[Twisted-Python] Fwd: [wearables] commercial survey - IEEE Pervasive Computing

Jason Asbahr jason at crash.org
Thu Jan 31 13:46:54 EST 2002


Excuse the forward, but this touches on some of the personal information 
space considerations of Twisted.  For additional illustration, may I 
suggest adding a Bruce Sterling book of short stories to your reading 
list, "A Good Old-Fashioned Future".  In particular, the story "Maneki 
Neko" illustrates a future application of portable machines and 
Memex/Twisted/ReputationNetwork systems for distributed gift-culture 
collectives.  Like ours.  :-)

Jason



Begin forwarded message:

> From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed at reed.com>
> Date: Thu Jan 31, 2002  12:20:41 PM US/Central
> To: rhodes at alum.mit.edu, "Thad E. Starner" <thad at cc.gatech.edu>
> Cc: wearables at cc.gatech.edu
> Subject: Re: [wearables] commercial survey - IEEE Pervasive Computing
>
> Though I'm still quite excited about the potential of self-contained 
> general purpose wearables, I have to say that the capabilities of my 
> Kyocera QCP6035 Smartphone, the Samsung palmphone and the upcoming Treo 
> are impressively general, and because they can be augmented by 
> intelligence on the Internet quite easily (having escaped the walled 
> garden of WAP), they can be quite general purpose.  Already they can do 
> something quite cool - you can attach a small GPS receiver (Pharos) to 
> them and get live location info that drives the navigation through 
> geographic data on the Internet.  There are no car-mount or portable 
> GPS navigation systems that can access up-to-date maps and directions - 
> they run off of internal data only.
>
> Thus the commercial world surrounding the Palm OS-based phones is 
> actually poised ready to go beyond PIMs into new apps.  The big limit 
> is the bitrate on CDMA and GSM nets that is available (very low, so it 
> pays to have local cache).
>
> The real problem inhibiting the market is the odd idea that what you 
> want to do with a mobile device is the class of things you do sitting 
> at a desk in your study or office.  I don't want to browse the Web in 
> general - or compose documents or read long Microsoft word attachments.
>
> But the Palm phones are plenty powerful enough to do cool things in 
> conjunction with general purpose intelligence elsewhere.
>
>
> At 09:56 AM 1/31/2002 -0800, Bradley Rhodes wrote:
>
>> >Computer enthusiasts have been known to rewrite a MP3 player's
>> >interface software to allow the uploading and downloading of any
>> >type of data, effectively making the device into the equivalent
>> >of a large floppy disk.  More recently, these devices are
>> >merging with PDAs and cellular phones to create a wide variety
>> >of available products.  IDC expects sales of portable devices
>> >with digital audio playback capability to grow to 15 million
>> >units by 2005.  In a sense, these devic
>>
>> It's not just computer enthusiasts anymore. The iPod is both an
>> MP3 player or, at the flip of a switch, a firewire 5G hard
>> drive. A friend of mine uses it both to play music and to store
>> all her personal email, so she can read email at work without
>> tainting company disk with it.
>>
>> You touched on the question of general-purpose, but I'd love to
>> see it addressed further. The average PC owner has a web browser,
>> email reader, full office suite and game machine all in one
>> box. Because of inherent interface constraints, the Palm Pilot is
>> only widely used for PIM applications: short memos, calendar,
>> phone and to-do lists. Wearables have even more interface
>> constraints than pen-based systems, which implies to me they'll
>> be even more task specific, at least until we get a bluetooth
>> equivalent that lets you have task-specific interfaces all
>> sharing one processor/memory/battery attached to the belt
>> somewhere.
>>
>> Comments?
>>
>> Brad
>>
>> --
>> Bradley Rhodes
>> Intelligence Augmentation | Software Agents | Wearable Computing
>> http://www.bradleyrhodes.com/
>
> - David
> --------------------------------------------
> WWW Page: http://www.reed.com/dpr.html
>
>
>





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