Why Samsung Gear is not completely a success ?

In less than 1 month, Apple will launch its Apple iWatch. And the question is : will it be a success?

This is always difficult to know if a new product will be a success or not … But there is 1 thing to understand when we launch a new product : what are the main failure of the competitor products?

And Samsung Gear, the main competitor is not completely success. Do you see nowadays, in the subway, in the street, people with the Samsung Gear Watch? … And the problem is not that the Samsung smartphones are not the leader, isn’t it? In 2013/2014, the average Worldwide market share of Samsung was about 30% ; in January 2015, nevertheless, the market share was reduced to 20%, decreasing from 30% (in ratio).

But, nevertheless, Samsung with Samsung Gear is the leader of smartwatches sold in 2014 with 1,2 millions of units.

Is people satisfied by their smartwatch ? … No!

3 main topics are not relevant for the Samsung watch:

• Autonomy : with 1 day of autonomy, you always have to recharge the battery of your watch … And if you are using your connectivity at the maximum, it is less than 4 hours …
• Apps: there is not a lot of usage for the Samsung watch : we are speak about 20 to 30 Apps, and not all of them are good
• Connectivity: with Bluetooth, the connectivity is not good and not secure …
• Sensors : camera, sound, … nothing incredible ! Less than a smartphone !!!

With Apple, what do we know:

• Autonomy : 18 hours … probably in the same condition as Samsung ; in full usage of connectivity, 3 hours … as rumor said !
• Apps : 34 Apps advertised on Apple Store for the moment ; and nothing that seems to be a revolution. What is the real interest to have a new connected object with a computer inside with so few Apps. To be dramatically upgraded!
• Connectivity : with Wifi in addition of Bluetooth, we can expect better connectivity, more secure than Samsung … Nevertheless, this connectivity between a smartphone and a watch will remain via Bluetooth … This is only connectivity with public Wifi area that could accelerate the connectivity; not so sure that it will be sufficient !
• Sensors : no revolution compare to Samsung Gear ; how to measure diabetes, arterial pressure, temperature, virus and batteries overview  … and more!

To conclude, Apple could probably sell around 1 million of iWatch in 2015 … but not more than Samsung Gear in 2014. You will not see 100 millions of iWatch sold, as for smartphones.

Why? No revolution of this object …

What could be the future of the revolution ?

• Autonomy : 1 month, 3 months, 1 year or … without any recharge! How to do that: reduction of energy usage by 10 or 100 by thinking the OS differently than for a smartphone. And use the energy to recharge with heat of the skin, solar and moving of the hand. If the autonomy is not the same or better than for a non connected watch, what is the real interest to
• Apps : minimum of 1000 Apps to have a real added of these connected objects with connection to bank, credit card, insurance, police, hospital …
• Connectivity : without 3G / 4G direct connection with military encryption is a must do for this type of objects
• Sensors : measure of health situation is a must do

Of course, Apple iWatch will not be completely a failure. And having 1 million of iWatch sold this year is not so bad. But this is not the revolution that Apple is pushing with its marketing. The connected revolution is not really ongoing with this object ; Apple just not would like to be outside the competition.

And the real revolutionary smartwatch remains to be invented with, this time, a lot of innovations. 

IBM Watson, the beginning aware artificial?

IBM’s Watson is a cognitive computing system, one that behaves like our brain, learning through experiences, finding correlations, and remembering — and learning from — the outcomes.

First hitting the spotlight when pitted against two of Jeopardy’s biggest all-time winners Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, IBM’s artificial intelligence machine names Watson threw these two off their throne in quick fashion – showing that artificial intelligence was a real thing and IBM has the technology.

Artificial intelligence is here now. This doesn’t mean that Cylons disguised as humans have infiltrated our societies, or that the processors behind one of the search engines have become sentient and are now making their own plans for world domination. But denying the presence of AI in our society not only takes away from the achievements of science and commerce, but also runs the risk of complacency in a world where more and more of our actions and intentions are being analyzed and influenced by intelligent machines. Not everyone agrees with this way of looking at the issue, though.

First, although Watson includes many forms of text search, it is first and foremost a system capable of responding appropriately in real-time to new inputs. It competed against humans to ring the buzzer first, and Watson couldn’t ring the buzzer until it was confident it had constructed the right sentence. And, in fact, the humans quite often beat Watson to the buzzer even when Watson was on the right track. Watson works by choosing candidate responses, then devoting its processors to several of them at the same time, exploring archived material for further evidence of the quality of the answer. Candidates can be discarded and new ones selected. IBM is currently applying this general question-answering approach to real-world domains like health care and retail.

