Nir Zion Pengas

Good chance of getting:

- 4G LTE: 100Mbit up, 50Mbit down (peak). this will be huge for everyone. streaming made easy, uploading live videos and pretty much change the rules of the game when it comes to utilizing the phone. the big question is – can the carrier(s) handle the demand?

- HD front and 8MP rear camera with a dual flash system. HD facetime – thank you very much. better photos at low light condition? yes please. no doubt apple will introduce major improvements to the camera, both hardare and software. by now the iphone is the most popular camera on flickr and it’s growing fast. we want to be able to take better photos easily, at different conditions and share them quickly. as the pixel count rises so the demand for bandwidth (see 4G LTE) and a quick turn around for large file sharing. we can ex (cpect something unique with this feature’s new offering. the inherit problem is the small chip for the camera and it’s ability to shoot in lower light conditions.

- wider screen: has been rumored for a while with some fake prototypes etc. can’t wrap my head around a wider screen unless it’s up to full HD, which will be, no doubt, incredible (i’ll rate this as 1% chance of happening). if i’ll have to guess it will be retina 2.0 with a slightly higher pixel density and a more crisp display than the current 960 x 640 at 326 ppi.

- better battery life: with iCloud and push across the board, there is no doubt apple is pouring tremendous effort behind making their devices stay up and running longer. expect something unexpected.

- built in noise cancelation mic: a la jawbone, it’s time for the iphone to become a better phone. and please let’s take care of the proximity sensor issue. please.

- NFC with eWallet OR BLE (4.0) + APIs: this will be very exciting to have. finally. eWallet patents are around for a while and android is a head of the curb. if we look east to japan we see clearly how mobile is used and credit cards are gone. yes – gone. the phone will be THE payment system in the very near future. it’s the credit companies that should be on their toes with this one. it is really all a matter of timing no? can’t enter too soon and definitely not too late.

there has been much discussion over Bluetooth Low Energy, otherwise known as BLE, which is the 4th version of bluetooth, now available in the just released macbook airs. what the new standard means is low energy consumption and wider range (50m) which means awesome apps and peripheral devices are heading our way. this is an interesting strategic call by apple, do they go with NFC and RFID or do they bet on BLE? based on the this recent move of incorporating BLE chips within the new line of macbook air… well… let’s see what happens

Little chance of getting:
- solar charging: apple has been working on this for a while now. heck, there is a prototype out in the wild that is solar enabled (link). this is a game changer and the reason why there’s little chance of getting this one is because it’s probably required to perform much more tests and phase out gradually. maybe a device which combines both battery and solar charging a la hybrid first.

- haptic display + APIs: probably the advancement i would like to experience the most. haptic displays will revolutionize the way we interact with smart devices and their touch screen as they provide feedback to our touch sensory system. imagine that each button you click on a touch screen feels real. this is huge for UX across the board and opens the doors for some unique applications. android has immersion – a great company to follow with a great mix of products, worth mentioning are their medical related haptic devices. check it out here.

- new map application: apple has made significant moves to become a player and tighten their vertical integration. this app should be nothing but fantastic and introduce features never seen before on smart devices. one option could be an augmented reality turn by turn navigation, integrated with location meta data and the users social graph.

update: this post was written thursday of last week. it is now semi confirmed the developer of mobileNotifier is hired by apple and that iCloud will be presented by jobs tomorrow.

one major revamp is the bare minimum as there are areas lacking where either android or cydia leaves the current OS lagging. and no doubt we will get what we are expecting.. just a gut feeling… here is my short list of enhancements that i’d like to see:

1. improved notification system: bar non that most important and required change to iOS. face it, the current notification system sucks big time. in the past, the real incentive to jailbreak your phone was mywi, my3g and going even further back, multitasking and naturally the most important feature – sim freeing your phone (Screw you apple and ATT for violating FCC regulations). now-a-days, mobileNotifier is THE reason why my phone is jailbroken. aggregate all notifications into a single window utilizing the empty space created when you double click the home page. apple – pls take note, this guy has done a great job.

2. dynamic home icons: ala windows8. yes you heard right. big chunky icons that actually display content and not just a static image. one good example is available on cydia and is called ‘weather icon’. it changes the degrees on the weather icon to display the current temperature. it also allows the temperature to be displayed on the status bar. really useful stuff. apple, please expose an API to do so.

