Did You Hear THAT Pin Drop?

The Raspberry Pi just got an upgrade, with the $35, credit-card sized computer adored by geeks everywhere recently obtaining an upgrade to 512MB RAM, double that what it used to offer at the same price. With this upgrade, the latest Pi can now handle multimedia, high memory and mobile applications. This should also enable the tiny computer to run a future version of an Android 4.0 OS.

Whew.

That’s all I have to say after the brutal 30+ hour journey back home from Singapore.

Jet travel = one big giant petri dish, and after I took ill during the first leg of my trip from Singapore to Tokyo, my sinuses took it upon themselves to become completely inflamed and congested, so I learned yet another helpful travel trick: Pack sinus spray in the carry on at all times.

Fortunately, my head never got to the point that it exploded mid-flight, and I was sentient enough when I landed in Austin to be able to drive home. Where I promptly slept for 10 hours.

The weekend in sport was just as daunting: My UT Longhorns got on the wrong side of the Sooners in the Red River Showdown, my Cowboy’s QB doesn’t know how to count in seconds at the end of a football game, and my New York Yankees lost their beloved captain Derek Jeter in an ankle-wrenching, season-ending heartbreaker, now heading to Detroit down 0-2 to the Tigers in the ALCS.

And then, to awaken today bright and early and discover more potential consolidation in the telecommunications space, this time with SoftBank’s 70% stake its buying in Sprint, which amounted to a $20B U.S. stake!

TechCrunch reported the news brought down the Sprint website overnight.

As has been widely reported, Sprint is well behind in the LTE game, and the SoftBank infusion is expected to help Sprint with their continued rollout of the new network technology, as well as consolidate their position in wi-fi broadband provider, Clearwire.

Faster, cheaper, better. Isn’t that (almost) always the objective in the technology game?

Speaking of, if you’re made in the spirit of a tried and true “Maker Fairean,” DIYer, the new Raspberry Pi is now shipping with double the RAM (512MB!) at the same tiny price tag of $35.

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that runs several variants of Linux and is primed for attraction to emerging growth market countries looking to move into the computing realm at a ridiculously affordable price.

And if that news is music to your geekish ears, also on the Monday morning news run down is Microsoft’s announcement it’s moving into the digital music game, using its X-Box as a music streaming Trojan Horse.

The Xbox Music service will be available through the Xbox Live service, and on Windows 8 tablets, PCs, and Windows mobile phone devices, and will include free and paid models for streaming AND downloads.

While you’re at it, how about delivery of a patch that keeps the  “blue screen of death” from ever darkening my virtual door again?!

Okay, that’s enough silly news banter for the moment.

I have to get back to work — Information On Demand 2012 is less than 7 days away (more on that shortly!). In the meantime, stay tuned for more interviews conducted last week at IBM InterConnect 2012.

Google’s New “Jelly Bean”

So did anybody else watch that Google I/O keynote earlier today from the Moscone Center in San Francisco?

Apparently, so, because at one point there were nearly 100,000 concurrent viewings on YouTube.

Yes, I said, 100,000.  Pretty impressive for a developer’s conference.

I’ll get to some of the key Android announcements momentarily…first, the show stealer, which for my money (and of which there’s not a whole lot), one-upped Apple’s keynotes in a way they’ll likely never be able to match.

As the team was preparing to introduce the much-discussed Google Glasses (which I hope, one day, I’ll be able to wear on the golf course and announce to my technophobe father exactly how many yards his shot is to the pin without missing a beat), Sergey Brin cut away to an airplane flying high over the skies of San Francisco, all featured in a Google Events Hangout.

I presumed the cutaway was Memorex, but soon found out differently.

The skydivers jumped from the plane, flew in their birdsuits a little ways, then opened their chutes and landed safely on a roof by or at the Moscone Center.

They delivered the Google Glasses to some manic BMX mountain bikers, who jumped a couple of roofs before handing them over to some dudes who were hanging by some ropes.

Before too long, they all came busting into the live keynote and up on the stage to deliver the glasses.

I’ll never think of my FedEx delivery guy the same again.

I guess everyone at Google Marketing and PR was pretty confident all their skydivers’ chutes would open and no Google Glasses were going to go splat along with their mules.  That, or they had a contingency plan to cutaway to poor voice-challenged CEO Larry Page trying to pick up the slack via ASL.

Like I said, the whole stunt got my attention.

There were a range of interesting announcements, including the Glasses (available to developers attending I/O sometime next year), the new Google streaming media player (Yawn), and Google’s own Nexus 7 (is that one step behind Windows8?) tablet.

But the new Android, 4.1, AKA “Jelly Bean,” was the storyline I found most interesting.

Google announced “Project Butter” as the new innovation in 4.1, which helps make transitions and animations in the Android OS run more smoothly (at a cool 60 frames per second).