This is very much how primate brains (like ours) work. Neuroscientists can recognize which brain cells monkeys use to represent different hypotheses about how to solve the current puzzle they are facing. Then, he can watch the different solutions compete for influence in the brain, until the animal finally acts when it is certain enough. If the puzzle has a short time limit, the animals will act for a lower threshold and will be less accurate. Just like us. And it wouldn’t be hard to reprogram Watson to do the same thing—to give its best answer at a fixed time rather than at a fixed level of certainty.

How about understanding? Watson does search text in various Internet sources (like Wikipedia) but didn’t during competition. It had to read the text in advance and remember it in a generalized way so that it could access what it had learned quickly by all different kinds of clues. Jeopardy! questions require understanding jokes and metaphors—what Hofstadter calls “analogical reasoning.” Being able to use the right word in the right context is the definition of understanding language, what linguists call semantics. If someone blind from birth said to you “I’ll look into it” or “See you later,” would you say they didn’t understand what they were saying?

If you’re looking for a thumb in the pie, IBM are now offering up part of Watson – their breakthrough natural language-based cognitive service called Watson Analytics. This analytic service is reported as a powerful predictive and visual analytic tool for businesses and can now be rented through a beta program.

There has already been 22,000 who’ve registered for the beta of this service, with IBM’s official explanation and release reading: “IBM Watson Analytics automates the once time-consuming tasks such as data preparation, predictive analysis, and visual storytelling for business professionals. Offered as a cloud-based freemium service, all business users can now access Watson Analytics from any desktop or mobile device”.

IBM was totally “as been” during the last twenty years (1994 – 2014),  going slowly towards the end of the company. But Watson, IBM could revolutionize the management of semantics which is currently lacking treatment ‘Analytics’ and take the lead on a niche again.

For the moment, it is really artificial intelligence but not more, as we can imagine with aware artificial…, for the moment. But it is probably the beginning. Aware artificial will be probably the next disruptive industrial revolution before the end of the 21 century…

Apple Watch release late February 2015?

Everything you need to know about the Apple Watch

The Apple Watch is the Cupertino firm’s first foray into wearable tech, and will be launched late February.

Apple unveiled its fledgling smartwatch at a launch event on September 9, padding out its product roster alongside the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

The Apple Watch features a custom-built UI that proffers a host of wrist-borne apps, as well as a pressure-sensitive touchscreen, ‘taptic’ haptic feedback, and the Digital Crown – Apple’s wristwatch-inspired winder input.

The smartwatch will come up against tough competition when it lands, facing off with the existing raft of wearable Android fare like the Moto 360, the LG G Watch R, and the Samsung Gear S.

Latest estimates tip the smartwatch to tout sales figures somewhere in the region of 20-30 million with Apple rumoured to have anywhere up to 40 million units ordered in time for day one.

Apple Watch development kit and model types?

Prempting the wearable’s upcoming arrival, Apple made its WatchKit SDK live last month. Giving early play time with the Apple Watch expereince, the wrist-based SDK is allowing eager developers to prep bespoke apps in time for the device’s release.

When the Apple Watch does eventually go on sale, there will be three model options to choose from – each with two display sizes to complement varying wrist sizes.

The standard Apple Watch model comes with a stainless steel silver or space black colour scheme case with the screen protected by sapphire crystal.

If you’re looking for something to keep up with you as you train, the Apple Watch Sport features an anodised aluminium case in silver or space grey with the screen protected with strengthened ion-X glass with colourful, durable band options.

Lastly, the Apple Watch Edition features an 18-carat gold face in yellow or rose, protected by sapphire crystal. It’s the premium edition of the Apple Watch.

Apple Watch Specs

To start off with, there will be two different sizes of the Apple Watch to choose from. The smaller option for dainty wrists is 38mm tall, while the larger option is 42mm. That’s something that we haven’t seen from any of the Android or Android Wear alternatives so far. Each Apple Watch is kitted out with a Retina display.

In terms of resolution, the developer kit revealed the smaller Apple Watch will tout a 1.5-inch 272 x 340 display, while the larger variant will boast a 1.65-inch 312 x 390 display.

