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How I would re-design the Kinesis Advantage keyboard

Post published:April 4, 2014
Post author:philip

Kinesis Advantage Pro

I'm a fan of the Kinesis Advantage keyboard, but it's definitely long-in-the-tooth these days. The keyboard's basic design reaches back over twenty years. The current USB version was introduced in 2002, and I don't think there have been any significant changes in the past twelve years. I've seen rumors of a re-vamped version, but nothing has been released. As you can tell from my previous posts, I believe there is a big difference between convenience features (such as wireless, backlit keys, etc.) and ergonomic features in keyboards. On the ergonomics side I don't think Kinesis needs to make many changes to what is a popular design. There are some changes that could be made, such as perhaps splitting the left and right sides, or making the keyboard more adjustable. On the convenience side, however, I think there are a lot of changes Kinesis could make to the keyboard. Here are my suggestions for the next generation of the Kinesis Advantage: Cut the cord When I originally wrote the heading above I was thinking wireless (see below) but the truth is, the one thing that has annoyed me the most over the years about the Advantage is that the USB cable…

Samsung looking to Israeli tech to compete with Apple’s iBeacon

Post published:April 4, 2014
Post author:philip

A couple of months ago I tweeted about an Israeli startup named ShopCloud that was showing off some fairly amazing retail technology: https://twitter.com/trauring/status/431121027528015872 https://twitter.com/trauring/status/431121374594080770 The interesting thing to me was that it enabled much of the functionality of Apple's iBeacon technology, without the need for physical iBeacons to be in place. It seems this fact wasn't lost on Samsung, which is now rumored to be trying to buy ShopCloud for about $80-90M. This was originally reported by the Israeli tech blog Geektime, and followed up by Israeli business news site Globes. This is particularly relevant if you look back at my post Who do you trust with your identity? which among other things looks at how Apple is using iBeacons to position itself as the preferred partner for mobile payments in the future. It's a smart strategy, giving the retailers powerful technology to engage their customers, while at the same time giving Apple access to those same customers. Google and various other companies have tried to use NFC to similar effect, but these efforts have largely failed. ShopCloud could allow Samsung, or whomever ends up purchasing it, an end-run around iBeacons and NFC. ShopCloud's INSIDE technology allows malls and store to map…

A few interesting keyboards, nearly in existence…

Post published:April 1, 2014
Post author:philip

Keyboard.io (Blog)

My last post, Why haven't there been any keyboard innovations in decades?, got some interesting responses. A couple of people said I was ignoring much of the progress in the past decade, citing lots of features added to keyboards like backlit keys, keys with displays built in, wireless, etc. These are all nice features, but they're convenience features. None of those features make typing more comfortable, or reduce repetitive stress injuries. Features that do those things are ergonomic features, and were the focus of my article. A few people said standard keyboards were just fine, so no innovation was needed. I suspect those people are still in their twenties, and haven't realized the effect of typing on their hands yet. Stay with your straight keyboard with membrane switches and then come back and tell us in a few years which ergonomic keyboard you've switched to... ErgoDox Someone also pointed out that I left out the enthusiast community, pointing out the ErgoDox keyboard and its distribution through MassDrop as an example. Now don't get me wrong, I love the design work done by individuals and collectively through projects like the ErgoDox. However, when the easiest way to buy a product is…

Why haven’t there been any keyboard innovations in decades?

Post published:March 30, 2014
Post author:philip

Early Maltron Keyboard

This might seem surprising coming from someone whose first job was for a speech recognition company more than 20 years ago, and whose current company also develops speech recognition software. I'm extremely annoyed at the lack of innovation in keyboards. It's not surprising that attention to keyboard design has lagged in recent years, when production of laptops long ago overtook the production of desktop machines, and tablets will soon overtake the combined production of both laptops and desktops. Take a look at this chart from IDC: If you count cell phones in the mix, the production of desktop computers is a tiny percentage of overall computing devices. Sure, some people use external keyboards with laptops, but overall the need for external keyboards in dwindling. Unfortunately, laptop keyboards have different design goals than external keyboards. While innovation in external keyboards usually has to do with comfort over long periods of typing, reduction in repetitive stress injuries, etc. laptop keyboards are usually focused on simply fitting into a very narrow space. Other considerations are of course secondary. The only real innovation in laptop keyboards that I can remember was IBM's introduction of its butterfly keyboard in the ThinkPad 701 laptop in 1995.…

IsraCoin, the new Israeli national cryptocurrency

Post published:March 27, 2014
Post author:philip

This month a new phase in cryptocurrencies began, with the introduction of a series of national cryptocurrencies, including Auroracoin (Iceland), Spaincoin (Spain), Aphrodite Coin (Cyprus), Gaelcoin (Ireland and Northern Ireland), and Scotcoin (Scotland). Now, to add to that list, is the new Isracoin. The idea of a national cryptocurrency is kind of counter-intuitive. By their very nature, cryptocurrencies should be borderless. National cryptocurrencies have some advantages, however, in that they are more easily understood by the average person on the street, and the average vendor in the marketplace. As they have all been started with the idea of giving out currency to people (and sometimes businesses and non-profits) in those countries, there is the potential for a much larger percentage of people in those countries to have their particular national cryptocurrency, than for any place to have a high percentage of Bitcoin users, for example. What all of these cryptocurrencies have in common is that they're based on giving out small amounts of currency to all residents or citizens (depending on the currency) of their respective countries (called an 'airdrop'). How this is done differs among the different efforts. For example, Gaelcoin is only pre-mining 1% of the 650M total coins to…

Who do you trust with your identity?

