Entries Tagged 'Idealistic Fridays' ↓

Through the previous “Idealistic Friday” posts I’ve talked about the various things I want to see in consumer electronics devices - open source software, wifi connections, touch screens and APIs. What kind of device would combine all those attributes? My dream device - in my estimation - would sell billions of units. Well maybe hundreds of thousands at least. I offer up the idea in the hopes that someone will actually run with it. I’ll take 5 at least.

photo credit: laihiuMy dream device looks an awful lot like a digital photo frame. The digital photo frame has really come into its own in the last few years. A couple years ago they were expensive, small and only in the homes of the techno-geek early adopters. Now they sell them in Target and CVS stores, they’ve grown much bigger and they’re pretty cheap.

Now apply our new attributes to the digital photo frame. Our new digital frame has a touch screen, runs extensible software and has a wifi connection. There’s one in my kitchen. It normally cycles through pictures of the family but pick it up and touch it and you get the menu. The menu has a couple of the applications I’ve installed on it - a grocery list that automatically syncs with the website of my local grocery store. When I walk into to grocery store there’s a little kiosk where I swipe my card and get it prints out a list of the groceries I need to buy. Conveniently the list is sorted by aisle so I know that in this particular store bread is in aisle 3. Peanut butter is on my list and so Jif and Skippy have added competing coupon offers. There’s also a recipe application I’ve added that connects to various recipe sites on the net.

Also on my kitchen device is a family calendar. I can see when the kids have soccer practice, when we have a party to attend and can add the fact that I’m ducking out on Thursday night to go to the poker game. When I’m in the family room I can add entries to the calendar and they will appear at all the devices throughout the house. And of course it’s synced with my Google calendar so I can add entries online too.

The one on my nightstand in the bedroom has a couple special applications I’ve added. There’s a small digital clock at the bottom and the current weather and today’s forecast in simple icon form. If I want more details about todays weather or want to check further into the future I can just touch the weather icon and explore further. And of course it can act as an alarm clock and wake me to random tracks from my MP3 collection. Not all of these devices are identical. The come in various sizes and capabilities -  not all of them need the nice stereo speakers built into my bedroom unit.

I’m embarrassed to say that the one in the family room - the one that charges in a dock and slips out for hand held use - also has my Google Reader application installed so I can keep up with my RSS feeds and accesses my Gmail account. Someday I’ll learn to be disconnected for a few minutes a day.

My parents have a few of these in their house too and because they’ve given me online access to the units I can beam them pictures of the grandkids directly from my digital camera (which also has a wifi connection). Using the API I’ve added some simple functionality to have my units monitor the health of all my websites and alert me when something goes awry. It wasn’t hard but did of course require a bit of programming. For most people however the devices just work - and popular applications are a one touch install. They’re based all on open standards so even though they’re made by different manufacturers they all work together.

Is it a crazy dream world that I live in? Not really. Such devices could be made today pretty easily using commonly available components. It’s the kind of device that no one (well not many) knows that they want until they see it. But once you get it you won’t be able to imagine how you lived without it.

Continuing in our series of posts on how to make the world (or at least our consumer electronics) better we now have devices that use a touchscreen are driven by open source software and have a WiFi connection. These devices are a easier to use and interact with than what we’re used to today and their open source nature means that you never have to be satisfied with their shortcomings. You’ve already downloaded some interesting mods to your dishwasher and you’re wondering where to go from here.

While that open source control software is great for when you want to tweak how your devices operate there should be an easier way to add new functionality to your devices. And then there are times when you want to export the functionality from one device to another. The best way to do this is via an API - an application programming interface.

In recent years APIs have become a foundation of various websites. Amazon has its webservices that allow people to find products for sale. eBay has similar APIs and also provides ways for sellers to add items to the site. Sites like Flickr offer APIs for searching for images and Google has APIs for products like Google Maps which enable developers to quickly build applications using Google’s core functionality. Perhaps the ultimate example of extensibility through APIs is Facebook’s applications which allows developers to add functionality to a user’s Facebook profile page.

As you can probably see APIs come in two flavors: those that export data/functionality and those import extensions into the application or device.