The Apple Watch display can sense force via a new feature call Force Touch. This will allow the device to distinguish between a tap and a press for more contextually specific controls.

Reacting to that, there’s also the Taptic Engine. The Watch also features a custom built heart rate sensor that uses infrared, visible-light LEDS and photodiodes to detect your pulse and heart rate. Combining this with data from the accelerometer and the GPS and Wi-Fi found in your iPhone, the Apple Watch can track your physical movement.

Under the hood you’ll find the Apple S1 processor. There’s no specific specs for the S1 yet, but it is protected from the elements, wear and impact by resin.

Connected car: new model building by Google

This is incredible to see how Google progressed within 1 year about their program “Google self-driving car project”. This is now not anymore, a concept with technical tests using a Toyota cars, as it was last year, with Prius or Lexus RX; this is not anymore a technical solution with engineers embedded in these cars, checking the issues of the software developed.

This concept allows Google to propose a completely automatized car without any steering wheel nor any pedals of acceleration or brake nor any engineer embedded in the car.

A new model of usage born

These cars will not be sold by Google; the cost of cars remains too expensive from now; some rumors speaks about a price of 1 million of dollars for the first Google cars, if we integrate manufacturing costs and R&D costs included; and the running costs of these cars is unknown for the moment; for sure, limited people could buy these cars if they would be allowed to buy them.

These cars will be firstly rented by Google to replace your car to go to supermarket, to go to airport or to go some meetings in your town.  This model reinvent the usage of transports.

On one side, this car can be compared to a public transport, completely optimized: the car is able to take you everywhere; and you can go everywhere; this car is a two places car, it doesn’t take a lot of place in the road circulation and you don’t need to park them; the car is able to know the traffic jam and optimize the way to go to the destination.

On the other side, this car can manage all small “travel” corresponding to 80% if car usages. This is a complete revolution for the car manufacturers in the next 10 years; in this case, people will not buy anymore a car; what is the interest if you can “call” a car when you need it?

Of course, it means that there will be enough “automatized” cars available in one place as big towns. This is also a complete revolution for taxi or public transports: this automatized transport can be very competitive in the next 10 years and completely change the model of transports in big town.

Continuous disruptive model as Business model

This revolution is exiting because Google, a “big” company with 50000 employees and 60 billions of turnover, is able to make some disruptive innovations on many different sectors every year!

Generally, companies are able to make one disruptive innovation every 10 years; and when it is more, a big risk of failure of the company can be predicted. In the case of Google, it seems not; their Business model seems to be constructed on their capacity to continuously be able to build some disruptive concepts with a lot of synergies with existing profitable activities they also manage.

A lesson to be learn by many worldwide companies if they would continue to exist in the next decades.

Scribble: the connected pen

Four colors pen is too nerdy? Go Scribble and 16 million shades!

What unleash your imagination!

This is a true innovation offers us an American company: the first pen connected. Scribble can take any color and reproduce on paper. This little gem of technology has a color sensor 16-bit RGB, an ARM 9 processor and an internal memory of 1 GB Add the Bluetooth 4.0 and micro-USB port for charging and you get a pen 2.0 tune with the times.

Usage is childish!

Place the sensor on the color you want to remove and press the button! The unit is responsible for storing the color. Thanks to its memory, can store up Scribble 100,000 colors. With its ink cartridge and mixing chamber, the pen offers an exact reproduction of the sampled color.

The Scribble will be offered in two versions, one ink (U.S. $ 149.95), the other version stylus (U.S. $ 79.95). The release date is not yet disclosed, but the company website offers users (in exchange for an email address) to warn when the pen will be available for sale.

See more details: http://getscribblepen.com/blog/

How to Capitalize on the Golden Age of IT Innovation

We have reached an inflection point within information technology (IT) where the conversation is moving from cost to value. IT is no longer focused on back-office infrastructure. In a digital world, the function has transformed to help unearth valuable data insights and define the future of products. Given the historical and deep knowledge with big data, security and infrastructure, the IT function plays an integral role in delivering delightful customer experiences across all digital platforms.

On a panel addressing how the Marketing and IT relationship has been reinvented, the more important one is the convergence between IT and marketing with the ability to take data capabilities in the IT organization and merge it with marketing aspirations. The Marketing and IT partnership is tighter than ever; both functions are working with synergy to implement and manage digital technology and leverage data insights to provide personalized experiences.

