AIM Institute Technology Blog

James McQuivey – Forrester Research
Session powerpoint available at http://forr.com/CES2012

Speaking historically, there are so many things that didn’t exist just 10 years ago. There was no Facebook, no YouTube, etc. As digital consumers, we now find new ways to do old things: send mail, look at and organize our photos, store and watch our home movies, research information, play games, use coupons, etc.

Digital disruptors are here now: Zuckerburg, Biz Stone, etc. This is similar to an episode of the 6 Million Dollar Man–better, faster, stronger, etc. Many companies make the mistake of simply taking what they do and display it digitally. They usually miss the mark if they don’t completely disrupt their own business. Digital disruptors are Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, etc. These are the “platform creators”, although it’s important to understand that not every new device is a platform. There are also “experience creators” that create software applications that give the consumer the experience on the platforms that have been developed.

Imagine a group of disruptors have gotten together to create a “Disruptors Handbook.” It would have 3 sections: Harness the Power of Empowered Consumers, 2: Generate More Ideas More quickly, and 3: Deliver a total product experience.

Disruptive technologies examples: Cotton gin, printing press, apple iPod, + MANY MORE!

Today, there are many more people that are producing ideas, as well as more people that are willing to invest in these innovations. This is why it took Apple two years to sell 2 million iPods, but only took Kindle Fire 2 months to sell 2 million units. Kindle rode the wave and benefited from the road that was paved by Apple. That’s just good business. Apple produced products that people didn’t even understand that they needed or wanted, but made their followers feel like they couldn’t live without the product.

Businesses should look for the intersection of the next cool thing that consumers want with the most immediate thing that your company can provide. This is because there are so many more competitors now than there used to be.

Examples: A person wants to lose weight. They are asking what they can do next.
Answer: The research says that a person can very simply lose weight by keeping track of the calories that they consume. An app came out called “Lose It” which changed the landscape. No TV show, no magazine, etc. The research also says they need to keep track of calories that you consume–so an app was created to track exercise. The research says you need support–they added a feature to be able to communicate with others in the community. This was all created 3 years ago by 4 employees operating on a shoestring and has now been copied by WeightWatchers, etc. Now a company has created MealSnap–take a photo of your meal and the app will figure out the number of points.

The Magic Mirror: A young lady is getting ready for a date and looking in the mirror. What can the mirror (mirrored display) provide? The girl says “Magic Mirror” and the app appears and allows here to choose different hairstyles, makeup, etc. If you’re Mary Kay, you could also have a button where she can communicate instantly with a Mary Kay personal consultant to advise her. Maybe her hairdresser (as a service provider). Maybe Cosmo or Seventeen is the service provider?

Both of the platforms to make this happen already exist, but to be a disruptor you must simply build a “digital bridge” that connects the customer with your service to create the unique experience that they want. Mark Zuckerberg says he only wants 5 minutes of your day, but when that is scaled by the number of users that creates his gold mine for him. Businesses also need to think in that format–have them share 5 minutes of their day.

Forrester has an assessment that takes about 5 minutes to find out how ready you are to participate in digital environment at www.forr.com. Their research has shown that businesses recognize the digital era and are excited about it, but most have not yet developed policies that actively encourage and reward digital innovation among its business groups.

Talk ended with picture of 6 million dollar man, but next slide photoshopped Mark Zuckerberg’s face over Lee Majors as the 17.5 billion dollar man! Slides at forr.com/CSE2012.

Geoffrey Morrison, Privateer Writer/Editor/Contributor
CNET, Sound+Vision, HDGuru

Scott Wilkinson, Online Editor
HomeTheater.com

3d tv is here, but how does it work and why is it such a big deal? Theatres have been losing money in recent years due to increases in home technology equipment and more affordable prices. Therefore there’s a push by the theaters to set themselves apart by offering 3d digital movies. However, it was quickly adopted by home tv equipment manufacturers as well. This tug of war between home and theatres is what has advanced the technologies that we enjoy today, so it is a good tension that exists.

Theatres have always enjoyed the fact that the screen is huge and in most cases this is an advantage that they still enjoy. Here’s what is in the near future.

Hardware: 3D tv’s will function as both a 2d and 3d device. THere is an interesting pushback among the entertainment crowd that divides them: some love it, others absolutely HATE it. Those that dislike 3d either just don’t enjoy the experience or feel strongly that the essence of a movie is its story, not the visual effects.

