My Appearance on WGST's "The Sully Show" 6/20/14 Talking Tech

Rick is in Detroit this week. Doing some pieces on Detroit golf, travel, etc.  Detroit is making an effort to come bck from the dead and PureMichigan.com is the travel arm of Michigan.

Have a listen:

listen to ‘The Sully Show June 20, 2014’ on Audioboo

Current tech topics

Amazon Releases their new "Fire" Smartphone

Is this the "shopping" or "buy" phone

Amazon took to the stage in Seattle this week to talk about its first smartphone. The device is a rather middle-of-the-road piece of hardware, and comes with features that range from genius to gimmicky. The Fire Phone has a 4.7-inch 720p HD screen that Android claims is one of the brightest available for better outdoor viewing and reading. It is powered by a 2.2-GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor from Qualcomm with Adreno 330 graphics and 2 GB of RAM. The phone will be sold in 32-GB and 64-GB varieties.

The Fire Phone includes a 13-megapixel main camera that can shoot 1080p HD video. Amazon is providing unlimited Cloud Drive storage for photos taken with the Fire Phone. The camera has an aperture of f/2.0 for better low-light performance and optical image stabilization for sharper photos. It also has a 2.1-megapixel user-facing camera for selfies.
Dynamic Perspective puts four user-facing cameras to work in defining and tracking the human face. This lets Amazon add a three-dimensional element to many parts of the user interface, such as the lock screen wallpapers. Dynamic Perspective also helps users control on-screen content, such as the pages of an ebook. Amazon is offering a software development kit for Dynamic Perspective to third-party developers so they may take advantage of the technology. The effect is certainly cool.
Firefly uses the Fire Phone's main camera to recognize objects and text or language. Think of it as a barcode scanner on steroids. Not only can it root out the details of the movie, CD, garden hose, and frying pan you want to buy, it links to the items on Amazon's website if they're being sold there. Firefly is not a new technology, but Amazon appears to have done it better than anyone else. For example, it is lightning quick. It can recognize and link to items far faster than many similar apps and services. Firefly can also be used to recognize music, like the popular Shazam app, or live television shows. Amazon thinks Firefly is so important it gave the app a dedicated button on the side of the phone. Like Dynamic Perspective, Amazon is offering developers an SDK so they may use Amazon's object recognition tools for their own Firefly-based apps.

HP bets it all on The Machine, a new computer architecture

HP, one of the original 800lb Silicon Valley gorillas that has seen much happier days, is staking everything on a brand new computer architecture that it calls… The Machine. Judging by an early report from Bloomberg Businessweek, up to 75% of HP’s once fairly illustrious R&D division — HP Labs – are working on The Machine. As you would expect, details of what will actually make The Machine a unique proposition are hard to come by, but it sounds like HP’s groundbreaking work on memristors (pictured top) and silicon photonics will play a key role.

In the words of HP Labs, The Machine will be a complete replacement for current computer system architectures. There will be a new operating system, a new type of memory (memristors), and super-fast buses/peripheral interconnects (photonics). Speaking to Bloomberg, HP says it will commercialize The Machine within a few years, “or fall on its face trying.”

Google Fit To Curate Steps, Calories, Heart Rate, Other Biometric Data

Do we want Google to know all of our health data?

Google is planning to release a new product called Google Fit that will aggregate health data from various devices and apps, according to a report Thursday from Forbes. Fit will use available APIs to pull biometric information together into one place, but it's unclear whether it will be a standalone app or part of the Android OS. Reports of Fit come on the heels of Apple's announcement of HealthKit in iOS 8, a system that also interacts with apps and APIs to curate and present health data like steps walked, calories consumed, and heart rates logged. Fit also follows the announcement of Sami, Samsung's health platform for culling health-related info.

The World Cup is a hit Online

Almost half of the people watching the World Cup are watching in online or on a mobile device.
FIFA 2014 world cup is on right now, and there is no doubt that this tournament will showcase how online media consumption has grown over the last few years. Akamai being a world leader in online content delivery, is bound to benefit from this trend. In this analysis, we attempt to estimate Akamai’s incremental revenues for the second quarter from the delivery of World Cup matches and related content online. Media content delivery accounts for roughly 40% of the company’s value according to our estimates. Media traffic continues to surge as mobile devices proliferate and demand for social media, video streaming and online gaming continues to grow at a frenetic pace.