had a few hours at the end of the day where I could do some coding on a demo we’ve been using for some time. The demo consists of a python application that emulates a car, a set of cloud services which process mqtt enabled devices, and an iOS app that represents a key fob that sends messages to the “car” simulator via the cloud. The initial iOS app was designed for one size screen and one orientation. I’ve always wanted the iOS app to be responsive to the orientation of the phone and to resize based on the various screen sizes, so I took the time late Friday to go back and add auto layout to the app.

I didn’t write the initial app, so completely redoing the interface was not an option. I had to go back and deal with auto layout within interface builder. I personally enjoy doing auto layout completely in code, so this was going to be a new experience for me.

After completing all the fixes, checking it into the repo for others on the team to take advantage of I discovered a new setting in Xcode for iOS8 – Adaptive Layout. I plan on doing some looking at that next!

Learning Swift

I’ve been a big fan of Ray Wenderlich’s site for getting up to speed on iOS programming, etc. For the last few weekends I’ve been spending my “free” time going thru his Swift by example book. While I’ve not gotten too far yet, I am enjoying the material. If you are interested in learning Swift, I can say it’ said good place to start. Go check it out!

MacWorld Expo 2015

By now, any reader of this blog already knows that IDC has cancelled MacWorld Expo.   While they didn’t say “cancelled,” they did put it on hiatus.  As someone who has gone to many different “user” focused conferences over the years, this means cancelle.  At least in any form we may recognize.  We may see a new “Mac Expo” come in to being, but I don’t think that we will ever see same type of conference.  I look back fondly at the friends I’ve made, the sessions I got to sit thru, and all the cool tech that I got to review.

Over the years, I have been trying to get time to go to WWDC, but my day job held a conference every year at the same time.  The good news, at least for me, is that my day job is combining multiple large conferences into one mega-conference.  The date for the new mega-conference is now in Febuary, and I have a chance to try and attend WWDC.

Given Apple’s registration process this is going to be tough, but at least  there’s a chancce.  So I think it’s time to go ahead and book my hotel room.

Review – Home Inventory for Mac and iOS

According to the makers of Home Inventory (Binary Formations, LLC. ), September was “National Preparedness Month” and as such they made their flagship product “Home Inventory” available for 50% off.  I got the opporuntity to do a review of the Mac product, along with both iOS companion products – Mobile Backup and Photo Remote.  Binary Formations was founded a little over four years ago, but the product shows a level of maturity of feature set, that comes from building a product that is truly needed by the developers themselves.  The Mac App has a PDF user manual that is over 150 pages, and I admit I had to go to refer to it a few times to understand how to access some of the features – but more on that later.

What is Home Inventory?  Well it’s name describes it perfectly, it is an inventory that any home owner should have, for insurance purposes, of the items in their home.  Most insurance policies require some sort of inventory in order to reimburse after a disaster, and Home Inventory puts the tools in your hands to make sure you have what you need.  Given the completeness of this application, I won’t be able to cover all aspects of the program, and will instead focus on data capture.

I have been meaning to do a home inventory for insurance purposes for some time, but I never really have had the time to do so.  Writing a review of the app is a perfect opportunity to give it shot. Being a realist, however, I knew I would never be able to do a full inventory in time to make a meaningful review, so I decided to do a much smaller inventory, i.e. the things on my desk in my home office.  This still became a bit of a daunting task.  Should I do everything, or only those things which are relevant and expensive.  I again took the shorter path.  I would only do electronics gadgets, and there are plenty of those!! My plan was to enter 10 items, and see how it goes.

First I needed to install the Mac App, not a problem as it is available on the AppStore, so a quick click got it going.  I created the initial data file during the launch, and was presented with a screen to define some basic home information, including a picture of the home, a Maintenance Schedule and Assessment History.  You can also include detailed information about when the house was built, the lot size, age of the home, and purchase price.  This level of information is great for an insurance assessment, probably not so much for a review on the web.  So I have blocked out most of that information and included a random house picture for this review.

The First thing I entered was using the Photo Remote to take a picture of the DockIT Air case I reviewed recently (see that post).  The iPhone App requires that you are on the same wifi as the Mac running the software, that the Mac version of the application be running, and that you select the Menu options Inventory -> Photo Remote, or press Command-R.  You are walked thru either scanning a Barcode (which I did with another item) or taking a picture.  If you scan the barcode it will do a look up on Amazon (or perhaps other services) and pre-fill in much of the information about the object.  You are then walked through a series of items to select the location, make, model, serial number, price, etc.  If you don’t hit “save” you will lose the data you have entered.  Also, if you close the window on the Mac the connection will be broken and you will lose your information.  You cannot add all the information on the Remote Photo app, and will find yourself going back to your Mac to complete the process.  The good news is, that while some of the views have visual prompts to accept new value (for example – a Click to add receipt button), drag and drop seems to be working fine.

The following pictures show you how the iPhone App works, and include a few screen shots of the Mac App.

1) Define Inventory File
1) Define Inventory File
2) Define your home info
2) Define your home info
3) Add Picture and Address
3) Add Picture and Address
4) Add Assessment History and Maintenance
4) Add Assessment History and Maintenance

After getting your basics setup, the following screens show how I added a item via my iPhone using the Photo Remote app.

1) Connecting to Mac
1) Connecting to Mac
2) Choose how to add
2) Choose how to add
3) Add a Photo
3) Add a Photo
4) Add a Value
4) Add a Value

Given the goal of this application to make sure you are prepared in case of a catastrophic event, I like that they support storing the data on DropBox and for those who are a bit more worried about privacy and security (you will, after all want to include all of your policy and assessment data in the program), you can do a manual backup to your iPhone via wifi.  Having multiple ways and locations where you can store the data is critical for ensuring that your inventory is safe in case of an emergency.

