Google Glass Zombie Edition

Google launched its "augmented reality" device (Google Glass Explorer Edition) in 2013 to much fanfare, though the hype soon overtook the realities of the product. Though never aimed at consumers (it cost around £1,000), the media, and to some degree Google, positioned it as that. Then came the crash and people wearing Glass were known as "glassholes".

Google Glass Explored Edition was just that, a platform that "explorers" i.e. developers, could start experimenting with augmented apps. Though the device did have a camera and wearers could take snaps of things they saw and camera info could be used by apps, Glass is really more of a Head's Up Display (HUD).

In 2015 Google stopped production of the Explorer Edition, but quietly in the background apps were developed and Glass found a market in the industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) arenas. Think surgery and having access to patient data or access to information about the operation, or in industry working on some device and instant access to pertinent information maybe an instruction or service manual. The list goes on and in these areas, lightweight HUD technology is a big winner.

Now it's 2017 and Google have announced Google Glass Enterprise Edition. This will be sold by resellers and positioned squarely for the ISM markets and launch partners were in those very fields. It's definitely NOT a consumer device. Google were right all along and there's a good chance they sell lots of units in those specialist areas.

The other contender is Microsoft Hololens, again people are writing it off as an expensive tech gadget, but Hololens is to Microsoft and Glass is to Google.

Xaomi MI smart band - Chinese tech at Chinese pricing

There are lots of smartbands on the market at the moment all claiming to aid fittness by quantifying activity on a daily basis. Many companies have been preaching expensive devices which limit their attractiveness to the general market, however there are now devices coming out at the lower end of the market (such as the Jawbone UP Move which was reviewed recently). Lower pricing means that more consumers will use these devices and start tracking what they're doing.

Xaomi are a Chinese mobile phone maker who have been producing a range of phones that compete with Samsung's Galaxy offerings. It has recently been branching out into other products such as Internet TV's and fittness products.

Xaomi recently launched the Mi band, originally only available in China, it's now available to the wider market. The Mi band arrives in a rather plain card box box and contains the Mi unit (in aluminium) which fits into a silicon strap with 'pop' style clasp so it's easy to fit. There's also an odd looking USB charging cable and some Chinese instructions. Not a lot in the box but it's pretty much self explanatory.

First thing to do is charge the Mi unit by placing it on to the charging cable and plugging it into a spare USB port. Then download the app (available for iOS and Android, search for Xaomi) and then it's ready to start measuring.

There's no display on the band, just 3 LEDs. These correspond with either pairing or the amount of effort you have made to complete your steps. The band paired with a Galaxy Note 4 and it's lasted several days without a recharge.

The interface on the "Mi fit" app is faily simple with a round counter showing how far you've progressed towards your step goals. It tracks sleep and steps like most of the others and does a good job. Compared to other apps such as the S Health app on the phone and another band it showed the similar data for steps and mileage. The interface is relatively simple as can be seen below:

The app shows how you have been doing everytime you open it. There is no background syncing going on, which may be a good thing for battery life. The band tells you with a buzz when you have reached your step goal anyhow. The app does though have a couple of differences, compared to others. It shows you the amount of fat you have burned which is fairly depressing. A US band probably wouldn't show this information because it could be seen as negative. There are also no goals to reach like Nike and there are no pep talks such as Fitbit and Jawbone. Very plain and simple and to the point. Sleep tracking is automatic without having to press anything which is a nice feature (the Misfit Shine also does this and though the Microsoft band has a sleep mode, it can auto-detect sleep if you forget to manually set it) but there is no info apart from a histogram about what it looked like.

Bacause the Xaomi Mi band is basic, it also misses some of the accelarometer information of some of the other devices and it cannot necessarily differentiate between different activities like other apps. There is also no way of telling it what you are doing and for how long. For example last week having walked about a bit and cycled about 35 miles the Samsung app shows this:

While the Xaomi App shows this:

Conclusion

So even though the Xaomi Mi band is not great at everything and there is still some work to do its not a bad piece of kit. The fact you can also get it for £15.99 on Amazon is an amazing deal!

4/5 for general getting fitter (walking and running) 1/5 for sports people

Microsoft gives Windows Phone away

Microsoft, who aren't known for giving away anything for free, have decided to drop licensing fees for Windows Phone 8 (for devices with displaces less than 9 inches). Though it only has about 3% of the phone market, that's still quite a big hit to cope with as current fees are around $5 - $15 per phone, though that's estimated to be less than $1bn per year.