It is an exciting time in IT, from the role the function is playing in developing products and solutions to the new partnerships that are being forged to drive business impact. There are a number of fundamental tenets that will help IT leaders capitalize on the golden age of IT innovation:

• Shift to a Services Model: IT leaders need to shift their organization from a delivery model to an end-to-end services model. Move from a project management and back-end infrastructure role to taking on the total cost of ownership in developing services that help drive the profits of a company. With this model IT specialists have an ongoing partnership with the business, product, and marketing organizations and are embedded into those teams.
• Build New Skill Sets: The next generation of IT is re-defining the skill set and competencies of people in the organization. IT Specialists need to have an end-to-end services mindset where they work on smaller teams for longer periods of time and take a “you build it, you run it” approach. IT specialists also need to think more like marketers, as data is deeply embedded in the process of creating, targeting and delivering personalized experiences to customers.
• Think Like a CEO: The CIO is in the unique position to see the entire spectrum of the company’s operation and business. As CIOs’ influence broadens, they must think like a 21st century CEO having a strong acumen around running a business (P&L), anticipating customers’ needs, innovating experiences, and understanding the competitive environment.
• Entrust the Business: Leaders need to ensure they are prioritizing the projects that will truly drive business impact. Entrusting projects/initiatives to other groups or vendors is a very smart and strategic decision. By doing so, resources are freed up to focus on IT innovation and initiatives that help drive business revenue.

We should be energized by the opportunities that lie ahead in IT. Never before, the level of partnership and integration across the organization was higher than today. We are breaking down the barriers and silos and forging a new path for the next generation of IT.

Google: new tablet tailored for 3D

The Mountain View company plans to produce from June 2014, 4000 tablets equipped with cameras, infrared sensors and software to capture images of 3D objects .

After glasses connected (and before clothing) , Google continues its momentum in innovation by developing a tablet with this time function for capturing images of 3D objects. Google is about to start production next month of tablets equipped with two cameras located on the back cover but also infrared sensors and specialized software to capture precise images of objects 3D .

These tablets , with a size of 7 inches are for the moment the prototype stage but could be officially announced during the annual Great Mass Google I / O addressing developers , which will be held 25 and 26 June in San Francisco.

It has been several months that Google is working on another generation of mobile devices , especially with the announcement of the Tango project in February and a prototype smartphone also equipped with sensors and 3D display technologies. This tablet would be another piece of development of Google in the field of advanced 3D functions with mobile devices, including improved navigation inside buildings and in stores (indoor) or to increase the immersion in 3D applications including video games . An area where Facebook is precisely positioned by placing the hand on the startup Oculus VR for $ 2 billion in March.

Shodan the search engine of connected objects

Made in USA, Shodan is a search engine that can identify all connected objects (webcams, automation tools, robots, hydro, IT companies …), but also to take control. An application that allows you to become aware of the risks of piracy, some will say. Which encourages hackers, say others.

The year-old site known as Shodan makes it easy to locate internet-facing SCADA, or supervisory control and data acquisition, systems used to control equipment at gasoline refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities. As white-hat hacker and Errata Security CEO Robert Graham explains, the search engine can also be used to identify systems with known vulnerabilities.

Besides opening up industrial systems to attacks that target unpatched vulnerabilities, the information provided by Shodan makes networks more vulnerable to brute-force attacks on passwords, many of which may still use factory defaults, CERT warned. The organization advised admins to tighten security by:

• Placing all control systems assets behind firewalls, separated from the business network
• Deploying secure remote access methods such as Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) for remote access
• Removing, disabling, or renaming any default system accounts (where possible)
• Implementing account lockout policies to reduce the risk from brute forcing attempts
• Implementing policies requiring the use of strong passwords
• Monitoring the creation of administrator level accounts by third-party vendors

Short for Sentient Hyper-Optimized Data Access Network, Shodan contains a wealth of information about routers, servers, load balancers and other hardware attached to the internet. Its database was built by indexing metadata contained in the headers the hardware broadcasts to other devices. Searches can be filtered by port, hostname and country.