3. OTA updates: not likely but definitely nice to have… over the air updates makes lots of sense. please – no more plugging in to itunes and backing it all up. this ties up to the next item that is most definitely making an appearance on monday:

4. iCloud content sync: this will probably make a big eco. iCloud can and will take cloud services to the next level. apple doing what they do tiered up, may see music sync and later down the road app sync.. so iCloud will probably allow you to purchase music from iTunes and stream it directly from your cloud storage. no need (or an option) to download and sync stuff. fantastic. one viable option is to open a US front against spotify, the EU-stream-the-song-you-want kind of service in the US. imagine a yearly/monthly plan ($20-$50/year) where you can listen to what you want… that’s a nice one.

WHAT’S MISSING? iphone5 with 4G, NFC and iWallet, A5, double down on RAM, larger display and IR.

Major snore from Apple in my opinion. I think that the event itself, and the fact it was streamed to Mac machines and Safari browsers only is THE reason why Apple had failed and will continue to fail (in my eyes) with the latest announcements. I am talking about a close eco system and spoon fed experience.

Apple failed with the TV expenditure. Steve did not show us numbers, but clearly it was a failure. The big changes were sizing, pricing of shows and streaming, as opposed to storing. Is that what the users really want? To a certain degree, yes. Users do not want to worry about storage, they want to pay less for a device and for content. Apple did deliver on this, but it will not be enough, I believe, to be a killer device like the iPhone, and take over the living room with a storm. WHY? Because of the closed eco system and spoon fed experience.

Apple did a great job in educating the users and providing a great user experience across the board. I argue that user experience is what Apple is really selling and why people are using it. Coupled with the motivation to challenge and innovate, and you have a winning strategy.

This does not and will not work for the TV because only Apple fanboys will forget everything they know, and start a fresh with Apple TV, and forget all they know and do with their many years of habit. The TV is one area where users do not want to get the Apple filter applied to. Users don’t mind it with their iPod shuffle. They don’t mind it with their Mac OSX based machines, and to a certain degree they agree to it with their iPhone (mainly because Android did not step up it’s UX game to be considered a worthy competitor. yet).

Apple will gain a small market share and will have to come up with something much better than that to capture the imagination of the bigger market. I believe that can be done by turning the Apple TV into a real entertainment center to compete head to head with the Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo Wii as a console, introducing the iOS appStore for the TV. That can be killer. But even that is not enough. An Apple TV can only be better than, let’s say, a Mac Mini hooked up to a TV, if it is open. By open I mean I can do whatever I want to do, as opposed to whatever Jobs wants me to do (buy his content that he chose for me).

Examples for this behavior are ample and sad. Apple removed Camera+ from the AppStore recently because TapX3 released a hack which allows you to fire up the camera from the volume button. Apple initially declined the feature, claiming it will confuse people. So Apple is stepping up to the plate as our parents (more like a big brother), deciding what is confusing for us. Clearly, releasing the shutter speed in an ergonomic way may confuse us. I feel over estimated, and I do not think it is for Apple to decide for me what’s confusing and what’s not.

Apple’s attempt at social media is probably the most interesting news to date from that event. A social network around music, which is mutually exclusive from Facebook. Did I snore yet again? While I do believe this is a GREAT idea and a fantastic opportunity for Apple to increase sales on iTunes – the segregation is peculiar. Even worse – who wants to live inside iTunes? Though revolutionary, iTunes is hate by many. Looks and feels old and clunky. Navigating through your music sucks and discovery with genius is, well, boring…

Apple’s notion that people will have iTunes open to see what their friends are listening to is optimistic at best. Not web based, not facebook integration. Only one hope – it integrates with iTunes on your mobile device. I cannot imagine myself opening up iTunes when I want to listen to some music, and getting up to speed with what’s going on with my music buddies.

Apple can definitely relax a little. Let go of the grip and think of a more open way to provide users what they do best. Or not. My personal opinion is that they will not do that, and continue to thrive with a small market share that pays hefty sums to be a part of the cult.

