Android is Moving into Sub-laptop Space

When Android came out on a cell phone, it was quite a sensation. Within a couple of years now, it seems to be moving into these small formfactor laptops. Gartner reported from Computex 2009 in Taiwan that Android is set to move into this space certainly. Computex showed quite a few exaples of these products that used Android.

This space actually includes couple of types of products. The netbooks, 10 inch display with Atom on the inside kind of products that are primarily aimed at being a net aid. These products are actually PCs with scaled down performance, being the same Wintel combination. In fact lot of people are seeing these as truly affordable laptops.

The other product category in the same display format are called smartbooks as these use the processors used in smartphones and giving you similar net access on the small notebook format.Thees are predominantly ARM processor based.

Examples on both kind of platforms were seen on the show floor, coupled with the fact that Microsft is not going to port windows 7 onto ARM, there's enough incentive for Goole to fill that vacuum. Additionally ports to MIPs also were shown. Acer is even doing a x86 port of Android. So, what's going to stop Android! Let's watch and see, this is going to be interesting.

Embedded Center of Excellence!

I'll be embarking on teaching a course this coming semester starting end Jul/beginning Aug. I hope I am able to do a good job at it. More than anything else though I'd like to set up something that'll give students a practical orientation.

Setting up an embedded centre of excellence would be a nice thing to do. Bsides offering students the practical orientation, it'll also provide the institute opportunities at industrial collaborations. If things work out properly it can even be a collaboration center for off-shore projects too.

I am trying to intriduce some changes in the student projects this year. I'd like the faculty too to make their hand dirty and participate in the projects themselves too. Not only forces them too learn practical ideas, students too would like the leadership. Rigorous tresting is another thing I'd like to introduce so that software projects create products rather than yet another data acquisition system!

Integrated Netbooks-Some More Thoughts

If we ever arrive at a definition of an integrated device that does netbook functionality, can cover the smartphone features and be an eReader too, it'll make life so much easier for students in general! With Kindle like facilities they would never need to carry a school bag to carry books again. Whatever other books they need can get downloaded via wireless from the school library! All their communication needs, access to the internet as well as reading and researching books can be fulfilled by this one device! You just carry this handy unit in your shirt pocket( may be the jacket pocket) and you have everything you need!

If the claims like those from Nvidia that powerful graphics chips they are bringing out will beat the likes of Atom from Intel and make for truly powerful netbooks, they may continue to play games or view videos and other entertainment activities after school hours are over too.

Natural Language Processing

I was discussing a possible R&D programme with my colleagues. We did a litt brainstorming and top of the chart item came out to be natural language processing. No wonder it was top of the mind issue for many of my colleagues. It is such a complex area to investigate. Computer implementation of comprehension, learning and the synthesizing natuarl languge is so tough for computers. It is because we derive so much information from body language the tone and inflexions used by the speaker, a lot of contextual information. These contextual stuff may even be unspoken and lot of it is something we pick up on our way in growing up!

However, human babies pick up these skills so quickly and so well. I is the learning abilituies of us human being that makes it so easy to learn these skils. Same goes for writing comprehension as well as actual writing. Humans do it so easily all the time, yet it is so tough for machines. The CAPTCHA used everywhere beats a program most of the time. Yet, one look and you are able to read the CAPTCHA letter/ numbers presented to you!

Prduct Boundaries Blurring- revisited

In the last post I delibareted about netbooks, smart phones and may be ebook readers blurring. I had not considered the digital camera mainly because of the miserable resolution offered by the phones. But, looks likke even this product might get subsumed into this one hypothetical product that we'll be carrying around some time in the future.

Though the resolution uis still low, thwe new iPhone 3G S brings ibn a innovation in cameras that indicate, if only resolution reaches 7 to 8 MP levels, a smart phone might include good camera too.The biggest innovation is a macro focus mode in the camera of the latest iPhone. I do not know yet how good this is is but macro used to be offered only with bulky optical lenses only. And that used to be one problem in integrating a good camera into a phone. If such innovations are coming it may not be far when we could get a good camera in the phone.

The autofocus camera in the iPhone can adjust for color, light etc besides focusing. The focus can be changed by tapping and so on. The camer takes good video that an be dowbnloaded easily too. The time may not be far when I carry a device that is a phone of course but also can let me do productive work that I can do on a laptop, carry my entire book library ( beside the musiclibrary it can do already!) and let me read them anytime and let me take pictures and videos and edit them. Becaus of the high speed network access downloading a book, uploading video, doing my work and staying touch with other via the video conference is not going to be a problem at all! Is that where all this is heading. Let's watch and see!

Product Boundaries Blurring

In those earlier time products used to be very distinct. A TV was a TV, a PC was a coputer you used for computing and Internet use. A laptop was a laptop you lugged around when you hit the road and a cellphone was a phone you carried with you wherever you go!

Then things started getting complex. Cell phones started eveolving and email, net surfing became fairly common. A FM radio receiver, a digital camera, a music player are all sort of expected in a phone. What adds a new dimension is the capability to uncompress and play HD video on phone( see, TI OMAP 3430 Processor Handles Video For Smartphones). That takes a lot of processor power. It is also a short step to tag on some general computing tasks, run some applications. That's happening. In fact iPhone hyas a store dedicated to applications running on it.

Laptop meanwhile eveolved into netbooks. Smaller displays, less capabale processors, less power consumption and of course less costly applicaes came on the scene. This is the netbook category and being driven by the likes of Intel Atom processor. Can we not have a device then that is like a netbook and gives me the phone capability! Will it be any different than the smartphones! People have started promoting a category called smartbooks that fill this niche. So what is this device going to be like, going to eveolve into finally!

My own thoughts are it will be really nice to have a netbook, a little smaller, thinner format that is like a comuter, net surfer, a mobile phone of course. Otherwise it does not make sense to carry a phone, a netbook and such other multiplicity of devices. Ideally I should be able to carry one device and be able to take care of everything that we need to do on the road!

Content, SEO and Crap

Search engines decide what is an important web site by several methods. If a site had good content there will be a good use of keywords the topic it is dealing with. So keyword desity is an item on this chart. Lot of people will obviously refer to the content if it is good. There is that back-link concept.

As long as things worked on these assumptions, this was working reasonably. However along came the e-commerce revolution. People needed traffic to their sites. If you have a large enough number coming to your site, a certain percentage of them would become buyers of your products. Now, if visitors cannot find you in the millions of search results, you remain the store on the main street of some obscure town-the internet equivalent. You have to get on to the first page if not the number one position!

Along came the SEO experts and discovered the above among other things. I am sure they work. But one direct consequence is that a lot of content on the net is simply useless. They are aimed at generating these keyword densities and the backlinks. The actual content could actually be meaningless. It' gotten so bad, you'll find sites easily which has parts of a page simply repeating the keywords over and over again. Meaning of "ad nauseam" hits you straight! Generating backlings has taken over the comments on forums, blogs and networking sites. There only aim is to create a link back to the target site. What the comments say is irrelevant.

People have started realising this, I guess. There is a momentum building slowly about quality content. Just the stirrings now. Hopefully, things will work out.