PJH Studios

Category: Technology

Mostly related to issues surrounding technology and computers, main include current events or news.

  • Jambox wireless speaker by Jawbone

    Everything about Jawbone’s portable wireless speaker, the Jambox, is well done. The speaker itself, the included cables and charger, the ease of use, the carrying case and even the packaging all show serious thought in the design, presentation and experience of the product.
    Jawbone Jambox wireless speaker

    The Jambox comes in four different colors: black, red, grey and blue. Shaped like a rectangular brick, it measures approximately 2.25″ tall, 6″ long and 1.5″ deep and is a solid 12 ounces. The build feels solid, with quality materials–a rubberized top and bottom allow for a solid grip when holding and maintaining position on an uneven surface. The speaker’s grill is styled aluminum, where each color has a different design.

    As for buttons, there are only four: the on off switch, increase volume, decrease volume and a function button. Pushing the function button once will cause a voice to speak the approximate battery life remaining. Very smart. Also, the function button can be used to send or receive calls if paired with a bluetooth phone.
    Jawbone Jambox side view

    To connect the Jambox, there are several options. The primary means is via bluetooth. Pairing is as simple as turning on the Jambox, and then going into the device’s bluetooth connection screen. I’ve used an iPhone and an iPad to connect to the device with no issues at all. Also, there is a stereo line in jack for devices that lack bluetooth.

    Speaking of stereo line in, a 3 foot stereo to stereo cable comes with the Jambox, along with:

    • 60 inch micro USB cable (for charging and syncing to a computer from longer distances)
    • 12.5 inch micro USB cable (for charging and syncing to a computer at short distances, and for traveling)
    • a wall charger with a plug that folds out
    • a neoprene like carrying case

    Jawbone Jambox with case

    The case is especially clever. It’s made of a synthetic neoprene-like material that fits over the Jambox like a sleeve. The ends consist of foldable tabs with a thin magnet within the sleeve. As the tab encloses the end, it gently snaps to the case. One drawback, the case fits almost too snugly, and may take practice to push/pull the Jambox out of it.

    But how does it sound? How does a $200 portable, wireless speaker sound? Impressive. Don’t expect something compared to a $2000 hi-fi, but you’ll hear a full range of sound with good bass response. I played numerous albums on it from a variety of artists: The National, Mumford & Sons, Iron & Wine, Rilo Kiley, Feist, Ella Fitzgerald, Broken Social Scene, The Beatles, Vampire Weekend, classical guitar. It tends to lose the high end, but it keeps the feel of the music clear and crisp. It can get loud enough to drive a small party in an apartment or living room or patio.

    Lastly, the device is intelligent. Pushing the function button will state the battery life, but it can be upgraded with apps and firmware modifications to do more. Not a fan of the pre-installed voice–you can change it from 4 different voices, and that doesn’t even include the other languages it supports. If you create an account with other services, you can add apps to assist with caller id or voice dialing.

    Of note, Jawbone took consideration to the packaging, too. The hard plastic case covers the Jambox, and a tab on each side of the case clip into a heavy paper box. Inside the box, the cables are neatly placed and labeled along with the carrying case and charger.

    The utility of the Jambox offers a lot of value from dialing and syncing to phones, and also pairing with devices to provide richer sound beyond the devices tinny, mono speakers (e.g. the iPad). Instant parties can be had, watch movies or play games away from a TV, create a conference room speaker. This is definitely one, cool little, electronic brick.

     

  • The Zen of Social Media Marketing – Shama Kabani

    The Zen of Social Media Marketing by Shama Kabani

    primes people for how to use online social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs and more. It’s mainly introductory, best suited for someone who’s new to social media. She takes old marketing strategies and shows how social media uses them online — attract, transform and convert.

    Kabani breaks down:

    • Websites, Blogs, and SEO (search engine optimization) – fresh, relevant content is where it’s at.
    • Facebook – more of a breakdown of the different parts of Facebook
    • Twitter – what it is, and how to have conversations
    • LinkedIn – professional networking online
    • Video – various video mediums online, more than just You Tube
    • Social media policies – you should spell out the rules of use

    She pulls out key learning points as Zen Moments. Each chapter contains relevant anecdotes from people who have applied the concepts, and the last part of the book tells of numerous case studies of how people used social media as a whole for success.

    Kabani knew this book would become dated, so she encourages people to go to her website for updated content… and enter a password to do so.

    If you’re digitally savvy, you can pass on this book. If you’re not, and need to get online, this will be a good start.

  • Google museum view

    Google takes its street view concept to the world’s top museums:

    Cameras mounted on a special trolley travelled through empty galleries after the public had left, taking 360 degree images of selected rooms which were then stitched together. So far 385 rooms are navigable, and more will be added.

  • Five months

    Dan Provost and Tom Gerhardt went from a simple idea–a tripod mount for an iPhone 4–to an actual, physical product, called the Gliph, in five months.

    This turnaround, from idea to market in five months by two guys with no retail or manufacturing experience, signifies a shift in the way products are made and sold — a shift only made possible in the last couple years.

    Provost details the whole process. What they did when, why, how, who they had to contact. It helped that they understood design, so they could relate to the people who would make their product real. Amazing stuff.

  • A Day in the Future

    As I rise and stretch, I notice I’m sore. Not from tending the fields though. I have no fields. Some unseen person does all the field-tending for me. Sometimes I forget that there’s any field-tending going on at all.

    Lyrically written.

  • Curation is the new search

    Google has been much maligned of late, due to its increasingly spammy and gamed results. Paul Kedrosky makes a point that curation of web content will be on the rise.

