Shonzilla, a pattern-seeking animal

Street Hero - Amazing bus jump

An attempt at launching a viral campaign for the latest HTC smartphone running Google Android - HTC Hero. This video is supposedly created by a parkour group Street Heroes whose MySpace page is a couple of days old.

To get the full point of this viral ad, make sure to watch the related video where you can see the entire commercial from point-of-view recorded with headcam, i.e. HTC Hero strapped to guys head. :-)

[via thestreetheroes and digital buyologie]

I’m catching up here with a company manufacturing a home device platform based on Android platform which is always worth a mention and a deeper look. If you heard about them already, please bear with me as I’m doing a quick analysis of their business and the market they’re entering.

The ambitiously named company Touch Revolution from San Francisco is behind these devices with a humble name - NIMble which stands for Natural Interface Module, and also a purported quick method of operating these devices. Apparently, they’re calling touch or multi-touch features natural interface although in my world it would be plain speaking and moving hands in the air but that’s just me :-) which is not to say they have that in mind (and on road map) further down the road as well.

Touch Revolution is obviously clear about the future of Android platform as they’re basing their entire business model on it by jumping on the Android bandwagon. And rightly so! The ease of development using Android SDK is the best so far thanks to the use of Java programming language (developers do not need to handle memory issues since those are handled by Dalvik VM) and the social aspect of Android programming model as I tend to call the fact that applications can easily open extension points and get extended by other applications using intents. Intents are essentially messages that can be sent and received by any application on Android platform as nicely explained by Mark Murhy. Their offering is in creating a market place around custom Android devices manufactured by them in at least two ways:

• If you’re an Android application/service developer, Touch Revolution is providing you with “Controlled Application Delivery through our Service Delivery Infrastructure, allowing for central application and service management” which is a kind of Android Market a’la Touch Revolution. This could be an opportunity for Android applications that are best consumed in the comfort of an office or home (like dashboards combining several data sources that can hardly fit the surface of a mobile screen like T-Mobile G1’s). Those could also be applications that are geared more towards land-line phones v.s mobile phones, although I must admit, the difference is diminishing. Some possible examples of such applications would be telephone exchange and IVR systems, teleconferencing and video-phone application, to name some of them. I would personally love to see the VoIP running on this device and, eventually, the most popular open-source Asterisk PBX ported to or well integrated with Java/Android.
• If you’re a big company, say a phone company or consumer electronics company, you might be interested in getting “Customized Form Factor and Feature Set to meet your needs. From Design Through Launch, we provide electrical, industrial, mechanical, software, and manufacturing support”. Last year, AT&T has released Home Manager manufactured by Samsung, which integrates/converges a variety of functions in a single device. The right term for such devices seems to be home communication hub but it is not important yet. Anyway, it makes sense to have your hands-free while reading the text or watching a video (or video conference) on the device lying on your desk or kitchen desk while you’re prepare that nice sandwich. Apparently, Touch Revolution is also aiming to build and scale its business by relying on their initial time investment in customizing existing or developing new drivers for the hardware by putting the same hardware in different packages and designs

In the platform sheet, the company is touting the screen as being a multi-touch projective capacitive glass screen but there’s no multi-touch magic in this demo above. However, the company’s founder is Mark Hamblin, who used to be Product Design Lead at Apple on the original iPhone’s touchscreen, so I’m pretty sure multi-touch will be supported by September 2009 when first devices should hit the stores at $300 with $10-20 monthly home service contract. It is still unclear to me what home service will embody.

Apparently, the future is here and it’s all about touch. I would surely like to touch these devices from Touch Revolution and play around with them, if not even develop software for them. The market for Android applications is bound to explode this year with more netbooks running Android and, now, home systems. Eric Schmidt agrees, naturally.

All in all, in my view, Android arriving to devices other than mobile/smart phones is a natural convergence for the platform. This has been illustrated by T-Mobile’s decision to use Android in home devices as unveiled in a confidential document about which I wrote a while ago in my initial rant about Android.

Taiwanese Elan Microelectronics claims to have patented multi-touch technology under the name “eFinger Transparent Touchpad” before Apple filed for that patent. They already had some issues with Synaptics, the company that has been supplying Apple, no more no less, with their own touch technology (e.g. touchpad for iPods).

Now, Elan Microelectronics is suing Apple over multi-touch (or was it multi-finger?) patents. In this video you can see their eFinger Transparent Touchpad technology being used in a device that runs Android OS. That also proves the flexibility and potential of open-source Android platform.

On a side note, it is evident that Elan’s technology is more powerful then the original T-Mobile G1’s capacitive screen has and as demonstrated by an Android deveoper, Rye Brye, several months ago.

Rhodes framework

Here’s another open-source cross-platform mobile application framework I’ve discovered. It’s called Rhodes framework. This one is both very interesting and special because it does not use web browser as run-time environment but it rather creates native applications.

Cross-platform mobile applications are written in Ruby programming language using MVC architectural. This is definitely good news for all Rails developers out there and perhaps an additional push for everyone else considering finally learning the Ruby language and Rails framework as well.

The version 1.0 release a week ago, on March 24th, supports mobile platforms such as iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian, BlueBerry, and last but not least, Android.

Rhodes framework includes the first Ruby implementation for all the mentioned platforms except Symbian which already had one. Cross-platform mobile Ruby code gets translated into natively optimized mobile apps. One of the main components is client-side component called RhoSync which allows integration with web services and, consequently, integration with almost any back-end system or application. Some integrations already available with Rhodes framework are SugarCRM integration and Ligthouse integration.

How does it work? Nice people from Rhomobile explain it themselves:
“In general, developer productivity is much higher in Rhodes than writing to diverse native device operating systems and APIs since most of your UI customization can be done in HTML templates (ERB files). Rhodes also provides access to native device capabilities such as GPS and PIM data via an extended set of tags (e.g. <geolocation/>).”

Has Rhodes framework intrigued you? If so, have a look at Rhodes tutorial.