Home Monitoring

[The author has a current business relationship with this company]

For those of you who have considered a video monitoring solution but were put off by the complexity and/or cost of those solutions in the market, you should check out a new system by a company called WiLife.

This system is a case study in design elegance and was engineered from the ground up as a complete video monitoring solution. The results of this holistic approach is a system that:

• Can be installed in 10 minutes
• Produces high quality video
• Can be monitored via the internet from anywhere in the world

To do this, the user needs no special skills other than typical PC user skills. If you can do e-mail and use a word processor, you can run this system.

Interested? If so, please contact me at info@terryhitech.com and I will let you know more...

CES 2006

I visited CES 2006 in Las Vegas a few weeks ago and was struck by a number of trends:

1. Voice and Video Over IP services. It’s not that these services are new, but that they are now being integrated into everything. The company that makes the Yappernut was showing a mouse that doubles as a handset for your Skype service. They were pretty excited about it, but I was having a hard time discerning the advantage over other alternatives.
2. "Active" Game Interfaces. Video games have gotten a bad rap lately and there are now plenty of companies who are trying to integrate an active experience with the game. Jackie Chan was associated with a company that had the widest variety of offerings. There were examples of good and bad in this genre, here are a few below:

• Good – dance beat floor mat. This has been a hit for a while in the arcades, now you can do it at home. Variations include aerobics and martial arts.
• Bad – virtual table tennis. One of the key elements of a video game is to provide an experience that you can’t get otherwise. After playing virtual table tennis, I found myself thinking I would much rather have been playing the real thing.
• Good – Golf tee as an accessory to the PS2. This allows you to take real swings with real clubs. In this case, providing an experience that I might not be able to have otherwise – e.g. playing the Kapalua Plantation Course in Hawai’i.

1. Monitoring. Get ready folks. Cameras are being integrated into everything and being made available at price points that allow many more people to play in the game. One interesting company at the show was WiLife, showing their LukWerks home video surveillance system. A complete system can be installed, registered and configured in about 15 minutes. Watch my website for more information.
2. Miniaturization. Several companies (notably many of them are Korean companies) were showing media players with tiny screens that are designed to store and play video files in addition to music. I get "smaller is better" for my MP3 player, but I think there is a serious limit for anything with video associated with it. Unless they plan to start offering 20/10 lasik for both eyes with each purchase, I say the screens need to be a little bigger.

The show was huge this year and I put a lot of miles on my shoes. Just as interesting as the products was seeing which companies were generating buzz and why. Here are my subjective observations on show buzz:

• Sony had a hit with the "previews" of the PS3. People crowded around to get a glimpse at the video. PSPs were also popular.
• Honda drew crowds for Asimo. It is pretty cool, but I still can’t figure out how all of that R&D is helping them to build better cars…
• Polaroid was nothing but crickets and tumbleweeds. There were a bunch of rebadged flat panel displays, some Polaroid instant cameras (really, this is NOT new technology Polaroid), and some informational posters. Even a prolonged saunter through the center of the large display area did not evoke a response from the booth personnel. Apparently they didn’t want to be there either!
• The Samsung "booth" was unreal. I understand that it cost about $8,000,000 to erect this display that seemed the size of a city block. Cool products, cool layout, and attentive personnel. This was a home run.
• Motorola is back in a big way. The company that was bleeding market share and profits a few years ago is generating buzz with cool products like Razr and iRadio. (I don’t know what happened with Rokr, that’s a real dud...) The booth was jammed and people were really enjoying printing out new "skins" for their Razr phones.
  

This year promises to be interesting and exciting for creators and consumers of high-tech products.

Ciao!