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The Next Web last week felt like a google glass meetup. All the tech hippies where there showcasing the latest toy from Google.

Let’s face it – this toy rox. Augmented reality has been in our minds for decades. And while head up displays have been around for a while, no one has ever managed to produce a device that got as close as google glass to becoming mass market. But they are not there yet. Set aside the price point which I’m sure will drop significantly since the bill of material is 150USD tops ( I haven’t checked the price of microdisplays in a while).

Yet as usually the challenge is not about the device, it’s about the services it will enable. I took a long close look at the Glass SDK and was pretty puzzled by how close the Glass ecosystem can be. Basically the interactions are limited to inserting “timeline” events that will display on glass and that can be bound to user’s location updates (every 10 mins or so). This sounds awesome but also very limited. I would like to be able to enrich Glass’s dictionary of voice commands to script stuff I often do online, I would like to be able to use the camera to read 1D or 2D codes and display ad1-hoc information or even better scan heads and listen to voice fingerprints to pull out the vcard and notes I have on someone … but all that can’t happen with such limited access to the system.

At this point I’m glad I didn’t throw away 1500USD on glass – set aside the brag factor I feel they’re plain useless – but I really do hope google will provide the tools to bring the device to the next stage and that it will hence be ready to bring value to the masses.

Regular folks won’t even notice this or – worse – won’t even have a clue about what it’s all about.

Today Google announced the End Of Life of google reader who’s been around 2005. For the regular folks reading me (are there any? ) Reader was a tool to syndicate all your favorite RSS feeds and manage your reading lists. The core feature from my prospective was the ability to keep track of what had been read and what had not.

It had dozens frontends aside from its own web which I rarely used, my favorites being Reeder on ios/mac and Newsrob on Android which helped me to scroll through a mass of info (several hundreds news a day in eclectic categories such as tech, venture, gadgets, drones, scuba…) and hand pick at fast pace the ones that seemed relevant to *me*.

There have been plenty of hyped products such as Flipboard or Pulse trying to reinvent the way we consume news feeds by creating a nice looking dynamic magazine. In my opinion, while those products did reach their goal in terms of design and experience it’s a complete failure in terms of posts-per-minute you can process. There’s no better tool than then user’s brain to pick  what’s relevant for him and the only way to streamline the process is to display efficiently the data he needs to decide wether he want or not to actually read a given post.

I do realize that my way of consuming news (few hundred feeds generating ~ 500 posts a day to scroll through) may be old-school but there’s no alternative solution. Twitter has ended up being a 140character dump where you can’t hope to follow all the activity, facebook is less aggressive in terms of amount of data shown but then you miss way to much stuf…

Anyway time to look for alternatives… but I guess I’ll just have to follow the existing app ecosystem and hope they’ll adjust before Reader reaches EOL… So long Google Reader !

I remember the days when thinking mobile was a real exercise where you needed to totally rethink your product so it can still being value to your users while surviving the limitations of the mobile itself:

* ridiculously small screen
* hectic Internet access
* buttons and T9 text input
* j2me or WML as sole way to display contents

Building something reasonably useful on those platforms was a real challenge while flash and HTML were already rocking the place on the desktop world.

But let’s face it, phones those days have nothing but the name in common with those dinosaurs from 10 years ago – and a few days before the MWC starts it’s time to look back and reflect on the next evolutions of the online ecosystem.

I’ll start by sharing a few bets that I’m strongly believing in:

Mobile and desktop are not 2 different platforms anymore

* while desktop has become pretty distant to native apps as it has been embracing the cloud and SAAS over the past 5 years – and while during that time the mobile has been going the exact opposing way embracing apps – I believe HTML5 is on the verge of maturity delivering a real convergent experience on any platform disregarding its aspect-ratio, available input methods or size and portability. HTML5 apps with local storage shared on the cloud between devices (as it is being added to the new versions of Chrome) will be transforming SAAS apps into rich applications running on your local virtual machine (WebKit) and leveraging on the cloud to be executed. Google is heading this way, Adobe is heading this way (after Nitobi’s acquisition ) … That was even Apple’s Jobs bet before he realized the technology wasn’t ready yet.

* Apps features will depend on the screen size / aspect ratio: not the platform. Responsive design is leapfrogging every day. While today’s implementations are mostly heavy hacks, new approaches at layout definitions are redefining the way we design the apps UX based on mandatory and optional content to show depending on the case. Mobile and desktops both face the same fragmentation challenge, and anyway the frontier between platforms is becoming more fuzzy every day.

* Mobile ads are actually wrongly labelled : they should be called in-app ads as they enable you to display rotating ads within a dynamic application which is not dependent of the reloading of pages to update its contents. And likewise geo-tagetting which seems to be only bound to mobile nowadays is also being very relevant on the desktop (although maybe a bit less precise as not relying on a GPS).

All those elements lead me to think that if you’re lucky enough to start building a service today, this is your chance to make it right from the very start. Think multi-screens, think offline and asynchronous, think MVC on the client side, think API on the backend, and build one app to serve all platforms but include the support of various rendering modes to support the various screens you’re targeting.

