Category: Tradeshows

Expectations for CES next week

Posted by Charbax – December 30, 2010

Category: Opinions, CES, Archos, Google, Pixel Qi

Between January 3rd and 11th, I am going to video-blog from CES 2011, make sure to often refresh my RSS feed and/or subscribe to my YouTube channel, (at last year’s CES I published 75 videos), I’ll try to feature the coolest ARM Powered devices that I can find at the show.

Have you got any scoop or ideas for what I should video-blog at CES? What questions would you like me to ask the representatives of which specific companies? If you read on any other blogs about any interesting products showing at this CES, please post your suggestions for what I should film here in the comments of this post. You can also send me an email: charbax@gmail.com or you can even sms/call me or leave a voicemail between January 3rd and 11th at my US phone number +1 (702) 238 8630 (only active when I am in the USA).

Here are some of the things I am expecting or hoping to video-blog at CES:

– Lots of Froyo, Gingerbread and Honeycomb stuff. Android in everything!

– Several dual-core tablets are rumored. Nvidia’s Tegra2 is rumored could be one of the stars of the show, rumored to be the “reference design” for Honeycomb. Sounds great, but I am also looking forward to all the other upcoming Dual-Core ARM Processor platforms and I am wondering if products featuring these will be shown at this CES already.

– How soon are the Dual-Core smart phones and tablets being released and at what prices? Will LG, Samsung, Motorola or other present phones at CES to beat Nexus S already?

– ARM Powered Chrome OS Laptops and Google TV Set-top-boxes, I will be looking for the first clues of these products.

– Tablets, more tablets? Any new design features to allow tablets to be used more for productivity? Are some Honeycomb designs like Archos without the hardware Android buttons? Designs with foldable/swivel keyboards?

– Pixel Qi 7″, 10.1″, big OEM announcements? Hopefully these LCD screens will be ready for Kindle-LCD, ipad2, samsung galaxy tab2 and more hopefully mass manufactured and everywhere within the next 3 months.

– Texas Instruments next generation nHD pico projector in all kinds of phones, tablets and other devices at CES? Or not to be shown before February at Mobil World Congress? I’d like to see this type of pico projector be used together with sensors to detect when touching in user interfaces projected for example on a table (see my video of a table-pico-projector prototype UI demonstrated at CeBIT 2007), this could turn any ARM Powered device, even pocketable, into a large screen computing device.

– New ARM Powered platforms for cheaper and better smart phones, tablets and laptops? Rockchip may show ARM Cortex-A8 RK29xx, Broadcom may show BCM2157 for sub-$75 Android phones, is it time for VIA and Telechips to show new faster or/and cheaper solutions for new cooler low-cost Tablets, Laptops and Set-top-boxes?

– Are the new ARM Processors capable of full 1080p at up to 60fps with full high profile and full high bitrates of every codecs?

– Nintendo 3DS is coming in February/March, any other manufacturers to mass manufacture products to use that parallax barrier 3D screen from Sharp that doesn’t require 3D glasses?

– Are ARM Powered NAS boxes and Pogoplugs/Sheevaplugs going to be powerful enough to download and seed BitTorrents at full speed, allow for full speed gigabit LAN file sharing even on the cheaper solutions?

– How much is going to be LTE, how soon and are anyone showing anything to do with White Spaces yet? How soon could that be deployed and at which cost and with what range and authentication features?

– I’d like to see Sanyo release a HD3000 with WiFi/Bluetooth and optics and sensors closer to that of a DSLR. Or it will be interesting to see more DSLR type optics and sensors in more video camcorders and see how affordable those setups can become. It seems Sony, Panasonic and all other major camera makers are going in that direction for the next generation of best HD camcorders.

Please post your expecations/hopes in the comments or send me an email!

Category: Opinions, CES, Archos, Google, Pixel Qi
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Salim Ismail, Executive Director of the Singularity University at LeWeb 2010

Posted by Charbax – December 26, 2010

Category: Robots, Other, Exclusive videos, LeWeb

At the Singularity University in Silicon Valley, 80 students in 2010 (picked out of 1600 worldwide applicants) study futures, law, finance, networks, biotechnology, nanotechnology, medicine, robotics, energy and space to prepare for that point of singularity when artificial intelligence meets human intelligence.

Find out exactly what is going on at the Singularity University at http://youtube.com/singularityu and http://singularityu.org you can also watch Salim Ismail presentation at LeWeb here.

