Bonjour 2010

There is one story in slashdot, said one guy boosts the mobile broadband signal with a kitchen saucepan, which is a very cheap and almost always available trick to everyone. Unfortunately, I am not able to open the video link in youtube due to GFW. Well, as 2010's is knocking at the door, I hope everyone has a big dream come to true in the next year and there will be better technologies for the world.

A Green TV

Today, I was working at home. During lunch time, I opened my TV set, all goes well, after two minutes, TV screen turns off automatically, while audio is still on, just like a radio. This has occurred couple of times, until today an idea comes out of my mind. Will it be a very nice feature if the TV can automatically turn off the video display but keep the audio on when it detects there is no audience. I call it green TV as it can save a lot power if you just want to "listen to" the TV or you are busy with a phone call or simply left home and forgot turn off the TV. The technology behind is not complex, what I suggested is adding a smart camera module inside the TV and with certain intelligent video/image alogrithm, the camera can judge if there is person watching the TV or not, and pass the information to screen controller for making decision. Within this camera, we even can implement more sophiscated algorithms to dectec human body's gesture, e.g., wave hand vertically to switch channel, wave hand horizontally to change speaker volume etc,. Not only we are watching TV, TV is watching us as well. A lot of innovations can burst out! I bet TV set is another wonderful battlefield in the next few years.

HD Video Transmitter and Receiver

Recently, I am helping Sam to seek an local parterner, who can make HD video transmitter and receiver, as wll as HD video recorder. The system architecture is HD Camera + HD video transmitter + I talked to my university supervisor Professor Chen, whose expertise in video indurstrial is well established. And his team developed TI DaVinci-HD based video recorder for multiple companies. Professor's concerns is the volume and price

Pending Ideas

There are couple of ideas keep coming back to my mind. I don't expect to turn all of them into successful products, I do want to put significant amount of my effort to make some of those ideas happen. I herein archive them -

• Smart Board - digital ink with storage capability, replace conventional whiteboard
• Portable patient monitor - low cost, easy operation personal medical equipment
• Foetus ECG monitor - low cost, easy operation, accurate machine for family use
  
• P2P TV - embed peer to peer (BitTorrent, eMule) capability into home TV Set
• Infant feeding chair - a special chair to release parent's hands when feeding the baby
• Run errand - business model, help customer to handle personal affairs, e.g., retrieve visa
• Thinkgeek - business model, sell very special but interesting elecrical equipment
• Internal trading - sell bamboo derivates, e.g., foodstuff, crafts
• Wedding helper - business model, new couple list the gifts they want in our website, friends and relatives pick up what they like to offer, we deliver goods
• ...
  

personal pension and medical insurance

Today I went to a government department to retrieve a debit card, which I can use to deposit money as my personal pension and medical insurance as the company does not take care them for its employees. I need to deposit 869RMB each month, which is 26% of Shanghai average salary. Among 869RMB, 68% goes to personal pension and 32% goes to medical insurance. I need to deposit moeny before 10th or 19th of each month.