GigaOM » portable devices

Collaboration on the move has a long way to go, survey finds

Jessica Stillman — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 13:27:53 +0000

Look around any airport, restaurant or train platform and the sea of faces buried in smartphones and tablets will immediately confirm your suspicion that we’re increasingly working on the go. But while the ability to get online anywhere with portable devices may be allowing us to be more productive out of the office than ever before, a new survey released today from collaboration tools company harmon.ie reveals remote collaboration is still far from painless.

The survey asked 500 U.S. respondents about their mobile working habits and unsurprisingly found that as a nation we’re pretty addicted to working outside the office. Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed told harmon.ie they finish documents, proposals or presentations while on the road, with 56 percent of respondents admitting to working with documents while in a restaurant and 29 percent while stuck in traffic. One in seven even admitted to conducting business while in the bathroom. A measly three percent said that they have no need to collaborate with coworkers while outside of the office.

With our mobile working addiction reaching the typing while on the toilet stage, you might think that we’d have collectively perfected our tools and processes for being productive on the go. But according to harmon.ie’s results you’d be wrong. A shocking 84 percent of traveling executives and managers reported that they cannot work effectively while on-the-go, despite their iPads and smartphones. Other figured from the survey back up this picture of less than perfectly productive mobile workers:

54 percent of those surveyed reported lower personal productivity while on the go
43 percent reported that they are often missing key information to complete a project
32 percent said that they often make mistakes in critical documents while on the go
56 percent of executives admitted to project delays or missed deadlines because of poor mobile collaboration; 38 percent missed business opportunities altogether
Half of all respondents reported difficulties in getting input from colleagues in a timely manner
41 percent said they work off potentially out-of-date documents

“We live in an era of what we call BYOD and with that comes the expectation that every important application and document will be available while walking around with an iPad or smartphone,” said Yaacov Cohen, CEO of harmon.ie. “The reality? Not so much.”

Does this mesh with your experience – despite all your gadgets do you still struggle to be maximally productive while on the go?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon.

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DARPA-backed start-up builds iPhone sized X-Ray machines

Ryan Kim — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:49:13 +0000

X-ray technology, which first appeared in the late 1800s, hasn’t changed that much, aside from shrinking the size of X-ray machines down to the size of large handheld drills that cost some $40,000. Now, a Los Angeles-area start-up is steaming ahead with a more affordable, ultraportable X-ray machine that utilizes a brand new technology built off focused static electricity.

Tribogenics, which spun out of DARPA-backed project at UCLA, announced today it has raised $2.5 million from Flywheel Ventures and other angels to build its portable X-ray machines, which should be available in the next year or two. The company said it’s hoping to disrupt the existing $12 billion X-ray machine industry, improving the way other existing industries such as mining, medical devices and security screening lean on the technology and enabling much broader use of X-rays by consumers.

The technology is built off a discovery made by UCLA researchers Carlos Camara, Juan Escobar, Jonathan Hird, and Seth Putterman who found they could create X-Rays bright enough to produce images from peeling adhesive tape. They were able to recreate this tribolelectrification by using an actuator that brings an epoxy surface in and out of contact with a silicone membrane. This ionizes the air and when captured in a vacuum, can create X-ray radiation. This approaches eliminates the need for high voltage, which has previously limited how portable and small other X-ray machines can get.

What Tribogenics has done is turn this whole process into a handheld product called Pocket XRF about the size of thick iPhone. It doesn’t create an image like medical X-ray machines. Instead, it’s designed to send a burst of X-rays into an object and stir up the atoms inside. Then it reads the various fingerprints of the materials inside and presents the results on a graph. That means a jeweler can tell what metals went into a ring or a safety inspector can see the lead content in a product. Miners can see if there are precious metals in a sample. And security screens can inspect objects quickly.

Dale Fox, a mobile pioneer and serial entrepreneur, helped co-found Tribogenics and now serves as its CEO. He said Pocket XRF will make its biggest impact initially in precious metals and hazardous materials, making the discovery and detection process easier and cheaper. He said the products will sell for less than $10,000 a piece initially before dropping down to a much more consumer-friendly price. Ultimately, he said Pocket XRF has the potential to become a consumer tool that brings some of the forward looking features of Star Trek’s fictional Tricorder to the masses:

“It’s like when we made the move from vacuum to transistors in electronics; when you made that jump, the power requirements went down, the devices got smaller, lower cost and more rugged. It opened up an explosion in electronics.”

