Collabora‘s mission is to accelerate the adoption of open source technologies, methodologies and philosophy. It does this by providing consultancy to companies who are deploying open source technologies in their products, by providing its own open source based products and through knowledge sharing activities such as training. Collabora’s initial focus was instant messaging (IM), Voice over IP (VoIP) and videoconferencing technologies, but the company has since expanded its offering to include general multimedia, mobile web technologies, collaboration infrastructure, automotive infotainment platforms, graphics optimization, multimedia interoperability & productivity software. Collabora’s customers include many large IT corporations such as Nokia, Samsung, Intel, Texas Instruments and Google.
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Linaro Enterprise Group Manager Andrea Gallo
The Linaro-hosted “Enterprise Group” (LEG) is dedicated to accelerate Linux ARM server ecosystem development and extends the list of Linaro members beyond ARM silicon vendors to Server OEM’s and commercial Linux providers.
Fleur Pellerin Interview, French Minister of IT
Here’s my quick interview with Fleur Pellerin, she is a politician and minister delegate in the French government. She was appointed Minister Delegate with responsibility for Small and Medium Enterprises, Innovation, and the Digital Economy attached to the Minister for Economic Regeneration (the former Ministry of the Economy, Finance, and Industry) by French President François Hollande on 16 May 2012. After my part in English that lasts 1 minute 55 seconds, I also filmed some of what she said to some other media in French.
My question is about what the Government can do to speed up Technological innovation, from Startups, to established small to medium sized companies to the big Tech companies in society. At the end I also try to ask if there is any chance that the French Government would re-introduce the Socialist party’s idea of Global Licence, an idea of introducing taxation at the ISP-level to finance arts and culture, pay artists, pay musicians/film makers/writers even bloggers and programmers is what I think could be good. Not to replace all existing monetization for content on the web, but to supplement it and to stop trying to put children in jail who pirate content on the Internet or to punish them by cutting off their Internet access.
My opinion is that Government has a big role to play in trying to help speed up Technological Innovation worldwide. Not just to let companies do what they want, where so much relies on the good intentions and good judgement of a few giant corporations like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Intel, I think that Governments should do the most possible to speed innovation forward in the best interest of all the people. That is to enable the usage of Smartphones, Smart devices, Apps ecosystems, etc to improve society for all citizen, to fix certain problems like health, food, education, accomodation, jobs, transportation, the economy, all those can be fixed by clever use of the existing potential of technology. I wonder if all those solutions do appear if Government just sit back and wait for big enterprises or for small new startups to become big enough successes fast enough to decide to develop and implement each of these technological solutions to fix each problem in society when they think it can be profitable enough for them or for when they think they have a good enough reason to provide solutions for each problem.
Here you can see Fleur Pellerin’s keynote discussion Q&A in English at LeWeb 2013:
And there was also another French Minister at LeWeb 2013, Arnaud Montebourg, who did some great performance in his Q&A answering questions from Tech Investors:
Lapka Breathalyzer and PEM, Geiger, EMF, Organic and Temperature/Humidity Sensors
Lapka releases this new Breathalyzer for iOS and Android, they also have their Lapka personal environment monitor PEM kit, that connects to your Android/iOS phone to measure, collect data and analyze your surroundings. Lapka’s PEM kit features 1 Geiger counter (measure radiation around you), 1 EMF (High Frequency and Low Frequency electromagnetic fields) sensor, 1 Organic sensor (nitrate measurement in fruits and vegetables) and 1 temperature/humidity sensor.
Excelitas DigiPile Proximity Sensor at 10µA (passive infrared) Veritas Detection Group
Gregory Gallinat of Excelitas Technologies (a Veritas company), demonstrates their new DigiPile Thermopile Detector proximity sensor, ultra small consuming only 10 microamps, would for example enable a future smartphone to detect presence to turn itself on (not even need to touch the device like in the Moto X).
You can read more about these sensors here: http://www.excelitas.com/pages/product/Thermopile-Detectors-Sensors-and-Array-Modules.aspx
NAO Emotional Autonomous Humanoid Robots Interview, Bruno Maisonnier Founder of Aldebaran Robotics
Bruno Maisonnier Founder of Aldebaran Robotics talks about his french autonomous humanoid robots, including the NAO Robot, an autonomous little humanoid robot that can interact emotionally. They are developing Robot hardware platforms, developing a Linux based operating system dedicated to humanoid robotics, understanding emotions, understanding dialog, an SDK and Tools to enable all developers to develop apps for the Humanoid Robots in their apps store.
