SlipHead Design

Product mashups (integrating separate technologies into a single product) represents one of my favorite ways to innovate. An interesting mashup that is likely to enter the market in the next few years is an embedded projector within laptops and cell phones. Especially for laptops, the ability to give a presentation anywhere without requiring a separate (and expensive) piece of hardware would be really nice. Cell phones also could benefit from this technology for showing movies, gaming, etc. A quick search found the Microvision Pico Project Displays which is aiming to make this mashup a reality. Keep a close watch on this company!

There is a new game in town. It is not entirely original, instead it is closely akin to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. The basic idea is that you can get from any one Wikipedia article to any other Wikipedia article through six intermediate articles or less.

For example, try going from Morocco to Oceans 13 through six intermediate articles (or less). Good luck, it is not as easy as you might initially think!

Yesterday was the beginning of the registration period for .mobi domains. The idea is that any website with a .mobi domain will be geared for displaying on cell phones and other mobile devices (i.e. low resolution and low bandwidth devices). I bought a few domain names, but it was interesting to see how many of the good names were already taken during the .mobi ‘land rush.’

In the process of thinking up interesting domain names to grab, I was also focusing on various business ideas for mobile devices. Since I do not have the time to pursue all of these, I thought it would be worth making a list that others could add to and comment on:

• Shared Calendar/Scheduling Site
• National and Local News
• Local Weather
• Social Networking
• Group or Individual Chatting
• Live Traffic Updates
• Flight Status Information
• Mapping/Directions
• Price Comparison/Shopping Companion
• Calories of various food items/Healthy Food Information
• Ski Reports
• Surf Reports
• Sports Scores/Game Tracking
• Local City Guides/Attraction Guides
• TV Guide
• Movie Times and Tickets
• Concert/Theater Times and Tickets
• Music/Ringtone Downloads
• Gaming (poker, soduko, etc)
• Advanced Calculator
• Encyclopedia
• Online Payment/Banking
• Golf Teetimes
• Local Hotel Rates/Bookings
• Airline Check-in

I recently had a business idea which I am sure could be a success if only I had the time and money to implement it.

The basic idea is that you create a service where regular postal mail is automatically scanned and emailed to the appropriate recipient.  Nothing complicated or fancy, just a basic service to help bridge the analog-digital divide.
Initially, I envision people signing up for the service on a website and getting a postal mailing address in some large city like New York.  The mailing address would likely just be a PO Box.  Any mail then sent to that PO Box would be automatically opened and scanned by a machine such as the ones made by Opex.  The service would probably cost around $5 a month - although I have not really run the numbers to find the appropriate price point.

If this basic business model ended up being successful, then I envision offering additional lines of business related to the principle of automatic mail<->email handling.  Ideally, it would be possible to partner with the US postal service and offer mail redirection of people’s home address to the email service.  Another avenue of possible interest would be to setup and/or operate digital mailroom solutions for businesses of all sizes.  There are a number of other obvious directions the business could go.

Anyone want to spot me the money to get started?

Since there have been a string of high-profile laptop thefts in the news lately, I thought it would be worth sending out a few quick ideas on protecting your laptop in case it gets pinched.

1. Use a Hard Drive password
Most of the modern Dell laptops support this. It is turned on through the BIOS configuration screen, but is different than a BIOS password as it actually sets the password within the hard drive’s controller firmware. This will disable read and write access to the drive until a correct password is given. Simply moving the hard drive to a different machine will not make it go away. Basically, the disk is unusable until either a) the correct password is given, b) the physical controller on the disk is replaced, or c) someone solders a debug port onto the right hard drive controller pins and reverse-engineers the back-end diagnostic protocol.

When the hard drive password is set, you will have to enter it every time you turn the machine on or resume from standby. Since you are (hopefully) already doing this anyway when Windows or Linux boots/resumes, simply turn off the OS password protection and you will still only have to enter one password to boot/resume.

2. Use an encrypted volume to store any work
I personally like TrueCrypt because it works on both Windows and Linux, is really easy to use, and is free/open-source. Basically, it will create what looks like another hard drive on your machine where you can save all your data. Simply create a shortcut on your desktop to that drive and you are good to go. Yes, you will have to enter a password the first time you want to mount the drive, but it will then stay mounted until you reboot. Just don’t forget your password (and make it long enough not to be brute-forced)!

3. Securely delete files and encrypt your swap file
I use a program called BCWipe on Windows which is also free and does three things really well. First, it installs some Explorer hooks to allow you to easily delete files in a secure way (multiple overwrite passes, etc). Second, it can go through all your deleted/slack space and scrub any leftover bits. Finally, it has the ability to encrypt your swap file on the fly…very cool.

4. Use a screensaver password
Dumb i know, but when combined with the other options it makes getting on the box pretty difficult.

5. Write or download a script that phones home
In case all the above falls through, write a script that periodically goes and checks your personal webpage or something. I set it up as a cron job under Linux or a scheduled task under Windows. This way, you’ll at least be able to track the IP address of your stolen laptop when the thief goes online.