    The answer, of course, is that we won’t — do them all by hand, that is. Instead, the re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation — not one people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or unconsciously (tweets, etc) — and partly about hand curation (JetSetter, etc.).

  • Disney, masters of theme park operations

    Disney has theme park logistics down to a nimble operation that monitors all aspects of a park. They use a combination of weather reports, historical records, airline and hotel reservations to predict park capacity, but once the Magic Kindom opens, ride queues, cash registers at in park restaurants, foot traffic in particular areas are all monitored from a command center. From central command, more boats can be deployed if the queue reaches a certain thresh hold. Or:

    Another option involves dispatching Captain Jack Sparrow or Goofy or one of their pals to the queue to entertain people as they wait. “It’s about being nimble and quickly noticing that, ‘Hey, let’s make sure there is some relief out there for those people,’ ” said Phil Holmes, vice president of the Magic Kingdom, the flagship Disney World park.

    And sometimes, they even throw parades.

    What if Fantasyland is swamped with people but adjacent Tomorrowland has plenty of elbow room? The operations center can route a miniparade called “Move it! Shake it! Celebrate It!” into the less-populated pocket to siphon guests in that direction.

    It seems like a fun way to earn more dollars.

  • A physicist solves the City equation

    Geoffrey West, a physicist, set out to study cities and urban growth and find variables for growth and decline. Consuming massive amounts of data, he discovered cities are governed by Laws, just like physics.

    After two years of analysis, West and Bettencourt discovered that all of these urban variables could be described by a few exquisitely simple equations. For example, if they know the population of a metropolitan area in a given country, they can estimate, with approximately 85 percent accuracy, its average income and the dimensions of its sewer system. These are the laws, they say, that automatically emerge whenever people “agglomerate,” cramming themselves into apartment buildings and subway cars.

    Cities grow like organisms:

    The correspondence was obvious to West: he saw the metropolis as a sprawling organism, similarly defined by its infrastructure. (The boulevard was like a blood vessel, the back alley a capillary.) This implied that the real purpose of cities, and the reason cities keep on growing, is their ability to create massive economies of scale, just as big animals do. After analyzing the first sets of city data — the physicists began with infrastructure and consumption statistics — they concluded that cities looked a lot like elephants. In city after city, the indicators of urban “metabolism,” like the number of gas stations or the total surface area of roads, showed that when a city doubles in size, it requires an increase in resources of only 85 percent.

    Why do people move to cities?

    In essence, they arrive at the sensible conclusion that cities are valuable because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”

  • Kevin Kelly – What Technology Wants

    In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly views technology’s evolution from multiple perspectives–the anthropologist, the sociologist, the evolutionary biologist, the technologist and the futurist. Using these perspectives, he examines his core thesis: technology is an extension of our abilities.

    Broken into four sections, Origins, Imperatives, Choices and Directions he combines ideas from various disciplines with stories, documented history and deconstruction of facts. In Origins, evolutionary biology and anthropology explain humans and human interaction with technology. We began as a very simple species, and we adopted tools as we needed them. As homo sapiens evolved, our needs became more complex.

    Throughout Imperatives, he documents history and science with sociology in mind–how does technology affect us as it progresses? How do we reconcile our needs and abilities as humans adapt and grow into higher order civilizations? Technology comes from lower order needs, desiring of higher order abilities.

    Choices begins with Kelly stating that the Unabomber was right. Quoted at length from his manifesto, the Unabomber disdained technology due to it taking over our lives and growing beyond our control. Kelly points out the flaws in the manifesto somewhat cautiously–humans are incapable of fully living without technology. The Unabomber relied on others for tools and materials.

    The last two chapters consist of Kelly’s futurist, philosopher take on where technology is going. At length, he charts Technology’s Trajectories among 10 different areas: complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, freedom, mutualism, beauty, sentience, structure, evolvability. These areas are the same areas that life itself works within, he states. Lastly, in a nod to James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games, Kelly believes that our relationship with technology and ideas will constantly push boundaries and seek ways to grow in order to continue.

    In short, this book is full of ideas and perspectives. One particularly interesting idea he proposes is how many geniuses missed out on fully reaching their potential because they weren’t alive at the right time in history? Further, once a technology is created, in never ceases to exist. It may become rare, but it will serve a niche. If you want to get the most out of What Technology Wants in the shortest amount of time, read the last two chapters. Read the entire book for a synthesis of numerous ideas converging at once.

  • Can technology end poverty?

    Kentaro Toyama worked at Microsoft Research India for several years leading research initiatives but also ICT4D, or Information and Communication Technologies for Development. ICT4D seeks to address global poverty with technology.

    He learned a few things while there.

    Technology—no matter how well designed—is only a magnifier of human intent and capacity. It is not a substitute.

    Just giving impoverished communities access to technology won’t help those communities. They need skills and literacies to operate the given technology. They heed to be shown how the technology will help them in their own environment with practical day to day uses.

    In every one of our projects, a technology’s effects were wholly dependent on the intention and capacity of the people handling it. The success of PC projects in schools hinged on supportive administrators and dedicated teachers. Microcredit processes with mobile phones worked because of effective microfinance organizations. Teaching farming practices through video required capable agriculture-extension officers and devoted nonprofit staff. In our most successful ICT4D projects, the partner organizations did the hard work of real development, and our role was simply to assist, and strengthen, their efforts with technology.

    How technology can address poverty? Look at how it’s widened.

    1. Access: Increase the access to technologies
    2. Capability: Everyone has the same skill level
    3. Motivation: How to apply the technologies and skills to relevant situations