Scan a Bed Time Story for Me, Daddy

By | November 22, 2011
6 Comments

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This is up there among the lamest products of the year: a scanner that will convert a book to speech.

Well actually, it sounds quite good. I’d imagined a device that could flip the pages over while you sit back nursing a Scotch. When everything’s done the scanner converts the text to “high quality speech with a lifelike voice” and you’re off, listening to The Little Prince while you’re driving/power walking/sleeping/making out/performing keyhole surgery.

Only you’re not: The Plustek BookReader does use only one button, and it does include a patented feature that means you don’t have those weird edges when you scan a book. But you still have to do it manually. A single page at a time.

I’m all for cutting steps out, and this cuts out a lot, but it sounds to me like this is for a very specialized market. Other than the visually impaired, how many people are going to scan a whole book? At a page every 15 seconds, by my calculations, it would still take more than an hour to scan a 300-page book.

Wouldn’t it be quicker to, er, just read it?

And yet Plustek reckon that

[t]he BookReader’s printed words into MP3 capability is designed for every age; parents who want to give their children the option to listen to books instead of just music, adults who wish to enjoy reading while driving or multi-tasking, and busy executives or medical professionals who find it easier to listen to their books and documents when they don’t have the time to read.

If they’re that busy I’m not sure they’re going to have the time to sit around scanning. If their lives are so full I’m not sure an extra device that requires them to turn a book around and flip pages is going to find a slot.

Plustek BookReader, a text to speech peripheral device with book edge scanning design!

The Failure of the Open Field

By | November 22, 2011
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It’s great that Apple has created a new platform with the iPhone and the App Store. But it’s also a ripping indictment of the personal computer industry—and cellphone industry—thus far. And not to be too nice to Apple: The beautiful stuff we’re seeing with the iPhone is mainly about pastime—not about productivity (or creativity.)

Here’s what Apple has done right: It’s created a beautiful device that works and seduces. It’s created a single environment and process for people to be able to buy, download and install applications. And then it’s set some standards so things don’t get out of hand.

This is something that should have been done years ago. Microsoft had oh so long to come up with a way for third-party developers to produce good applications and have them certified and delivered in a way that makes it easy for consumers to install them (and the developers to make a decent living from them.) Instead we have a world where increasingly users are reluctant to download apps because even the best of them come front-loaded with crapware and configuration changing tweaks.

Nokia and the other big cellphone players had a decade to get their act together: To make phones connect seamlessly with computers, and for third party developers to come up with applications that made their devices compelling. I hate installing anything on my N95 because I know it’s a nightmare. Why bother?

Now Apple have done what needed to be done. They’ve done well and they deserve to take over the market for these reasons alone. Now the iPhone has become an extraordinary device capable of some spine-tingling stuff. Computers, finally, are tapping into the creativity of individual developers. And at a price point that’s not free, but for most people is as cheap as makes no difference.

I doubt Microsoft will get it. I doubt Nokia will get it. That makes me sad. But I also have a deeper regret. That, because it’s Apple, I don’t think we’ll now see the really full potential of software ideas and development, because Apple is still a very closed-in world. That is part of the reason for its success. Making everything a single pipe tends either succeeds spectacularly or fails dismally.

But it also caps its potential. By acknowledging this success we’ve also admitted that the online chaos that we thought would work, would somehow organize itself, has not worked. Try to find a decent application for WIndows XP. Or for your N95. Try to browse and just see what’s out there, and experiment. You’re brave if you do. Apple’s walled garden approach is a roaring success because we’ve failed to make the unmown field work. And we had long enough.

From the Desk of David Pogue – So Many iPhone Apps, So Little Time – NYTimes.com

Radio Australia Topics, Feb 6 2009

By | November 22, 2011
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What I talked about on the Radio Australia Breakfast Club today:

  • Everyone, it seems, is writing an iPhone app. Including a Singaporean 9-year old. Not surprising since half a billion apps have been downloaded since the app store went live six months ago. iPhone apps get security conscious: Bank Info lures the thief with juicy bank data but in fact transmits locational information to the owner. FoneJac will make your iPhone go off like a car alarm if someone picks it up.
  •  Google launches Latitude: Now you can see where your friends are, not where they say they are.
  • Pew Internet and American Life Project finds teens preferring SMS and instant messaging over email (d’oh) but also over social networks and virtual worlds. (Emily of textually.org points out that email was out from about 2004 in South Korea.)
  • A big step: Microsoft offers, not just a list of steps to fix a problem, but to do the steps for you, with its Fix It program. Good idea, or thin end of a dodgy wedge?

Beware the SMS Premium Number Scam

By | November 22, 2011
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An Indian phone company is warning users against a variation on the premium rate phone scam, whereby users are contacted by email or mail and asked to call a number to confirm winning a prize. The number is a premium number—either local or international—and the user has to sit through several expensive minutes of canned music before finding they haven’t won anything.

The Indian variation is that victims are sent an SMS containing the phone number they should call. They’re then charged Rs500 ($10) a minute as they navigate their way through an automated phone tree.

Control Enter » Blog Archive » Beware of false lottery winning claims via SMS

Traffic Light Scam II

By | November 22, 2011
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More on the Italian traffic light scam. I wrote to Mr. Arrighetti asking for comment, and received this from Silvia Guelpa, who says she is a consultant to the company. In summary, she’s arguing that the company, and its founder Stefano Arrighetti, haven’t done anything wrong and that if anyone has broken the law it’s the companies and police who have been responsible for changing the settings which created the huge volume of tickets.

She makes the points that

  • KRIA is a manufacturer and does not sell to the City Councils but to Companies who rent the T-RED to the Police with contracts based on the number of ticket (about 30%).
  • T-RED—the system–does not actually control the traffic lights, which are managed by a controller.
  • T-RED can be configured to detect immediately after the red phase begins or after a configured delay (0-10.000ms). Local Police and Companies renting the systems set the yellow on the controller for as short a period as possible and reset to zero the above mentioned delay, in order to increase the number of tickets.

This, she says, is what is causing the abnormal number of tickets.

She also says there has already been one investigation, by Milan’s attorney, which concluded after one year that KRIA is “absolutely innocent and out of any private interest.” That investigation, she says, resulted in the arrest of “bosses of the companies buying and renting T-RED and they admitted that they forced and won many tenders incorrectly.”

But with public outcry still strong—three million tickets still had to be paid—Verona’s attorney started investigating KRIA’s certification—whether or not its system had all the right paperwork. The idea, she says, was to find an excuse to cancel all the tickets.

KRIA believes it has all the right certification, arguing that the only parts which need to be certified are “the fixed, immutable components of the device”–cameras, lighting systems, PC and PCI board. But Ms Guelpa says the attorney’s power “is unlimited during the investigation phase. They can even arrest people.”

Her argument is basically that Mr. Arrighetti is being made a scapegoat on a technicality.

Lesson from this? I guess I’m still reeling from the idea that police forces would fiddle the system to fill their coffers, not just in Italy but elsewhere. But I guess the bigger point is that all kinds of technology are susceptible to this kind of manipulation, which raises the question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?