6. Finally, use a personal firewall to protect you from Network-based attacks
This is not so much concerned with a thief stealing your laptop as it is concerned with data theft through the network. I really like ZoneAlarm for its ease of use and simplicity. Just be sure not to accept any ‘incoming connections’ unless you are know that it is safe.

I was digging through some files today and came across the old version of SlipHead.com.  There were so many good ideas in it, that I just had to put it back online.

Go ahead, click on the link and take a walk back through memory lane.

Prediction: Google will buy Sun Microsystems sometime in the next year.

Why? To get into the desktop PC market of course. And what better way to do it than to use Sun’s existing PC manufacturing capabilities combined with their new Global Desktop software. Google will be able to complement these technologies with it’s own unique and highly-scalable online storage and hosting solutions to create the next best thing since sliced-bread.

So, I predict that you will soon be able to buy a Google-branded PC which uses some derivative of Global Desktop to enable a seamless web-desktop (webtop) experience where your data is kept on their servers and can be transparently accessed either through your home GooglePC or a standard web-browser on another machine. Applications such as Office will be pushed out as advanced web-apps (Global Desktop will allow for much richer applications than can currently be offered by AJAX, etc). The whole experience will be seamless - you will never know whether the particular application you are using is running on your local machine or is running on a Google server somewhere over the electronic horizon.

Of course, there will be plenty of people up in arms over privacy concerns, etc. I think, however, that the convenience factor will outweigh the concerns for the average Joe and we will soon see the GooglePC taking on the likes of Microsoft and Dell.

Batteries are an essential part of almost every portable electronic device. Unfortunately, battery technology has not kept pace with other areas of technological innovation. While devices are often tweaked to be more and more efficient with their power consumption, little emphasis seems to be placed on actually creating an innovative and more effective portable power source.

Now what’s interesting to me is that there are a number of power sources readily available to any given portable device. The challenge is to find ways of usefully harnessing this energy. Obviously such a task is not simple to do, but consider how much energy is generated by simple external forces such as gravity, sunlight, wind, motion, air pressure, etc. Surely it is possible to convert these forces into electricity.

My vote is to use the force of gravity as the power source for a micro-generator which could keep a traditional chemical battery charged enough so that I would never have to plug-in my laptop again!

As part of my wife’s birthday this past year, I got her a new phone with the GPS service offered by Telenav. Well, let me just say that this service is fantastic!

The application uses assisted-GPS which is a combination of cellular network and satellite based location determination. Once the current location has been determined, the handset software connects to the Telenav servers to provide a wealth of services such as maps, directions, business lookup, etc.

The application seems to be very well-written and does a great job of tracking your current location and plotting it on a map. Now, if only I could get this for the Treo!

Is there an Apple/Dell merger in the near future? Although they have comparable market caps (approximately 55B and 70B respectively), most people would probably say no…why would Apple want to lose the premium they get from selling hardware? What would Dell gain out of the deal?

But I am not so sure that it would be a bad fit. The thing is, Apple is rapidly becoming a content company. Sure, they make a tidy profit on hardware sales such as their award-winning laptops and iPods, but their future lies in content distribution (iTunes, etc) and making world-class, easy-to-use software (Mac OS X, iLife, iWork, etc).

Now, Apple’s problem is that despite their raging popularity in the social sphere, they have yet to break into the business market. In fact, their worldwide PC market share over the last 10 years has declined significantly. This is where Dell comes in: they are tired of being tied hand and foot to Microsoft and would love to find an alternative Operating System and Productivity Suite.

Dell is the king of selling business machines. This is exactly the market segment where Apple has failed to make inroads (and a big segment at that!). Now, combine Dell’s powerful distribution channel and distaste for the Microsoft monopoly with Apple’s legendary software and desire for the business market and you have a perfect match.

There are a number of other factors which make this a good deal. The first is that Dell controls their own hardware. Apple’s software requires good control over the PC hardware to provide a seamless, headache-free user experience. Most often, this is voiced as “it just works” on a Mac.

The second factor is that Apple is currently making the switch of their entire codebase to Intel x86 hardware. This transition is somewhat painful, but will eventually lower the adoption barrier if they ever did want to work with Dell. In fact, hacked versions of Mac OS X run almost perfectly on modern Dell machines.

The third factor is that the next version of OS X (Leapord) will likely have the ability to run Windows applications natively without the need for Microsoft. My guess is that Apple intends to achieve this through some enhanced derivative of Wine. Having direct application compatibility would be critical for Dell to support its existing customer base while still being able to transition them to a new operating system.

Finally, if Sun and Google get together, it will add a serious new challenger to the PC market. Both Apple and Dell will need the support of each other if they are going to try and fight against this sort of competition.

The biggest negative in my mind is that it would be highly unlikely for both Michael Dell and Steve Jobs to enjoy holding the reins together. Something would have to give for a merger of the two companies to go through. Perhaps then we will not see a full merger, but rather we will see a strategic partnership where Dell sells business PC’s and servers running ‘Mac OS X Business Edition’ complete with the iWork productivity suite. Meanwhile, Apple still sells their hardware to the consumer market and tries to build the next-generation software needed to take on Google.