Shonzilla, a pattern-seeking animal

Life is a game of patterns and chance, and those who play well will win.

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Common Chargers for all Mobiles (paper signed, they will come)

Several mobile device manufacturers and mobile operators (17 of them to be exact) have finally agreed on the common interface for charging increasingly sophisticated and battery-hungry devices. This small achievement for a mobile industry and a great one for device manufacturing company CEOs has been achieved under the umbrella of Open Mobile Terminal Platform initiative.

The USB standard that was agreed upon is Micro-USB (aka Micro-B USB) which would be possible to plug into either a USB Micro-B or Micro-AB receptacle (i.e. USB socket).

There are several benefits of this effort:

across-industry standardization
no more asking your colleagues for a specific charger that quite possible no one has (or not at work at least)
smaller or disappearing piles of chargers in our drawers
better utilization of hardware, no matter how trivial
smaller (and greener) shipping packages

Of course, data connectivity would be achieved through the same port.

Interestingly enough, Apple is not on the list. Neither is HTC spokesperson claims that they will participate in this scheme.

There’s an official document named “Common Charging and Local Data Connectivity” available online.

[via ZDNet]

Wed Jul 23

A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200

TechCrunch wants to build “A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200” that’s as slim as Apple Air and is based on Linux, FireFox, and Skype - technologies that would enable regular internet users to Get Things Done.

TechCrunch tablet concept

This initiative launched by Mike Arrington cause a significant number of comments at TechCrunch. People suggesting ideas and offering their know-how are coming from various backgrounds: server-side software development, web development, Linux hacking, user experience, hardware design…

Although I’m excited by an idea and would like to get engaged (if I weren’t swamped by invoicable and fairly interesting work already), I’m a bit sceptical. A couple of reasons:

So far not a single crowdsourced hardware project has succeeded .
Serious coordination is needed in such a multi-faceted project (concept design, hardware design, software development, industrial/UI design and user experience all tied together)
Seed money is necessary (preferably backed by a consortium of companies without a conflict of interest in the web tablet market niche)
Better invest time&effort into further expansion of a community around one of open mobile platforms like Android, OpenMoko, LiMo, and last but not least Symbian. As an added bonus, you get to phone your friends (and fellow collaborators). :-)

Anyway, my (founded) skepticism aside, I believe TechCrunch should rise to the occasion and show more committment in this initiative. They could do thins in several ways:

Approaching potential partners. Perhaps the “home of crowdsourcing”, Cambrian House, or more hardware-oriented CrowdSpirit should be involved as well.
Taking pre-orders. Committed future customers can be used as angel investors. Has this be done before?
Build a serious community. Community (web site) dedicated to this effort would be a “Web2.0 way” to structure an direct efforts is necessary in such a complex project.
Start small by modifying existing open-sourcesoftware, then iterate. Today, software is almost free replicate but can become more expensive to produce than hardware. Though, hardware design has a higher barrier of entry and it takes some viable software platform solution in order to build hardware for it, especially on a crowdsourced project. Therefore, I would start by modifying open-source software and testing it out on commercial multi-touch tablets out there.

Interested? You have skillz? Help them build it!