Support My Idea

When Scott Hassan went to Las Vegas for the International Consumer Electronics Show last week, he was still able to get the kids up in the morning and help them make breakfast at his California home. Hassan used a remote-controlled screen on wheels to spend time with his family, and today his company, Suitable Technologies, started taking orders for Beam+, a version of the same telepresence technology aimed at home users. This summer, it will also be available via Amazon and other retailers.

Hassan thinks the Beam+, essentially a 10-inch screen and camera mounted on wheels, will be popular with other businesspeople who want to spend more time with their kids, or those with aging parents they’d like to check up on more often.

Hassan says a person “visiting” aging parents this way could check up on them less obtrusively than via phone, for example by walking around to look for signs they’d taken their medication rather than bluntly asking, or watching to check that they take their pills with their meal. “For people with dementia or Alzheimer’s, I think that being able to see and hear and walk around with a familiar face is a lot better than just a phone call,” he says. “You could also just Beam in and watch Jeopardy! with your grandmother on TV.”

The Beam+ is designed so that once installed in a home, anyone with the login credentials can bring it to life and start moving around. The operator’s interface shows the view from a camera over the screen, as well as a smaller view looking down toward the unit’s base to aid maneuvering. A user drives it by moving a mouse over their view and clicking where they want to go…

Technology Review

Apple has lost its grip on tablet dominance, as Gartner today released numbers that show Android was the top tablet operating system in 2014. 

While sales of iOS tablets grew in the fourth quarter of 2013, iOS’s share declined to 36 percent last year, while Android captured 62 percent of the market. 

Worldwide sales of tablets to end users reached 195.4 million units in 2013, a 68 percent increase on 2012, according to Gartner. 

Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner, said in a statement that a significant drop in price for Android tablets was one of the reasons for the overall growth in slate sales, but she cautioned Android OEMs will now have to refine their products to keep customers coming back.  

“As the Android tablet market becomes highly commoditized, in 2014, it will be critical for vendors to focus on device experience and meaningful technology and ecosystem value — beyond just hardware and cost — to ensure brand loyalty and improved margins,” Cozza said.  

Apple, which  has always preffered higher margins to selling cheaper devices, saw a 16.8 drop in market share, as market demand was driven by the improved quality of smaller low-cost tablets from branded vendors, and white-box products continued to grow in emerging markets. 

“Apple’s tablets remain strong in the higher end of the market and, Apple’s approach will continue to force vendors to compete with full ecosystem offerings, even in the smaller-screen market as the iPad mini sees a greater share” Cozza added. 

Apple was still the top tablet vendor in 2013, followed by Samsung, which claimed 19 percent of the market. 

Gartner considers tablets part of the “wider ultramobile marke”t that also includes hybrids and clamshells. The research firm said sales of ultramobiles to end users reached 216 million units in 2013, an increase of 68 percent on 2012. The tablet remained the most popular device, accounting for 90 percent of overall sales of ultramobiles in 2013 — followed by the clamshell and the hybrid, with 8 percent and 2 percent of sales, respectively.

“Although there were few models available last year, the hybrid form factor was the fastest growing category in 2013. Hybrid ultramobiles attracted users’ attention because the keyboard offers better use of productivity applications and benefits from a tablet form factor,” said Cozza. 

Gartner said it expects replacement buyers to start upgrading to hybrid ultramobiles that will be introduced into the market from 2014, satisfying users who no longer want to deal with owning multiple devices or who want to keep up with the latest computing trend.

Wireless Week

You have seen our last comparison of Samsung Galaxy S5 with its Galaxy S4 and Galaxy Note 3 now it’s time to compare it with the flagship of Sony, the Sony Xperia Z2 and also with the LG G2. The Samsung Galaxy S5 and the Sony Xperia Z2 are Water and Dust proof with IP67 and IP58 certifications respectively. Let us see what each device packs in them and how does each device stand after the comparison…

Android Advices

If you are using responsive layout for your blog or website, you should make the Facebook like box responsive. After using responsive layout for my Blog, there was everything responsive except the Facebook like box. Finally I have found a quick solution to make the Facebook like box responsive with a bit of CSS and a div to enclose the iFrame. The responsive Facebook like box will make your blog more beautiful on mobile devices. So here, I am going to share how to make your Facebook like box responsive…

TechClause

The music player is one of the most popular features of your Android phone. The application allows you to listen to your favorite songs when you are in the mood for some entertainment. Since Android is one of the most widespread mobile platforms, several music applications are now available in the Android market.

