Envelope / Develope

After a few years of not paying attention to my sport life I decided to see how well I fare measuring what can be collected with a sport watch sensors - heart beat, distance, speed, pace and (bonus) my sleeping patterns. After a few deliberations I acquired a Garmin Vivo Active, first edition and started to use it. On that path I discovered some shortcomings which became annoying and funny sometimes: for sleeping you had to start/stop the cycle in order to have a relevant time frame after running a few laps, sometimes, I forgot to stop the timer and jumped in a car and drove home. The smart watch could not detected the speed change and sometimes I ended up with a few good tens of kilometers on my running book. My friends called my "the unknown Ethiopian champion runner of Toronto" whenever an update of the firmware occurred, my customized screens disappeared the wake-up function/ring is effective only if you sleep with the watch; there is no sound but mostly a trembl...

Or read the small print before you buy  I am in the same cohort of adults as you, probably: with limited time for vacations, I am planning almost every day for seeing, sucking up scenery, tasting food or wines or having fun in a memorable way. Rarely there is a moment where playing by the ear is on my schedule. Often times I am forced to improvise as my plans are totally screwed by inevitable mishaps. And here comes one of my reality encounters with what is a map in our days and how different than reality it is.One hand driving, one eye on map and one eye recording the imagery, brain where are you ? In today over-scanned/over-visited/over-blogged/over-you-tubed world to be driven in a dangerous or unknown place by the technology seems like a dystopian event. And still, that happened to me. Garmin has an interesting policy regarding their own GPS devices - the maps are free for LI(F)E. What is not known, but hidden in the bottom of the license agreement, is that the l...

            I was reading " The case against Google " from which several things I never imagined were revealed. Google won the search engine war just because, for one reason, at the time Microsoft was battling a monopoly lawsuit with USA and refrained on hurting Google by using the same tactics used with other competitors during the precedent years.             The complains about unfair treatments are not coming form users, who are totally unaware of the subtleties of the search engines, but from the companies which are getting users through the search engine. The Shyhook, Yelp, Getty museum examples are eye opening!  If your customers are arriving at your site via Google search, the single pipe could always derail them and sink you page rank. What is next, for your business?             Why only the EU had the nerve to fine Google with 2.1 billions for monopolisti...

The small electronic gadgets are everywhere in your life, and I will enumerate just a few of them, most of us for sure have them around the house: smart remote controllers (like Logitech TV remotes) digital cameras wireless routers smart TVs SAN/NAS - array of hard drives to back-up your data smart watches mobile phones tablets, mobile devices GPS devices audio/video recorders or players media players or recorders smart toys for your kids (game consoles, game pads, etc...)                  One of the aspects of almost all of them is that at their "heart" there is a system running, like a small engine. The engine is built on two parts - hardware and software. The hardware part is most of the time fixed, you cannot change it, in best of cases you can upgrade it (that will make a subject for another post). The software part is the subject of this post, for companies building the product is calle...