David Duey

WebOS on the Radar

Nova Spivak has a good post where he discusses the WebOS.  There’s already been a lot said about the WebOS, but it’s often vague.  Nova provides a little detail about where he thinks the WebOS is headed and even mentions his stealth company, Radar Networks.  Cool stuff!

In my view the coming WebOS will not live only on the desktop, rather it will be a web service that lives "in the cloud." Desktops will become views into it, rather than the center of it. The desktop PC era is almost over. We are entering a new era of mobility and plurality -- our digital lives will be spread across multiple devices, most of which will be mobile. We will require access to everything, no matter what device we are on.

When a user logs onto any device -- be it a laptop or a mobile device -- they will connect to their account in the WebOS. The local device will synch with their WebOS account to get their latest desktop layout, their preferences, and any new notifications or changes.

Forgot My Prosthesis

I was in a hurry this morning and I forgot my cell phone.  I’m at a loss; it’s become an appendage.  I forgot my prosthesis.  How could that happen?  I guess I’ve been assimilated.  Luddites beware, I have difficulty living without my tech stuff and I'm just fine with that.

WiFi RFID, I wish I could get the data

WiFi RFID is really cool stuff.  The RFID tag consists of a chipset that receives wifi signals and uses triangulation to determine the location of the RFID tag.  Obviously, the wifi transmitter has to be listed in a database along with its location information in order for this to work. 

Anyway, it’s cool stuff because any wifi transmitter, for instance the good old Linksys wifi router at home, can be used to provide location information.  The advantage of wifi over GPS is that it can be used indoor as well as outdoors.  The disadvantage is the same as GPS; it’s hard to get the location data back to server in real time if you don’t have your own wifi network or don’t want to pay for cellular transmission.  Ubiquitous wifi would solve the problem, but that’s a long way off.  I just want to be able to inexpensively transmit a small amount of data at intervals of anywhere from three seconds to sixty seconds from any location.  Is there any current technology other than the cellular networks (not cheap) that will allow me to do that?

The Weird and Maybe Meaningless Thought of the Day

Is the current state of the internet a dependable enough source of information and data to allow developers to treat it as a reliable source of data for use in applications (i.e. non-proprietary data) without resorting to semantic web data structures (RDF)?  In other words, would an internet search resultset always return the latest known data or information for that particular search without the need to rely on a proprietary data source?  It certainly wouldn’t pertain to all data, but could it pertain to a certain class of data or information? 

What Is and What Is Possible

I really like this quote from Peter Rip's blog:

VCs have always made money at finding the ideal point of friction between the Present and the Future.  Profits accumulate in the gap between What Is and What Is Possible.  Web  2.0 is now firmly in the category of What Is.

A New Journey

My wife and I are working on a new business called Georneys.  Georneys is the outgrowth of an idea my wife had for keeping track of children (we have two small boys), particularly in crowded and congested areas such as theme parks.  The idea is to provide peace of mind for parents and caregivers as well as increased safety.  We plan to be as open and transparent as possible about what we’re doing from both business and technical perspectives.  We’ll be providing updates on our progress at the Georneys’ blog.  I’m sure there will be a lot of adaptation and change along the way.  Needless to say, we’re both very excited about the new business.

As part of our efforts to grow the business, we’ve applied to TechStars.  Acceptance into the TechStars program would require us to move to Boulder, Colorado.  We’d be more than happy to do that for all of the mentoring and learning opportunities we’d receive.  (In fact, I suspect we could be enticed to stay in Boulder, it looks like a great place to live and build a business.)  We’ll have to wait another month or so to find out if we’ve been accepted into the program.  In the meantime, we’re working on our business plan and trying to raise some angel funding.

From a technical perspective, to accomplish the Georneys mission, we’ve been looking at a number of cool and interesting technologies.  I’ll be blogging about some of the technical stuff that I’ve found; it’s been a great learning experience so far, and I’ve been surprised about some of the things I’ve found with regard to GPS and WiFi positioning systems.  The technologies seem to have been grouped in the category called "real-time location systems" (RTLS). 

Also, we’d love to get any feed back or suggestions you might have.  Please leave a comment or contact me via email if you have any input or questions.  Thanks!