Technology of theatrical 3d: commercial cinemas use glasses to isolate the left eye from the right eye. There are two ways to do this: Passive polarization and Active polarization. Both use polarization to orient light waves in opposite directions. The light that comes from the projector is polarized using either circular polarization, RealD, or linear polarization (IMAX uses this). Passive polarization is cheaper and uses disposable glasses and is what most theaters use. Active shutter is another type of device that isolates each eye, but the glasses are much more expensive and they tend to cut the light that reaches your eye by about 80% which results in a very dim image.

Technology of home 3d: In 2012, 80% of manufacturers will include 3d in their products. Again, the sets will deliver both 2d and 3d experiences and require a set of glasses to separate the optical image. Each eye receives 1920×540 (half the image) then combined to form 1920×1080 (full picture). The problem with current technology is that since it broadcasts in 540p, there are black lines that are visible to the viewer which is bothersome. Also, sometimes the right eye is able to see some of the image that is meant for the left eye and vice versa. This is called crosstalk. Some people report that this is readily visible to them, others are unable to see crosstalk. Right now, bluetooth is able to deliver 1080p per eye, but no broadcasts are currently broadcasting at that resolution. The Olympics will broadcast in 3D.

The term 3d is really not technically accurate–it is really stereoscopic imaging. True 3d is what we see with our eyes. Unfortunately, right now “fake 3d” requires glasses regardless of which technology is being used. “Glassesless” 3d is produced using holograms, but that must be done in a black room with 4 walls and really expensive equipment.

There are projectors that are now being produced that will project 3d affordably (must use glasses), but they must be shone on a special silver screen that accepts and maintains the polarization. The Optima projector is affordable at $1500, but most result in a dim picture.

The jury is still out on how this technology will develop, but it is definitely on the way. Dreamworks has just announced that all of its movies from this point forward will be 3d. The proof of this is that there were several movies that were released in both 2d and 3d, and the 2d versions made much more money. So the public has not completely embraced this yet.

Innovation Panel Discussion at CES 2012
Brian David Johnson, Futurist, Director, Future Casting
Intel Corporation

Henry Holtzman, Chief Knowledge Officer
MIT Media Lab (Could be a good Infotec speaker–interesting and engaging)

Robert Stephens, CTO
Best Buy

Tim Bajarin, President
Creative Strategies Inc.

Tim Stevens, Editor-in-chief
Engadget

A lot of today’s inspirations have come from TV shows when we were young. Start Trek had a big influence on today’s technology. The way that we interface with our devices has come along way in recent years: I want my phone to wake me up at 6 am.”

Some things that we can expect soon: More refined Siri (voice recognition). A sassy Siri has emerged and people appreciate that gadgets now are taking on a personality. Right now we are in an “automation” phase, which will allow some of the novelty to pass. While hardware continues to get better with embedded sensors, the software coding that must happen is where the greatest opportunity lies. Humans enjoy making our devices more “human-like.” Home automation and health/fitness are areas that will continue to develop. Siri seems to be the talk of the town in terms of artificial intelligence that is working well.

Hardware Innovations Coming soon: Corning glass cable can now be twisted and smashed which will allow much greater consumer market penetration. Augmented reality is in its infancy as are flexible display technologies. The cloud model is big right now, but near field communications will emerge that will share the load (crowd computing). There are a lot of similarities that mobile users have with each other, and there is research happening now that will greatly decrease the bandwidth load by utilizing peer to peer connections. An Android app is being written that serves as a router for telephone communication. If there are users at a conference that are Verizon customers, Sprint, ATT, etc and one of those networks goes down the router effectively uses the other cell networks to place the call via peer connections.

LED lighting will emerge and replace lighting as we know it today. This will not only allow modulation of light, but some predict that the LED connections in a home or building will emerge as the emitter of data and home lighting will someday replace the wireless routers that we are familiar with.

This presents an interesting dilemma: home is where we go to be non-productive. A participant asked if homes are the future workplace–will people still go to the office in 10 years? Answer: People will always enjoy other people and personal interaction. Those that understand that and are able to combine that with technological efficiency will win BIG!

Some examples of this: answer the door with a webcam, put the garage door down with your iPhone, use webcams for security, etc. Whoever can create “twitter-like” communication between devices will win. Robotics will continue to emerge and mature: a robot is computational power (aka computer) that has legs. A robot can walk around your home and tell you that someone just emailed you. Or it can serve as a medical assistant for seniors to monitor conditions and keep Alzheimers patients safe in their own homes. Anybot has already been developed and is performing many of these functions. WIMM.com is an example of where these innovations are coming from. These are small boxes that run on 2 AA batteries and have wifi, accelerometer, etc, They are easily configurable via a very simple web interface.

Elder care is a wide open frontier right now, because all research says that seniors are better off if they can remain in their home longer. Once an interactive robot or laptop is developed that can do this, a new disruptive technology will be achieved.