Of course Microsoft do get a nice revenue stream from Android licensees as they still have to pay royalties to Microsoft for their mobile patents.

This might just tip the balance and get more handset manufacturers to switch to Windows Phone and though Microsoft won't get direct revenue for the OS, they will get revenue from the add-on services such as Office 365 which users are encouraged to sign-up to.

Netflix dumps Silverlight

Netflix the video on demand service has dropped Microsoft's Silverlight in favour of using HTML5 vide extensions.

Though Microsoft have said they will support Silverlight until 2021, Netflix have been ready to migrate for a while and users can be unhappy with the browser extension that can be troublesome to install.

The video extensions Netflix will use are Media Source, Encrypted Media and Web Cryptography API which will be implemented in Google's Chrome browser and ARM based Chromebook and are likely to be native to other browsers soon. As the extensions are part of the W3C HTML5 specifications, users wont have to install any browser plug-ins to support them.

Nokia dumps Qt

Nokia has sold the Qt business to Digia including 125 staff mainly from Oslo and Berlin. Digia had already purchased the Qt licensing business from Nokia in March 2011.

Qt is a cross platform set of libraries allowing developers to use the same front-end code for MacOS X, Windows and Linux (as well as other embedded system like Symbian, INFINITY, VxWORKS and QNX). Qt was originally developed by Trolltech which Nokia bought in 2008.

Nokia has lost its way in recent years having dropped its lead in the mobile phone markets (though it still has a large base in 3rd world countries) as is now concentrating on a smartphone market using Microsoft Windows Phone.

Digia is hoping to further develop Qt which has been used by over 450,000 developers and Digia is hoping to rapidly support MS Windows 8, Google's Android and Apple's iOS.

The commercial version of Qt will be maintained at Digia and the open-source variant at Qt-Project.

Microsoft completes acquisition of Skype

Yesterday (13/10/11) Microsoft completed the acquisition of Skype which now can operate as a business devision of the Redmond Corporation.

The official Microsoft press release is here.

The sale went through for $8.5bn which is a considerable sum for a service which is basically free, though Skype is generating revenues.

Skype brings video calling to Android

Skype has announced that Skype for Android 2.0 now supports video calling which will work with Skype for iPhone, Mac and Windows. Video will work both over WiFi and 3G.

Support for handsets include the HTC Desire S, Sony Ericsson Xperia neo, Sony Ericsson, Xperia pro and the Google Nexus S.

Facebook are going to announce a 'major new service' next week and it's rumoured that Facebook video calling will be based on Skype (though the rumour is recent, Skype has been working with Facebook for some time and precedes the Microsoft acquisition). The video calling will be in browser, though it's not clear whether the user has to have the Skype client installed too. This should give Skype a major boost as Facebook has 750m users compared to Skype's 170m (active), it should also help Facebook and Microsoft head off Google's voice service.

Microsoft makes more from patent licensing than WP7 licenses

Microsoft (MS) has a huge patent portfolio and a lot related to mobile technologies used in mobile operating systems such as Android and others.

It recently added General Dynamics Itronix division (who make ruggedised systems running both Windows and Android), though a small player it is going after companies like this to show that it may be better to license Windows Phone 7 (WP7) rather than use Android and pay MS patent license fees.

MS has already reached agreement with large companies such as HTC (one of the largest manufacturer's of smartphones again running Android and WP7) and has lawsuits against Motorola and Barns and Noble.

It is thought MS are trying to destabilise Google's mobile power base and get manufacturers to use WP7 as it's protected against any other kind of licensing in terms of intellectual property.

It's alleged that Microsoft make more money from Android IP royalties than they do from WP7 licenses - so though they'd like more vendors to adopt WP7, they're winning on both sides.

Microsoft-Skype kills Skype for Asterisk

Many will know Asterisk the open source IP PBX (IP telephony system) that is commercially supported by Digium.

At Astricon in 2008 Digium announced a partnership with Skype that would allow an Asterisk system join the Skype network as a Skype client, though commercial (costing $66 per channel i.e. each concurrent call the Skype network requires a channel) many people used this to connect their internal VoIP systems to the outside world taking advantage of free Skype to Skype calls and cheap calls to the normal telephone networks using Skype-out.

