Entrepreneur, Technologist, Traveler, Snowboarder, and Poker Player
If you have been counting cards and know that the odds are favorable to hit rather than stand (the normal play), you better think twice because the systems from NICE are watching, and you could be booted from the casino for making too smart a play. Look carefully at the photo on the right. The system from NICE is analyzing a blackjack game using video recognition technologies. It can identify the cards that you have, and it tracks how the game is going and how everyone is playing and betting. If you cheat or play too well, the NICE system will send an alarm to the casino staff e.g., "there is a card counter in seat 3 and table 20," and you will be out of luck.
Here is a tip from the guys at NICE, while most people think that an 18 is a good blackjack hand it turns out to lose more than 60% of the time based on their actual observations of millions of blackjack games. I have not checked their math. The only thing that NiceVision is missing is pattern recognition on the players’ faces, and they expect to have this soon.
Such amazing and ubiquitous video recognition has only been made possible recently through advances in computer hardware and software. The implications of such technology are staggering. Currently, systems like NiceVision are being used to at airports to scan for unattended baggage. But there is nothing to prevent this technology from being used in stores to identify you as a shopper and learn your patterns. I won't be surprised to walk into, for example, a Safeway that I have never been to before one day in 2015 and hear, "Welcome, Vidal. How have you been? You look well. We haven't seen you in a while...." How will the automated supermarket of the future know who I am? Because I walked into another Safeway five years ago in another state and the cameras captured and remembered everything. Everyone will be famous. How nice.For my first product review on this site, I decided to share the Firefox extensions I find most useful. If you have not switched to Firefox already as your primary browser, I would be curious to know why not. In any event, one of the benefits of Firefox is all the incredible free extensions that are available. Here are the extensions I like with the links to download them. And please feeel free to comment if I left out any outstanding ones. There are so many and I am sure I have only discovered a small handful!
There were sessions, workshops, and panels on podcasting, video blogging, building communities, etc. One speaker had just come back from Iraq and New Orleans and showed some incredible raw pictures. I got to meet a lot of bloggers and learn about their projects and websites. I posted some photos from the event here, and you can also find more under tag "webzine2005" on flickr, or technorati "Webzine 2005". By the end of the conference, I got really excited about video blogging, and so I am going to transform this website in a video blog going forward. Text is so 90s. I will be working on that this week.
I’m going cancel my DSL line, and with that my home phone line. The only reason I kept the landline phone was because of my DSL, and now I certainly don’t need that. I actually hate my landline phone from SBC. It costs a lot of money, and it doesn’t have free nights and weekends, and the charge me for “long-distance� calls which can be just the next town away. To avoid getting ripped off on toll calls, I subscribed to Sprint long-distance at an additional cost and they bill me an annoying service fee that just went up even if I don’t make any long distance calls in a month. Most of the calls or receive on my home phone are from solicitors anyway so it is pretty much a SPAM phone. I’m going cable modem and cell phone only, and I don’t see why I would ever want to go back.
I purchased a "TV Timer BOB" last week, and started using it with my kids. It is a small, very simple to use, household transformational device that sits next to your TV. You plug the power cord from the TV into the back and it locks in place, then you plug the device into the wall. You can program it to allow your kids to only watch so many hours of TV per day or per week. You can set up as many as 6 different accounts each with a different PIN code. It has a lot of nice options. When time is up, the power to the TV shuts off.
What was really interesting was that even though I gave my kids a generous starting allowance of TV per day, their actual TV time dramatically decreased. Before when TV time was free and uncontrolled, they didn't mind killing time by watching it. Now that TV is measured and limted, they don't want to waste their time allowances watching shows that are not worth it. They don't even use their whole allowance. And oh, TV Timer BOB keeps your timer running if you forget to turn the TV off!
One of my friends recently took a position at Flock. He showed me their browser and I decided to try it. After about 1 week, I have pretty much switched to using it as my primary web browser both at home and at work. Flock is based on the Firefox browser which I was already using and so the transition was easy. Almost all the extensions I use are available for Flock with the exception of Colorful Tabs which I miss. You have to re-download your extensions because Flock cannot import them from your Firefox installation. Some nice things that Flock adds are the photo, newsreader and blogging integrations. I like the way you can see Flickr photos from within the browser and it includes an uploading client as well. I exported my OPML file from Newsgator and the integrated RSS reader in Flock was able to import it without any problem. I am enjoying the integrated RSS reader better than what I had a Newsgator. Flock is only at version 0 .7 so I'm sure there's a lot more that they are planning to add to it. I could go on about all the cool things I discovered about it and some of the minor annoyances it's just easier if you try yourself. This is a cool product and it's free of course.