Post published:March 22, 2014
Post author:philip

Who will you trust with your identity?

This is the second in a series of articles, which started with The long goodbye to passwords. You might want to read that first, if you haven't already. Let's start with a few questions: Have you ever had your password exposed by hackers, such as was done with Adobe, Gawker, Cupid Media, Stratfor, Yahoo and Sony users? When you go to a web site to buy something, and they offer to store your credit card information, do you let them? If you answered yes to #2 above, what sites do you say yes to, and why? How many companies have direct access to your bank account, such as PayPal, other payment service, or a stock brokerage? Have you been pwned?* Let's start with question number one. Has a password of yours been revealed by having an account hacked? You might not even know it. Troy Hunt operated a very interesting site called ';--have i been pwned? where he has collected many of the files stolen from web sites by hackers (and subsequently released online) and made an interface where you can search by username or e-mail and see if it shows up in any of the files. Adboe itself had over…

Replacing the battery in my iPhone (10 minutes + 1 month)

Post published:March 18, 2014
Post author:philip

My iPhone 4s showing the original battery

I use an iPhone 4s as my main phone. While Apple still sells this model, as someone who has been using it for over two years, it has certainly started to show its age. In pre-iPhone days, when one's battery invariably wore out, you could buy a new battery and swap it easily. In all its wisdom, Apple pretty much squashed that idea. It's a compromise between being able to let consumers replace their own batteries, and having slimmer phones. Apple chose slimmer phones. If you're asking why I still use an iPhone 4s, instead of an iPhone 5, iPhone 5c (just kidding), or iPhone 5s, it's really quite simple. Nothing in the more recent iPhones has been particularly interesting to me. Sure, I want more screen space, but the amount extra in the iPhone 5 is not exactly going to change my world. Sure, I'd love a faster processor, but 90% of the time it's really irrelevant to me. Touch ID is a nice gimmick right now, but not particularly useful. I believe Touch ID will become more useful in the future, but by then there will probably be a new iPhone anyways. That said, it makes it a…

Are cell phone photos the 110/disc/APS photos of our day?

Post published:March 11, 2014
Post author:philip

Kodak Disc Film and Camera

I've heard it said that the best camera is the one you have with you. Sure, any picture is better than no picture, but with cell phones today many people don't ever bother to bring a better camera, even if it's small and fits in their pocket. Obsolete Film Formats The reasons 110 film, disc film and APS film (known as Kodak Advantix, Fuji Nexia, etc.) were created were all more or less the same – to allow the creation of smaller cameras that used more convenient film cartridges. Cartridges of various kinds allowed consumers to take pictures without worrying about advancing the film, and take the film out of the camera without having to rewind the film back into the film canister. These formats were popular because 35mm film cameras were more complicated to use, and more prone to making mistakes (opening the camera before rewinding the film, for example). The biggest problem with these formats is that in order to make their cameras smaller, the size of the negatives are necessarily smaller than 35mm film. Smaller negatives means lower quality and higher grain. The last format APS, was the highest quality of these formats, yet still lower than…

What ever happened to the Open Handset Alliance?

Post published:March 6, 2014
Post author:philip

What ever happened to the Open Handset Alliance (OHA)? Some of you are probably scratching your heads wondering that the OHA is to being with, and that's not so surprising. What you might be shocked to know is that, officially, the OHA is the organization that guides the development of the Android operating system. You can be excused for thinking Android was a product of Google. The OHA hasn't even bothered to update their own web site since 2011. The last phone manufacturer to join the OHA did so in 2009 (Acer). Even when a major breach of the OHA partnership emerged in 2012 (the launch of a phone by OHA member Acer running an 'incompatible' version of Android) it was Google itself which responded, not the OHA. Interestingly, in Google's response, it does mention the OHA and the responsibilities of its members. So what happened? The Mobile World in 2007-2008 Back in 2007 when the OHA was launched, we were living in a very different mobile world. The most popular phones, by a far margin, were made by Nokia (and were 'candybar' shaped). On January 9th, 2007, Steve Jobs got up on the stage in the Moscone Center in…