Why aardvark? u guys had something great going on here.. selling out so soon, with so much potential to make you much richer than the $50M google gave u… just like smule who had a fantastic head start with the ocarina and other apps.. they raised $3.9M dollars thereafter. the aardvark community grew strongly quickly and created a niche that no other search engine does nor did. real time answering from real people. sure, u have yahoo answers et tal.. in those u hope that someone knowledgeable will pick up the glove and provide you with the info you need. by using vark, u can get good answers in minutes, and the more you ask, the more the system learns about how to route the question to the right person and figure out which answer was a good one. there was an attempt at the beginning of the interent revolution. at the time i was at my 2nd year in college studying computer scient. one of our teachers started a small venture where people answer each other’s questions. the implementation was not at it’s best, but it kinda worked. after two years of operations the money had run out and the creative ideas of how to make money dried as well, so they shut it down (for the life of me, i cannot remember the name of that company). what vark is doing differently is several things. one, it uses jabber/xmmp protocol to be present right there alongside gmail contacts with google talk, or any aggregator (like adium) that supports this open source protocol. the heart of the system is the algorithms to analyze a given question, suggest the right tag (ie topic) and route it to whoever is a good authority in the field (usually more than one person). those people are online (naturally) and can either pass or answer. you can then continue discussing the issue with them, rank it as a good answer or flag it as an inappropriate one. if u did not get the answer you want, you can resubmit it, change the tags and hope for the best. i started testing aardvark since the day it launched it’s beta and later on the iphone app. at the beginning there were not many users, and not so many questions to answer, but quite slowly, over a period of two months it was working really well. best case scenario, i got a solid answer in less than a minute. nothing i could do with google or any other search engine. the social aspect is interesting as well. people love giving answers to what they know about. there is an innate desire in humans to help each other out… u may say it is an ego thing (and to some extent u are probably right), however, people get our of their way to provide answers sometimes, doing basic research, giving good links and more. so why is google buying aardvark? good question. two answers: one, the small team of aardvark are ex google employees with top notch management with yale and stanford grads. these are serious people with the creativity and leadership ability to makes things work. they understand google and it’s weaknesses and have found a way to monetize. two, real time person to person (rtp2p) search does not exist. and the aardvark team has shown us that it can be done, and done well. so where is the money? meaning… how does the aardvark makes it’s profit. good question again. and the answer is simple: just like google’s adwords, the aardvark places results that are paid for. for example, let’s say someone is asking the community if they can recommend or know a computer technician in the upper west side of manhaatan. some people will respond giving their input, but this question can be routed directly into a paying customer, who wants to be notified immediately when someone is looking for a technician in the metropolitan area. long short – a lead engine. i have answered several questions and provided links to products on amazon, using my amazon referral id, so why not others in a streamlined maner, where the vark directs all of those potential leads to the user. aardvark also plants automatic answers. i was questioned by the devel team about the quality of that feature a couple of months back, when i was looking for someone to build a loft bed in my studio. i got an answer from service magic, a well known lead generator for all type of construction work. if haven’t tried aardvark u definitely should. they are at http://vark.com, they have a free iphone app and they can be added to your fav jabber client as aardvark@g1.vark.com. Confirmed: Google has Acquired Aardvark.

google provides me with email alerts whenever the word “pengas” pops up on the news/blogsphere. we are a small family and i am interested in learning if there are members of us out there in the world (like greece, israel, US, canada and australia).

today i got an email from this service which, supposedly, had found a mentioning of “pengas” in it. when i opened the link (Lucky in Love: A Flower for My Hair), i did not find any pengas. what i did find is penga. more specifically: “…I basically followed the tutorial Penga from Convention of a…”.

so what is going on here? my alert is for “pengas”, and here i am with a result of “penga”…
my guess is google is using a rule engine to better understand a word. gramatically, pengas can also be penga’s. for example, think of the game “pengas’s peril” which is everywhere. i get notifications about it as well.

so for google’s engine penga and penga’s are related, hence, i get both results if i omit the apostrophe. but what google doesn’t get, is that i am not making any abbreviations. pengas is my fully qualified last name.

here is where i believe the semantic web will make a difference. by using metadata to describe the essence of the word (or context) i will be able to instruct google that pengas is NOT penga’s. it CAN be pengas’ (for singular or plural), but please don’t waist my time with redundant results.

unfortunately google is lagging behind it’s services in other areas as well…
take a look at this page…

this is has 54 map locations that i have created on a google docs spreadsheet. using the map gadget, i’ve put them all on a map and published it as a web page and then embedded it into the site.

this page take over a minute to load on certain browsers. on chrome (mac version) it does not load at all.

absolutely ridiculous. i actually published this issue in the google docs help forum

as u can probably see i got not answer since november of last year.

long-short. google needs to stay on it’s tows and get things together. it is these little things that will separate them from their competition. search sites like wolfram alpha.