Communication between humans has evolved drastically from the days of US Mail. Email is great, however the problem it presents is there are multiple streams of information bombarding us with email, twitter, google +, Facebook, SMS, etc. Which of those is going to win? Many predict that text messaging is actually what will soon die since many of have smart phones that have chat, twitter, face time, etc. Text messaging really is an artifact of what we’ve always done. 3-4 year old childrenn have only known today’s methods and are confused when they walk up to TV, tap on screen and are confused when nothing happens. They have been raised in an interactive arena:

Predictions for next 10 years:

Smartphones will have expandable displays that are transparent when held up so that the images can be augmented with data. Unfortunately, they have forced us to compress our lives into a 4 inch screen. A “telephone booth” concept may emerge where larger displays are placed everywhere that humans spend time allow our personal devices to interact with public displays. Another model is a contact lens that is worn that is laden with LED’s and serves as a display for our data. Devices that will “win” are those that learn about the user and are able to use artificial intelligence to become smarter and more efficient. Battery technology has reached the point where the stored energy borders on explosive. We must somehow find a different way to power our devices. Automobiles will advance, but will use a person’s smartphone in a dock to control climate, music, seat preferences, etc. The car will know when you enter and dock your device and will adjust itself to you.

Jon and I are awaiting our plane to take us to the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show. While both of us are excited about the technology companies that will be there all week, our focus will also be on observing the way this conference is conducted. In addition to attending sessions and touring the exhibitor booths, we will also take notes on how the organizers of this conference run their registration process, what they give out in their attendee bags, what types of sessions are offered, and what other activities are offered to conference-goers. The idea is to bring fresh ideas back to Omaha for our conferences and events. Be sure to add this thread to your RSS feed so you get regular updates from us this week! More later….

Every once in a while the ‘intertubes’ will rain some good stuff and just a few days ago that rain came in the form of Bootstrap. Whats Bootstrap you ask?  ‘Bootstrap is a toolkit from Twitter designed to kickstart development of web apps and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.’ As programmers we are often asked to come up with the look and feel for an application along with some user interface gadgetry. This can be a daunting task depending on the clients tastes and likes.

What Bootstrap offers is a set of tools (all compatible with each other) in one lightweight package that can be used to create those applications. One of the bigger/better tools Bootstrap has to offer is a content positioning/layout system. If you use their layout system you should be able to achieve a consistent look across numerous browsers and their descendants ( This is HUGE ).

I will say there were many ‘layout systems’ prior to Bootstrap but they never had all widgets rolled into it like bootstrap does. There is a bunch of other great built-ins as well so Google ‘Bootstrap Twitter’ and check it out. Remember my friends, stay thirsty.

Netsuite is a web-based accounting and business process system that has garnered some praise over the last few years for it’s flexibility and customizability. And while it’s true that the interface allows you to customize many things, many business processes still require other (non-Netsuite) systems to work. For that reason, integration is important. Fortunately, Netsuite provides a robust API framework for getting data out of the system as well as uploading data to the system. Unfortunately, if your language of choice is php, the documentation around this API is a little sparse. This article is meant to give you a simple example that was not well defined in the Netsuite php documentation: how to get a complete list of customers.

In my search for the best documentation around the Netsuite API, at least with regards to PHP, I’ve found a number of online resources that will be helpful. They are listed at http://www.delicious.com/adamhaeder/netsuite.
Read the rest of this entry »

I am a stickler for correct spelling and proper grammar (overlooking my own mistakes, of course), and am especially critical of application error messages. Providing a specific message for each type of error leaves a lot of room to make mistakes. By “each type of error,” I mean: if you have a numeric field that requires a value that should only be positive and not greater that 1000, you would provide the following error messages:

• Empty Field: Please provide an answer for “[field label]” that is a positive number not greater than 1000
• Number too low: “[field label]” must be a positive number.
• Number too high: “[field label]” cannot be greater than 1000.

I understand that this approach can be cumbersome, and the general solution is to only require values and have a parameterized error message, similar to:

Warning: Please enter or select [a/an] ‘[field label]‘.