Blogged with Flock
I was really impressed with the screen on the device. It uses a 2nd generation ePaper from a company called eInk . The lack of good resolution, high contrast screens is something that has held back reading documents electronically for me. It just tires the eyes too much to read anything more than a few pages on a computer screen. And while I did often carry ebooks on my Palm device in the past, the screen was just too small. Well, that doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore. I was also really impressed by the weight and thinness of the unit and the fact that the battery is good for 7500 page views.
Here is a video I took of flipping through some pages on the Reader, and I uploaded some pictures as well. The unit is small and light enough that you can hold it in one hand and just flip through the pages as opposed to paper books which require you to hold them with two hands or least use two hands to switch pages. I thought the user interface was very good and easy to use without much instruction. With just a few moments of instruction we were up and running and I am sure we could have figured out how to use the Reader without that.
I liked the fact that you could change the font size easily to make the text easier to read. This is something of course what you cannot do in a real book. The docking station is really handsome. I liked the fact you listen to audio at the same time as you are reading. I liked the bookmark system. I liked that the device could natively read PDF files. They connect store reminded me of the iTunes store and I thought that was good. I think the Sony reps said they expect to have about 10,000 or more books available at launch.
I am hoping that this product will be successful and that there will be follow on versions and further innovation in this area. I admire that Sony is trying to reinvent the category of ebooks. Here are some things that I thought could be improved upon in future versions or updates:
First of all, the hardware is impressively small and sexy. The industrial design is very appealing and they pack a lot of stuff into a tiny package. Sony hardware engineers did an impressive job. The Mylo can play videos and MP3s, show pictures, and includes Opera web browser, Skype, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, and more. It is an 802.11b device. The Mylo is multi-tasking so you can listen to music while you do other things, and you can keep all the communications apps running simultaneously. I found the device quite responsive.
The controls except the keyboard are well designed, and the device is fairly intuitive to use for a proprietary device. The battery life seems good. The device is lightweight, and the rechargeable battery is removable like most cellphones so you can carry a spare. It comes with some nice headphones. The device has 1GB of internal RAM plus expansion which is pretty good. You can buy it in black or white which is nice.
While the Mylo definately is a cool device, I thought some things could use improvement.
Even though I have relatively small hands, I found the keyboard a little too small and the repeat rate on the keys is not good. It doesn't have a good feel. Worse however, is that the keyboard is not backlit so I cannot use the device without good lighting. That is a pity because the screen is otherwise quite bright.
I have two WiFi access points, and I could only get it to connect to one. A third public access point in my neighborhood (yes, we have free WiFi in my Silicon Valley neighborhood) it kind of connects to but not really and it fails. And if you don’t have WiFi, the device is cute but not so useful. The process for connecting to WiFi access points while not bad, could use some improvement and robustness. It would be good if the device also supported Bluetooth (for connecting through a cellphone), or 802.11g. All the devices at my house are 802.11g so I had to switch my router back to mixed from “g-only� to get the Mylo to work. Otherwise, I would have been 0 for 3.
Since the Mylo is all about being online, I expected to see more of an online portal and wireless services for the device. When you register for your Mylo ID, you don't get too much more than 3 offers from third parties. Moreover, this device is supposed to be targetted at young people from the "Myspace generation." I tried browsing to myspace.com but the experience is not so good--I could not navigate the site. If the mylo could be used with myspace, I imagine my daughters would want one! And youtube.com videos I couldn't see either because the browser lacks Flash. :(
The Mylo is only being promoted and sold online. That kind of makes sense to me. What I didn't get is the campaign “Rush Mylo� which is some “Animal House�–esque spoof on fraternities. I know I am not in the target market for Mylo anymore, but I was in fraternity in college and I found the campaign bizarre and somewhat offensive. I don’t see how it would appeal to the vast majority of students who are not interested in fraternities at all either. I hope I am either wrong, or they come up with a better marketing campaign.
Typing on the keyboard is quite usable albeit not as good as with the full keyboard on the 8700. I don’t particularly like the predictive typing but it performs much better IMHO than T9 and some of its other precursors. It’s just good enough that I can deal with it.
The screen and industrial design are great on this device. It is super slim and small. The trackball also works surprisingly well. I didn’t expect that. The fact this Blackberry has a camera and accepts microSD cards are huge pluses and erase some of the only advantages that other smartphones had over the Blackberry. All the Blackberry’s awesome email capabilities and applications are in full force on this device. The essential free, third-party applications on the Blackberry right now are Gmail, Google Local, and Blackberry 411.
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