Unfortunately the partnership is now dead as Skype (or now Microsoft Skype as Skype is to be known after their acquisition by the software giant) have decided to discontinue the licensing of Skype proprietary code that is included in the Skype for Asterisk product.

Customers can still purchase Skype for Asterisk until 26th July 2011 and Skype will continue to support the product until 2013 (and Skype "at their discretion" may continue support beyond that).

Though Skype for Asterisk only represents a small proportion of the Skype population, is this indicative of the way that Microsoft is taking the company as Asterisk and other open source solutions directly compete with some of Microsoft's offerings? If so it's a shame as it it's likely that only MS products will work with Skype and thus further locking customers into Microsoft's solutions.

Though to be fair, rumour has it that Skype was already looking at ways of ending the relationship with Digium.

Samsung drops Symbian

Following on from the announcement by SonyEricsson that it would not be producing anymore handsets based on Symbian to concentrate on Android, Samsung has also announced it's dropping Symbian and will be developing new handsets based on Android and Windows Phone 7.

This must be a blow for Nokia who are still pushing Symbian and hoping that Symbian^3, now open sourced, would be a competitor to Google's Android and Apple's iOS and to some degree Microsoft's WP7 though earlier version of Windows Mobile haven't been too successful.

Nokia have a confused approach and are utilising MeeGo (their joint Linux venture with Intel combining the best features of Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin) as their smartphone operating system, though Symbian^3 also offers smartphone features (though can also be cut down as a dumb OS for cheaper phones).

Though Nokia are still dominant in the phone arena, selling 1.4m phones per day, it's a costly exercise to keep development teams for MeeGo and Symbian when no-one apart from Nokia is using them and Android is becoming the default OS for smartphones (apart from Apple's iOS which they are unlikely to license to other phone vendors).

Maybe Nokia should drop MeeGo, move to Android and admit Google have won and just develop Symbian as a 'dumb' OS for the non smartphone market.

HP's saucy acquisition of Palm

HP acquired Palm for $1.2bn and maybe there's method behind the madness, why would they want Palm?

The price seems quite high for a mobile company that isn't quite meeting market expectations and though Palm have some nice devices (the Pixie and Pre) and a new operating system (WebOS) they're not selling brilliantly.

HP make PDAs, they're trying to sell them into the enterprise which is where HP do well. Palm used to sell into the enterprise and do well, but they've lost their way and the introduction of WebOS was too late too little and they've been overtaken by Apple with the iPhone, RIM with their Blackberries and Google with Android based systems. HP license Windows Mobile which hasn't been the huge success that both Microsoft and HP would have liked.

So HP's acquisition of Palm suddenly means they have their own operating system WebOS which they can develop, make shiny and integrate on to their own devices and get their mobile devices back into the enterprise.

There's a second reason too, HP want to make tablets (of the computing variety) and they need an operating system, especially since Microsoft have just dropped their tablet plans. WebOS could fit that bill and again would fit well in HP's core enterprise market. It will need some polishing, but HP have got the clout to push it in the right direction. They can develop a creditable competitor to Apple's OS and Google's Android/Chrome systems and Intel/Nokia's MeeGo.

Maybe the acquisition was too cheap?

Microsoft Releases HD Photo plug-in for Photoshop CS2/3

Microsoft have released a HD Photo plug-in for Adobe's Photoshop CS2 and CS3. It's available for both Windows XP/Vista and Apple MacOS X (10.4) on both Intel and PowerPC.

Currently it's still beta, though it's expected to be the final version.

It was known as Windows Media HD, though MS have submitted it to JPEG and it should become JPEG XR (XR is short for "extended range). MS are allowing the technology to be used in a royalty free manner and will submit all specifications allowing anyone to implement the format on any platform in any language.

Microsoft buys Tellme

Tellme produce voice recognition software, companies like FedEx utilise their technology.

MS are likely to integrate the Tellme voice recognition software into their an on-line collaboration service or even LCS (live communication server) which was released in beta this week.

Tellme had solutions for Linux and other open source variants, but will MS now kill these as it has done in the past with other companies it has acquired.

ISO PDF anyone

Adobe is trying to get the PDF specification ratified as an ISO spec.

Initially the v1.7 specification is being submitted to Association for Information and Image Management with the hope they'll submit it to ISO to become an international standard.

Is it just a way to fend off Microsoft who are pushing their XML format for Office 2007?