Innovation about security will become more and more important, more costly, to take in account in the management of all the companies SI.

http://www.shodanhq.com/

Big Data: The Internet of Things

Science fiction? Well, no. All this and much more is feasible today. Internet-enabled white goods and wine coolers, remotely controlled lighting systems, alarms controlled from the internet, health reading devices and so on are all available today. Bringing them all together in a connected world is not the stuff of the future. It is in the here-and-now.

The Internet of Things is THE most exciting trend in the world can affect our daily lives. The trend is termed The Internet of Things (IoT) and it will affect every single human on the planet in time. It will allow connected cities, connected countries, more efficient allocation of resources and fundamentally change the way we live. It may even help us save the planet. It is that fundamental. And, according to one thought leader, 2014 will be the tipping point.

The market impact from the IoT is mind-boggling. Gartner believes that in just 6 short years the economic value-add from internet-enabling devices and delivering a connected world will amount to nearly $2 Trillion.

As it gains momentum the IoT is going to drive a tsunami of data. The growth in data that we have been experiencing in the last decade has largely been fueled by social media and unstructured content, with the proportion of enterprise data growth being relatively limited.

If businesses and governments are already struggling to keep up with data growth, and balancing the opportunities afforded with various cloud architectures, imagine what it is going to be like in 5 years’ time when they’ll be 500 billion connected devices all generating data! Some of this data will be ephemeral of course, but most will need storing, managing and mining.

In the last few years’ data storage as a topic has moved from an IT budget line item into a potential strategic enabler of growth. The CIO is keenly aware of this. However, as the tsunami of data hits, every C-suiter is going to need to understand this. NetApp has long been at the forefront of data storage efficiency technologies (such as snapshotting, de-duplication, compression and thin provisioning) and these will remain the foundation in this new world of IoT. There is no other way to address the need to store the quantity at an affordable cost. But it will also need highly sophisticated data analytics engines and mining applications. SAP Hana, Hadoop, MapR are just the tip of the iceberg. Making these apps effective requires a robust, highly scalable and performant underlying data management platform which can span private, public and hybrid clouds flexibly and transparently. The #1 storage operating system, Data ONTAP has been designed with these goals in mind from day 1. As every Sunday School attendee knows – the wise man built his house upon a rock, and as a every grown up CEO will get to know – the wise CIO builds his data center on a rock-solid data management platform.

50 years ago this week Isaac Asimov presented his vision of what the world might be like in 2014. Back in 1964 he outlined his predictions in an article for the New York Times. Asimov was a science fiction author and chemist, and although I don’t suppose anyone would have understood the term back then, he could well labelled a “futurologist” in today’s parlance. He was surprisingly accurate in those predictions. In some of them he was half-right and obviously he missed some completely, but in the main, he called a lot right. He may not have got the terminology completely correct but he essentially predicted the ubiquity of smart phones, the fledgling nature of robotics, the role of nuclear power and the advances in 3-D technology amongst many others. He predicted a world of wireless devices. By that he meant they would not use a conventional electrical cord and get power from a grid, but actually be powered by nuclear-charged long-lived batteries. Well he got those details a little wrong, but a world of internet-enabled wireless connected devices is precisely what we are talking about with the IoT. Read his predictions here. Given the rate of change in technology in the last decade, it would be pretty challenging to try and predict what the world might be like in 2064, so hats off to Asimov for his perspicuity.

iGlass: reality augmented by Apple

In parallel of the Google Glass developed by Google and that could be sold starting 2014 or 2015, it seems that Apple is working on a new Apple patent for glasses recently discovered, detailing the project “iGlass” as we call them. Apple could work on reality augmented glasses projects since 2008.

These glasses are mounted in HMD (Head Mounted Display) or a display to the eye. HMD has an OLED screens or two with magnifying lenses and other optical elements associated. Lenses and other components are used to give the user a view image far as not to tire the eye. This is explained in the preamble Apple.

Currently, there are HMDs for military or engineers to have some first-hand information as geographical data or stereoscopic representations (techniques to reproduce a depth perception from two planar images) from CAD drawings.

The “iGlass” could, using a processor, display source images from external sources. This means that the iPhone could serve as a source eyeglasses for example. Apple glasses are therefore an accessory in addition to your device. So most of the applications running on your iPhone or iPod could work with your glasses.

To conclude, the HMD is revolutionary and allows the user to adjust the glasses to his vision and thus enjoy a unique experience.

iGlass would be probably introduced with other connected devices like iTV and iWatch, using contextual computing concepts with multi sensors management.