Googlers also demonstrated more responsive widgets (I hate to wait on any mobile device app!), which users can drag and drop and move around on their home screen.

Android Heavens, open up and save me from thith mobile lag!

The Google voice recognition engine is now going offline, which means you can transcribe to your heart’s content without being connected to the Interwebs.

“Android, go beat up Siri and then send me some funny pics of such that I can view on my newfangled Android 4.1 home screen and share them via my non-lagging new Facebook app on Jelly Bean!”

The new “Google Now” was also a cool new feature, which allows you tor bring up new “cards” that contain relevant and timely information (“How tall is the Empire State Building?”).

If Trivial Pursuit ever makes a comeback, I want to play the Google Now-assisted edition!

Google Now also takes advantage of temporal and physical data it knows to make friendly suggestions to you.  For example, when it’s lunchtime, Google Now could suggest some local restaurants nearby and let you easily make reservations to go there.

I’d suggest you view the video below to learn more about Google Now, but despite my preference to stick with the Apple iPlatforms, me likey the new “Jelly Bean” and hope Apple responds with some similar features in a future iOS release.

TurboTech: A Humorous Look At 2011 Technology Trends In Review

It’s not many people who have the opportunity to be able to say that they’ve worked with a true broadcasting professional like Scott Laningham.

Blogger's Note: No dolphins were harmed during the making of this video. Green pigs who stole bird's eggs, well, that's a whole other story!

It’s even less people who would take the opportunity to actually come clean and admit to having done so, especially on more than one occasion.

Because I’m neither a true professional nor someone who likes to allow the skeletons in his closet to begin to accumulate, instead of facing as many of them as I can take head on like some egregious out-of-control episode of “Walking Dead,” or, worse, a full-on “Angry Birds” like assault come to life (but only if it’s the ad-supported version, as we’re too cheap to actually buy a copy), it is with great pleasure that I feature for you my readers the latest episode of “TurboTech,” another fine example supporting the postulation by Gartner and others that broadband video is here to stay…even if Scott and I are not destined to be ourselves.

The following is video documentary evidence of what happens when nature cannot simply abhor a vacuum, but instead must attempt to fill it with technology forecasting tripe at the end of another grand year of massive technological disruption.  In our case, the year 2011, which was filled with much technological wonder and wonderment, not the least of which included fabric-based computing.

It shall also not go unnoticed by somewhat regular (assuming there are any of you) viewers that Scott continues to look and sound much, much better than me in these episodes, indicating once again that Scott continues to have better technology than me.

This, too, must change.

Car Windows

Is anybody but me getting a sudden influx of Facebook SPAM?

I’m suddenly getting notices from my “friends” with links to some Blogspot address asking me to watch some video.

Oy vey.  I wonder if that could somehow be a viral video campaign related to today’s Windows 7 launch.

Speaking of which, I haven’t yet figured out how to get Windows 7 on my Acer netbook.  It’s currently got a dual boot with both Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Windows XP, but because most netbooks don’t have a DVD or CD-ROM drive, upgrading is going to be a big challenge.

I’ve visited both the Windows marketing pages as well as the Microsoft store, and there’s no information on the Netbook upgrade version (from which you can load via USB device, or so I had heard) of Windows 7.

So, all that hard work by Microsoft on getting W7 tuned up and ready for the netbook market…well done!

I did stumble onto this post from the Windows 7 blog, which announced a number of special offers and promotions, including a Windows 7 launch party in NYC.

You know, I really would try and make it, but alas, I have to head to a meeting to watch some paint dry.

David Pogue has a review on The New York Times with the following headline: Windows 7 Keeps the Good, Tries to Fix Flaws.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but then again Pogue is an unabashed Apple fanboy (Full disclosure: So am I.)

But, being a technology dude, I find it is my geeksworn duty to try as many technologies as I possibly can, from IBM and from our competitors, so that I can better understand the state of the market.

That said, I never tried Microsoft Vista, save for one time when I was at a Gartner Symposium in the fall of 2003, and I got to try out an early beta.

I thought it really cool that Vista was going to include RSS feeds (RSS feeds were pretty new back then…amazing how so many people still don’t know what they are!)  Other than that, I just couldn’t see it, especially with all the additional horsepower it required.

No, for me, Windows XP was always good enough, and like so many, I never found a compelling reason to upgrade to Vista.  And then, I discovered Mac OS X.

For my money, operating systems should be like car engines…they should just work.  Turn the key.  Engine cranks.  Off you go.

And for me, Mac OS X has been a pretty good working engine, and considering that it’s basically a UNIX derivative with a nice GUI overlay, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

If Windows 7 can provide the kind of stability and an elegant GUI that OS X has been providing for years, then by golly, knock yourself out.

I’d certainly consider putting it on my Acer netbook…but I’m definitely not interested in spending days under the hood trying to figure out how to do so.

Kinda defeats the point if I can’t get in and just turn on the engine and drive.