iRing : The End of iPhone Theft

After watching Eric Li's TED talk, I remembered something Condi Rice said on the Tonight Show a few years ago - something about, if America wasn't the dominant power, there would be a lot less compassion in the world; I don't see people wanting to migrate to China. And, now, a few years later, I've actually heard an American woman say she wants to move to China and start a company - not for any ideological reason but because it's the thing to do these days.

Anyway, back to the subject. Before I posted this, I wanted to see who had already thought about this one. Great minds think great things, but not necessarily alike.

My friend took her iPhone with her to the apartment complex pool party and got robbed. Think, how nice it would be if you could wear a ring that gives you a mild electric shock when someone moves your iPhone, and then you press two buttons on the ring simultaneously, and the phone immediately, silently (!!) calls 911. Inspite of having insurance, she had to pay $160 to Verizon to get it replaced.

In their last developer conference Craig Federation of Apple made a big deal of how a thief will not be able to use an iPhone with IOS7. Duh - who wants to use it? Where do you think the repair shops at the mall that can fix your broken iPhone screens are getting the screens from? Wonder if there really is iPhone aftermarket parts industry.

Panda Poker

Panda Express' internet access was down today, so they couldn't take credit or debit cards. Luckily, I had cash. Bill came to $7.10. Sorry, I says, I only have 7 - is that okay - but I have a credit card..

It's okay. I had 8 - my backup was - just kidding. Anyway, bluff worked.

Then I thought, most people in the store have smartphones. How about an app that lets you use your phone and your data connection to pay your tab? I guess AAPL lets you do that in their store - maybe WMT too.. How about without tying you into a chain's app? Maybe that's what bitcoin is all about?

Google's Biggest Duh

You're in gmail, you want to send an email and add and attachment. You can add files from your Google-drive.

You're in gmail, you're reading an email that has an attachment. You want to save it to your Google-drive. Oops - there's only View and Download. Duh!!!!!

Follow-up : Thanks Google for adding this much loved feature :)

How You can Be a Billionaire

Start a company that publishes - you guessed it - books. But, only publish one book on any subject. You can see what'll happen - the top authors in every field will be stepping over each other to write The Book on that subject. Forget you making them deals. They'll pay you to be able to write The Book on their subject.

iWatch = iPhone

Not time to buy AAPL yet obviously - the big players are still doing their best to drive the stock down..

Anyhow, my take is that, if AAPL played their cards right, they'd make the iWatch have the entire functionality of an iPhone - except for the small screen size of course - so you'd have to communicate using Siri.

Here's a good deal - if you don't have a phone plan, and you buy an iWatch with a new contract, you can use your iPod as an iPhone - if it's within range of your iWatch - how does that sound? Or your iPad too -- which people might like more. Basically, now the iPhone is no longer what you used to think of it as - though you could still buy one of those if you wanted. Essentially, the full (full-screen, etc) iPhone functionality can be realized using a combination of either iWatch and iPod or iWatch and iPad. Nice?

A Practical Use for CV

How about a footrest to put under your desk at work that's smart. When you leave the desk, it retreats to the wall. When you approach, it only moves (to the right position) if you lift up both feet off the floor invitingly. You get the idea - it needs to be smart.

Extending Computer Vision

Thanks for visiting the Embedded Vision Academy and accessing resources provided by BDTI. We are interested in your experience in using these resources. If you answer a few questions for us, your name will be entered into a drawing to receive your choice of:

        A copy of Gary Bradsky’s Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision with the OpenCV Library, signed by the author. (We will either send you a copy of the current edition now or you can opt to wait for the new edition.)
        A Raspberry Pi development kit

    We will draw four winners from among the names of those who respond to our questions by Tuesday, October 16.

    To enter the drawing, please reply to this message and insert your answers to the following questions:

        What resources did you download?

ubuntu Virtual Machine

        What did you did you do? For example, if you downloaded the OpenCV QuickStart Kit, did you build the example applications? Or, did you use OpenCV to create your own?

No, I don't see a tutorial on how to do that - I did play some of the examples. I'm not a software guy, but I want to build CV apps

        How did it go?

Playing the examples is easy. We need a presentation on a hello-world approach to building a new app - how to you build a motion detection app on your own - not use someone else's fully packaged app.

        Do you have any suggestions for similar tools?

Hello world docs would be nice

        What additional embedded vision resources would you like us to offer?

Take 5 of the most popular cameras, ranked for quality and cost and build a library for them - someone should be able to buy one of those 5 and then go to the website and get everything he needs to build an app. If it could be ported to Raspberry Pi, super.