Importing New Functionality

photo credit: tombothetominatorWhich devices can benefit from allowing users to import new functionality? Lots of them. My new digital camera has some amazing software that allows it to detect the human face on the screen to make sure the face is in focus. If your camera doesn’t do that wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily add it. And how about red-eye correction. Again something that some cameras already have but there are certainly other applications you could add. Maybe some software to allow you to stitch photos together into a panoramic shot? Sure you can do that on your computer later but if the camera could do it you could correct that one shot that was off a little or darker the the rest because a cloud passed by. Or how about some OCR - optical character recognition - right on your cell phone camera? You’re in the store and see a piece of furniture but you’re not sure it’ll fit the space you have. Snap a pic, turn the image into text and send a text message to your spouse.

photo credit: KhürtEntertainment devices would benefit greatly from being able to add new funtionality. TiVo started down the road of allowing people to write extension that could run on the device but seems to have unfortunately back off from the idea. It’s a shame because I’m sure there are dozens of great idea that could be added to the device that many more people would undertake if it didn’t involve having to open up and hack the machine. The possibilities for a device like an Xbox which is really a very powerful home entertainment computer are nearly endless.

Exporting Capabilities and Data

The flip side of having APIs which allow you to extend the functionality of a device is to have APIs which export a device’s functionality and data to other devices. Back to the digital camera imagine if your digital camera (which already has WiFi capability) could operate under the control of your computer. Set your camera anywhere in the house and your computer could use it to take pictures. Make your own time lapse video of your plants blooming. Or turn it into an instant spy camera that uploads pictures of your cat to your private web page so you can spy on him while your at the office. Today you can go out and get a wireless web camera to do these things but the digital camera is far more ubiquitous than a web cam and many people don’t need that kind of functionality on a regular basis.

Not for Everyone?

While I’d be a huge fan of applying all these principles to every device APIs probably aren’t necessary for everything. Even I have trouble thinking of a good API for my toaster. Devices that are good candidates are devices which have capability that can be export for other devices to use or devices that are good platforms for running new functionality.

Hopefully if you’ve been following along with this series you’re getting an idea for how opening up the devices around us can lead to exciting new applications. If you’re a product developer for Sony go ahead and build these ideas into your next generation products but if you’re not thinking like this is still a useful exercise that will help you open yourself up to new idea in the areas where you do work. Next up: a fictional device that combines all these idea and will sell a billion copies as soon as someone builds it.

On previous Idealistic Friday’s we’ve established that we want our consumer electronics devices to be driven by open source software and have a WiFi connection. The next thing we’re going to demand in our new improved world is inspired in part by the blockbuster device of 2007, Apple’s iPhone. Even those of us who don’t have an iPhone (I don’t) are affected by it. Certainly all the geeks among us have at least had a friend hand us their device to show how cool it is. And it is damn cool. And it’s cool in large part because of that big, beautiful touchscreen.

photo credit: QypeThe touchscreen on consumer electronics is something so brilliant that it’s amazing it hasn’t become ubiquitous already. I’m not talking about touchscreens on computers. I don’t want fingerprints all over my monitor when I already have a perfectly good device for entering text (the keyboard) and pointing (the mouse). But the majority of consumer electronics devices are too small to put a keyboard and pointing device on them. Hence the touchscreen.

What are the advantages of a touchscreen? Well first of all we’re all pretty used to graphical user interfaces on PCs by now and the touchscreen allows graphical user interfaces on these much smaller devices. The alternative is clunky menus which seem oh so 80s in comparison. Most importantly the touchscreen allows the manufacturer to turn the entire display surface of the device into a dynamic input surface as well. It effectively makes the display larger while making the input area larger at the same time. Quite the bending of the laws of physics there. The bigger display and the dynamic nature of the input area means that you can accomplish far more complex manipulations while making the device easier to use

Improvements all around. Any type of complex interaction with a device that’s too small for a keyboard is greatly improved by using a touchscreen. My car navigation system uses a cursor, my wife’s uses a touchscreen. My car salesman tried to sell me on the “no fingerprints on the screen” angle. He’s wrong. The touchscreen is just far easier to use. So much so that it negates the minor issue of smudges on the screen. Even very simple interactions could be improved with a touchscreen though. My microwave has a small led display and some pre-defined buttons. So when you want to cook a food that it has pre-programmed you often need to cycle through the menu and then try to decipher the 4 letter spelling of the word. With a touch screen you could have a picture of a big bag of popcorn next to a small bag instead of repeatedly hitting the popcorn button to find the “Rglr” size. Imagine setting the time on your clocks by dragging the hour and minute hands into place - or sliding back and forth for a digital clock.

