Century park gathering

This morning, I met 7 GE colleagues in Century park. It is very happy to met old friends in a so nice day. Kids are excited, we have 6 girls and 2 boys, setup a small tent in the lawn. My daughter is too young to be invovled, she felt into sleep finally :-)

High Speed Wireless

There is an article reviewed three different high speed wireless standards,

• WiGig
• WHDI
• SiBEAM

WiGig works at 60-gigaherz wireless spectrum, creates a 10-meter range with transmit speed up to 7 gigabits per second, which is almost 11 times of 802.11n speed (600 megabits per second). WHDI puts more weight on multimedia content delivery, especially for high definition video, it uses 5 gigaherz spectrum with throughput up to 3 gigabits per second, with a range of 100 meters. SiBEAM also uses 60-gigaherz spectrum and provides multi gigabits/second capability, makes it a strong candidator for replacing existing cables in your home.

Back to video, all above standards requires video be digitized before being transmitted over the wireless link. Well, there is another standard called HDcctv, which aims to transmit high definition (720p, 1080p) video over coaxial cable without digitization and packetization, the throughput is up to 3Gbps. Unfortunately, HDcctv also has two competitors, PSIA and ONVIF.
Let's see who will become dominant standards for streaming high definition digital video and analog video!

iPad

iPad was first on sale on Apr 3, to my knowledge, it is not just an ipod touch with big screen. It enables many rich media applications which are not optimized in small screen device like iphone. This version supports wi-fi and bluetooth, and next version will support 3G network. It is a picture frame, a news paper, a movie theater, a skype phone, a game station, ... what ever you named it. I shall buy one and try home dashboard on it. There is one article talks about it from Sina

Home dashboard

I was thinking a board with full customized capbility, with a 9 inch LCD, you may drag and drop pre-built widget such as weather, stock, transportation, sports, news into the display area, the device will deliver the information timely; It shall be able to download and playback the pictures/videos in your camera or camcorder so that you don't need to connect the camera to the computer manully; more over, it can connect to your web/security camera, display who is in your front door. Finally, the device is able to be powered by a battery like a cell phone.

In one word, home dashboard brings various convenience to your daily life and makes your home looks modern. The question is how much you will pay for the device?

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