Category: Robots, Other, Exclusive videos, LeWeb
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John Ham, Founder of Ustream.tv at LeWeb 2010

Posted by Charbax – December 26, 2010

Category: Web, Exclusive videos, LeWeb

John Ham discusses interactivity for live video streaming, infrastructure scaling for high quality video streaming and other upcoming features of http://ustream.tv such as pay-per-view.

Category: Web, Exclusive videos, LeWeb
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Joe Green, Co-Founder and President of Causes.com at LeWeb 2010

Posted by Charbax – December 25, 2010

Category: Web, Exclusive videos, LeWeb

Joe Green co-founded Causes.com with Sean Parker who founded Napster, the guy played by Justin Timberlake in the recent Facebook movie “The Social Network”. Causes.com allows anyone to use their Facebook and Twitter friends and followers to raise funds for any kinds of organizations. You can also watch his presentation of causes.com on stage at LeWeb with Loic LeMeur.

Category: Web, Exclusive videos, LeWeb
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Pixel Qi partners with CPT for mass manufacturing dual-mode screens

Posted by Charbax – December 21, 2010

Category: Displays, CES, Pixel Qi, OLPC

Pixel Qi and CPT are preparing 3 different screen sizes to be mass manufactured in 2011, including a 7″ 1024×600 design that will be shown early January at CES in Las Vegas.

CPT has a monthly production capacity of 40 million LCD screens. That’s 480 million LCD screens per year. How much of these are going to be Pixel Qi types is to be seen. CPT is the worlds second largest manufacturer of mid-size (4.8″-11.6″) LCD screens (behind CMI).

I’m hoping that the 3 sizes that they are working on are 4.8″ or 5″, 7″ and 10.1″, sizes which I think are the best for Tablet and E-reader use. 4.8″ or 5″ being the largest to fit in normal pockets (passport sized), 7″ the largest to fit in jacket pockets and 10″ being current top Tablet and about the size of an A4 page. But I also think 11.6″ or 12.1″ screen size like the one Google wants for Chrome OS notebooks could also be a good size.

This alliance started early last summer when CPT showed a transflective screen of its own design at a Taiwanese trade show. Discussions between the two companies at that show made it apparent that Pixel Qi and CPT should work together to bring stronger product to market faster. A close alliance was formed and the teams have been working together quietly all fall. They have created samples of a 7” 1024×600 screens scheduled for mass production in early Q2 2011, which will be first publically shown at the CES 2011 exhibition in Las Vegas in early January 2011. This represents an expansion of Pixel Qi’s manufacturing strength beyond its first LCD manufacturing partner who has been shipping Pixel Qi’s 10” screen.

These dual-mode reflective and transflective LCD screens are crucial to realize the combination of Tablet and E-reader into one product. Without this type of screen, I don’t believe tablets can be used for reading books as backlights are not meant for reading, and for e-readers to use LCD also makes them more versatile thus also including all the tablet functions into one same product. Most importantly, this screen technology improves battery runtime for ARM Powered devices considerably, as in a 10″ ARM Powered tablet or laptop, the backlight probably consumes about 80% of the devices overall power, consider thus a screen that can work without a backlight or with a lower backlight intensity, and you have a battery runtime multiplied by as much as 5x in that same product. Thus an ARM Powered Tablet or Laptop that had 10 hours battery runtime on a regular backlit LCD may have up to 50 hours using this type of screen. Thus also making this screen absolutely crucial for projects like OLPC and the Indian education $35 tablet project if they want to make it viable that these devices can be used places where there isn’t a lot of power.

Source: pixelqi.com/blog1/

Category: Displays, CES, Pixel Qi, OLPC
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Google TV devices “delayed”, may not show at CES

Posted by Charbax – December 20, 2010

Category: Set-top-boxes, Opinions, CES, Google, Google TV

The New York Times reports Toshiba, LG, Sharp, Samsung and Vizio have Google TV projects going, that they may have been all planning to unveil those at CES but that Google may have asked them to delay their unveiling until next software update including full Google Marketplace support is ready. Samsung may still show a couple Google TV devices at CES, Toshiba has confirmed they won’t, Vizio might show some Google TV stuff but only privately and maybe not to be blogged about.

