As we moved towards the first set of rapids you could feel both a sense of urgency and impending doom. The sun, dominant from the moment we left shore, was now hidden behind storm clouds and lightning lit up the dark skies. Ominous. We were 13 people jammed into a floating dirigible heading straight at something called McCoys Chute on the mighty Ottawa River and it dawned on me that we were all voluntarily paddling forward despite the raging river in front.
Maybe it wasn’t at that very moment that I considered the boat as a metaphor for the enterprise and the raging river, the turbulent wireless handheld space but you can understand that those shouldn’t be one’s final thoughts. It wasn’t until later, much later, that this concept dawned. Read the rest of this entry »
John Criswick, our fearless founder, lead investor and chairman of the board was in California this week as Sir Richard Branson unveiled the latest spacecraft in his Virgin Galactic fleet, White Knight Two. Why is this important? Well, John is one of 200 people (and one of two Canadians) to have purchased a ride on this historic journey and we are living vicariously through him!
You can take a look here at some Canadian coverage of the event and stay tuned as the countdown to the desert liftoff begins (estimated at summer, 2010).
I love this video. I’m sure a lot of our customers can relate :-) Warning there is some nsfw language used.
The more times you watch it the more great things you notice that you missed the first time, sort of like watching Christmas Vacation for the 20th time.
One of the common complaints I hear all the time from our customers is that the screens and keyboards on mobile devices are too small. This is improving with new devices like the iPhone that has a huge screen, but you can’t make the screen or keyboard bigger without increasing the physical dimensions of the device. For example I think the sweet spot for laptop screen size is 15″, any bigger and the laptop is just too big to carry, as for the keyboard, remember IBM’s cool foldout keyboard nicknamed the butterfly keyboard, that was a great idea:
On the Mobile Device side there are a few developments that will eventually improve the screen size and keyboard size issues. First on the keyboard side, I purchased this laser keyboard a few years ago and I still love it today, I think the manufacturers goal is to OEM this technology into the actual mobile devices instead of a separate bluetooth peripheral.
As for the screen size issue, I just noticed today Texas Instruments (wow they are still around?) just posted a video of their prototype Pico Projector embedded in a BlackBerry Curve, once again a great technology when eventually miniaturized and embedded in devices will improve screen size. This following video is cool, except for the fact that the projector was embedded inside a dummy phone store BlackBerry, you can tell right away by the paper screen:
