One of my many vices is that I’m a junk TV addict; I live alone in a house with six TVs, three DVRs, a blue-ray disc player, and a Slingbox so that I can feed my addiction while I’m on the road. I’ll waste as much as three hours a day catching up on the latest junk TV, and just like junk food it’s compulsive but completely unmemorable. I read with great interest in Monday’s New York Times about a device that will allow users to convert pretty much any video source into an MP4 on either a memory card or USB storage device, and the most amazing thing about the device is that it’s an open source hardware platform. The producers of the device know that they have a great idea, but that there are others out there who could take it in other directions, or improve upon the current implementation, so they have provided the plans and designs and access to their engineers to enable and encourage that innovation to happen. I’d love to see open source hardware continue as a trend in 2008.Talking about USB storage, one of my favorite Christmas presents of all time was one that I received from Roy Hann at Rational Commerce, it’s the smallest running Ingres instance that I’ve ever encountered. It measures approximately 2.5cmx1.5cm and has a complete running Ingres instance on it. Check out the Rational Commerce site for more information http://www.rationalcommerce.com/mojopac.htm.

 

  Posted in Innovation

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 10:00 am and is filed under Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.