This year,after a gap of couple of years, I was a judge at the Texas Big 12 Business plan competition. The purpose is to bring out the innovation in the Big 12 schools and encourage the grads there to commercialize their discoveries and inventions. There was a healthy snack company from Oklahoma State, skincare company from univ of New Mexico called Surya Skincare, VeraPulse from Univ of Missouri (interesting photoacoustic technology that enables oncologists to “hear” the melanoma tumor cells”) and Microtransponder from UT Dallas. Microtransponder and Verapulse moved forward and the finalists are then eligible to compete in the Global Moot corp next month.

How often have you heard someone ask you – just after you pulled out your Treo or Blackberry or any other PDA phone. “Do you like your phone? I am thinking of getting one of these..” I have a Treo and have carried a blackberry in the recent past. If I go back far enough, I have carried a Apple Newton with an EMBARC ( Electronic Mail Broadcast to A Roaming Computer) wireless receiver card, briefly considered a “SIMON” personal communicator from Bellsouth/IBM. I gave up on the Simon since I would need to do some weight training to handle it right but the Apple Newton was great for making new friends on the plane. Had a Palm VII connected to a wireless network for a while, carried around a Metricom Richochet attached to my laptop until that service was discontinued. Toyed around with the Nokia 9000 (monochrome version) for a while, during my time in Europe and Asia – but wasn’t satisfied. The quest for the ideal personal communicator device continues – and I for one after nearly fifteen years, haven’t found the ideal device yet.PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) have become faster, have more memory and have smart operating systems. Most of them can run a limited version of your desktop applications and/or provide a way to read your document files. The support for email has gotten better and blackberry has earned its “crackberry” nickname. Miniaturization has worked great for components but not for usability when it comes to keyboards or small screens. We need a lighter, faster, powerful, small device (with large screen and large keyboard), with a long battery life (using a light battery of course), with support for WiFi, Bluetooth and probably VOIP (Voice Over IP) support.

My ideal “personal communicator” would have a large screen but in a small form factor, extremely light (would like a clamshell design), long battery life, powerful enough to view, edit my desktop files, browse the internet, check and respond to email and a full keyboard. Enable me to synchronize my calendar with my desktop or network calendar. Biometric security would be nice to have and if I could also use my phone as a payment device at restaurants, vending machines that would be a big plus.

Are we there yet? Large screen in a small factor is a bit difficult to implement physically but the phone can project a screen and a keyboard (virtual keyboard – VKB). VKBs have reached the European market and companies such as Canesta have made “typing in thin air” a reality. Based on the few demos I have seen, projection screens are still a few years away – but you get the picture. Future cellphones will be lighter but still project a full keyboard (when you need one) and of course, project a full desktop screen. That would be very handy probably replace my laptop.

As we add more power to the cellphone and more features, battery life becomes critical. Rechargeable lithium-ion cells are the standard on phones today, but rarely last more than a few hours of talk-time. Nearly five years ago, Motorola announced a milestone in miniaturizing fuel cell technology to power cell phones. More recently Toshiba announced a miniaturized fuel cell and pictures of this fuel cell can be found on the web. Expectation is that these fuel-cells will have a life that is at least be double that of the current lithium battery life. There’s a catch – you still cannot take a fuel-cell powered device on a plane. But it does look like the power problem will get resolved in the future.

More powerful chips from AMD and Intel will make these “personal communicators” more powerful. With powerful operating systems such as Symbian, Palm or that of Microsoft – we should expect a near desktop experience on these phones in the future. There are several phones (Authentec, PanTech, Willcom) already on the market that support fingerprint based biometric authentication on the phone. More than 20m Koreans make payments using their cellphone – it’s only a matter of time before cell-phone based payments make their way to North America.

In short, the phone of the future may meet our expectations. For now, I am going to get a second phone for voice only and relegate the Treo to calendar, email and browsing – this may also decrease my likelihood of swerving off I-70 while trying to find a phone number sans a scroll wheel on the Treo at exactly 70mph (no more- no less)

(First published two years ago)

My 3yr old son walked into my study hearing the radio. He looked at the computer monitor with a puzzled expression and said “that’s not the picture, that’s your email”. He kept scanning the room – I realized that he was looking for a TV picture to match Garrison Keilor’s voice. He was born in the 21st century and will never know a time without TV, internet or on-demand content. I explained to him that radio was TV without a picture – he reluctantly accepted that. From a simple radio more than sixty years ago we are in the information age where “place shifting” is the latest buzzword.

