SlipHead Design

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!