Word of the Day: psychurgy. Mental energy or function
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German boffin wants to make dumb gadgets smart
A GERMAN BOFFIN is not happy with just making electronic gadgets very precise, he also wants to harness the power of the cloud to make them a bit smarter.
Karlheinz Brandenburg, who gave the world the MP3 player [he can have it back any time he wants it. Ed] is backing Perfect Stream technology that lets computing power in the Internet "cloud" do the thinking for simple gadgets.
Brandenburg told AFP he thought those Perfect Stream guys were "just crazy" and having a laugh, but he likes "crazy" because people said the MP3 was "crazy" too.
Perfect Stream's idea is to have digital video and audio tailored to individual tastes and delivered as a service to essentially any gizmo that can talk to the Internet. It has been trialed successfully in Germany and the company was at CES to license the technology to Internet service providers in the United States.
A gadget can be programmed with a person's preferred shows, news sources, music, Twitter feeds, or other Internet content, and the data can be routed to digital picture frames, in-car navigation systems, feature phones, game consoles and more.
Apparently personalised Internet streams can be directed to everything from clever online electronics to the daftest $50 phone with prepaid plans.
At the heart of the technology is processing digital content on servers "in the cloud" and then feeding it to gadgets that need only receive and decode the data. µ
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I'd like simple everyday chores to be done or started for me.
Running the bath, and auto=stopping when it's full.
Starting my car so its warm/cool for when I get into it.
Heating my clothes before I put them on, lol.
Taking my clothes from the hamper, sorting and then washing them.
We have routines as people, we live our lives in routines. Lets have some automatic macro stuff for the home.
Telling me which stuff my cupboards are getting low on and preparing me a shopping list, then after I check it I can have the goods delivered OR added to a list and the trolley fills itself while I am on my way to the store.
I tried ordering over the internet from supermarkets and they are often substituting items, yet when I go to the store I can find those items. Are they lazy packers or is the stuff really not there, or are they only allowed to take so much of it for internet orders?
Sounds like a security nightmare to me...
All sorts of home appliances suffer by cheapskate manufacturers putting as few buttons and displays into them as possible. Well, have them controlled through a web page instead - that works for me.
You are probably not supposed to operate a toaster without supervising it, so I suppose that turning it on by remote control in the morning -before- you start looking for your clean socks isn't really allowed.