Tony Fadell, the Nest CEO who was Senior VP of Apple’s division from 2006 to 2008, says that Apple built prototypes of a similar device to Google Glass but “didn’t have time” to turn them into actual products.
At Apple, we were always asking, What else can we revolutionize? We looked at video cameras and remote controls. The craziest thing we talked about was something like Google Glass. We said, “What if we make visors, so it’s like you’re sitting in a theater?” I built a bunch of those prototypes. But we had such success with the things we were already doing that we didn’t have time … Expand Expanding Close
The LeWeb conference is running Dec. 4 through Dec. 6 in Paris, and father of the iPod and Nest creator Tony Fadell sat down yesterday to talk about Nest, product design, and the company’s future plans to bring Nest to 500 retail shops starting with Canada. Of course, as usual, Fadell’s former employer Apple was a topic of conversation. Fadell talked a little bit about what he learned from Steve Jobs in terms of product design, and he talked about his time at Philips compared to Apple and Nest.
Another interesting guest that made an appearance is Apple’s former Vice President and General Manager for Europe, Middle East, and Africa Pascal Cagni. He resigned in May. Pascal talked about his time at Apple and his former role at the company. He also talked about his working relationship with Jobs, his continued admiration for the company, and secrecy at Apple. The full video is below:
Oh, Kickstarter. It is a primary place where tech lovers’ dreams have an opportunity to become reality; it not only promotes some of the most innovative ideas, but it also makes those of us in the real world more anxious for a gadget-filled tomorrow. Enter LIFX.
LIFX’s, well, life on Kickstarter is only nearing the 48-hour mark, but the reinvented light bulb already surpassed its set goal and hit $402,707 (as of press time) worth of pledges. In a nutshell: LIFX is a “Wi-Fi-enabled, multi-color, energy efficient LED light bulb that you control with your iPhone or Android.”
Just watch the video above for the full effect. A few of the more notable integrated uses include changing indoor light color to match any mood, visualizing music, security measures for while away, or even just enabling couch potatoes. Those who pledge at least $69 will get a handy-dandy LIFX “smartbulb” to try, with an estimated delivery pegged around March 2013.
Home-automation technology is a huge hit among startups, such as former Apple Senior Vice President Tony Fadell’s popular Nest Learning Thermostat, and even carriers are trying to get on board by developing services that streamline life and home processes.
AT&T, for instance, produced a consumer home automation and security suite of services that began trials earlier this summer. The services, which exist under the “AT&T Digital Life” naming umbrella, control home functions and implement security features. With Nest and others creating a buzz in the mobile home-automation space, expect to see LIFX flying off retailers’ shelves this time next year.
We’ve seen examples of the Siri interface running on prior iPhones and a proof-of-concept video allegedly showing the full Siri port running on iPhone 4. And now, a St. Louis developer @plamoni has figured out how to run a proxy server on his computer to fool Siri into thinking it is talking to Apple’s servers.
The proxy server acts as a middleman that intercepts Siri commands and returns answers. According to the project page, “the idea is to allow for the creation of custom handlers for different actions”. It works by setting up a DNS server on your network to forward requests for guzzoni.apple.com (the Siri servers) to the computer running the proxy.
He used the proxy server to run a custom plug-in that can manage his radio-controlled thermostat via Siri (Tony Fadell should love this). It doesn’t require a jelabroken iPhone since everything is going on off the device. As you can see in the video, Siri responds to commands such as, “What’s the status of the thermostat?”, or “Set the thermostat to 68 degrees”, or even “What’s the inside temperature?”. What’s best, his hack lets any device with a plug-in to be controlled via Siri. A sign of things to come from Apple? Two more videos follow right after the break.
According to the newly-released DisplaySearch Tablet Quarterly report, shipments of tablets powered by chips based on ARM’s CPU designs will grow by a projected 211 percent in 2011 to nearly 60 million units. At the same time, mobile devices using Intel’s x86 architecture are not expected to pick up steam until 2013. Meanwhile, Apple sold 11.12 million iPads in the September quarter, a 166 percent annual unit growth, grabbing a Strategy Analytics-estimated 67 percent market share of all quarterly tablet shipments, down from 96 percent in the year-ago quarter when the company took the market by surprise and left competitors flabbergasted.
ARM’s domination in mobile stems from the tremendous growth of smartphones and tablets, the vast majority of which come with chips based on ARM’s blueprints. With iPad accounting for more than two-thirds of tablets and their A-series of chips being based on ARM’s designs, it’s really not surprising that tablet PC architectures are now feeling the heat by ARM and iOS.
In retrospect, the mobile landscape might have looked a lot different had Apple’s deceased co-founder Steve Jobs not listened to the iPod Godfather Tony Fadell. I found this incredibly interesting anecdote yesterday in the authorized Steve Jobs bio by Walter Isaacson…
