The intelligent home ...

Tonight I had a very interesting evening visiting a colleague from work who has really thought through how he wants his house to respond in an intelligent way according to the people living in it.  In fact, not only the people, but he has also had to take account of the pet cat and how it would otherwise activate movement sensors!  But it is an impressive example of home automation.  The lights, the door bell, audio and video and temperature and humidity control are all catered for.  

The system allows him to inspect the status of and control devices in his home remotely over the Internet.  The system he has chosen to use is called Idratek and it presents an extremely flexible array of options using a wide array of sensors.  It all constitutes a leading edge example of what a future ubiquitous sensor environment combined with intelligent processing can do to enhance and optimise aspects of human living.  

As per the comment ... more info about the installation can be found on his blog.

Innovation requires more than the idea...

I just caught the end of a television programme where presenter James May was remarking that if the motor car was invented today, then it would probably be banned under safety regulations alone!  The invention might have been described as a small metal box that individuals pilot themselves and travel at significant speeds with very little training, and which are powered by a tank of highly flammable liquid!  It's quite believable that the invention would be squashed before it was allowed to take off.  

Similarly, if I had rolled into a meeting to design a new messaging service, and had admitted that it would be priced as the most expensive data messaging (£/Mb) known to man, I would've been shown the door.  Instead I might have described the user interface, whereby you press a small key once to type 'a' and twice for 'b' and three times for 'c' and that each little button has at least three functions associated with it, again I can imagine being told to go and think again.  However the SMS service has been extremely popular with billions of messages being sent around the globe daily.  Indeed it was originally never designed as a service, but instead a diagnostic tool for engineers.  

Innovations like these which we take for granted today might never have come to pass had the circumstances and timing been different.  I wonder how many great ideas we stifle today for similar reasons? 

The first android phone...

The first phone based on Google's Android mobile platform has been announced and of course immediately compared to Apple's iPhone, but then all mobile devices are nowadays - which says something about what any new device has to cope with!  It's imaginatively called the G1 and comes with a touch screen (not multi-touch), lots of wireless interfaces and most of the usual features you would expect.  But I am not convinced it is the capabilities and features of the G1 which will determine its success.

The iPhone must be the most hyped device of all time.  And sure, it has a number of limitations.  But it is the phone that is in everyone's mind when comparing others.  It is very difficult to compete against the mind of the consumer.  It is also harder to launch a new consumer product in the advent of an economic recession.  But I think two other things may make Google's entry to the phone market very difficult.  Compared to Apple, Google doesn't have the same unique hardware and software capability, rather it will always be harder to come up with the best user experience on devices when they are effectively a product of many producers, all integrated together.  We've seen that in the difference of the user experience between the Mac and the PC.

The second very dangerous risk that Google is taking with Android is the application distribution policy and infrastructure.  The tech users and the hackers, the leading edge folk will love the openness and the ability to do absolutely anything with the phone, loading any software they like, with no certification or checking of what various downloaded software does or where it comes from.  But the normal user, the man in the street, may actually worry quite a lot about the exploits that the mis-users may attempt on their phones.  Again,we know from the PC experience how if some people can do bad things then they will, resulting in a virus problem that everyone detests.  

I hope that Android manages to do well despite the concerns I have raised here.  Certainly the market can do with more initiatives like this to provide better and more innovative advances than Windows Mobile or Nokia/Symbian would make if left alone.  Perhaps Google is simply using Android to attempt to fragment the marketplace and drive the eventual mobile applications space into the cloud?  

People-led service requirements

Today I attended an event at Essex University.  One of the presentations was by an employee of Kodak about the process of moving from a people need through research to service development.  It was really well done, and concentrated on the way they had observed and analysed what people like to do with photos, in order to understand what service to offer through software support for managing digital images.  I wish so many other service offerings would begin from this approach.  

I often evangelise about the innovation of Apple in this blog - and I think they really do have some great examples, not just with product but also process and business models.  One of the reasons some of their innovations in the products and services they offer to customers are so good is because they also start from the perspective of what people like and want to do and accomplish.  This then drives how they use technology to simplify and break down barriers so that users can get done what they want, in ways that suit them ... without engineering hundreds of features that they don't need.   It was really nice to hear a similar approach from Kodak.  

Are we all working comfortably?

Flexible working can mean very many things ... job sharing, flexi-time hours, working from home rather than the traditional office, or working part-time in some way to name just a few.  But while work is better regarded nowadays as something people do rather than somewhere people go, in the future work will follow an even more different pattern.  

We are already seeing how today's definitions of flexible working allow organisations to employ the best talent even if those people happen to have non-standard circumstances or requirements which would have otherwise previously precluded them because of processes that tried to fit them to a fixed templated work pattern.    In the future, working flexibly may also encompass the idea of working timeshared for different employers in a much more widespread way than happens today.  The employment market will be far more dynamic and accommodate much more individual preference about the when, how, where and for whom work is done - particularly in academic or administrative work roles.  

From the individuals' perspective, their value will not be so much in terms of skills and knowledge but rather their ability to network and maintain links between other people.   This networking will be crucial, both with people and with machines that will perform the tasks which people do today.

Social or anti-social games?

Many people, particularly parents, are concerned about the amount of computer game playing time spent by children.  On the face of it, such games cause today's younger generation to spend yet more time in front of a computer screen.  There is an assumption that all of this takes place in isolated bedrooms up and down the land.  If children didn't get any fresh air then this would certainly be a problem.

But of course children play games, and actually, reality shows that many young people are playing games while socialising with their peers, either in person or online.  Communication is an important and natural thing for them to do while they pursue the enjoyment of gaming.  In fact many adults don't understand the concept of multitasking like this because in their generation it was different.  A change has taken place and is continuing to take place.  Secondly, many of the games which are popular actually involve thinking about moral or ethical issues, making decisions about the welfare and development of others in a community or involve some aspect of social care.  And thirdly, more and more young people will have mobile devices as time goes on which allows them to play games anywhere, outside, inside, wherever they are and whoever they are with.  In fact, in future, I think there will be more older people who are playing games of one sort or another too... I wonder if their view of the younger generation will change? 

Dogs or robots?

I read recently how a biotech firm in Korea (RNL Bio) and the Seoul National University had trained a pit bull terrier to perform certain domestic tasks such as removing laundry from a washing machine, fetching things from the fridge, amongst others.  Then they cloned five other dogs from this well trained parent.  Articles were subsequently written about whether dogs trained in this way could rival and be better than domestic robots.  I suspect that some would have opinions about the ethical aspects of the canine solution to domestic automation.  

Actually, I would still prefer a robot anyway.  There are plenty of reasons why the dog could choose not to follow its training on any particular day.  The dog will also eventually tire from domestic work.  The programming "breadth" possible for a robot should out-strip the number of tasks that a dog can be trained to do.  Finally, the dog will always require more maintenance, and have a more limited lifespan.  Unless its training extends to clearing up after itself then I still prefer the robot alternative, all of the previous points not withstanding!   

What is perhaps more interesting than to debate the merits of robot versus dog, is to wonder what might be the motivation behind the scientists who chose to train and clone the pit bulls?  Which species of animal do would be considered next?