I set up my (or rather my wife’s) Amazon Echo last night. I have a hard time not calling the Amazon “Alexa,” because that’s how you address it. You say “Alexa play some rock music” and it does so.
The Echo is a black cylinder that listens for commands and questions and sometimes does what you say. You can ask it about the weather or news, and it will tell you. You can have it read audio books to you. I think I even read it can be a speaker for your phone, but I haven’t tried that yet. It can play music from Amazon Prime or from music you’ve bought through Amazon. It also plays Internet radio stations from IHeartRadio and others. It can remind you of things and add things to lists (shopping and To Do are the defaults).
All these things can be done by your phone, of course, and with Siri (and presumably Cortana and Google Now), you can even use your voice to command many of them. But Echo seems more suited for people that are not as technologically inclined. I’d say Echo’s audience is the over-30 or even over-40 crowd, because anyone younger than that has their phone surgically grafted to their hand and doesn’t need Echo. For those that don’t want to spend time hunting for apps on a tiny screen or choosing playlists, Echo is great!
Last night, my wife was enthralled having it play music from one of her favorite bands (I won’t name it so I don’t shame her 8-). Even though we have CDs and MP3s from that band and she could access them from her iPhone, she never has. Now Echo makes it easy, and she was thrilled. She beamed that I had brought music back into the house, even though we have a fancy surround sound system with many ways of playing music (that she never uses because it’s too complicated).
Echo isn’t perfect. If you ask it a questions that it doesn’t understand, it simply doesn’t respond. At least Siri has the guts to says she didn’t understand something. I asked “Alexa what audiobooks can I play?” Since I have a few Audible audiobooks, and Audible is an Amazon company, this seemed like a reasonable question for Echo to be able to answer, but it listened to the question (as seen by the ring of blue lights as you speak and it listens), then didn’t bother responding. That’s disappointing.
Overall, though, Echo seems really great, particularly for people that don’t want to get music and answers via their phones. I got an early bird deal that made Echo $100, but now it is $200 (or $150 for Prime members), which I think is a little much. You really need Amazon Prime, too, because of the access to the music library, so it is an expensive gadget. But it is a nifty one.
Last Sunday, we decided to visit Treasure Island Park next to and behind the Montage Resort in Laguna Beach, because a storm in the Pacific was causing bigger than usual waves. It was a cloudy morning, but a pleasant temperature for a walk. The first pictures are of the arch, then a few pics of the waves, and finally, we saw a couple of whales near the beach. My iPhone has no zoom, so they just look like black specks, but I think the 2nd picture of the whales shows one of them spouting.
The Arch
Looking North
Waves crashing
More Waves
Whales (really)
Maybe a whale spouting
That speck is a whale
I also took a few videos. The first two show waves crashing on the beach, while the second is a guy using a drone to film some girls dancing on a rock. I was impressed with how fast and precise the drone was!
This morning, we woke to magnificent blue skies, not the marine layer predicted by the weatherman, so we went back to Treasure Island Park, but this time I took my good camera. The tide was much lower than last week, but no whales this time…
I live in a house on a ridge that we’ve nicknamed “Weathertop,” because it gets lots of weather, and, of course, the obligatory Lord of the Rings reference. Last night’s storm made the house live up to its nickname. The winds at Weathertop tend to come from the south west, yet because of the position on the ridge, there is nothing blocking the wind. Of course, our bedroom is at the south end of the house, and the bed is on the west side, so last night I was kept awake by all the creaks and thumps from the wind gusts heard clearly through the window behind my head. The really strong gusts buffeted the house enough that I could feel them. Then the rain hit, powered by all that wind. It sounded like power washers on all windows and doors at once, which is scary if you live in an old house and don’t like water getting in. It looks like we came through relatively unscathed, but I’m surviving on a total of maybe 3 hours of sleep today.
My shiny new iPhone has shipped, so wanting to know more about when it should be delivered, I signed up for the UPS My Choice service. To verify me, UPS couldn’t text my cell phone for some reason (perhaps the prefix doesn’t match my current address, since I’ve moved without changing the number). So the UPS website offered me a quiz instead. This was a multiple choice quiz with one right answer per group. UPS asked about a street I lived on when I first moved to California more than 25 years ago. They asked about the location of a temporary delivery address we had for a short while during a move 14 years ago. They also asked where a particular prior address from 10 years ago was. This means that UPS has put together a profile of me that tracks back 25 years, yet I never sent them change of address notices or any other way of connecting the addresses. That’s impressive! I’ll refrain from using the word “scary,” which was my first reaction, because they are providing me a service, so keeping track of me doesn’t bother me too much. And, of course, we’re always happy to see the UPS driver because it means something we ordered is arriving!
It is a bit of a cautionary tale, however. If UPS has this kind of profile gleaned from years of delivering packages to me, what must other companies have? UPS may know I’m getting a box from Amazon or Best Buy, but the retailers know what is in the box, so they can develop an even better profile of me. Which leads to the question: Then why are the recommendations on most websites, including Amazon, so crappy? We’ve all heard amazing data mining stories where a retailer knew women were pregnant before their families did, etc., but so far, only Netflix seems to be very good at guessing what I want.
This is the Building a Product panel at the UC Technology Commercialization Forum on May 8th. Next to me are Dr. Christine Ho of Imprint Energy and Dr. Michelle Brown of Olfactor Laboratories, as well as the moderator Dr. Thomas Lipkin of UCLA. The picture is pretty low res, because it was cropped from an iPhone 4S photo taken 25 or so feet away by my wife. I should have brought my good camera for her to use…
On Thursday May 8th, I participated in the “Building a Product” panel at the University of California Technology Commercialization Forum at the Westin Hotel near San Francisco Airport. The day-long event had presentations by researchers who have products that are nearly ready to commercialize, as well as panels and talks by venture capitalists and members of industry.
The “Building a Product” panel was right after lunch, so it had great attendance. It was moderated by Dr. Thomas Lipkin from UCLA. The other panelists were Dr. Christine Ho of Imprint Energy and Dr. Michelle Brown of Olfactor Laboratories. We all had very different experiences in the transition from academia to startup, so the panel had plenty of different perspectives.
It was exciting to hear UC President Janet Napolitano mention Hiperwall and the other companies by name during her opening address!
Homeland Security Today magazine has published an article about how a powerful, yet cost-effective Hiperwall video wall solution helped the Coast Guard modernize their command center while maintaining and enhancing capability in a budget conscious manner.
Click the link in the paragraph above or use the URL below:
The sunset last night was spectacular. I presume the smoke from the Colby fire in North Los Angeles County made the reds and oranges pop even more. These are unretouched photos (well, resized only) that show the color we saw. Catalina Island is the most prominent island in the photos, but San Clement Island is visible in one or two. Click on the photos to get a larger size image.
The Hiperwall Engineering Team had a great, carnivorous lunch yesterday at Agora in Irvine. We celebrated development of significant technologies and features for our next major release. It was a fun time of tasty food and top-notch nerd talk!
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