highpowerZONE Archive of engeniusBLOG

Texting has taken a long time to become fashionable in North America. (Do fashionable and long time create an oxymoron?) It has to be eight years since I saw my nephews and nieces texting in the UK, furiously clicking away at a much lower cost than using voice circuits. When their phones did run out of coverage time, they would have to run down to the corner shop to buy a time-refreshed card.

Whether the “language” of texting originated across the Atlantic – and I presume it did – it has caused considerable apprehension to the teachers of English. As long as five years ago a Scottish newspaper reported concerns by teachers about essays being submitted by pupils in the only written language that some of them understood: texting. Other teachers were just happy to get assignm...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Our Product of the Year Awards are always a great adventure for us. Every New Year the Editors at EN-Genius snuggle down with all the reviews that they have written in the past year and select the best products from among that already heady group. The criterion that is most important in the selection of a winning product is that it must be capable of making money.

We don’t ask vendors to write essays to tell us how important their products are; we don’t ask them to buy tables at a grand dinner; we just plain stick our necks out – as we do every week with our reviews.

For the past couple of years the Awards have been made of marble. (As one canny soul pointed out, EN-Genius has stopped cutting down trees – now they’re knocking down mountains!) They are very heavy… Each Award is individually engraved and it takes a while for them to be delivered. And then, brave souls that we are, we try to present as many of the Awards that we c...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Do you remember those heady days when you understood the rules in life? In your own home, be it a humble mobile in a park in the deep South or a monstrous mansion in Montecito, you were private with your own life – or that of your family – free to live as you chose. The only intrusion you might feel would be from the nosey person in the market trying to judge you by the contents of your shopping cart.

You also knew that you had nothing to fear from the CIA, because they only spied in other countries. That changed during the Nixon years when he instructed the Agency to threaten the FBI to stop a domestic investigation, on the grounds of national security. That investigation? Why, Watergate!

Bob Woodward, of the Washington Post, reported in his book Click Here to Read More >>

There is a TV commercial currently running from Verizon Wireless using the tag “You’re looking at it” to imply that the network is its people. We are led through pithy comments by supposed employees who also give their job titles. One of those titles really gnaws at my brain: Data Engineer.

Data is the plural of datum and needs to be treated as a plural noun, such as “data are carried…” It certainly cannot be used as an adjective, so data engineer must be a compound noun for a person that actually does things. But what exactly?

I spent a little time with Google (did you know that if you Google "Google" you get an “about 129,000,000” responses?) and came up with all sorts of data engineer information.

First I ignored data engineer titles when they had yet another noun, or more, in front of the title. There were Aero...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

As I write, wild fires are savaging Southern California and nearly one million people have been displaced from their homes. This should be a crisis for the whole country, but this evening the Federal government is standing back and is virtually saying that it is California's problem -- probably because little to nothing has changed at FEMA (except people) since the agency's tragic inability to respond following Hurricane Katrina. Bush is taking his compulsory press tour this coming Thursday, no doubt calling on logistics and facilities that could be much better used for helping his fellow citizens.

Nor, it seems, is our industry helping. According to the Intertech USA web site, the 8th Annual LEDs Conference, starting tomorrow, October 24, 2007, is continuing on. "Neither the San Diego Airport nor the Sheraton San Diego are being...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Steve Jobs has always been a smart marketeer. I may be extremely critical of some dubious stock option awards (and cancellations, seemingly just to hurt engineers) and his, let's call it “colorful” language used off the public stage; but he has always been on top of understanding his loyal base of followers, and users.

The disaster that followed the $200 price cut on the 8 Gbyte (8 GB, 8 GigaBell in Apple speak) iPhone and the elimination of the 4 Gbyte model were both totally predictable. The $100 store credit offered to early adopters (what can you buy in an Apple Store for $100?) was just an insulting afterthought.

The news was accompanied by the message that one million iPhones have been sold since launch, certainly an impressive number considering the limited network of the “new” AT&T.

Before the launch, I attempted to Click Here to Read More >>

You would have had to have been lost in a rain forest in Brazil for the last six months to not be aware of the iPhone from Apple (Google finds about 70,300,000 mentions as of today). The wait is nearly over and the first buyers are already camped outside the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York, as I write. On Friday June 29, 2007 the approximately 200 stores will close from 2 PM to 6 PM to ready the spaces for the 6 PM launch. When a store exhausts its stock, after re-opening at 6 PM, the doors will close again.

Additionally, almost 2000 AT&T (the extremely new version of AT&T, that was Cingular Wireless -- what a sad story AT&T has become) stores will be selling the phones on the same day. The rumors of the initial production quantity available vary dramatically and I have heard numbers between 100,000 and 500,000, with a general consensus of around 300,000. Think out the math here: both Apple and AT...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

This seems to be the age of sleaze. From the no-bid contracts to the likes of Halliburton and other profiteers; from the lies coming daily from Washington about WMDs, terrorist threats, firing of US Attorneys and the World Bank, to name just a few; from corporate greed like the firing of senior (more expensive) staff at Circuit City, which backfired on the bottom line; from the lies that daily emanate from Israel to support a life of terror for peoples from whom that state has stolen their lands; from the cover-up that depleted uranium has wrought on the health of the children of Iraq.

Maybe it is just the information bandwidth we now have. If you go back nearly two hundred years communications were still very primitive. It wasn't until the magnificent steamship The Great Eastern finally laid the first reliable transatlantic cable in 1866 that news across The Atlantic took less than two weeks to arrive.

The practicality of the time change from two weeks' wa...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Last week was one of my favorite ones of the year; I got to hand out our Product of the Year Awards in Silicon Valley. This year our awards are beautiful, engraved marble plaques. I'm always sorry that I cannot get around the whole country to present all the Awards but we do as many as possible in person.

The process generally involves the company organizing the presentation with a mixture of management and engineers attending. Last week we had CEOs, VPs, design engineers and marketing staff in attendance.

I concoct a little, off-the-cuff, short speech about the product -- and why the award, according to our totally undemocratic process, was made. I have never seen, in all the years we have been doing this, surprise or any kind of startlement on the faces of the company employees. What I do see on their faces is the fact that their very hard work is being validated by this guy who has the temerity to say it pu...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

Hopefully Emma Thompson is heading towards at least an Oscar nomination for her performance as novelist Karen Eiffel in the romance/comedy/tragedy (?) movie Stranger Than Fiction, in which Will Ferrell plays an IRS auditor whose life Eiffel appears to be narrating in a voice he alone can hear: "This is a story about a man named Harold Crick and his wristwatch." Harold is in a major rut and one of the awful things he does in his boring life is to count the number of toothbrush strokes he makes -- in every direction -- during his morning ablutions.

Well, glory be, in these days of product placement in movies (reportedly $55 million in Casino Royale with Ford coughing up $25 million of it), the producers of Harold's movie missed out by not involving Oral-B…

The latest sm...  -- Click Here to Read More >>

A couple of days ago I was sent an e-mail asking whether I wanted a briefing, for a story, by a PR agency that was hired for the promulgation of the story. The body of the message was:

In a world where security and surveillance issues create uneasiness on the best of days, a team of innovative security and technology experts have come together to create what is the most secure access control solution available for tracking human as well as physical assets on the same network. Imagine hundreds of people passing through a eportal as powerful long-range, unobtrusive cameras capture facial images that are matched against a data archive at a rate of 60,000 images per second. Secondary identification is made as individuals' RFID credentials are read and matched to biometric records. Any exception to the match-ups triggers a security situation, based on business rules in place, focusing on the specific individuals, while others continue on uninterrupted.

...  -- Click Here to Read More >>