You can also watch the keynote video by Bruno Maisonnier at LeWeb 2013:
Nizar Romdhane, ARM Director of Media Processor Ecosystem, working with Game Engine, GPU Compute
ARM works with the ecosystem to support the game developers to take optimally advantage of the ARM Mali Graphics, GPU Compute. ARM is to be in the core of the future of Gaming. Already dominating in Smartphones and Tablets, most Smart TVs and Set-top-boxes also use ARM, most of them are becoming Home Consoles now also, quickly closing the gap with home consoles (from Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft). In the very near future, we will probably see most high-end video games running on ARM Powered devices. Here showing the Unity Engine running at 1080p smoothly at full framerates on Exynos5420 with ARM Mali-T628 with OpenGL ES 3.0. Working closely with developers, working closely with Google collaborating on the tools for development of advanced video games. Supporting the most advanced video-games on the latest Android.
Latest ARM Server solutions booths tour
Showing off the latest Applied Micro 64bit X-Gene ARM Server Development Board (which Rob Savoye of Linaro eagerly wants to start playing with), Dell’s 64bit ARM Server solution running Fedora 19, working on a proof of concept for early 2014 for Dell’s key cloud server customers (Google? Amazon?) before going into mass production (Dell already did some 32bit ARM Server tests in Europe with some customers), some things like Oracle JDK still has to fully come over (needs some tuning) to the platform. This is just me walking kind of randomly around some of the ARM Server demo area at the ARM Techcon. Then checking out the HP ARM Server booth, showing off some of the latest HP Moonshot ARM Server solutions also talked about in HP’s Keynote at ARM Techcon, watch the official video of that keynote or my version (sitting on the front row).
James Bruce, ARM Director of Mobile Strategy, talks Next Generation Smartphones
James Bruce talks newly announced ARM Mali-T720 for Entry-level and new ARM Mali-T760 for High-end devices. ARM Mali-T720 brings GPU Compute OpenGL ES 3.0 to the entry level smartphone in the next 18-24 months. AmLogic now ships Mali-T450 in their new M802 chip. James Bruce talks further of what ARM can do for the user experience, talks designing benchmarks to measure the performance of the user experience vs certain benchmarks measuring things that aren’t relevant to the user experience. The ARM Architecture ecosystem is amazing, for example, in Q2 2013, there were more ARM Cortex-A5 devices shipped than all x86 PC/Laptops combined in that quarter.
Google Glass app Glashion “OK glass, I want this!” buys anything you see
Glashion is a Google Glass project that allows you to buy fashion products that you are looking at. Look at any fashionable bag or dress on a bypasser or in a store, and then the app queries the ShopStyle API for similar matches based on object recognition technology. You simply tell Glass when you see a product, “Ok glass, I want this!” and you can then buy the product with a blink. At least that is their idea.
streamroot 4K p2p video streaming over HTML5 WebRTC for FranceTV
Stream for example 4K video for cheaper bandwidth costs as all users can upload using this p2p live video streaming technology from http://www.streamroot.io/ StreamRoot is a JavaScript/HTML5 solution which optimizes the bandwidth consumption of your video streaming platform by turning the mass of simultaneous viewers to advantage. When a user streams a video on your website, he connects to the other viewers watching the same video and downloads parts of it directly from them. StreamRoot is based on HTML5 and uses WebRTC so there is no plugin or application to install for the end user
David Hornik at LeWeb 2013
David Hornik is an investor at August Capital and he talks about ventural capitalism with Web startups, with tech companies, if he thinks that there is a new tech bubble going on now with Facebook/Twitter/etc or not.
And here’s the US VC Roundtable at LeWeb 2013:
Dina Kaplan, Co-Founder, Blip at LeWeb 2013
She traveled all around the world over the last few years after quitting her job CEO of Blip.tv.