The long goodbye to passwords

Post published:March 3, 2014
Post author:philip

First of all, if what's written above is your password, you need to change it now. I'll wait. Okay, good, now for the rest of the article. Why Passwords Don't Work It's not much of a secret that passwords are not a very good way to secure information. The real problem is when companies try to make users utilize more secure passwords, they end up making the whole system less secure. Does that seem counterintuitive? Here's a scenario. A company wants to make their corporate systems more secure. They decide that the passwords their employees are using are not secure enough, so they institute rules for passwords, which include: Must be 8 characters or longer Must include a lowercase letter Must include an uppercase letter Must include a number Must include a non-letter/number character Must not be the same as the previous password used Must not be the same as the username, or contain the username You've probably run across these rules before. You may not have seen all of them, but you've probably seen most of them, and probably many of them with a single system. In theory, these are all good rules. Where they lead to a less…

Stephen Wolfram never disappoints…

Post published:March 2, 2014
Post author:philip

http://youtu.be/_P9HqHVPeik No one will come away from this video amazed at how humble Stephen Wolfram is, but that's not the point of the video. It's an introduction to a forthcoming programming language from Stephen Wolfram, named appropriately enough Wolfram Language, that attempts to build on the past 30 years of his work creating Mathematica, his book A New Kind of Science (humbly referred to on his site as Wolfram Science), and Wolfram|Alpha. It takes the knowledge and algorithms built in to Wolfram|Alpha and makes them available in a symbolic programming language. The demo is fairly entertaining (considering its topic) and it should be very interesting to see what is done with this language once it's available to the general public. For more information, see the Wolfram Language section of the Wolfram Research web site.

Jon Medved interviewed on recent Israeli exits

Post published:February 26, 2014
Post author:philip

Great interview with Jonathan Medved, on Bloomberg TV in Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress (MWC), about Israeli companies and the many large exits recently, both acquisitions (shown in the graphic above) and the recent IPO of Wix. Last time I saw Jonathan Medved was actually in Barcelona at an earlier MWC when he was CEO of Vringo. Now he's running the very interesting OurCrowd crowdfunding firm, where accredited investors can invest a minimum of $10,000 into startups (a VC for the masses - or at least the accredited masses). Take a look: http://youtu.be/E1qae-vSoCc or view it on Bloomberg's web site.

What happens when you try to video mountain biking using your phone?

Post published:February 21, 2014
Post author:philip

http://youtu.be/jRDOzMYIXGo This is just a fun post of some video I filmed last week while mountain biking in my hometown of Modi'in. This trail is on a hill behind a major highway. There are a few things I'd like to point out about the video. I filmed it using an iPhone 4S mounted very securely to my bike using a machined aluminum Rokform bike mount that screws into the steering tube. The mount and the phone do not move at all. The blurry parts and wavy video that makes it look like I'm on an acid trip must have something to do with the CMOS sensor in the camera. A GoPro this is not. I don't know how current iPhones perform with extreme video situations like this, but I hope they're better. The stabilization correction is done using software called Elasty. It normally would remove the black edges, making the video rectangular as it was originally (losing some of the edges), but I think the rotating box is more dramatic and gives you a better sense of what the stabilization software is doing. Youtube added the extra black space on the left and right sides of the video, I guess…

What the heck are stickers? A half billion dollar and growing business…

Post published:February 16, 2014
Post author:philip

Viber Sticker Store

http://youtu.be/o5LKXDwpqPE I've noticed something when talking to friends about messaging. If they're not from Asia (yes, technically I live in Asia, but Israel is not Asian in that sense) they don't get what stickers are all about. Why would they really? In the United States, and I believe Europe as well, stickers are more or less irrelevant. I would venture to guess that most Americans think stickers are just fancy emoticons. Facebook added stickers to it's messenger app, but although it's called the 'Sticker Store' it appears they're all free. Perhaps this is a first step towards commercialization in the future, but I think if you get something for free you don't really appreciate it, and in this case it probably means most Facebook users ignore this feature. It's also, as I mentioned, viewed as just bigger emoticon. Viber, which just sold a couple of days ago for $900M to the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten, implemented a sticker store as its first monetization strategy, followed by connecting calls to the traditional phone network. Stickers, in fact, are available on all the major messaging platforms with the solitary exception of WhatsApp. See the nice chart from Mark Watts-Jones on the 10 ways…

Lots going on in the mobile messaging space

Post published:February 14, 2014
Post author:philip

It's an interesting time to be in the mobile messaging space. I discussed the history of Internet and mobile messaging less than two weeks ago in my post The history of messaging, and where it’s going, but even in just the past few days, lots of things are shifting in the space. Just yesterday Skype (a division of Microsoft) announced that they are enhancing the chat functionality of their apps, enabling them to sync properly between apps on different platforms. Clearly, this is an attempt to take the fight to the mobile-first messaging companies that started with text, but started moving into Skype's audio and video call space. Skype has had text messaging for a long time, but if you looked at your messages on your computer, they would not show up as read on your phone, or visa versa. This is what Skype is fixing. A few days ago it was rumored that an un-named Asian messaging company was looking to buy Viber for up to $400M. Speculation was rife, with obviously names like WeChat, Kakao, and LINE being bandied about. The head of Viber, CEO Talmon Marco, denied it outright. Well, he was not lying. Viber was not…

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