You can find these applications online very easily but it might prove difficult to select the best applications from among them. A list of the top ten Android music apps is given below…

Top Apps

So you know those old wives’ tales about tweaking your battery stats improving your battery life? Well apparently those old wives’ tales aren’t true. In fact— Google says you’re wasting your time by fiddling around with your battery stats or using battery tweaking apps. Google’s own Diane Hackborn recently addressed this common myth and urban legend of tweaking battery stats improving your battery life…

TalkAndroid.com

Just read this article on Google’s Project Tango which is a 3D Vision Chip embedded inside a phone. I’m pretty sure you have no idea what a 3D Vision Chip is because I had no clue what it was either.  As a simple explanation, it’s the same technology behind a XBox Kinect that allows you the Kinect to track and map the physical world to a digital world so you can be given points for your sweet moves in Dance Central.  And if you’re not an XBox fan, it’s the same technology they showed in Dark Knight where Batman could see the layout of a building through his mask or how they found the Joker because they mapped the entire city from cell phone signals.  It’s a really cool project and the fact that they’re jumping to embedding it inside a phone is really exciting because that could mean we’ll see an Android handset with one of these fancy 3D Vision Chips in the not so distant futures (but still distant because this would probably be super expensive).  And of course, there was talk about this and Google Glass and how if this was integrated into Glass, you could map an entire building simply by having someone walk around. I don’t know if this could realistically show things on the other side of a wall, it seems more realistic that it would just be able to map the physical items it can see and process, but who knows. I have no idea how you get your hands on something like this, but I would definitely be interested if they made this available to developers.  I really do need to spend more time working on mobile apps…

Everyone is talking about Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp for $19B and along with Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for $1B, I really don’t see how these acquisitions help Facebook (and apparently I’m not alone according to financial analysts).  I don’t see these driving more usage on Facebook and I guess I don’t see how the added data you get form WhatsApp users being that valuable to Facebook, but who knows, maybe I’m missing something obvious.  Or maybe it’s simply a way to consolidate consumer tech companies and have more of our personal information consolidated across different platforms that most would think are separate (I bet there’s a lot of kids out there who use Instagram and bash Facebook without realizing that they’re still drinking from the Facebook teat).  I’ve used WhatsApp and it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t great either, the app didn’t always notify me when I got a message and I would sometimes have to open the app before I saw I got a message from hours ago. I found actual text messages to be far more convenient and efficient. So I’m not too sure what the huge draw of WhatsApp and how they got so many users around the world.  But in any case, good for them and congratulations to the 50 employees who I’m sure all became instant millionaires/billionaires.  Still waiting for my big pay day, but I’m thinking I’ll have better luck playing the lottery.

So it looks like Microsoft is making some serious waves in the CRM space as it fights with incumbents like Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Oracle. With the purchase of Parature (huge congrats to the Parature team for a great exit), Microsoft CRM is definitely expanding its feature set and functionality to really give the other guys a run for their money. It will be interesting to see how all the different pieces play together and if the sum of all their parts is enough for companies with existing systems to spend the time/money to convert to CRM or for small/medium companies who are growing and using spreadsheets or other free/cheap alternatives to upgrade to CRM instead of one of their competitors. As someone who worked with a lot of companies to implement a support solution, I can say the way to win the war is to make setup as simple as possible, possibly even providing tools that make converting from any system a piece of cake.  I can easily say that transferring everything from one system to another was possibly the most painful thing the team had to do.  And it’s not a value-add, it doesn’t make anyone’s life easier, it simply is the cost of converting.  And when you want companies to convert, you need to make transferring to your services as easy as possible (as well as providing an amazing product).  Anyways, I could talk about all the way that a CRM solution could be built to make it the best/easiest and most attractive solution out there, but realistically none of the big guys will listen to me, they have teams of product managers who know best, but I doubt many of them have had to work with 100+ companies to convert/implement/integrate CRM systems….

Kickstarter announced on their blog that their system was compromised and hackers were able to access personal information and encrypted passwords.  This definitely means that if you have a login on Kickstarter that you should go and update your password.  And if you use that same password on other sites with the same email address, you probably should go update those passwords too.  I just wrote about some ways to create unique passwords that are easy to remember, so you might want to check them out and implement you own system.