Place shifting evolved from another buzzword “time shifting”. Time shifting refers to being able to record content and watch/listen to it later. Place shifting refers to being able to watch/listen to it later from a different location or place. The VCR was the earliest form for time-shifting for video content, however programming the VCR was best left to folks with multiple doctoral degrees. The TV Guide in the early nineties was a multi-billion dollar business and consisted of a half-an-inch thick book with program listings. If you could navigate the TV Guide and program the VCR to record the programs you wanted – you may have achieved time shifting. Then came along VideoGuide (yours truly had a small role there) that put the entire TV Guide on you TV screen in an interactive manner and you could navigate that with your remote and select a program to record. This was a big leap forward. More than ten years later, it is still the preferred user interface on a TV. The VideoGuide was primitive in that it interfaced your clunky VCR to the TV and you had to have blank tapes in the VCR to record. The arrival of hard disk based TIVO heralded true time-shifting. Of course, TIVO turned selling TV programming into a recurring revenue business, but with free services such as MeeVee.com it may have to find other revenue sources. There are several Personal Video Recorders (PVRs) standalone (sony, toshiba, JVC) and PC based solutions (Hauppauge) that provide TiVo like timeshifting today.

With the launch of Tivo-to-go, arrival of products like Slingbox and ORB networks, place shifting technology is commercially available at fairly reasonable price. As the cost per terabyte and cost per Mbit of bandwidth fall steadily, place-shifting becomes economically viable and possible. This means that if you have an internet ready mobile device you can watch your recorded Baseball game from anywhere by streaming it to your device. Of course, you can also do it from another browser enabled computer from your vacation home. This one approach – another is that of a portable media center (PMC) offered by companies such as iRiver, Archos and Lyra. These solutions can store as much as 400 hours of video (at the high end) and of course much more music and are portable. These solutions essentially claim that you can carry all your videos (I can’t think of more than twenty movies I would to like watch) – currently about 100+movies on a small device and watch them anytime, anywhere. Some of these devices support wireless connectivity as well as well as video capture – a Digital video recorder (DVR) – function.

These technologies are at their infancy today but soon will become ubiquitous and I believe that the next generation will not know a time when they could not access any content from any where. There are several technology pieces that need to get better and some gaps need to be filled before this happens. There are still opportunities for entrepreneurs to innovate.

To access content from a mobile device, you need a device that can support the memory requirements for video and a network that provides a decent bandwidth. All the major mobile service providers are rolling out their high speed networks and we are a couple or more years away from high quality streaming video. In the near term there are opportunities to develop mobile optimized Codecs – most of the current codecs are based on DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) compression techniques that are standardized through formats such as MPEG.- 1 & 2.Research, both private and university, is now underway to leverage Fractal and Wavelet compression techniques to improve video compression and of course that’s another billion dollar opportunity awaiting an entrepreneur.

Video indexing will help us find and watch relevant content – the TV guide can be considered to be an early form of video indexing. Google Video, Yahoo Video have started indexing video. Indexing is primitive and innovation is required to help locate that specific “home run” or scene from a movie to be located and streamed on-demand.Future video transmission standards such as MPEG-7 are expected to support granular indexing. This of course means conversion of 40 plus years of video into a new standard – with indexing (probably manually done). Could this be an outsourcing opportunity down the road?

All the buzzwords aside, as consumers we want to record and store any content that we like, find & retrieve specific content from any device we own and from any place. We also want to manage the content, share it and edit it. I would safely estimate that we are about 2 years away at the minimum but not more than five years when these devices are as ubiquitous as an Ipod. Until such time place shifting in my home refers to the sofa cushions miraculously arranged into a space ship twenty feet from their previously known location and piloted by a power ranger.

I spent a day with NR Murthy in Claremont, CA near LA. He was helping his daughter move between dorms and mentoring me at the same time – it was quite an experience to spend 8+ hours with him. Need permission to access – please email author for access.