Overall, this is a very complete, if somewhat complex, program.  I do not knock the complexity at this time, as the objective is to truly be ready for a complete inventory of your assets for an emergency, and that is a complex goal.  The program includes the ability to print many different reports, including a move report – which I thought was a great use of all the data you collect.  I hope that overtime they continue to simplify the interface and make it much more iOS and Mac like in its interface.  A single example of how this would work would be to allow the Photo Remote to be able to capture the pictures and basic information without having to connect to the mac.  Right now if you exit the app on the phone, before a “save” action, you lose the data you’ve been entering on that item to that point. iOS apps should be able to handle a loss of network communication without losing data.

I can’t say I am looking forward to completion of my Home Inventory, but I am certainly glad that this tool exists to ensure that I have captured all the things  I need to be prepared should I ever need it.

Local IoT Demo coming up

As I mentioned in my last post, I am focusing on the Internet of Things in my day job. I am going to be at a local meetup at the end of the month, the RIoT meetup. I love the name, and this is their second event. Unfortunately I missed the first meetup, due to a conference I was at in Orlando. RIoT stand for the Raleigh Internet of Things Meetup.

At the upcoming meetup I have seven minutes to present an IoT topic. My goal is to demonstrate a IoT app (a very simple one at that) which connected my cell phone to the IBM Bluemix cloud service and a Raspberry Pi (which in my demo will represent a car). The app will allow my cell phone to lock and unlock my car door. While the code will be trivial, what will be cool, assuming I can pull it off, will be that the cell phone will be near instantaneous in unlocking my car. I will also do a dynamic (yet trivial) code change to the mobile application which will change the message that is sent when the lock status changes.

The idea is to show off composable services on the cloud, continuous delivery for an application, and integration to a non-traditional end point. Come join me at the Meetup and let’s talk tech!

The Internet of Things and App Development

The Internet of Things has been a hot topic for the last 24 months, reaching a fevered pitch in the last few months.  When I was at CES earlier this year, you couldn’t find a company that didn’t have some perspective on the Internet of Things (IoT).  Car companies, consumer electronic companies, even clothing companies were showcasing their new connected products and how the IoT was going to improve the consumer’s experience with their brand.

I’ve been thinking about this and what makes the IoT different than prior versions of connected products.  To me it is two key factors, the level of connectivity and the quality of the software.  Let me explain

Level of connectivity

For decades, large industrial plants and manufacturing facilities have been using real-time and near real-time data to improve the efficiency of their business.  The did this via ethernet connectivity and sometimes expensive satellite and microwave connectivity.  These systems were affordable because the cost of unplanned downtime was so high, that almost any connectivity costs were acceptable.  Additionally, cognitive computing algorithms  were developed around very specific use cases, i.e. pump maintenance schedules, which had to be custom developed based on the specifics of a plant or facility. These finely tuned systems of systems were built around the connectivity and proprietary standards of the hardware in place.

Now the cost of connectivity and level of penetration of simple protocols like TCP/IP are cheap and near ubiquitous.  You can added a wifi or 2G/3G/4G radio into a product very inexpensively, while transmission costs are now bore by most of the end consumers as part of their day to day life.  This is very different than the last few decades, and means that much of the value of a IoT solution, will be in the software’s implementation of the data and consumer’s usage of the device.

Quality of the software

With the mobile revolution over the last 7 years (I go back to June 29th, 2007 when the iPhone was first available – even though had been very happy with a Palm  Treo for years before this), consumers have become used to higher quality of software.  Why do I call it higher quality?  Is it bug free? NO! Is it more functional? No! Is it more atheistically pleasing?  no. What I mean by quality of software is that it is doing what you need when you need it.  Some of the most popular fitness tools in the last few years, are applications on a smart phone – apps like Moves which tracks your walking, biking, and running based on the accelerometer on your phone.  They take advantage of many of the capabilities of the phone, and given that most people keep their phone with them at all times, it becomes the de facto fitness device.  We see the same phenomena with pictures,  the majority of pictures on Flickr, are taken with smart phones.  The same with games, the majority of time spent gaming is spent on smart phones (I made this one up, but I would bet it’s true).

So the software that is running when you need it, on the data that you have with you, and provides you with the insights you need to change your behavior, improve your process, or just better engage in a situation is higher in quality in my opinion.

So why do these matter in the Internet of Things?

In the IoT, devices and software have to work hand in hand to improve processes and a person’s environment.  As developers, we need to understand this aspect of the internet of things.  It’s easy to get consumed by the cool factor, but cool without value isn’t that cool.  So we need to improve our software to better serve our users / customers. And the Internet of Things provides us with a great way of doing this.

Internet of Things applications and things have the ability to provide us as developers with real-time and near real-time feedback on how consumers are using our product.  We should take this information and quickly improve our product to increase its value.  This means letting a consumer know what data we can and do capture, and providing no nonsense, easy to understand terms on how we will use this data to improve the consumer’s experience.

We then have the ability to take this feedback and improve the product or create new ones.  This faster time to feedback is a principle foundation of the ideas behind DevOps.  Another key aspect of DevOps is scale, and the Internet of Things is all about scale for the product/application developer.  While any individual using a IoT device or application is potentially a single node, much more value is gained in the larger scale system where patterns and other insights may be gained to improve a product or application.  And peeling back the insight requires analytics.

So what can I do as a Developer?

First, make sure you are open to your customers on what data you do collect and how it will be used.  Where it makes sense, expose APIs so your customers can extend your application and product, trust me they will come up with even more cool things to do with your application/product than you can image.  And three, take advantage of the faster time to feedback to make your product better.  Remember once you release a product or application, the engagement with your customer is just beginning.  It’s not about the initial sale, but about increasing the value over time.