Avoid annoying the customer. Have you ever walked up to a door and pushed only to find you need to pull? That happens because the door is poorly designed and doesn’t follow conventions. Increasingly people are coming to expect touchscreens and will often intuitively push on the screen to get things to happen. When it doesn’t work the way they expect people get annoyed. Annoyed people don’t recommend products to their friends. Lack of a touchscreen where it is intuitively expected was a big part of Scoble’s complaints about the Kindle device.

So why isn’t it already so? Even though they’ve been around for a long time in some form or another touchscreens the way we see them today are relatively new. It will take some time for device manufacturers to get them into their products. And then there’s the issue of cost. Since consumers can be so overwhelmingly cost driven in their purchases manufacturers are reluctant to add even a small amount of cost to their devices. But as with anything scale will make touchscreens more affordable and I think they’ll prove to be such a competitive advantage that it will be suicide to not use them widely.

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It’s fun having the power to change the world in this virtual way. I think that in general this is the way that entrepreneurs and creative people view the world. Exercise your mind and imagine how you can improve the world around you even if you don’t have the power to do so at the moment. And follow along here because I have plenty more ideas for you and eventually a fictional device that brings all of it together.

Now that all of our electronic devices are powered by open source software, we need a good way to get at the devices to update them and tools to use to provide them with more functionality. The ideal way to do this is with a WiFi connection.

Yes, I’m talking about nearly every device yet again. It would be nice to be able to login to your dishwasher and determine when it had last been run and/or the current state of the wash cycle. But there are other devices where that wireless network connection would be far more useful. Namely my car.

Think about what you car could do with even an “sometimes” network connection. Your car could e-mail you with diagnostics reports and maintenance requests (without some satellite based service that comes with a large monthly fee). Better yet you could login to your car’s web server while it’s parked in the driveway and check it’s status along with getting all sorts of interesting but useless stats.

Combined with the WiFi connection there are a billion new applications for your GPS navigation system. Anonymously submit your driving time/location/speed information to my new web service and I’ll generate an average speed for a given road at at given time of day. You can then upload that info back to your GPS which can now use it to determine the shortest route.

Forget trying to enter your destination with your car’s touch screen (or worse mine uses a cursor system). You can send destinations from your address book to your car’s nav system which can then design the optimal route for the 4 errands you need to run. Oh, and don’t forget to check the box that makes the grocery store your last destination - wouldn’t want your milk to spoil while your getting your haircut.

And finally there’s your stereo/entertainment system. Download your MP3 collection directly to the car. And beam the latest Disney flick to your in car pvr so the kids have something to watch on that next road trip.

The possibilities are nearly endless here and once again free boost for the device makers.

Welcome to Idealistic Fridays. Fridays seem like the most hopeful of days in general since there’s always the anticipation of the fun that’s going to come over the weekend. Of course there’s not much distinction between weekday and weekend for most solo entrepreneurs but just go with me on this on. In honor of the hope that is Friday I plan a series of posts about things that would make the works a better place in my not so humble opinion.

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Every device that has a computer chip should make their software open source.  Really nearly everything with a plug these days is run by some level of computer chip - from your TV to your dishwasher and at the more complex end things like your cell phone are essentially computers that are highly focused on a single task.

I think all of these devices should make their software open source. Yes, even your TV or toaster oven. Why? Well first of all why not?

There’s no downside to making embedded software open source. Companies will I’m sure disagree with this and say that their software provides a competitive advantage but I don’t agree. There is a point at which the device really is nothing more than an off the shelf computer and the product being sold is actually the software. A TiVo for example. I wouldn’t expect TiVo to make their software open source because in reality what they’re selling is the software. Your clock radio or refrigerator or car are a whole different story. Even given the software very few people would have the skill or desire to build the device to run it and even if they did it would almost certainly be more expensive than just buying the device in the first place.

Besides the why not there are two big reasons in my mind why this is a good idea.

Making your device’s software open source means I can eliminate those annoying little quirks about your device. Some of those quirks would even prevent me from purchasing your device or at the very least prevent me from recommending it to someone else. My alarm clock for example has the ability to play these nature sounds. I thought it’d be a nice thing to use to fall asleep to. Sony however thought it would be a nice thing to wake up to and that’s the only way you can use it. If their software was open source I could fix that.

Making your device’s software open source opens up the possibility of all new applications that you never thought of that could lead to increased sales. Sure the chances of that are remote for a dishwasher manufacturer but you never know what people can come up with. Certainly the creative potential of a whole world of people will exceed the creative potential of any one company’s creative staff. And who knows. Maybe a washing machine that can belt out MP3 tunes is just the thing that someone out there is looking for.