Jon Rolfe

NASA to launch Android Nexus phone into space

2011-10-18T18:05:00.004+01:00

The Android Open 2011 conference was held in San Francisco in early October and videos of some of the key note speeches and talks is now available on the O'Reilly media website.

One of the most interesting talks was given by Will Marshall from NASA who are working on using the original Google Nexus One phone (made by HTC and much like the later HTC Desire) as the processing capability for a range of experimental low cost and open source satellites. The aim is to build Android powered satellites for around $75,000 instead of the current $10 - $200 million for "small" or even $0.5-$1 billion or more for a major satellite. The irony is that these Android Nexus One powered satellites will actually be launching into space the most powerful processors of any previous satellites.

The first launch is scheduled for December 2011, with more launches of updated satellites next year. However, early testing resulting in a failed launch which exerted forces greater than 1,000g during a crash. This resulted in merely a smashed screen and the phone and memory card itself still worked. Well done HTC.

Amazon release cloud optimised web browsing

2011-09-28T18:13:00.001+01:00

Amazon today announced their new line of Kindle e-ink based readers and the much rumoured tablet Amazon Kindle Fire. However the interesting aspect was not the new devices, but their new Amazon Kindle Silk. This is a cloud service for optimising web browsing from their new tablet and minimises the data traffic to the tablet as well offloading the cache, name resolution and data requests to the cloud. This looks an interesting use of the cloud services to optimise mobile device browsing while possibly allowing some stealthy tracking of your interests and online behaviour!

Eric Schmidt interview at Dreamforce conference

2011-09-26T17:34:00.001+01:00

Google chairman Eric Schmidt gave an interesting interview to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at the 2011 Dreamforce conference. He discussed everything from the evolution of computing, cloud computing, his past successes and failures in his previous roles at past industry leaders such as Sun Microsystems and Novell and even some brief views of some other famous industry leaders and politicians.

The shift from Apps to HTML5

2011-08-11T18:15:00.002+01:00

Amazon recently launched their Kindle Cloud Reader, a HTML5 based web app for purchasing and reading Kindle eBooks even when offline. The web based app initially supports Chrome, Safari on Mac and Safari on the iPad but is sure to be extended to other platforms such as Android, and when used on the iPad will bypass Apple's fees over purchasing items within an application.

Amazon lists the features include:

An immersive view of your entire Kindle library, with instant access to all of your books
Start reading over 950,000 Kindle books instantly within your browser
An embedded Kindle Store optimized for your web browser makes it seamless to discover new books and start reading them instantly
New Kindle Store for iPad is built from the ground up for iPad's touch interface
Your current book is automatically made available for offline use, and you can choose to save a book for reading offline at any time
Receive automatic software updates without the need to download new software
Select any book to start reading, customize the page layout to your desired font size, text color, background color, and more
View all of the notes, highlights, and bookmarks that you've made on other Kindle apps or on Kindle
Sync your last page read across your Kindle and free Kindle apps so you can always pick up where you left off

Amazon's release follows the Financial Times move to a web based application and is likely to see a slow movement to web based HTML5 based applications that can run on multiple platforms and bypass proprietary application markets and their restrictions.

The demise of Google?

2011-08-07T15:21:00.003+01:00

Roger McNamee, co-founder and director of the venture capital group Elevations Partners, gives an insightful and controversial talk to the Paley Centre for Media. In his talk he predicts the demise of Microsoft and Google and the future importance of HTML 5 and Apple as hardware supplier. Some will disagree with his opinions (can he really argue that Google doesn't get mobile when they have half of the smart phone market?). Nevertheless it's an interesting talk.

Twitter Analytics

2011-08-07T11:58:00.020+01:00

Analysing Twitter posts is growing field and its refreshing to see Datasift as a UK based company as one of the leaders. Datasift provides a service and API to data mine, in real time, Twitter posts for content, sentiment and geo-location, or as they described themselves "a real-time social-data mining platform". The advantage of using Datasift is the convenience of their API and their agreement with Twitter for a full speed, unrestricted live Twitter feed or "fire hose" as it's dubbed. So it was good to see that Datasift have recently secured another $6m of venture capital to aid sales and marketing. Proof that Internet start ups are possible in the UK.