This post is concerned with the indefinite articles (“a” or “an”) preceding “[field descriptor]“. The rules for proper use are defined well here: Purdue OWL Indefinite Article Usage and are summarized below:

• If the first letter of the word is a vowel (a,e,i,o,u), use “an”, EXCEPT:
  • when the phrase starts with an “u” that makes a sound like “you” (as in “usurper” or “U.N.”)
  • when the phrase starts with an “o” that makes a sound like “w” (as in “one”)
• If the first letter of the word is a consonant, use “a”, EXCEPT:
  • When the phrase begins with a silent “h” (as in “honor”)

What follows is a JavaScript implementation of the indefinite article selection rules listed above:

function indefArticle( phrase )
{
    var ch3 = phrase.substr( 0, 3 ).toLowerCase().replace( /^\s+|\s+$/g, "" );
    var ch2 = ch3.substr( 0, 2 );
    var ch1 = ch2.substr( 0, 1 );
    var wrd = 'a';

    switch( ch1 )
    {
        /* words that begin with vowels, general rule */
        case 'a': case 'e': case 'i': case 'o': case 'u':
            wrd = 'an';
            break;
        /* words that begin with consonants, general rule */
        default:
            wrd = 'a';
            break;
    }
    switch( ch2 )
    {
        /* silent-h consonant exception */
        case 'ho':
            wrd = 'an';
            break;

        /* u sounding like "you" vowel exception */
        case 'un':
        case 'u.':
            wrd = 'a';
            break;
    }
    if( ch3 == 'one' )
    {
        /* o makes the same sound as w in "won" vowel exception */
        wrd = 'a';
    }
    return wrd;
}

Tested with the following code:

function sample()
{
    var i,
        l,
        messages = [],
        fd,
        field_descriptors = [
            'Otter', 'Moose', 'Bacon-wrapped fillet',
            'Historic Document', 'Honorable Mention',
            'U.S. Currency', 'Unified Front'
        ]
    ;
    for( i = 0, l = field_descriptors.length; i < l; i++ )
    {
        fd = field_descriptors[i];
        messages[messages.length] = 'The Indefinite Article for "'
          + fd + '" is "' + indefArticle( fd ) + '".'
        ;
    }
    alert( 'Results:\n   ' + messages.join( '\n   ' ) );
}

Produces the following output:

Results:
   The Indefinite Article for "Otter" is "an".
   The Indefinite Article for "Moose" is "a".
   The Indefinite Article for "Bacon-wrapped fillet" is "a".
   The Indefinite Article for "Historic Document" is "a".
   The Indefinite Article for "Honorable Mention" is "an".
   The Indefinite Article for "U.S. Currency" is "a".
   The Indefinite Article for "Unified Front" is "a".

As to whether the “h” in “historic” is silent… I have no opinion.

I was working on a project a while back that required a web interface to edit, delete, and insert event entries into an XML file. My biggest problem was that anytime I would edit or insert an event element, it would appear in the XML file as the last node rather than in date order. I figured out how to sort the XML contents as they were rendered in HTML using an XSLT (EXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation). This worked fine for that particular display but this XML needed to be displayed several different ways in different places and I wasn’t thrilled with the thought of having to create an XSL file for every variation. All I really needed was one XSL file to sort the XML data each time it was updated.

Read the rest of this entry »

This past weekend, I spent some time with my new camera, the Olympus E-PL2.  The E-PL2 has interchangeable lenses, whereas my Canon G9 does not.  Both can take photos in JPG and RAW formats.  With learning a new camera, there are times where you have overexposed or underexposed a shot.  I was looking for an application that runs in linux that allows me to adjust photo properties simply.  I read ‘Digital Photography Tools on GNU/Linux‘ and got some great suggestions for packages in Fedora, but haven’t had to to get into all of them.  I had installed Darktable a few months ago, but never spent time to look at it until now.

As described on the Darktable site (http://darktable.sourceforge.net/) “darktable is a photography workflow application: a virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers: it manages your digital negatives in a database and lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable. it also enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.”  The source code is available under the GPL version 3.  Binaries are available for most major linux distributions.

I had been looking for something to work on my photos without knowing a huge amount about the Gimp.  Darktable has many plugins in which to perform the actions I need in changing exposure and color, and working with RAW files without having the interface get in the way.

You can find some very good screencast tutorials on Darktable here:  http://blog.pcode.nl/2010/12/06/darktable-0-7-screencast-library/

For those of you with an artistic flair, I recently stumbled on a new word cloud site that is intriguing to use. if you’re not familiar with the term, a “word cloud” is a collection of words that gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Wordle (http://www.wordle.net) is one such website but its shapes that it allows are rather limited. If nothing else, a word cloud is a great way to see if the words on your website or in your published documents contain frequent references to themes that your organization desires to be emphasized. Word clouds make great gifts, logos, and murals since they combine a picture with words that further describe the image.

Tagxedo (http://www.tagxedo.com) is a free site that allows users to create a word cloud, but then morph the word cloud into whatever shape the user desires. To create the image below, I simply entered AIM Institute’s URL to grab the text from our site. I then downloaded a graphic (using Google Image search) to use as the shape for the word cloud.