You can watch her keynote at LeWeb 2013 here:
Xavier Niel, Free Illiad Founder, talks ISP and Carrier revolutionizing the Internet out of France
Here’s my Interview with Xavier Niel, the founder of Free, the second biggest ISP in France, invented triple play, where an ISP provides Internet, TV and Telephony through an advanced ADSL Set-top-box, and they have been providing such fast Internet with full IPTV and unlimited VOIP landline-replacement for a very reasonable 29 Euros per month, they started this years before every other ISP in the world had to follow up. And now in France since a year or two, Free provides 3G and now also 4G telephony, with amazingly cheap 2 Euro per month entry level pricing, all pre-paid no-contract only plans, this also has totally revolutionized the mobile carrier business in France.
faytech Touch Device, Management Interview
This video is an informative and interesting interview with Fan Yang and Arne Weber, the owners of faytech ltd, discussing the history and evolution of their years in the touchscreen industry and their passion to build the best products possible. Beginning over 8 years ago with starting to sell touchscreen monitors in Germany, they set up a importing business based in Germany which has grown to be one of Europe’s largest distributors of touchscreen devices. In 2008, Arne and Fan began to travel to China to find better suppliers, and ended up moving to Shenzhen and starting their own manufacturing company. Four short years later, faytech has over 70 employees, 15K sq. ft. of space, producing over 2000 touch screen monitors and touchscreen PCs a month, and achieving ISO certification in 2013.
DSP Concepts, Embedded Audio Processing
DSP Concepts demonstrates real-time audio processing for the ARM Cortex-M4, providing tools for audio processing.
Latest Freescale powered devices, wearable, internet of things, home hub and more
Freescale shows their wearable reference design, tiny to develop i.MX6 based BT4.0 accellerometer, adding ECG, heart-rate monitor, enabling a new range of Freescale powered wearable computers, smartwatches, headmounted computers, fitness devices, more to be announced and integrated. Freescale powers a range of healthcare products, weightscales, heart rate monitors and more. Freescale shows their Freescale One Box Platform, providing a reference Smart Home hub gateway, using Java, all the different wireless technologies integrated.
Geniatech dual-boots Linux with Qt UI on their AmLogic based Set-top-boxes
Geniatech engineer shows how they support dual-booting to some basic Linux from the SD card on several of the Geniatech Android Set-top-boxes, going back to their single-core AmLogic M3 based Set-top-boxes and also to their new ones. Geniatech tries or wants to provide everything open source and unlock their Set-top-boxes so for users who want a cheap ARM Powered Linux box, they can use Geniatech for that also.
Kevin Marks talks evolution of the Web 2003-2023 at LeWeb 2013
Kevin Marks talks HTML5, Open Standards, Webkit, browser ecosystem, it’s not just text anymore, it’s SVG, video, sound, device access and all kinds of stuff that are being baked into the platforms and that are being translated between the platforms, that is being solved. The difficulty is now we have large silos in Facebook, Twitter and some other proprietary social networks, that is what the IndieWeb is all about, trying to build infrastructure where components are composed on your own website, where you can swap pieces in and out of the proprietary social networking silos.
Here’s a video of Kevin Marks’s keynote presentation at LeWeb 2013:
Swatch Sistem51 review, automatic, mechanical Swiss Watch for the mass market
My unboxing and review of the new Swatch Sistem51, revolutionary ultra-simplified robot-automatic-manufactured, 51-part mechanical automatic wrist watch selling now in Switzerland for 150 Swiss Francs ($169), to be released in the USA/China in early 2014 and in the rest of the world later in 2014. This is the latest advancement in Swiss Watch Making technology, 90-hour power reserve, one screw holds everything together, with anti-magnetic structure. This significantly simplifies the mechanical automatic watch and makes it available to the mass market. Of course I want to see Swatch release real Smart Watches in 2014, using E Ink and LCD displays, using smart LEDs, Bluetooth 4.0, smart buttons, covering their watches with touch screens, including vibrators, microphones and speakers, all the while it’s great to see such mechanical advancement for the Swiss Watch industry. I expect ARM Powered Smart Swatches for next year, they could perhaps even combine the battery powered ARM Processor with the automatic watch mechanics.
You can listen to Alexander Linz of Watch-Insider.com’s really interesting 45-minute interview with Swatch Group CEO Nick Hayek here: http://www.watch-insider.com/featured/conversation-nick-hayek-ceo-swatch-group/




