Welcome to the Internet of things

Monica Rogati, a data scientist from LinkedIn joined Jawbone (popular for making the Jawbone UP device which tracks your movement).

Techcrunch says:

“Jawbone has made a key hire that shows some of the direction the company is headed towards when it comes to the quantified self and wearables development."

To me this shows the general direction in which this company as well as the world of electronics is moving in.

Tha Jawbone UP device by itself is merely a sensor, something which is by definition dumb. The power of this device comes from the what it senses i.e. the information it gives us.

Sensors gives us data not information

Say you wanted to track your running.

Scenario (1): Use an app like RunKeeper, it takes data from your GPS-enabled phone, measures distances, estimates calories burnt and gives you nice graphs of how you’re doing.

Scenario (2): Instead of running with your GPS-enabled phone and have an app track you, just remember a rough version of your route, use a map to get distance run and plot all those lovely graphs yourself.

The difference between (1) and (2) is that there’s not much of a difference, except that (2) is just more painful to do.

(1) and (2) are same as long as you don’t convert your data into information.

Enter the connected universe

The fun with scenario (2) is that the data you’ve created is now available for you to easily share with who ever you want,it is highly accurate and can be analysed easily.

Instead of just sitting there with you it can now be sliced and diced to produce insights: maybe you’re most likely to break your running streak on the third day, may be you run better in the mornings, all of this information is unlocked once once analytical intelligence is applied to the data you’ve generated. And you don’t have do this slicing and dicing yourself - there are tons of services and people ready to do it for you.

What’s my point? I’m trying to say that the device itself is nearly pointless — it is something that creates data, what really matters is who or what can take that data and convert it to information.

It is a natural trend that more and more devices are going to be connected and join a network.But unless we’re using these connections meaningfully, we’re going to end up having fridges with Twitter.

This state of all objects in your life being connected to each other is referred to as the internet of things. But the important part to remember in the internet of things revolution is that the things don’t matter, what matters is the information they can give you.

Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine — Peter Sondergaard, Senior VP at Gartner

The Microsoft Nokia deal

Will it work?

Nokia was, is and for some time may still be the world's top selling phone manufacturer,though its position has been severely weakened in recent years.

Nokia was the leader of the pack in both spheres of the mobile world i.e. hardware and software .. Nokia was almost always ahead of the curve in terms of phone features and its Symbian OS worked well.Nokia phones were trendy and reliable .Also Nokia had no real competition as its phones were much better than those of others.

Then there was the emergence of smartphones which split the phone market into two parts : The High-end smartphone market and the low-end/feature phone market. While Nokia's success in its earlier years ensured that it continued to sell a huge number of low-end phones wherever phones networks expanded on earth, this did not ensure Nokia's success in the smart-phone market. Nokia's upgrades to Symbian were slow (and mostly iterative) and though there are a huge number of apps written for Symbian, a effort to form something like an App store didn't come until 2007 which was the year of the iPhone Launch.

Despite the iPhone and the huge amount of buzz it generated, Nokia did not compete aggressively enough with Apple and continued a sluggish approach, probably because it did not expect data intensive smart phones could be so successful contrary to what had been true all along for Nokia.The company did make some efforts like first developing Maemo and then joining forces with Intel to build MeeGo.But Nokia's efforts lacked a definitive strategy. Slowly Nokia's position in the smartphone declined.

The other thing to hit Nokia hard was the emergence and success of a huge number of competitors in the low-end/feature phone market.This trend is especially visible in India where Nokia's market share fell from 74% to 51%.Once the default brand, Nokia position has been hurt by the emergence of many local players in the low-end market who have been much more aggressive in marketing their products and also whose products are more in tune with the local tastes.

These losses on both fronts left Nokia on a sticky wicket. This prompted Nokia into making some changes,the first was some management changes (including its first non-Finnish CEO Stephen Elop) followed by the announcement of deal with Microsoft

So how is teaming up with Microsoft going to help?

This is clearly an effort to regain a foothold in the smartphone market after silently being on the losing to Apple iPhone and Google's Android. Microsoft has recently launched the latest version of its Mobile Phone Operating system and it has received surprisingly good reviews.If you take a look at the UI, you will notice that 'Windows Phone 7' (as the OS has been christened) interface isnt merely an iterative improvement over previous versions of the OS but a rethinking of the OS for touch-screen phones. Many experts have appreciated the OS though it is yet to be seen whether it's going to be the much awaited iPhone killer or even and Android killer.

Nokia benefits from this deal because it gets a brand new and better OS for its smartphones while Microsoft gets to leverage Nokia's far-reaching brand in phone market to trigger a surge in the developement of Apps for the Windows Mobile 7 platform.

Shouldn't Nokia have adopted Android instead given the huge number of apps that have been written for it and the brand value associated with Android(Many handset makers tout Android as one of the key features because of the humongous no. of apps). It could have and there would have been some immediate benefits but joining with Microsoft instead gives Nokia the oppurtunity to kill two birds with one stone (or one phone :D). Also,the Android platform which is under rapid development and constant improvement isnt without its troubles.Since Android is Open source, handset manufacturers come up with their own versions of the OS creating a separate software ecosystem for their devices and virtually negating the advantage(or should say point) of the Android marketplace.

So overall,we may say that the deal is a smart move and both companies gain something but will this be enough for Nokia to regain its once-dominant position. Atleast, two things must necessarily happen for Nokia's success.First,Nokia (and even Microsoft) must market their phones more aggressively and create a buzz that was once associated with Nokia's (then)cutting-edge phones. Second,Microsoft (and Nokia) must convince developers to create apps for the Windows Phone 7 platform (which today has just above 3000 apps).Enticing Symbian developers to move to Windows Mobile 7 instead of iOS or Android may surely help.

PS:I'm a Nokia fan

How did the Duck Hunt gun work?

Just found out today how the gun for Nintendo's Duck Hunt game used to work.
Though I had always found its workings to be a bit mysterious, I never gave the problem a serious thought and still find the solution quite elegant(because its pretty simple too)
The answer is sort of counter intuitive because being a gun,you'd expect the device to fire or shoot something but the NES Zapper does exactly the opposite!
Here's the lowdown,
The gun contains a photodiode (a diode which can conduct according to the intensity of light incident upon it)
The detection of the target happens as follows:
When you press the trigger, the controller blanks out the screen (the screen becomes completely Black)
The controller also activates the photodiode.
After this,the controller flashes a white block in the region where the duck originally was.
If you're pointing in the right direction the photodiode will register a high else its a low and a miss.
(How synonymous 'low' and 'miss' seem ,though their usage here puts them in completely different domains) .
Of course, all of the above happens in a matter of milliseconds and you hardly see a thing.

Simple but Awesome!

If you want more than the simplistic description above, check out:

[How Did the Duck Hunt Gun Work?] via [MentalFloss]
[The Patent for the Zapper]

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Some humour while on the subject