Ok, I don’t have any stocks – I’ve been frustrated as a kid when playing with warrants, that was a casino-like experience that led me to think that stock market has little to do with the actual value of the underlying company. Anyways,

Apple has changed

We all love Apple (I’m actually a fanboy). Apple has been producing jewels that every tech kid has grown to love. No-one could resist the appeal of the first iPhones, the first iPad, or the amazing iMacs or Macbooks. All beautifully crafted products made with love that would last forever (literally, they have been my most solid pieces of tech).

For a few months now we’ve been witnessing a change. I’m not going to put it on Steve Job’s EOL, but it certainly has sped up the change.

• Product releases are now merely tech upgrades with beautiful keynotes to get them to sell. There has not been anything new for years now (aside from CPU bump, bigger screen….) and some of the key issues of the iPad such as how it can be used as a productivity device have been left unsolved.
• Quality has decreased drastically. While they pressure their subcontractors to prevent any scratch on the iPhone, the internal components are on the cheap. I just got my 3rd replacement retina Macbook Pro in 3 months, and it still has hardware issues  (the keyboard is buzzing while backlit which is a symptom for low-quality condensators inside…) (previously I had one of those LG screens with image retention and now I have a Samsung which flickers….)

I have the feeling that Apple has morphed from a company striving to build the best products to make our life easier and enable us to do more into a corporation taken over by employees only interested in the performance of their stock and less about making a change… that’s sad

This post has been on my mind for a long while, and even as I start writing it I know that this post won’t even allow me to dump a tenth of what I’ve had on my mind for a while now.

I’ve been doing or managing software projects for year now. Saw the rise of AGILE programming, saw people getting crazy about Test-Driven-Development… and yet I’ve rarely seen so much crappy software and such long development cycles in companies. Why ? Because Agile has become a method for hiding your responsibilities as a developer over a roadmap, a new way of crumpling  the whole development process where developers are empowered with everything while not given any responsibilities over the deliveries, a new way to fail project without consequencies.

AGILE is actually the less agile method I’ve ever experienced, where sprints are blind development tunnels where outside of the developers nobody can really evaluate how the project is progressing. With sprints lasting up to 2 months (I’ve seen it), and with no real ability o get anything delivered in-between, this is definitely the worst approach of all should you be a small-to-medium size company willing to deliver fast and iterate fast.

What are the real objectives for software ? In my opinion those points are a must and should always be granted

• The master branch has the current production code, and can be updated fast (after testing) should a bug be found. This is critical in my opinion : when a bug is found by a user in production : you must be able to correct it immediately ! And most of the time current methodologies just disable that from ever happening…
• No software goes to production before having been tested. An NO-UNITESTS ! Unitests are only good for testing complicated algorithms. You should focus on designing usage-based tests with scenarios following the most common user action suites. On the web, selenium is the way to go. And this is only going to enable you to limit regressions by highlighting potential side-effects of a latest code update that as a developer you may have missed.
• Deploy often. Why wait the end of a sprint to see a service update ? Some stories are fast to deliver and have limited impact on the codebase and can de done in a few hours… some require weeks of headaches… why choose your deployment speed to match the longest task development time ? Put each feature in a dedicated branch, merge them into testing when completed (for testing) and then into master for a final test run.

I’ve been wondering for some time now, following a conversation I had with Jordi Vallejo, how UAVs – aka Drones – will become available in the future to support non-military oriented use cases. There are already a bunch of companies providing civil drones, but those are still expensive 5keur+ and built by hand one-by-one… and they do not get very successful (those companies live on military budgets). On the other end companies such as Parrot with their AR.Drone have made the concept of UAV reach the masses with their cool toy, but unfortunately it’s really only a toy and cannot be used for other purposes. Moreover due to its high price and some intel I gather I think the AR.Drone is only a 100k-unit product with is very low for consumer electronics.

Yet civil drones have a wide range of use cases :

• Aerial photography (photographer, real estate, hotels, architects & construction companies, â?¦)
• Aerial video (film industries, news, sport events, live events, â?¦)
• Archeology
• Border control
• FirefightersInspection services (wind generators, smoke pipes, oil rigs, pipelines, â?¦)
• Insurance & Reviewer
• Military
• Police
• Press & Media designer
• Scientific services (biologists, geodesists (GIS), meteorological service, â?¦)
• Search & Rescue
• Security & Surveillance
• Special Forces

And those use-cases usually request expandable tools. If we take the firefighter case, they need to be able to get live update of a fire progress, yet when it’s windy they can’t fly manned copters, thus UAVs would be of high benefit to them to keep their ability to monitor a fire even in windy conditions.

Civil use case request also simpler controls (i.e. no complex remote) through a dedicated controller such as a tablet that would enable to basically pin the UAV to a point in the sky and have it hover around.

I’ve been wondering if it was feasible to make a sub 1000keur professional UAV that could be industrialized and it seems this is actually feasible. Below are a few renders of what it may look like. I’m now starting to wonder if I should push this initiative further.

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