I’m still getting my head around the technology and am trying to imagine how many uses we can find for it on a daily basis. But it’s a reminder of how technology is moving forward and how many sensors we can pack into increasingly smaller and smaller devices. In the coming years, we are going to be surrounded by an array of lightweight sensors that can do an astonishing amount of tasks, a lot of it mundane but some things very powerful as well.

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Why a 15-inch MacBook Air is only a matter of time

Darrell Etherington — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:03:00 +0000

Not one but two reports (from MacRumors and TUAW) arrived on Tuesday claiming that Apple is now working on an ultrathin 15-inch Mac notebook, with one report saying that a 17-incher is also on the way. These should be a bit more dependable than your average run-of-the-mill rumor, mainly because Apple’s whole device design trajectory says they should exist.

Apple tested the waters for an ultraslim notebook with the original MacBook Air, and at the time, it came with a lot of trade-offs. Back in early 2008, not including an optical disc drive seemed like a very bizarre move. And while the laptop’s price ($1,799) meant that it was out of range for most consumers, it still didn’t offer the muscle necessary to appeal to professionals.

But it did accomplish three important things: It put the idea of an Apple ultraportable into the minds of the notebook-buying public; it got Apple engineers to build upon the best elements from that first design, translating it into something everyone would want and many more could buy; and it kick-started Apple’s ability to negotiate for better prices on the specialized components required to make an ultrathin MacBook.

If Apple’s ultimate goal wasn’t to emulate the Air form factor across its notebook line (even if the “Pro” designation remains for 15- and 17-inch models, as TUAW says will happen), that would be a shock. Since the Air’s original introduction, optical media has become much less necessary to consumer and professional computing. And Apple’s recent decision to go with a digital-only distribution model for OS X Lion, the major update it released last week, suggests that it wants to wean users off CDs and DVDs sooner rather than later. In fact, the Mac App Store in general strongly suggests this, as did the iTunes Store before it. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple had road-mapped the death of the optical drive since it figured out with the iPod that physical media is antithetical to true portability.

Apple has also shown with the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch that it knows thinner and lighter are of key importance to consumers when it comes to portable devices. That approach has served it well on the mobile side, so why not apply it to notebooks as well?

Based on conversations I’ve had with Mac users, the limitations that many professionals cite when explaining why they didn’t buy an Air are few: Small screen size, lack of ports, limited storage and discrete graphics are among them. If Apple can deliver those (and space freed up from removing the optical drive should help), then an ultrathin MacBook Pro is sure to be a hit. At this stage, the only barriers to 15- and 17-inch ultraportable Mac powerhouses are technical, and those are not barriers that prevent Apple from doing anything for very long.

Consider that the 128 GB SSD option, when it was first introduced in 2008, was a $700 upgrade, along with a faster processor on the second-gen MacBook Air. The 256 GB upgrade, along with a faster processor, now costs only an extra $450 for the new 11.6-inch MacBook Air; that’s double the storage for nearly half the price of just three years ago. Apple seems much better able to manage the cost of solid-state storage, due either to smart sourcing or falling flash prices in general, and that should translate to higher-capacity options in ultraportable Pros. Plus, if Apple decides to not go quite as slim as the Air, fitting a 2.5-inch drive shouldn’t be too difficult alongside SSD customization options. Such a compromise would likely allow Apple to stay within the current price range of the larger-screened MacBook Pros, if SSD prices make that otherwise difficult.

TUAW says we’ll see these new machines possibly before Christmas. Apple doesn’t usually release new Mac hardware past October in terms of its yearly cycle, but October actually could be the perfect time for an update to the Pro line. The Pro went longer than usual without an update last time around, but in 2008 it got an update in February and then again in October. This year we saw an update in February that introduced Thunderbolt and new processors, so an October update wouldn’t be unprecedented.

I think Apple is probably quite far along in the development of these machines, and it may only be that the company is waiting and watching to see how the updated MacBook Air fares to decide whether or not the market is ready for it to embrace a similar form factor across its entire lineup. If that’s the case, then I think chances are good that we’ll see a larger, Pro-level ultraportable before 2012.

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