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Category Archives: random
Hardware for niches
Via /., a fascinating post from Bunnie Huang on hardware mashups in China. The focus is on phones but the idea of hardware mashups extends much more broadly than that. I especially like the idea of small manufacturing runs of niche products that scratch an itch for a relatively narrow market but one that today can be reached much more effectively than in the past.
IE*: From the bottom of the real estate crater
Housing prices continue to drop like a stone from their absurdly high levels of just a couple of years ago, more here in the Inland Empire than nearly anywhere else in the country. There are some good signs from the market, in a ghoulish kind of way; seventy percent of home sales in the region are for foreclosed properties, which means that the system is still sort of working, and working out some of the pricing problems that have frozen other capital markets. I mean, bad for the people who’ve lost their foreclosed houses, but at least the foreclosure sales are making a market and putting a price on those formerly overvalued assets. There’s still, though, a huge inventory of empty unsold (or unrented; the rental market has cratered, too) properties in the area, with more coming online as projects that were built on spec during the boom are completed. Lots of people are living in houses that are worth less than the mortgage they’re paying on it. If you’ll pardon the awful pun, this is the default position now for homeowners in the Inland Empire.
Crossing the Facebook chasm
In my little world, some kind of Facebook social network boundary seems to have been recently crossed. People who have better things to do with their lives than tweet now have Facebook accounts. I don’t know why that is, but Facebook, especially, seems to have become de rigueur all of a sudden amongst a much broader audience. Honestly, I still don’t know what to do with Facebook and I do my best to do as little as possible with it in the hopes that it will go away and stop bothering me, like MySpace, but it has definitely moved from early adopter to broad adoption in my circles.
What’s missing from CES: cheap wifi audio connector
There’ve been a lot of cool new product announcements coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show going on now in Las Vegas, including a new Palm phone based on their new WebOS, cheap/fast/durable flash-based hard drives, lots of Android-based devices that aren’t phones, network-connected televisions, and much else besides.
But one disappointment, to me at least, was the new audio system from Linksys, the consumer electronics brand of Cisco. It looks to me like a straight knockoff of the highly-regarded Sonos wireless music system; they both let you stream music over your home wireless network to devices attached to your stereo. Sonos uses their own setup, while Linksys uses regular wifi. They both have nice remotes — the Sonos one is supposed to be gorgeous — and they’re both $1,000 and up. I was really hoping that the Cisco announcement was going to be a cheap little box that attaches to your stereo to let you stream music from your computer.
That to me is an unmet need in the market still.
Besides Sonos and the new Linksys system, there is the relatively new Logitech Duet derived from Logitech’s acquisition of Slim Devices. The Duet is cheaper, around $330, and uses an open source streaming server, Squeeze Center, that has lots of nice add-ons. It too has a nice remote, which makes sense: Logitech has a line of very good Harmony universal remotes (I love ours). But the kicker is that you can’t buy and configure the little wifi ‘receiver’ (it’s unamplified) without the remote. I don’t want to spend $330 and I don’t want another remote in my house.
The Apple Airport Express has been around now for several years and it is pretty close to what I’m looking for; it’s got wifi and audio out and theoretically should connect iTunes to your stereo. I say theoretically because I’ve got one and it’s connected to both my wifi network and physically to my stereo; iTunes sees it but it doesn’t work, presumably because it wants some Apple-flavored wireless love. Crucially, for that setup, Apple has a free and very nice app that lets you control your music via the iPhone.
But it’s crazy that this is not a problem that hasn’t been solved in a hundred different ways. There’s lots of good music streaming software out there with published open standards and all that; the issue isn’t on the software side. It’s that no one has a simple wifi audio box that hooks up to your stereo.