So Google faces challenges in getting American TV networks to agree to allow them to stream TV shows from the web on the Google TV platform. I have estimated that if Google and Adobe wanted, if the negociations with US TV networks wouldn’t lead to a solution, that they could unleash a software update to present both the browser and the flash plugin as “User Agent: Generic” making detection by US TV networks impossible and thus forcing them to either remove online TV streaming completely or just regard Google TV as same user terminal as any “normal” laptop or desktop computer.

So let’s assume Google TV will have only a limited showing at CES, perhaps Google is trying to coordinate a giant unveiling of second phase of Google TV at CeBIT in March, by that time, more of the major manufacturers could present boxes, Google would present not only Google Marketplace and smoother software integration, they could launch world wide Google TV support (not limited to US anymore), they could also, as suggested by Tudor Brown ARM President last month, present cheaper ARM Powered Google TV devices such as the concept of a $99 ARM Powered Google TV box.

The $99 ARM Powered Google TV set-top-box is an important target, as that makes it affordable enough that everyone will buy one, providing full performance for 1080p YouTube streaming and the HDMI pass-through and IR blaster features, it would provide for the perfect platform to revolutionize TV.

Category: Set-top-boxes, Opinions, CES, Google, Google TV
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Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com at LeWeb 2010

Posted by Charbax – December 15, 2010

Category: Web, Software, Exclusive videos, LeWeb

If you have an idea to create a competitor to Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia or Google, but you lack the programming talent, you can still do like Kevin Rose did to start Digg.com, what Steve Jobs did to start Apple and what Bill Gates did to start Microsoft, you can just have someone else do all the programming work for you for cheap! Now that we have the Internet, why not hire someone to do it for those $500 or so that you have been saving up?

Digg.com was started for $200, Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer bought DOS for $50’000 from some guy which basically founded Microsoft, Steve Jobs convinced his programming friend Steve Wozniak to code the Apple OS inspired by ideas they got from the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center for “free”, some claim Mark Zuckerberg was hired as a freelance programmer for $1000 to program facebook (then possibly to have been called harvardconnection) before he decided it was too good and kept it for himself (something like that).

What do you think of the potential of outsourcing work using Freelancer.com or other such online freelancing sites? Can those sites also be used to connect freelancers in your local areas if you want to actually meet the freelancer face to face? What do you think is the potential to create a successful startup based on a small investment through freelancer.com or such site? What do you think is the value of an idea compared to the programming talent necessary to build it? What do you think is the risk of you potentially loosing your idea to a freelancer (like Mark Zuckerberg) if they find out that the idea is too good and they decide to keep it or duplicate it?

Category: Web, Software, Exclusive videos, LeWeb
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Super-Marmite.com is a Social Marketplace for homemade Meals

Posted by Charbax – December 13, 2010

Category: Web, Exclusive videos, LeWeb

What if you could buy a cheap meal from someone cooking extra portions of some healthy meal in your neighborhood instead of having to go to an unhealthy fast food restaurant? This startup won the “1st Prize for Originality” at LeWeb 2010 in Paris. The public also likes the idea a lot.

Category: Web, Exclusive videos, LeWeb
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Renault Twizy electric car presented by Matthieu Tenenbaum at LeWeb 2010

Posted by Charbax – December 13, 2010

Category: Cars, Other, Exclusive videos, LeWeb

This compact french-design electric car is to be released about a year from now, it has a range enough for use in cities, and the size is in between scooter and small car, easy to park, it’s actually a two-seater. It can even be configured to be driven without a drivers licence. This is an interview with Matthieu Tenenbaum who is Renault’s deputy program director for all of Renault’s electric vehicles including the Twizy.

Category: Cars, Other, Exclusive videos, LeWeb
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Pierre Chappaz on what is going on with Wikileaks

Posted by Charbax – December 13, 2010

Category: Web, Exclusive videos, LeWeb

At LeWeb 2010 there was an interesting Media Panel about the status of Wikileaks. This video features more from the point of view of French entrepreneur Pierre Chappaz who founded Kelkoo and Wikio.

Category: Web, Exclusive videos, LeWeb
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Shai Agassi at LeWeb 2010

Posted by Charbax – December 12, 2010

Category: Cars, Other, Exclusive videos, LeWeb

Project Better Place wants to eliminate oil within a few years, in partnership with Renault and other car makers, they are about to mass produce electric cars, Better Place is building out the infrastructure to switch batteries and to charge. You can watch the full Q&A video here. You can also watch Shai Agassi’s recent interview on the Charlie Rose show and on Morning Joe.

Category: Cars, Other, Exclusive videos, LeWeb
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